LECTURE

Tom Rosenstiel

Younger:  They did a survey that he’s going to talk to you about, too, about the war on terrorism and how it came on to television and into the media, and then we’ll have some questions.  But he also has a wonderful highlight to start with about why the Times has that slogan as their logo.

Tom Rosenstiel:  As I was sitting in the back I heard the question about “All The News That’s Fit to Print” slogan.  Let me just ask a question.  What does that slogan mean to you guys?  What does it imply to you?  What does it suggest?

Audience:  The only news worth counting is the one’s by the New York Times.

Rosenstiel:  I like that. 

Audience:  It’s even more like they’re going to filter it for you so you get what’s worth having.

Younger:  Something that’s not in it is not worthy.

Rosenstiel:  Anybody else?  Any good thing?

Audience:  To me, it suggests to me the idea of what’s news and that’s different from real life, and there’s something that constitutes news.

Rosenstiel:  That it’s manufactured.  Is it a good thing that it’s fit to print?  Or that they’re putting in only what’s fit to print?  Or is it a bad thing?  How many people think it’s a good thing?  How many think it’s a positive thing. 

Audience:  I think that in a sense we can trust the people that are putting the stuff in, and it could be a really positive thing, but without knowing any of these people first hand, it could be a great slogan that you could trust.  It could be nice if you could, but I don’t know if you can.

Audience:  My interpretation of it is it positions itself as the center and the way things are, as opposed to the way things might be or could be, so in terms of mainstream, to me it represents itself as mainstream.

Rosenstiel:  So in some way it’s an honest admission that they’re exercising some judgment, censorship, morality, their sensibility?

Audience:  That there’s a framework. 

Audience:  Obviously it’s problematic, but it’s the question of how many of those pages of a very dense New York Times are you going to read?  Because I don’t know any person who buys the Sunday Times--it takes you the week to read it, and then you have five more issues on top of it.  So you get through the first page and you’re not going to D12 to hear the story about lower east side infestation problems, and it might be there, but can you really get to it because it is a dense paper?

Rosenstiel:  So whatever you think of it, it’s definitely more than can fit in your head.

Audience:  To me it sounds a little patronizing, and something clicked in my head when we heard that seven photographers were sent to the same site and came back with seven completely different approaches.  And I thought, well, why can’t they put in all of these seven different approaches, which would really represent that collective subjectivity?  It’s still only seven people, but that’s not even a possibility? 

Rosenstiel:  The other six were unfit, you see.

Audience:  Exactly.  So what does that mean? 

Rosenstiel:  Let me ask you one other question.  Where do you think that this slogan came from?  How did they come up with this thing?  Any guesses?

Audience:  The person who sunk his life savings into studying this paper.

Rosenstiel:  Well that’s true, there’s a little back-story I’ll tell you, but you nailed it.

Audience:  I always got the impression that it came from that part of history where you had a lot of yellow journalism, like lots of gossip going on, reporters who could make  up a story and ruin somebody that they happen not to like.  In all honesty, that used to go on too.  I think it came out of that.

Rosenstiel:  You guys definitely nailed that last answer perfectly.  Adolph Ox bought the New York Times, he was an immigrant who had been a failed publisher in Tennessee and he bought the New York Times in 1892 I think, and New York press was dominated by what was then called “yellow journalism,” primarily by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst who ran the Herald and another paper.  Ox bought the New York Times which was a failing paper to create a newspaper that the middle class could read and not be ashamed of.  That wouldn’t be so sensationalized and would talk up, not down, to the readers.  A more intelligent paper that exercised some moral judgment that was not a scandal sheet, that was not sensationalizing, that was not basically playing to the lurid, not emphasizing celebrity gossip, sensationalism, scandal, and crime, which was the formula on the front pages of the Sun and Herald and other papers.  Within a few years--the other thing that he was doing was he wanted this paper to be more accurate, not just more moral, and after a few years he ran a contest for the readers of the New York Times to create a slogan, and there were all kinds of entries, and it was designed to do two things.  To articulate the journalist values of the New York Times and to create a distinction between the Times and the other papers in New York.  The other was to generate interest and create publicity and marketing about the values of the New York Times.  It would be as if ABC News said, “More People Watch Us Than Any Other Source,” or maybe that’s NBC’s slogan, but said something like we’re more moral than NBC.  As if the New York Times were going to be more aggressively marketing itself against the daily news.  That doesn’t really go on anymore.  People are much more polite.  The entries came in, things like “A school for thought, not a school for scandal,” and all kinds of things that emphasized that when they said “All the news that’s fit,” that what they were doing exercising taste, some moral sensibility.  That your kids could read this and they would learn and you wouldn’t need to be embarrassed about what your kids were seeing.  So that’s what they meant, and all these other implications that we pick up on today, I’m not sure how much they were aware of them.  The notion that the  news is something that’s synthesized and does not just exist organically and plucked out of the creek, there was some consciousness of that, but not much in 1890, whenever, when he did that.  That consciousness began to emerge 30 years later in the 1920s after Freud and the discovery of the unconscious (Laughter).  They weren’t thinking a whole lot about it back then.

I thought I would just add that little prelude.  I’m going to talk today about two things and hopefully we’ll have lots of time for questions.  I’m going to talk first of all, briefly, about the creative context, about what’s going on in the media landscape in general.  A little bit of history, and then talk about, because this is what I was invited to do, talk about what’s happened since 9/11 in terms of the kind of press that we’ve gotten.  At my little project in Washington, DC, which is part of Columbia University actually, we’re kind of a research institute think-tank sort of associated with the journalism school, we’ve done three studies on press coverage since the war began, focusing primarily but not exclusively on network TV.

What’s going on in the media world in general, which is at the backdrop of a lot of conversations that you’ve had here over the last week, and I understand that you go non-stop, late into the night, not enough bathroom breaks, the food’s probably uneven and all the rest, what’s going on in the media world can be summarized in the following way, and if I had a big blackboard I would write this down.  Basically, we’ve gone from a world in which there were a limited number of news outlets providing news for people to the extent that in 1980, in the Regan Whitehouse, they could walk outside, hit ABC, NBC, CBS, AP and UPI an probably hit 90 percent of the news consumers in the country.  Today you have a proliferating number of outlets.  A growing number of outlets providing information and news, chasing after a relatively stagnant number of audience members.  Now what that means, the proliferation of outlets chasing a stagnant or not very rapidly growing number of users, means that each one of those outlets has a smaller audience than it used to have.  There are only a handful of exceptions to that.  Most outlets have smaller audiences.  The consequence of that is that each of those outlets has less ad revenue, less money coming in.  The consequence of that is that they’re cutting their budget.  They’re reducing how much they invest in gathering information.  One other dirty little secret in the information revolution:  Most of the information revolution is not about gathering more information, it’s about processing information.  A number of people who are employed in this industry who actually gather may be actually smaller than it used to be.  The number of people who are employed who are taking stuff that other people have gathered and re-purposing it or re-processing it, that’s growing.  Okay? 

The consequence of what happens when you spend fewer, when you’re cutting the budget and you’re changing your product to chase a smaller audience is basically what we all talk about when we talk about what’s going on in the contemporary media landscape.  Well, what is going on?  One thing that’s going on when you’re cutting your budgets is you look for the most expensive things, and you cut those first.  What are the most expensive things?  Foreign bureaus are very expensive.  If you have  to cut ex-number of FTEs, full-time equivalent employees, at ABC News or at the Philadelphia Enquirer, if you cut a foreign bureau, you can probably get away with cutting fewer FTEs because they’re more expensive.  You have to have real estate there, you have to have all kinds of other things, everybody knows those foreign correspondents and their staff people get more expense account stuff and travel, so indeed, the networks have gone down from 12 bureaus 15 years ago, the numbers are approximate, I don’t remember them exactly, but they’re all down to about four bureaus now.  That means that there are implications to that.  That means that the kind of coverage we get on television from around the world is parachute coverage.  These are not people who are actually in these countries on a regular basis, they parachute in when shooting starts for the most part, and it also means that they don’t have a lot of close sources in those places, so that what is it that Christiane Amanpour is really good at?  Refugee camps, because that’s the thing she does in every place.  She knows how to do that.  She has a lot of sources in the refugee community, but she doesn’t know Slobodan Milosevic very well.  She may have interviewed him never, or once or twice.  As opposed to somebody that’s in that country, knows the people, has sources, so we get a different kind of foreign coverage just from the fact that it’s parachute coverage as opposed to in-country coverage.  It also means, of course, that you get less coverage.  In network television, also, you have another thing going on which is as you cut back on how much you’re willing to spend, you also have a change in the way people live.  The network news has always been on at roughly 6:30.  Now on the west coast it’s been diminished to point that it’s on at 5:30.  Well, Americans don’t live the same way.  We go to work, we’re at work longer, we have longer commutes, and fewer and fewer people are at home at 6:30.  So the growth area in network television has been in the early mornings, the Good Morning America and Today Show and things like that.  Also, there’s a growth in terms of how much primetime magazines that networks provide, and that means that they are orienting them, the people that they still have in those places, to feature reporters who can supply magazines as well as supply the nightly news, and not to hard news reporters who cover a limited area, cover beats, and are positioned around the world.  It goes along with the notion that you’re cutting costs.  You got a medical reporter and they can re-purpose these stories to morning news, evening news.  There’s a certain amortization of costs.

Okay, the consequence of that is that we have seen a changing of the definition of what is news on the evening news, and to some extent on the morning news, over the last 25 years.  In the 1970s roughly 75 percent of what you saw on the evening news was we would call traditional hard news.  By that I mean anything about domestic affairs like social welfare, the well being of the American population, and basic terms, anything about the government, anything about policy, national security, the military, or anything about the rest of the world overseas.  Seventy five percent of that fit into that basic grouping of what you might say is traditional front-page news.  The other 25 percent was spread out across everything, and we’re talking about the context of network news here, that everything else included some big topics like crime, which wasn’t then a big thing on nightly news because crime tends to be a local phenomenon, business, any lifestyle feature stuff, like how your money, cooking, the whole range of lifestyle stuff, and science and technology.  Today, last summer, the shift in the news agenda was as follows:  That traditional hard news had dropped to about 40 percent of what you see on network news, and all the other stuff had grown from 25 percent to 60 percent, and more feature-oriented nightly newscasts.  I’m taking the nightly news because that remains the most serious, the most hard-edged of the television news that we get in the United States.  What was going on there?  Like I said before, these features are something you can work on, you can put down, you can come back to, they’re more manageable in terms of time and cost.  They can amortize across different shows.  If you’re NBC and you have a cable network you can really amortize them because you can always run your money and your health and your kids are drinking too much, those things don’t perish very quickly, whereas hard news is really kind of useless a couple of days later.  Also, those things are sponsored.  There are sponsored segments on nightly news like American agenda or Eye on American on CBS Evening News which is something sponsored by Fidelity, and Fidelity says they want upbeat stories about X.  Those are feature stories.  It’s hard to have a sponsored segment about hard breaking news, because you have no idea what the hard breaking news is going to be tomorrow, so you can’t really go to the sponsor and say, “We want to have a special segment every day with your logo on it,” so the things that get sponsored are the weather, sports, you know, health and those kinds of things.  Sponsored segments bring in more revenue than regular stuff.  And as your audience is shrinking and your revenue is shrinking. . .  So the other thing that’s going on, and now we can more to network to local, they’re selling off more and more of the newscasts because getting revenue is getting harder to get.  So if you watch local TV news, you may notice, “Gee, why is there a Toyota logo on my weather map?”  “Why is the sports stories brought to you by whoever.”  Lots of things are now brought to you by. . .   And there’s a health segment on every local station all the time.  This is true in newspapers, too.  When I got in the newspaper business in the early 1980s, there was a big debate about whether we should have Camel cigarettes have this whole logo around all the sports scores on our page.  Well you look at USA Today, that’s there now.  That was an ethical dilemma in the early 1980s; it’s the standard operating procedure in 2002.  Why?  Not because TV news people have become less moral, but it’s a lot harder to make money than it used to be in the news business, in all its forms, even on line.  Against this backdrop you’ve also got the problem that more outlets means more advertising dollars spread out, and that means more clutter.  More of what they call in the amortizing business, more noise.  Do people actually listen to the ads?  Do they watch the ads?  How valuable is it for me as an advertiser to buy an ad on your channel?  Not only am I getting a smaller piece of the pie in terms of the American public but also now they have TiVo and other products, where people may be recording us and deleting the ads.  So what am I getting?  So advertisers are continually saying they don’t want a regular ad, they want something extra for their ad dollar.  They want something more like an infomercial, something beyond an ad.  Something that will break through the clutter, so what we’re getting is local stations and networks moving to some kind of alternative thing.  One may be tie-ins.  You may have noticed local stations that do, “Go back to school with W-USA, go down to Riggs Bank where W-USA and Channel 5 are doing a back to school promotion day where you can go down and get school supplies for the needy.”  Well, that was an ad.  That was an ad for Riggs Bank, and it was an ad that was designed to get you to actually go into a Riggs Bank where, if you do something, you’ll get something back.  It looked like a civic activity, but it was paid for and it was an ad.  There’s a lot more of that.  You may see bumpers, what are called now bumpers, which is the space between the ads and when the newscasts start on local TV and it’s going to happen on the network, where you’ll see something like that, it’ll be a home improvement tip by somebody, and it’s sponsored by Ace Hardware or something, and it’s a safety tip on how to use a power tool and not cut your nose off.  It looked like it was trying to help you.  It was an ad.  And that ad, incidentally, didn’t come out of ad time, they shortened the newscast to make that ad.  The reason they did that was because Ace Hardware said they don’t want to be in the ad block, they want to be in some other new place where people might pay attention.  So they know that you viewers out there think that, okay, after the ads there are promos for the shows on the network and that kind of cues my head to get ready for the news to start again.  Whoa!  I just saw a don’t cut your nose off with a power saw in that space when I’m starting to become cognoscente again, and maybe TiVo is even kicked back in so it’s not deleting that as a commercial.  Right, reset your TiVo.  So this is the backdrop.

Audience:  How far away from something like what Kevin Nealon from Saturday Night Live used to talk about subliminal things, you know, “Welcome to the News [Ace Hardware].”  How far away from something like that?

 

Rosenstiel:  I think those are actually product licensed on Saturday Night Live.  No, I’m kidding.  It’s like a double-irony.  That’s really a good question.  We’re there on the entertainment programming.  We are entirely there.  In movies, in reality programming, Survivor is essentially a commercial now, not only a commercial for CBS, but there’s all kinds of products placement inside Survivor.  There are fewer heads nodding on this one than I would have guessed, okay, so I have more of an egghead crowd here than I’m used to.  If you were to watch Survivor, subjective case, you would notice that they have things very prominently shot, the products that the Survivor contestants are using in their activity will have the logo on it, it’ll be “Survivor-ized” and it’ll be somewhat different for Survivor, but it’ll say, Poland Spring, or whatever.  You see this all the time in movies, of course, and to what extent is it going to happen?  It’s been happening for a long time very subtly where it’ll say, you know, “Bryant Gumbel’s suit supplied by Mr. Studley’s Clothiers,” or whatever.  The pressure is to increase all of that.  Now this is not meant as some kind of pinko, anti-capitalist diatribe.  Actually, I’m going to be on the moderate wing of all of this, but this is the backdrop in which we’re--when we analyze what the media is doing, and why is the news hall shrinking, it’s much too much of an oversimplification to say, “God darn it, the people at Disney are so much greedier than the people at Capital Cities,” or “GE is a much less moral company than the people who once owned NBC.”  It isn’t that simple.  In the last 20 years, network television audiences have gone from 95 percent of the television viewing audience, to about 48 percent of the television viewing audience.  It’s a much harder business to make money in.  And, in fact, you could argue that there’s all kinds of inequities in terms of cable versus broadcasting.  Broadcasting created why we watch TV.  We all learned how to watch TV from watching NBC, CBS--they created this industry, but they need to make a much bigger--it’s much harder to make money in broadcasting than in cable.  Why?  Because cable has two revenue sources.  You have to pay the cable company, I don’t know about you, but basic and preferred cable is about $50 just to get the signal now in Washington, DC.  $50 per month I pay them, just to get the stupid thing, and then any advertising they make on top of that is extra money for them.  In broadcasting, they get zero until they sell the ads.  All their money has to come from ads, so it’s become a very difficult business.  That’s why we see the things we see, and a lot of it is not driven simply by what audiences want, because they’re never sure what audiences want or will want next.  The notion of audience demand in the news business is very mercurial as it is in the entertainment business, but even more so in the news business because for the very simple reason that news is something that changes each day.  If I’m selling shoes, I can do a focus group and find out which kind of loafer people prefer.  I can get 25 people in a room and give them a blue one and a red one and a brown one and a black one with the stitching or without the stitching, and find out whether they like this or that.  You can’t do that with the news because the product changes every day, and the more you formula-ize the news product, the quicker it becomes stale.  I can sell that shoe for a whole season.  You cannot sell the same front page day after day after day for a whole year. You’d be out of business very quickly.  News by its nature needs to change, so it’s a very difficult thing to gauge audience demand for.  It’s a much easier thing to figure out how much does it cost us to produce this thing.  And indeed, when AOL bought CNN the first thing they did was do a cost per minute analysis.  How much do we spend to produce one minute of CNN versus FOX and MS-NBC.  And they said oh my goodness it costs a lot more!  Course they had bureaus all over the world and actually tried to cover the news, not always very well.  Whereas MS-NBC has no reporters, who only rents them as needed from NBC, its parent, and FOX has some reporters but in a few places and it’s not the same kind of thing.  So CNN is starting to look, and will gradually look even more, like FOX and MS-NBC.  Why?  Not because of research that shows that audiences want it that way, but because essentially the economic model is, It can be done at this cost, why are you not doing it at this cost? 

Okay, so the point of why I’m here:  When the war began, we had a media landscape that looked very much like the one that had been gradually moving in this direction for the last 25 years.  Forty-five percent of the stories on the nightly news were hard news, and on morning television, GMA.  Today 6 percent of the stories on their programs were hard news, and all the rest were soft stuff.  Come September 11 the following thing happens.  By October and November, the amount of hard news on nightly almost doubles.  Now more than 80 percent of the news on the nightly news is serious hard news about stuff that we once considered traditional, important stuff. You can debate whether it’s important or not, but the change is telling.  A lot more of it is about foreign affairs, a lot more is about the military and national security.  All things that were essentially absent.  Morning television, which had become in large part, in very significant part, an infomercial full of product placement, half of all the stories that you saw on morning television were selling you something, whether it was a cookbook or a movie or patio furniture or consumer products you could buy, and if you added in the commercial time, something like 35 minutes of every hour that you were watching you were being sold something.  Some of it inside the newscast and some of it in the commercials, obviously.  After 9/11 the 6 percent of hard news had become half their show, was now hard news.  You could actually turn on the Today Show at 7 a.m. in the morning and get a sense of what had happened overnight in the world.  And, indeed, the audiences for both the morning and evening news began to rise for a sustained period of time.  And they’re still rising, or they’re still up over what they were a year ago.  That is the longest sustaining increase that we’ve seen in network television news in a long time.  We’re talking almost two decades.  Now, is that because the news is harder?  Or is it because people are more attuned to what’s going on around them?  It’s a chicken and egg thing.  Even the research people at CBS, I assure you, do not know.  But the news had changed, and audiences were watching more of it.  Well, that was as of November, a couple of months after.  What’s happened since?  We studied network television news, morning and evening, all of this year through April, the first week of April.  And what we saw was that the world had not really changed.  The news agenda had become much more like it was last summer, you know, Gary Condit and all the rest, already by January.  By February the news was as light, if you will, as it was last summer in June.  Reporters had left Afghanistan and, you know, hear no evil, see no evil.  It changed in mid-March with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict which happened in mid-March, and the news suddenly became much more serious again.  Temporarily.  Why?  Hard to say.  One explanation is that among those four foreign bureaus that network television has, one of them is in Israel, so that an event that happens there gets covered heavily.  Another is that what network television and the news structure that has for newsgathering, is very good at covering either features or alarming, breaking news.  What it doesn’t cover very well is stories that are important but are sustained over time.  Stories that, as one person put it, are bending but not breaking.  So once the troops seem to be no longer in Afghanistan, we’re no longer in Afghanistan.  What’s going on with creating a nation in Afghanistan?  Oh, man.  Tell me in six months, but I’m not going to put that on my newscast.  It’s harder to do, it’s more expensive, it means people leaving people behind, it means leaving people in places where they may not make it on air every night, that’s exactly the kind of thing that is hard to justify economically, or at least under the new economics of news gathering on television.

Now all of this has some other implications.  We did one other study that we released in January that looked at what about the political tone or implications of the news that we’re getting, and here we looked at not just television, but also print and cable, and found that in the beginning we were getting a very factual and fairly carefully prepared diet of news.  In other words, in October and to some extent, particularly in October, the newscasters and the print people and the cable people were being very circumspect about here are the facts and we don’t really want to do too much synthesis or manipulation of them, this is what happened and we’re being very cautious about telling you what this might mean or where it’s headed, etc., etc., etc.  That circumspection began to fade over time, and by December, the news was much more likely to include interpretation and speculation, and the percentage of straight-ahead, hard news, as opposed to punditry which is the way we categorize it, we have punditry over here which is, “This is what I think.”  We have speculation, which is, “This is what may happen.”  We have interpretation, which is, “Based on my sources, I’m going to suggest this.”  Then we have straight-ahead here, just the facts.  And by December the percentage of facts had dropped, the percentage of analysis had gone up, but the percentage of speculation and punditry were also up to the point that you take these other three categories, they were as high in December, the amount of speculation and punditry and interpretation, was as high in December of last year as it was at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Not the height of the scandal, but in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal.  When the press was getting hammered for being very speculative.  Now what’s going on there?  Hard to say, again, so you take this with a level of circumspection, but I think it’s the same phenomenon that as your news gathering budgets are squeezed, sustaining your circumspection becomes harder.  As the news slows down and you’re more into covering a sustained story, you have to fill up the gaps in your reporting with interpretation, with speculation, and with punditry.  On television, particularly on cable, punditry is cost-effective.  What’s going on in cable news?  If you look at CNN now versus two years ago, more talk shows per 24 hours.  Why?  A talk show is a lot cheaper to put on the air, where you have a host and you talk about one thing for 25 minutes or an hour, the guests are on for free, and you don’t have all us annoying reporters to have to deal with and stuff to produce.  The more talk shows you have, the fewer reporters you need to sustain 24 hours of news.  So talk radio on TV is a function, again, not of audience demand, because the audiences for talk TV are not great, but they’re really cheap to produce relative to the evening news on network television, network broadcasting. 

Now, one other element beyond the fact that we moved towards a thinner, less fact-oriented coverage over time, and that is, if you look at the level of circumspection or skepticism about the American Bush administration policy for the war.  In general, throughout, not only at the beginning but as we moved further away from the attack, the amount of coverage that was skeptical of the Bush administration was quite small.  Only ten percent of the coverage overall, of stories overall, could be characterized as generally or predominantly skeptical of the administration’s point of view.  Okay?  Only ten percent of the stories, the point of the stories was to raise doubt or questions about Bush policy or US response.  I don’t mean the just moral justness of the American cause, I mean is this the right approach, is there confusion or controversy about it.  About, if I can remember the statistic, a little less than half of the coverage could be considered to have some balance, some skepticism in it, and about half of all the coverage, or 60 percent of the coverage, was almost exclusively pro-Bush administration without any real dissent contained in the coverage at all.  Now, print contained more dissent than broadcast.  Broadcast, if you will, was sort of an extreme way--was more jingle-istic or adversely patriotic or less skeptical than print.  Funny, we were talking about the New York Times in the previous session, the Times is the establishment newspaper, almost by definition, it’s a burden and an opportunity that the editors of the New York Times are aware of, are conscious of, and it’s an advantage and a disadvantage for them both.  It’s why people read them, and it’s also an inhibition.  But the New York Times contained vastly more dissenting information or information that you might see on Al Jazeera than anything you would have seen anywhere on broadcast or cable television in the United States.  While it is the establishment, it is far more likely to contain a range of point of views than most newspapers in the United States and other mainstream national media outlets.  Now, if you were to go to Al-Jazeera or The Nation or a plethora of other outlets, it would be quite different than what you see in the New York Times, but if you’re talking about sort of the mainstream things that your parents might read, or anybody who drives a Buick might read, the New York Times is quite diverse within that kind of an environment.

I can go on and one, but it would probably be more valuable for me to see if you guys have some questions.

Audience:  It’s sort of a two-part question.  One, living in a city where the national news comes on at 5:30, and the responsibility of local news, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, our World Beat is one minute, and it’s the funniest thing--it’s one minute of the world news!  And it’s amazing because New Mexico has its own subculture of fires and domestic abuse and stuff, so I wondered if both of you could talk about that.  Also, I hear this strange un-intersecting point, like you’re saying, “I only have two minutes and thirty second to say all these facts,” and then you’re saying, “Oh well, no one’s even giving the facts anyway.”  Like there’s this. . .

Rosenstiel:  That’s an overstatement.

Audience:  Yeah, I’m simplifying, obviously, but maybe it’s for Brian--how do you take this information that you’re hearing and seeing your own role.

Rosenstiel:  Well, first of all you have only a minute for the world news, but at least it’s presented by Andrea Thompson of NYPD Blue, so that makes up for a lot.  I think that there’s a double edge there in that local TV news thinks that its franchises to be local, they do put more national news in at certain times of day, particularly at the 11:00 news they think there’s an obligation to do more international news, but again the cost structure there is even more ridiculous than it is in national news.  They produce hours and hours and hours of news, in local, they’re expected in large markets to make 50 percent profit margin, and if you don’t you’re going to be hammered by Wall Street analysts, so you don’t have the freedom to set what your profit margin is going to be unless you have . . .

Audience:  50 percent?

Rosenstiel:  50 percent of large markets, 40 plus in medium and smaller markets.

Audience:  Why? 

Rosenstiel:  And the other irony about, just to talk about local news for a second, is that the TV markets were set up at a time for reasons that may not have much to do with the way communities operate, so in the New York City market you’ve got New Jersey, Connecticut, there aren’t political jurisdictions across all kinds of places, so what’s a local relevant community story in the New York City TV market?  God only knows.  Madonna may be one of the few things that everybody knows.  That’s why local TV news tends to be actually worse in some ways, more info-tainment oriented in large markets where they have more resources than in Albuquerque where, you know what the community of Albuquerque, you can say well, it’s a place, it’s a state.  In L.A. there are 20 congressional districts in the TV market, so no wonder they don’t cover anything political.  How could they, unless it was something that was so over-riding that they could say everybody was affected by it? 

(To Palmer) You should have a whack at this.

Brian Palmer:  Have a whack?  No, your point is well taken, when you talked about first the proliferation of talking heads on TV and the tendency to bring on radio talk show hosts--not even people who specialize in any particular issue or field.  CNN I think does that, but they’re also filling more of the airwaves with radio talk-show hosts.  But also the pressure on reporters. I think that’s well taken.  When I worked for the Village Voice as a guy in the community sort of thing, you always laughed at the expensive people who came in to cover the stories that we covered as a matter of course, and now I’ve become one of those people dropping into Afghanistan.  The pressure is on me, if I want to do good work, is to really, really, really do my homework beforehand and to really, really, really try to get a range of sources when I’m there.  As I said before I don’t speak the languages and that necessarily limits what I can do there.  The fact that I’ve proposed beat arrangements here so that I could do a beat.  Right after September 11 I wanted to cover Muslim-American communities, and they couldn’t spare me to do that because they needed to be able to throw me at disaster recovery or the story of the day, and that’s sad.  Now you know what the structural framework is now, the structural framework really does not make it easy to do community-centered, community-grounded, or even consistent reporting.

Rosenstiel:  Electronic journalism has really become anathema in that sense.

Younger:  I just had one question.  I’m real concerned about the lack of dissent on television. I guess I grew up in the 60s, and maybe you’re a little bit younger than I am, but there was a lot more dissent.  Meet the Press.  There were all these different programs that definitely had different ideas, that every time there was an issue, they always brought somebody, even if it was the lone person on this issue, up to talk with the other one.  Nothing like that--it was remarkably different.  Like the Vietnam War, any of those things.  There was somebody there.  You know?

Rosenstiel:  Well, two points on this.  One is TV has gotten into, as has a lot of corporate America, into the concept of branding.  During the Gulf War, going back another half generation, CNN got hooked on the idea that it could brand itself as the Gulf War network, although it didn’t really work.  After about a week most of that audience had migrated to ABC.

Palmer:  There was a real spike.  If you look at the chart.

Younger:  They were the ones that were there, they were . . .

Rosenstiel:  Right, and it lasted for about a week and a half and then it was gone, people over the sustained coverage, it was much harder for CNN back then, and people migrated to the traditional broadcast networks, especially, as it turned out, ABC, which had been doing more international news at that point than any others.  That notion of branding is now conventional gospel in media circles, and that in a sense was why you saw this rush to who could have the biggest flag and the waviest flag, and what slogan, “America at War,” “America Strikes Back,” They’re essentially saying, Oh my God, well now it can’t be, you know, it’s “America Challenged,” are we striking back or not?  Let’s do a survey; let’s do a focus group to find out what our slogan should be. There’s all this fevered pitch that’s outside of the purview of the news people.  There’s marketing that’s going on in determining this, but it intersects with the church, if you will, and that’s why you see this rush, and to some extent I think that once everybody’s doing that, it’s just cold war defense strategy.  The distinction between the FOX logos versus the CNN logos or ABC’s versus NBC’s were so negligible, there’s no limit to what you can do down there in that thing, that all you’re doing is saying, “hey, we have a flag too.”  You’re canceling out each other’s flags so that nobody can think you’re less patriotic than the other guy.  That’s issue number one; why you see this sort of overt patriotism, on the brink of jingle-ism; that they’re leading with their chin in a sense.  The second thing is that inside the context of cable, at that point FOX was ascending, and FOX was ascending with, even before 9/11, CNN was having difficulties in terms of audience, and it was doing it with an overtly patriotic argument that in a sense has been growing for about 15 years and has coincided with the decline in trust in the press, and declining audience, and that is a conservative critique led by talk radio and endorsed by certain republican politicians, that suggest that conventional news approach of the disinterested, circumspect journalists who weights multiple points of view and has an obligation to present dissenting points of view as a journalist value, that this is a liberal bias.  In their marketing, FOX says we give you just the facts and let you decide.  In their approach, what they actually do, not on a lot of their shows but on several of their key shows, they say, we’re not going to provide Al-Qaeda propaganda on our newscasts.  You want to watch that, watch somebody else because we’re an American network and our correspondents are packing heat, and if they see the enemy man, that enemy better fucking duck because . . .

Younger:  That’s dangerous for this country.

Rosenstiel:  Well, it may be dangerous for this country.  It also has broadcasters who are very worried about audience and their long-term future, saying, well we need to worry about that.  We need to look patriotic also.  We need to cover our base.  There is overt fear inside CNN even before 9/11 about the success of the criticism that CNN was somehow a liberal network and FOX was a conservative network.

Younger:  Could you ever survey people, because I went out and interviewed like construction workers and people everywhere, and they all seemed to want to wait, let’s look at it, even one construction worker, he really didn’t seem like he was very educated, he said a couple of things that were weird, but he did say that we were going to live a lot of our civil liberties now.  But he understood what was happening, and it seems to me that, I don’t know, maybe I’m in the wrong world, but people that I talk to across the country seem to have the same attitude.

Palmer:  But I think you are in the wrong world.  You’re in the world of the public, and I’m in the world of the corporation and we’re not really accountable to--that’s the news losing its public service mooring, and I think that’s the problem.  CNN, I don’t think, is responding so much to the political, I mean, that’s certainly a part of it, but FOX is creating a taste for this type of news, and FOX is now beating CNN in terms of their market share.

Rosenstiel:  I want to add one other thing to this, quickly, because I don’t want to chew up your time with this, but journalists have done a very poor job, not only of understanding what their role is, we are very anti-intellectual and fuzzy-headed about this, and secondly, as a consequence, we do not explain it to the public very well.  We have internalized, but only in the vaguest way, that it’s our job to tell people all the things that they need to know and to present them with lots of points of view so they can decide what to make oft his.  In much the same way that a doctor has a prescribed role, and if somebody comes into their operating room and there’s a shoot-out and the bad guy shoots up a bunch of people and the cops then shoot the bad guy, they come into the ER, if the bad guy is shot up worse, that’s who the doctors have a Hippocratic obligation to treat first.  We understand that lawyers have an obligation to give even the worst person in society a zealous defense, and if they don’t, that person can be set free, the lawyer can be sanctioned.  In a sense, journalists have a similarly prescribed role that we are supposed to, that we need to provide to society, which is to provide them with all the information they need so they can make up their own minds about what to think.  We have done a poor job of understanding what that means, we still are confused over the meaning of objectivity, we actually bollixed up the original definition of objectivity.  It was originally introduced in the 1920s because people were becoming aware of the fact that unconscious bias was getting in the news, so instead of, since journalists couldn’t be objective, they came up with an idea of objectivity which was a call for a more objective or almost scientific method of gathering and reporting news that was more transparent, you could explain to people why you’re doing this and why this is useful for them.  Journalists couldn’t be objective, but their method could be.  Well, here we are.  We had a question about it earlier today.  Nobody knows.  That’s completely lost.  We are all still sitting here saying, can we really be objective?  By my definition of objectivity, your work can absolutely be objective.  Can you personally be objective?  No, of course not.  Can your work?  Yes.  If you go out and shoot shots of an event, let’s say it’s the reaction of people on this campus after 9/11, and let’s say you shot some people crying and other people playing ping-pong, and some people praying and other people riveted to television, and other people running down to ground zero and you said, all of these things are happening.  By my definition, that’s objective work.  Why?  Because there were all those responses.  Now any one of those images, people could say, “Why are you taking pictures of people playing ping-pong and laughing as if they didn’t give a shit about what happened today?”  Well, that happened.  Those people did that.  It didn’t mean that they didn’t feel like they should go down to ground zero, but they didn’t.  So your work was objective because you captured the range of things.  You can talk about the sensibility, and how did you frame those shots and all the other stuff. . .

Palmer:  Yeah, like did you photograph the black people playing ping-pong and not white people playing ping-pong?  It’s that kind of thing.

Rosenstiel:  Right.  You need to explain to people that a scientific experiment is never 100 percent objective.  Can you use a method that you can then explain to people and they can judge the approach you took and why you took and then decide you think it’s professional?  Are you objective?  No.  Can your approach a system?  Yes.  Now, if we were to have developed a lot more sophisticated theory about our role in society and how to approach our work and all the rest of this stuff, and not actually in the 1930s confused the definition of objectivity and applied it to mean exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to mean, somehow that you could be objective, which is what it was not supposed to mean, we’d be much better off.

One last thing on this.  There’s an editor in Florida who’s come up with a term that the role of the journalist in society is that of the “committed observer.”  What that means is that we are committed to the community, you are an American, you are a citizen, you are all these things.  You are totally inner-dependent with your fellow citizens, but your role is prescribed like the doctor or the lawyer to be that of the observer; to be the eyes and ears for your fellow citizens, and provide them with things they may not want to hear or know because that’s your obligation and that limits how much of an activist you can be.  You are there as an observer.  It doesn’t mean you’re disinterested; it doesn’t mean you’re detached.  It means that you’re committed and your commitment is expressed this way.  There’s no reason if we had operated our profession differently, that that couldn’t be as popularly understood as the idea that lawyers will be provide a zealous defense to really creepy icky criminals.  But we haven’t don’t that, so we’re attacked for stuff.  More questions?

Younger:  I wanted to leap in real quick and try to connect you to Ira Rosen because we are culture-producers here, and your talk is a bit discouraging.  I think you may be recruiting a room of investment bankers, but Rosen was saying that because of this diffusing or atomizing of media companies that that’s going to create opportunity for independent image providers and all that sort of stuff, even though there’s still going to be corporate control of those main outlets, how do you see that atomizing affecting photographers and videographers and journalists who are going to go out there now?

Rosenstiel:  Two things. (End of tape) You have more opportunity, ironically, at a time of the corporatization of the media, you have more ability to create work now on your own, immediately, then you could 15 or 20 years ago in the more oligarchic period of media where you literally had to work with somebody who owned a printing press or had a TV license, to publish anything.  You can create a website and just publish it and give it away.  There’s not an economic model necessarily for that, but there’s not an economic model for MSNBC.com right now.  They have tons of audience, but they’re not making much money, hardly any, it’s a break-even operation.  So nobody knows what the economic model for a lot of the new media is. The other thing is that I can guarantee you one thing, and that is the innovation that connects with the public and is the next new thing in the medial world will not come out of NBC or ABC or CNN.  It will come out of somebody in this room, who does it on their own, outside of a corporate model.  You may then get brought into,  not necessarily co-opted, it may be that wow, but it’s very difficult to create innovation inside these corporate structures.  Almost impossible.  They are now assimilators, and they will copy and acquire that innovation.  My guess is that in a couple of--I think we are in a period of transition, and in ten years you won’t have so many outlets because the market can’t really sustain them.  There will be a bunch of big institutions that will go out of business.  CBS may be out of the news business.  MS-NBC may be out of the news business, and you will have a model that allows for a better product because it can sustain a bigger audience.  I suspect they’ll also stop giving it away.  Basically NBC and CBS, there’s going to be a fee paid to these guys so they can compete evenly with . . .

Younger:  It just seems to me, though, that in the news business it would be so much better if they had a lot of this conflict going on, because that’s what people like to watch.  It just seems like when they’re doing their best at that we’re all looking at it, and when it starts to go through all this stupid stuff we don’t watch it.  Why can’t we get the message?  Where are we missing it? 

Rosenstiel:  Competition in the news business is very good if you have a long-term strategy.  None of these companies have a long-term strategy right now.  They don’t know if they’ll be in business in five years.  All they’re doing is trying to make it from quarter to quarter, and that means very little investment for the future.

Audience:  I’m just curious about the coverage of the non-profit organization during the war, i.e., PBS and NPR, and I was wondering if you made any research about that coverage, and what would be the role of these organizations in the future?  Because I found I don’t have PBS but I found the coverage on NPR very different than the other networks and very reliable in a sense.

Rosenstiel:  It’s interesting that you asked that because when I started with the invisible drawing that I didn’t make on the screen there, I said there are a few exceptions to this.  NPR is one of the exceptions.  In the last ten years, its audience has more than doubled.  Why?  Because news gathering locally on the radio has almost vanished completely.  If you want to get news and information on the radio, all of that audience in the United States basically has to tune into NPR, except in a handful of cities.  It’s become more distinctive because there’s less stuff like it.  So NPR has benefited from this because they have stuck to their mission.  The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is essentially what you’re talking about when you’re talking about news on PBS, or maybe Frontline.  I think the Lehrer news hour has lost audience at a slower rate than other kinds of television.  It’s held on to more of its audience, so has Ted Koppel interestingly enough, so has nightly news, via entertainment on television.  I think that Lehrer could have done better had its product changed and been updated more.  I think they’re producing a 1970s-style newscast.  You can be as in-depth and be younger.  I think that may change in time, but basically that show is still run by Lehrer and to a lesser extent, Les Crystal, and they are very serious people, but Lehrer is about my dad’s age, and my dad tapes the Lehrer show when he’s not home.  My wife doesn’t watch it, but she’s 25-30 years younger than Jim Lehrer, but I think that’s an interesting issue they need to contend with.

Audience:  I’m wondering, because I know you have this overview of stuff, and at what point did whoever the powers that be in the news decide that the attention span of the viewer of the audience could only take so much.  Was there a study done?  Or did people use that as an excuse to validate . .

Rosenstiel:  That’s a very interesting question, because the research that is done in media is very, well, it’s really cheap.  It’s cheap and dirty research.  TV research is problematic for reasons I described earlier, and as an industry, the news business and media business doesn’t spend very much money on market research.  In part, that was because the news people don’t like market research, and they’ve resisted it, so it’s essentially been done by the marketing people and the entertainment people, who have to risk more money up front.  You know, it costs a lot of money to produce a new sitcom, it doesn’t cost a lot to produce a new magazine show on TV, just take your same people and generate new logos and put it on the air.  So the research they do is pretty lousy, and in local TV where it’s done largely through outside consultants, it’s really trash research.  I know a lot about it, I’ve seen the raw data, I’ve seen the raw questionnaires.  It wouldn’t pass anybody’s muster.  In part because they want to sell it for cheap and so you get more clients and make more money.  We’ve done really detailed studies where we’ve examined newscasts and local markets over five years, we have hundreds of stations that we’ve studied and studied.  They’re ratings trends.  This is not focus group research, it’s content correlated to ratings data, and we’ve found that regardless of whether the good, bad or middling stations, in terms of their quality or their style as tabloid or serious or whatever, there are five things you can say that will build ratings, and one of them is that stations that do more long stories that are two minutes long or longer and do fewer stories that are 25-30 seconds or shorter, in other words doing more long stories and fewer very short stories, that will build your ratings.  Too many short stories, too much eye candy, is a turn-off.  So the stations that are doing this, because they think it will create more interest or eye-candy, or people have ever-shrinking attention spans, they’re wrong.  It’s just wrong.  Now, why haven’t they done this research?  This kind of such that we’ve done?  Because we had a philanthropy give us $2 million a year that I spend doing research, and I’ve spent well over a million dollars just doing this TV research that generated that finding.  No station in the world would spend anything approaching that.  So they don’t know.  But a conventional mythology was created that people, you know . . . The other thing is that there’s an enormous desire in broadcasting and advertising in general to reach younger people.  It’s somewhat ironic because younger people have less money to spend on stuff, but there’s this idea that you want to reach the audience that’s hardest to reach, which is young men, and also they haven’t created their brand loyalty yet, which I think is also a misnomer because my brand loyalty changes.  I actually still read things and learn things, and I’m 46, and I change my mind, and I’ll buy a product and if it sucks I won’t buy it again, and things like that.  So my brand loyalty still changes, and I have a lot more money than I had when I was 18, but they’re not interested in my anymore.  They’re interested in people who are 18-35, who are males who don’t watch the news anyway.

Younger:  Well it’s curious though that it’s males.  When you think about it, maybe that’s why you see what you see on TV.

Audience:  You already talked about how the media in the United States covers mostly the national news, and my question is, I didn’t watch the news, I lived abroad for a long time, and when I came here I saw the difference, for instance, in CNN.  You have the CNN International, and I don’t understand.  It seems to me that sometimes America does not need the rest of the world, but at the same time there’s a contradiction, then why the news outside the country.  Is that to give an image?  I just don’t understand it.  I’d appreciate it if you could explain that to me.

Palmer:  I think oddly enough that CNN International is more in keeping with the ideals of the founders of CNN.  I think that’s what Ted Turner founded CNN for and things split off when they realized that there were different appetites.  And CNN Domestic does do very little sustained, substantive foreign news.  What is amazing to me is that you can have two almost completely different networks functioning under the same banner.  CNN International has a very, very different structure, and it’s run by different people, and they’re also the ugly stepchild.  The money goes to CNN Domestic.  That has always been ironic to me because the audience for CNN International is many times larger than the audience for CNN Domestic, however, there’s no real revenue coming from CNN International in the same sense that the revenue that comes from CNN Domestic from these big-name advertisers and cable subscriptions.

Rosenstiel:  And it’ll be interesting to see what will happen or what would happen if, in a sense, you created a level playing field.  If you had, when we get even more channels on our TVs, if somebody said, “You know what?  I’m going to make CNN International available and the BBC,” and this product already exists, it wouldn’t cost a lot to create a channel for it and see if whether a segment of Americans would gravitate to a more serious news in a broadcast venue.  I think there are three things that are causing this decline, this absence of foreign sensibility or internationalism in American television.  One is that we have this history of being isolationists in the United States, and the rest of the world can go to hell, and it’s true in the way we’ve marketed products, they way we’ve conducted our foreign policy for many years, and it tends in increase in good times and then we become somewhat more international in difficult times.  The second thing, so that’s a reality, but it’s not the whole story.  The second thing is the cost stuff we were talking about before, which is reinforced by what you were just saying.  That as money gets tight, they toss the foreign stuff overboard fastest because it’s the most expensive, and it’s reinforced by this idea that Americas don’t care about that stuff anyway.  Then the third factor is one that’s important to recognize when you think about media in general, and that is you have to realize when you say, “What’s the audience,” you’re not talking about the American public.  You’re talking about the audience you’ve acquired over time for your particular product.  If you create a produce on CNN Domestic that is very heavily domestic, that’s increasingly focused around X, Y and Z and you’ve made that your meat and potatoes, if you then change that, the audience that watches you will be disoriented and some of them will actually go away.  Because you’re restaurant has been a hamburgers and French fries restaurant and all of a sudden you put coacovan on the menu and they say, “What the fuck is this?  Where’s my burgers and fries?”  And no one’s going to order the coacovan.  So if you want to change, you have to leave the coacovan on the menu for a really long time, along with the burgers and fries, until new people come into your restaurant and say, “hey, I had a coacovan over at the McDonalds and it was amazing!”  And you have to promote it, and that takes a year or more, which is why when a TV stations has a new format, new anchor, “we’re going serious,” blah, blah, blah, the first thing that happens is their ratings go down.  Why?  Because all the people who were there, once you start serving them spinach, they say, “What’s this green stuff?”  So there are three big intractable long-term reasons that make it difficult to say, “We’re going to get more serious now,” or, “We’re going to get more international now.” 

Audience:  On the economics of these broadcasting.  During the two to three days on TV there weren’t any commercials at all.  And actually stations were patting themselves on the back, saying, “This is really great.”  So I was wondering the economic impact of that, or are they trying to make up for it now?

Rosenstiel:  Well, if you go back and look at the history of news on television, they used to think that there were a lot of factors here, but they basically think of the product of CBS or NBC in its totality.  And they would say, “We’re going to produce the news, we don’t care if it makes money.”  Now they could afford to do that because there were three channels and they were making money hand over foot--these weren’t angels, they were just monopoly business.  So they said, “Don’t worry about making money in news because what news does for us is it makes people think better of us,” and Bill Paley literally thought that if they had a better newscast, that people would also think they had better sitcoms.  If people liked Walter Cronkite they would think better of Jack Benny, and that they would create credibility for the whole corporation.  In some ways, that worked.  Because there’s all kinds of research that shows that if you turn the TV off at night on CBS, you wake up in the next morning, it’s on CBS and you’re going to watch that.  Now this was in the days when you actually had to get up and touch the television set to turn the channel, but it’s still true to some extent.  Never underestimate the laziness of people or their ability to lose the clicker under the mattress and stuff.  So what happened after 9/11 was people were struck by the fact that networks were exercising judgment and doing something that seemed like a public service.  No commercials.  It was very serious news.  It was really helpful.  It was telling people, “We don’t know if this is true,” or, “We’re not going to tell you about this because it’s only a rumor.”  People thought better, not only of television, but of journalism in general.  The Pew Research Center for the People in Press found the first up tick in 15 years in attitudes, generally, towards journalists and whether they were moral people and whether they were helping the country and democracy and working on behalf of the public.  Well, there was a reason for that.  It wasn’t just, “I’m watching more news,” it was because when they watched the news, the news really was different.  It was more serious.  There were fewer commercials and all of that.  So I think it goes back to, you’d have to have a long-term strategy and say, “We’re really going to re-think the way we operate this.”  Right now they have operated television news with a portfolio mentality, which is to say, how much is news making, how much is entertainment making, how much is sports making.  Everybody justify their profitability and their existence independent of each other.  In a synergistic world, the units within the division, were thinking of synergy as something simply to market, so that during a golf tournament you’d see all kinds of promotion, but that golf tournament had to pay for itself separately.  So the synergy was on the marketing side, and not on the revenue side, if you will.

Audience:  During those three to four days of no commercials going on, economically, I found that if there were commercials you would change the channel to go somewhere else, to find the news somewhere else, so I think to have the commercials running would have been actually more damaging for the networks, because they’re losing their viewers, they’re going to change the channel, because we were all glued to our television.

Rosenstiel:  Yeah, I think that’s true, and I also think that people would have been offended, and the networks thought that people would have been offended. 

Palmer:  And I think advertisers knew that too.  I recall, I wasn’t a part of these discussions, but I think that the sense was that advertisers didn’t want to advertise anyway.  Then the question became at what point would it be appropriate to get back to order.

Younger:  I think that’s definitely true because the businesses, a lot of people I knew, they weren’t shooting anything anymore--there were no commercials being made, everybody was dropped.  For almost two months there was nothing in this town.

Palmer:  Everybody was shooting on their own.

Younger:  Well, not only that but just . . .

Rosenstiel:  I also think, and it was risky when advertising did come back, there were some people who came back and there were a lot of commercials that made it sound like if you bought a Ford you were doing a patriotic thing, and that was . . .

Palmer:  Yeah, especially when you have politicians saying going out and shopping is patriotic.

Rosenstiel:  Right.  So again, a lot of this comes down to, do you have a plan for where you want to be in five years a corporation, and if you do, how do you get there?  The fact is, I think, at this point these guys are going, as they used to say, inch by mother f-ing inch.  They’re just in the jungle and they don’t know where they’re going to come out, and it makes it very difficult which is also I think why all the innovation is going to come from individuals, from entrepreneurs, and from younger people.  At the same time that I’ve presented what is potentially a very bleak picture, I’m probably more optimistic than I would have been five years ago, because the technology has created an opportunity for people to create on his or her own, without having to be hired, if you will.  Like The Onion, an odd example.  But the best stuff on the web is generally  not coming from giant corporations which are risk-adverse. 

Audience:  One thing that I’ve been thinking about is how the news itself, or how it’s become so self-referential, too.  I think about the example of just a couple of days after 9/11, I remember seeing I think more than one analysis where they did overtime, they had some pundit come in and interpret what was going on with the presidential tear, and when that finally appeared and everybody just breathed a sigh of relief.  And referring back to all these previous broadcasts of him, on television, making speeches or in interviews, and first it was stiff, and how the process ends up being repeated and it becomes like where our politicians become products themselves, where they’re learning from this media, I mean, clearly we have all these tapes of Hitler practicing speeches, it’s not something new, but I’m wondering what kind of criticism has happened or has been voiced if any, in that kind of production, where it’s so clear what it’s being used for and the fact that we should even expect that our president is somebody who’s “in progress” is sort of ridiculous as well, and yet everybody just . . and I also personally don’t understand sometimes how a lot of anchors and interviewers keep a straight fact when it comes to something like that.  It’s great acting, the nodding, but sometimes I’m wondering, “Are you believing this?”  Like what’s going on!  You know what’s happening!

Rosenstiel:  I often say that everybody does their own focus every day.  Of the people that you run in to.  And one of the things that you have to do if you want to succeed in being an effective and thoughtful communicator, and I think of journalists as a sub-group, special group communicator because of this tie to all these other values we’ve been alluding to.  You need to make sure that you have created, that you are getting outside of a small circle of friends.  That you are in touch with a wide group, that your personal focus group each day is unexpected and very diverse and that you’ve thought about that.  And one of the things that goes on that you’re responding to is the fact that people in the media world only talk to other people in their small circle of friends.  So Ari Fleischer is talking to journalists and he’s talking to some spin doctors and the journalists are talking to Ari Fleischer and other journalists and spin doctors, and they all think that they are--that the food they eat is the only food there is.  Or that you’re going to fail as president because we didn’t like what you said, so we’re going to write a story on the TV or take a picture of you that makes you look bad, and Ari Fleischer is thinking we’re not going to succeed as president because look at the press coverage we’re getting.  The fact is that to some extent, what you do is going to determine whether you’re successful or not.  You may get lousy coverage.  There’s all kinds of--I can point to research that shows you that Ronald Reagan’s popularity surged at the very moment that his coverage became more negative.  Why?  Because the economy began to improve and people cared more about that and responded to the pictures of Reagan, or responded to what Reagan was doing and what was happening in their lives, and they didn’t really care what the AP wrote or what CBS said.  And even Ronald Reagan didn’t appreciate that.  Sometimes, in fact, reality still counts.  These guys, the press secretary is there to generate positive press coverage, and if he doesn’t, he gets called on the carpet.  So everybody is thinking about it incrementally, but in fact I think there’s more going on in these things.  Most of my career has been spent studying politics and the intersection of politics and the media, and I can tell you that all kinds of things, like that usually ad expenditures, how many ads a candidate puts on, have a negative impact on his fortunes.  There’s empirical research that shows that usually the more ads you do, the more people actually get sick of you, but your media consultant who makes his money off of selling more ads, having you buy more ads, does not tell you this, and may not even know it. 

Ultimately, the work that resonates with people, that you hear people who you don’t know respond to, that’s where the future is.  The way that media evolved was basically as follows: The press used to be in the United States, controlled by parties.  It wasn’t there to make money, it was there to be political propaganda.  It removed itself from that, it took about 100 years to do that, because they discovered that they could have more of an impact on people and have more people acquiring the product, if they were free and independent.  Most of the great publishers in the press were very concerned with creating citizenry.  Making people into American citizens, and that became the backbone of their economic success.  They acquired an audience, they built an audience, and then, only then, did they figure out a way to rent that audience to an advertiser.  It wasn’t commercially oriented, it was audience oriented originally.  And, if you think about the audience, think about the audience, think about the audience, you will succeed.  Don’t think about the revenue, don’t think about the bosses, think about what do people need.  What information do people need?  What do they not know?  Do the unexpected thing that you think they’re going to want.  It’s the thing that people didn’t know they needed that is ultimately the next new thing.  If you gave them what they’re already getting or what everybody thinks they want, other people are doing that. 

One last thing on this.  I was at a meeting here about a year ago here in Manhattan where a brilliant professor from Columbia, a sociologist/media expert, said, “It is mostly true, not entirely true, that most of the great journalists in American, not all, have been from the working class.  And it is mostly true, not entirely, that most of the great publishers in America, not all, have been immigrants.”  And it’s true.

Younger:  Because they have an outside respect?

Rosenstiel:  And because it’s about citizen building.  What we think of as the modern media, journalism in its broadest sense, evolved out the enlightenment, out of the notion that people can govern themselves, and to govern themselves, they needed information.  Before 1600, only the rich, only the royal family knew stuff, and to create self-government, other people needed to know stuff.  They needed to make information held by a few, transparent to many.  That’s how journalism was born.  And the more self-government you have, the more journalism you have.  In 1604 the first newspapers began to pop up in Germany and France and England, out of coffee houses where men used to go to get gossip and information for their business.  These coffee houses became newspapers.  Somebody said, “Hey, I can take what I hear in the coffee house and put it on paper and people can get it and not have to come to the coffee house.  And I can make some money doing it.”  Well, 30 years after this began, somebody first used the term “public opinion” in the British Parliament.  Before there was journalism, the public didn’t have enough information to have an opinion about anything involving public affairs.  So what we do from the very beginning and even now is more connected to creating citizens than it is to creating money, and if you think about the audience, you will succeed.  The money will chase the audience, not the other way around. 

(Applause)

Rosenstiel Analysis 

by Glenn Kawabata

Tom Rosenstiel seems to have one of those jobs that sound too good to be true.  He received a substantial grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts with the charge to clarify and improve journalism standards.  The result is The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which attempts to objectively examine the current state of the journalistic media.  Rosenstiel presented not only an overview on the project’s mission statement, but he also expounded, in some detail, on a recent project that examined the content of the media following the events of September 11, 2001.

It has become quite common to criticize the state of current journalistic media.  The situation wherein conglomerate corporations own the majority of the outlets of media seem to be viewed as negative not only by Rosenstiel, but also by almost anyone who has critically examined the situation.  In view of this, the project seems to be quite valuable.  It appears to be examining the situation in much more critical detail than the media outlets are doing themselves.  The assumed relative autonomy, with which The Project for Excellence in Journalism operates, provides the space in which to accomplish this.

However there remains one primary question, which perhaps was not addressed: What is to become of this data and analysis? Rosenstiel mentioned several other studies whose results seem to contradict current trends in journalistic media output.  The Project for Excellence in Journalism was started in 1996 and while various studies and results were discussed, no mention was made of any feedback that Rosenstiel has received.  Recognizing that these trends are still occurring in journalistic media, one wonders whether the conclusive data from the project is reaching the intended audience. It seems that the project’s intended audience was not clearly identified, although, the implicit assumption is that it is the contributors to, outlets of, and powers that control journalistic media. 

Finally, it seemed that Rosenstiel’s presentation lacked self-criticism, such as the possible inherent bias in his methodology.

Although the methodology and scope of the project is impressive, one wonders whether it is reaching those that it should. Rosenstiel has clearly contributed some “hard data” to the dialogue but a vital question remains, how will such data cause change in the system?

It was mentioned that one of the few exceptions to current trends in media is National Public Radio.  Many people have switched to NPR and the Internet for the majority of journalistic media information.  The issue of the current state of journalistic media needs to be addressed in a dire way. Rosenstiel’s project certainly reflects a step in the right direction, but it is necessary for the data and conclusions to reach the intended audience. Simultaneously, self-evaluation and criticism is also necessary in order to continually lend the project and its results credibility.  But is this a media format that is perhaps beyond repair?