 Good afternoon. My name is Amy McCreath, and I'm the coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's forum, Elections 2004, Did the Media Fail? As you may know, this is the third of a three-part series that the Technology and Culture Forum has cosponsored with MIT's Communications Forum. And if you were with us in the fall, you know that we had some tremendous presentations, some of which were a little bit scary in terms of the information that they gave us about the trends in how people are getting their information and the influence that the media has and the content of the media as people were preparing for the elections last fall. So today, we're doing sort of a post-mortem. We're looking back and seeing what the effect of the media was and the role that it played with a particular eye to its effect on our democratic process and bringing information to citizens so that they could make good choices about how they were going to vote. We're really thrilled that today we have two tremendous speakers with us to lead this conversation, Terence Smith and Kathy Young. Each of them is going to be speaking for about 20 minutes and then we'll have lots of time for conversation. So we hope that you'll be thinking of questions that you'd like to ask. We'll have plenty of time for that once they're finished with their presentations. David Thorburn, who is the director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, will be the moderator for that part of our program this afternoon. And once again, let me just say, David, that it's been a great pleasure to work on this series with you. When it gets to the time for questions, there are two microphones, one on each aisle. And if you could come to the aisle to the microphones and ask your question into the microphone, that would be a great help as this event is being audio cast and also videotaped. So let me introduce you to the speakers for our forum today. Terence Smith joined the news hour with Jim Lair in August of 1998. And he was brought there to establish and lead the media unit as its senior producer and correspondent. Terry and his unit are four-time winners of the Arthur C. Rouse Award for Media Criticism given by the National Press Club. Prior to joining PBS, Smith spent 20 years as a national and foreign correspondent and editor within New York Times and 13 years with CBS News. And as someone who is a devoted watcher of the news hour, I want to personally thank him for being here and for his good work. Thank you. Kathy Young is a columnist for the Boston Globe, as many of you know, and a columnist and contributing editor for Reason Magazine. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Born in Moscow, she's lived in the United States since 1980. She's the author of two books, Growing Up in Moscow, Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, and Ceasefire, Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality. As I mentioned to Kathy in the last few days, several people told me that they noticed that she'd be with us tonight. And they told me, oh, I always read her column. And a few of them said, sometimes I really disagree with her, and sometimes I really agree with her, but I always read her column. And I think that's actually a sign of great respect and a good sign that a journalist is getting people to think and that people read her even when they don't agree with her. So we're really glad that you're with us today. So now let me turn the program over to David Thorburn. And thanks again to our speakers for being with us. Is this on? There are two minor corrections. One is Henry Jenkins will be happy to learn that I am not the director of the Comparative Media Studies program, but the director of the MIT Communications Forum and a faculty member in Comparative Media Studies. The second correction, more serious. And I want to encourage our speakers to think in these terms. We're going to be talking not just about the election, but about its aftermath and the coverage of the presidency and the White House and American politics in the period after the election as well. Because when I invited Terry Smith to come and talk here, his first reaction was, oh, that's old news, the election. What about what's happening now? And it seemed like a helpful correction. So I hope not only that the speakers will take up such matters, but that you and the audience will not hesitate to raise questions about the relation between our media and our politics as it is being played out today as well. Which of you is going first? I will. OK. Shall I? Go ahead. OK. Good afternoon. I came here this afternoon from Hollywood on the Potomac that the true entertainment capital of America. And as I was in a cab coming from Logan, I heard that Nicholas Aguipante's brother, John, currently the US ambassador in Baghdad, will be nominated to be the new and first director of National Intelligence Director, or Intelligence Czar. And John is an old friend of mine. I've known him for 30 years. And I thought to myself, hmm, Baghdad may look good after a month or two of Washington in that job. It's a very interesting selection, not from the pure intelligence community. And we'll see first, of course, how he fares going through approval, the approval process. But taking your admonition about the election and now, let's talk a little bit about the election and what I see, anyway, as the highs and the lows of the media coverage of what was without question. I think one of the most interesting, closely fought, intensively covered elections of any of our lives, our time. It also produced the highest turnout in two decades. So it clearly got people's attention. I thought that among the highs in the coverage, that there was a lot of good work done, most of it in print, not exclusively, that work that profiled the candidates that dissected their positions and challenged their accuracy in their television advertisements and statements that pointed up the inconsistencies in their stump appearances. And all in all, there was actually a great deal of very good work, a lot of it done in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the predictable so-called mainstream media, including USA Today. And yes, I do mean USA Today. They did a lot of very good coverage. I think there was good work done as well on television. Frontline once again did its excellent, in-depth portraits of the two candidates in the general election. And I think you can learn a lot by watching those. I believe the news hour where, as we say, we dare to be dull. We looked hard at the candidates and many of the issues that arose. We developed a fact check segments on the truth of what they were saying on the road and ad watch segments about the truth or falsity of what they were saying on the air in their paid commercials. I think there was actually a lot of good discussion in the great welter of talk on the all-news cable networks. It was unfortunately very heavily mixed with opinion. And I think people can be forgiven if sometimes they find it a little hard to sort out one from the other. But in fact, there was a great deal, a very interesting commentary. Probably the most interesting coverage and the most that which was different in 2004, even from 2000, was the attention paid and coverage provided on the internet. It came of age in at least two respects. One is a fundraising vehicle, the like of it never seen before, and you know it has created the template now for campaign fundraising in the future and maybe beyond campaigns, but just sticking for the moment with the campaign. So it was long promised as an effective vehicle to do that. It really delivered this time, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the campaign. Mainly for Democrats, and I think you'll see the Republican Party catch up in a big way. You already did towards the end of the campaign, but I think you'll see it in the coming years pretty dramatically. But more importantly, as a source of news and again of fact checking and double checking of what was being said not only by the candidates, by the campaigns, by their surrogates, but also by the mainstream media. And that too came of age. A lot of it came from established internet websites, but a great deal came from the ever-growing army of bloggers who were quick to get on what they perceived to be inaccuracies or worse real distortions in either the coverage or in what was said. The famous case, of course, was the unmasking of the faulty documents put on CBS, purporting to describe shortcomings in the president's National Guard service back in the early 70s. I am told that the first questions were raised on a blog 18 minutes into the hour-long broadcast. I don't know about you, but that raises some suspicions in my mind as to whether or not that blogger was put up to it or had information in advance about those documents, knew that the whole thing was coming down that night on CBS Wednesday, 60 Minutes Wednesday. It just raises an interesting question. I'd be fascinated if anyone has any insights on that. It seems awfully quick to me. I took this up with Walter Bender this afternoon. He sought to persuade me that he too could have found the problem with a little th in 18 minutes or less. OK, well, maybe. I raised the question. Was it, in fact, spontaneous, or was it not? I don't know the answer. In any event, I'm certain that the internet will and the bloggers especially will continue to play an even larger role. I think they have. Witness just recently now the unmasking of Jeff Gannon, AKA Jim Guckard in the White House press room, a writer for Republican-sponsored websites who, in fact, his main function seemed to be to throw softball questions up to the president for him to hit out of the park in the news conferences and appearances in the press room. I think that's interesting. More poignant in some ways and certainly more consequential was the early, almost immediate reaction of the bloggers to Easton Jordan's remarks. The CNN president who spoke at Davos about his suspicions about whether the coalition forces in Iraq had targeted journalists. They killed 12. Was it accidental? Did he raise the notion that it was perhaps not entirely accidental, that those journalists got in the crosshairs of coalition forces? An interesting question. He backtracked from his statement to that regard while still on the panel when challenged to document what he was saying and to explain if it was true why it wasn't already on CNN. He backed off considerably, but great attention was paid to it in the blogosphere. And the heat billed on Easton Jordan and forced his resignation, perhaps among other causes, but forced his resignation just in the last Friday. So the impact, the immediacy, the probing quality was there in the campaign. And I think we see it continuing as a part of media life now. And I expect that to continue as well. I thought there were some real lows in the coverage. There was that whole senseless distraction about the war in Vietnam, not the war in Iraq, the war in Vietnam. We had to spend about a month arguing about that and the respective roles of the two men to no end. Nothing new was turned up. One of the unfortunate aspects when the controversy turns not from the subject but to the media delivering it, let's say Dan rather, and in the case of the documents, is the original question tends to get lost. The original question was, did the president receive preferential treatment as the privileged son of a distinguished Texan at the time he applied for a position in the National Guard and when he was allowed to exit it before completing his service? And the corollary question, if those documents were fake, who faked them and why? Good questions. They get totally lost when the controversy turns on the news organization delivering the news rather than the substance itself. Easton Jordan's question hasn't been addressed. What is the role, what was the role of coalition forces in the death of 12 of 60-plus journalists who have died in Iraq? In Vietnam, I recall commanders who felt and would candidly say that anybody who got between them, their forces, their unit, and the enemy, did so at his or her own risk and was, if not a target, not to be worried about. So attitudes differ. There are many unanswered questions about the killing of two journalists in the Palestine Hotel when a US tank raised its barrel, fired at a camera position located on an upper floor and two journalists were killed. Well, they said they took fire from the Palestine Hotel. Maybe they did. That was their defense. The army looked into it. Lo and behold, the army found itself guiltless. And I would argue that the matter has never been seriously examined or resolved. So that's just sort of an unfortunate fact that when the controversy turns to the media, the substance tends to get lost. Certainly, the whole nonsense about the swiftboat veterans for truth and their campaign, it was a fiction. And yet, it was a fiction that was sustained by talk radio and talk television without, again, anybody examining what were the substance of the allegations made about Senator Kerry and his service? Did they hold water? It went to the allegations, not to the substance. That's an unfortunate pattern. And it certainly qualified, in my opinion, for one of the real lows in the campaign coverage. Finally, there were some big shortcomings, it seemed to me, in the category of unanswered questions and unaddressed topics. I don't think, for example, that news organizations have figured out how to cover the so-called war on terrorism as a political issue. It is, of course, a political issue. And it certainly was in the campaign. I don't think they've sorted that out and figured out how to address it and separate out where the politics and the news, if you like, intersect in that regard. I think they tend to muddle the concept of homeland security and its concerns with this generic war on terrorism and then mix Iraq in in a kind of mindless way. And then they shorthand everything. And I'm certainly probably as guilty as anyone else. But in the shorthanding, it all gets blended in to a fair muddle, in my view. And I think that's a huge disservice. Now, it's argued that the news organizations, that the media also missed the whole moral values issue. Well, I don't think that's true. I don't think they did miss it. They never labeled it that. I don't know what moral values mean in a political context anyway. But it's really about character and the perception of character. And I think they did address that in some respects. I think there were many articles, a lot of coverage, on the question of the religious right and its role in this campaign and previous campaigns. This was not a mystery. We knew it was a growing force and an active force. I recall reporting myself, and many others did, about the Bush administration, the Bush campaigns, a vigorous pursuit of church groups, and their lists, their email lists and everything, building up an almost unprecedented email community, if you like, of over 6 million people, many of which were drawn. They would just go and get entire lists from some very large congregations that might number in the thousands. And that's interesting, I think, for those congregations to address and be as a phenomenon in an electoral cycle. I find it quite interesting. But it was covered. So I don't quite agree that news organizations did not perceive the moral values question as being as important as it is. I'm also not persuaded by the polls that when somebody comes in and asks you, what do you think is most important? And they give you a list of four or five things and moral values are one of them, which certainly I'm very concerned about moral values. Put it right up there, if not at the top right behind it. I mean, I just I really question the whole thing. I wonder how much there was to it. There were other whole subject areas that were not examined sufficiently that we're already reading in the headlines now. The president once or twice mentioned in the campaign, more than once or twice. He mentioned in the campaign a concept to reform or reorganize social security and to introduce private accounts, sorry, personal accounts. Apparently, private is out, the White House has decreed, private suggests privatization. Oh, no, no. We mustn't talk about personal accounts, so I'll try to be better on that. It was part of his platform, but I don't believe it was examined and probed in anywhere near the depth it is now receiving, which is very interesting. We talk about that later. What's happening to that concept and that proposal and raise the question whether we will ever see a bill. I'm not persuaded that we will. But in any event, that's one. And let's talk about Iraq, but not really about foreign policy. There wasn't any foreign policy. There was Iraq policy. That's what we talked about. We didn't talk about the Middle East peace process, which had, by the time of the election, lain dormant and unattended for so long. We didn't talk about it. The issues were not raised. What about dealing with China in the new century? What about the big issues? In addition to Iraq, no. Iraq took all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, and very little else, in my experience, was addressed. So I think they all need more scrutiny in the future. One last thing that was really missed and was so important, the Republican competence at electioneering. I don't think anybody realized or, and certainly few, wrote about how much better at getting their man elected the Republicans were. It wasn't just Carl Rove. It was far more than that. It was a sophisticated operation in 50 states, more or less, and certainly in the important states, the Ohio's, the Pennsylvania's, the Florida's, et cetera. It was highly sophisticated, exceptionally well financed, and much, much better than anything comparable on the Democratic side. It should have been possible to determine that in the course of the campaign, rather than to see it as evident as anything could be when it was over. They had delivered, and they have become much better at the business of American elections. And we can talk about why and what goes into that. But I mean, it's true, and that was a missed story. That wasn't covered. The other harsh fact about the coverage is that the truth is, despite the big turnout, a great portion of the public tuned out except for a couple of moments, the debates, which I think really have become the focus of our elections and are where the vast majority of people make up their mind, those who haven't already made up their mind. And to a lesser degree, the appearances at the conventions. Those are reduced to about an hour or two of coverage. So you can't place too much emphasis on that. I spent a week here in Boston. We covered it four hours a night without regard to the health or interest level of our audience. And I believe actually people do pay attention at that moment. And they certainly do at the debates. But beyond that, again, despite the turnout, I'm not sure that the vast complex known as the media got through to the public in any great detail. Maybe you can't penetrate it. But I'm not convinced that they did. Post-election, it seems to me that there has been a more critical, more skeptical view of the administration and its new initiatives of the situation in Iraq and the realities that prevail there. This remains to be seen. But I believe that if you look at the coverage surrounding the inauguration, the State of the Union, some of the proposals that have come out of that and that the president is pushing, I think more questions are being asked. And that's a very good thing. The real test as we go forward from here is how skeptical, how probing, how questioning will news organizations and bloggers and everyone else be if, for example, the administration begins to beat the war drums again on Iran or, more likely, in my mind, Syria? You can hear a little of it now. How many questions are being asked? What are the tough questions? What is the goal, let's say, vis-a-vis Syria? Is it just to get their troops out of Lebanon? We seem to have discovered that only a few days ago when Prime Minister Hariri was assassinated. They've been there for 40 years. But now it's an urgent matter. Let's get those troops out. I think a lot of questions have to be asked about what the real agenda is, about the approach to the support for Hezbollah, about all these issues. And they're complicated. They're separate from Iraq. They're different and intimately related to our support for Israel. And so those are questions that I would like to see asked. I would like to believe are being asked. And hopefully we won't end up, as the generals always do, fighting the last war. Thanks very much. OK, well, first of all, I'd like to thank the forum for inviting me. It's a great pleasure and honor to be here at MIT. I hope everyone can hear me fine, because I have a little bit of a cold. And if someone has trouble hearing me, just let me know, and I'll try to speak up. So the question of the day is, did the media fail? And I guess one question that immediately arises is, did they fail to do what? I suppose there are probably many people on the right who would say that the media had an agenda to defeat Bush and elect Kerry, and in that sense, they certainly failed if that was their goal. And then on the other hand, you would probably find a lot of people on the left who would say that the duty of the media was to uncover the truth about what the administration was up to and basically show the people that it was in their best interest to elect Kerry, and certainly they failed in that respect. So probably, at least as far as the mainstream media goes, I don't think anyone is too happy with it at the moment. Then you do find a lot of criticism on both the right and the left. Now, in my opinion, I do think I'm a little bit more pessimistic, unfortunately, than Terence. I think that there was a failure to cover a lot of the issues in the election. I do think that it was an interesting campaign, but it was, in a way, it was interesting primarily for being, at least in my view, the most mean-spirited, the most hysterical campaign in my memory, where maybe it just seems that way after every election, I'm not sure. Certainly, I think it's ridiculous that we spent a lot of time, basically, as was said, before refighting the war in Vietnam. I'm not sure it was entirely the fault of the media, because in a way, the media kind of deal with what the campaigns give the media. And I do think that, in a way, the tone was said by John Kerry when he did emphasize his record in Vietnam at the convention and basically made that kind of one of his qualifications for office, John Kerry reporting for duty and all of that. And, you know, predictably, there was a response from people who were, you know, whether or not they were formally affiliated with the Bush campaign, they were certainly on that side of the spectrum, who went after Kerry on that account. And I think, by the way, just I'm not sure that it really goes to the question of the media specifically, but I think it was really not very smart to kind of underestimate, you know, knowing the full record of John Kerry's very vigorous criticism of the military after he came back from Vietnam, I think it's kind of amazing that the Democratic Party underestimated the extent to which there would be a backlash among a lot of veterans. So I think, you know, the fact that the response to the swift boat ads was so slow and coming, I think really shows a pretty shocking lack of foresight and preparation. I think it's something that they certainly should have been ready for. And again, I think that is really not so much the fault of the media as I think it is the fault of the campaign. Now, I think that the selection has been very interesting in the sense that, again, agreeing with what was said before, we do live in a new media world in a way. It's been changing, actually, for a while. It certainly was that the media landscape was changed by Fox News in the sense that there was this very kind of ideologically different voice. And certainly a lot of that was found in not even so much the reporting as in the talk shows in Fox. And then, of course, we also have the rise of the blogs. And it's just interesting how the landscape is changing so fast. I mean, how many people three years ago even knew what a blog was? I mean, I remember, I'm not sure when, but I remember seeing this article. I think it was in Slate that was headlined, do you blog? And my thought was, do you what? I mean, the word was just something that I'd never heard before. It sounded kind of weird. To me, at least some kind of valley girl jargon or something. I mean, it kind of sounded like a combination of bloat and blob, which is not a commentary on the blogs at all. I actually have the utmost respect for the blogs. But it kind of took a while for me to get used to the word. And I mean, I will, one of these days, get into blogging myself. Haven't done that yet. But I'm certainly getting there. I do occasionally post on the blog of Reason Magazine called Hit and Run. Now, the blogs have changed the media landscape, I think, for better and worse. Basically, the good news is that there are no more gatekeepers than the bad news, that there are no more gatekeepers. And basically, we're looking at two sides of the same coin. I think in a way, I mean, there has been a lot of very wild-eyed, incredibly optimistic talk about the rise of citizen journalism and how basically anyone with a computer can now be a journalist. Well, you do actually need to know something of what you write about. So it's very fine for every person to be their own journalist. But at the same time, it's going to create a lot more kind of noise than light, unless we actually have people who bring some qualification to the job. And again, I think that there are a lot of bloggers who definitely know what they're doing and who focus on their area of expertise. And I would also want to add that I think in a way, some of the differences between the blogs and the traditional media tend to get exaggerated. For instance, even what I just mentioned, the issue of people writing in areas where they don't necessarily know a whole lot of, don't necessarily have a lot of expertise, a lot of people in my field, a lot of opinion columnists often do the same thing. And I try to avoid that. But it definitely is a problem in the field, because as an opinion columnist, you're expected to write about a very wide variety of things. And a lot of the time what people do is kind of rely on whatever experts they trust the most. Then they basically tend to select those on an ideological basis. So in that sense, I think the opinion columnists aren't really that different from the bloggers. Now in terms of gatekeeping, it is quite true that the bloggers basically act as each other's fact checkers, so that you can certainly argue that somebody who's spreading outright lies on blogs is going to be discredited pretty soon, and it is basically going to get caught. Now the problem is there's this old adage that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. And I think in a way that can probably happen even faster in the age of the internet and the blogs. And a lot of the time, I think one problem is that there's just no way that people can really figure out which information to believe, because you have all this competing information. And I think that was definitely the case for a long time with a swift boat. That's because I have to say, I have seen some analysis on blogs, on non-foaming of the mouth, reasonable-sounding blogs. That certainly made it sound like there was a good deal of substance to these charges, to some of them at least. And in the absence of being able to independently verify what people are talking about, again, you're left with a question of who do you believe? And you're left with a question of, do you just end up believing the people that you're more ideologically in tune with? And I think that kind of leads to, I think both that and the rise of the talk shows, I think leads to a greater polarization of opinion, which I think is really at a pretty unprecedented level right now. A lot of people, at least in my experience from people that I correspond with, people who send me feedback, a lot of people tend to, when they go on the internet, to kind of stay in an ideologically congenial niche. They go to the blogs where they are very unlikely to encounter anything that will offend their sensibilities politically. They basically spend most of their time, I would say, probably about 90% of their internet time reading stuff that reinforces their prejudices. And I think that's certainly true for people on both the right and the left. I don't really see a whole lot of difference in that regard. So I think in that sense, I think the blogs can be something of a problem. Although, again, I think it really only magnifies some of the tendencies that already exist in the mainstream media. One interesting observation, by the way, that I heard the other day from Michael Barone, who's a political commentator with US News and the Motor Report and appears in a number of TV programs, he was talking about the role of the blogs in the election. And what he pointed out was that at least in this election, his opinion was that the blogs damaged the Democrats in two different ways. One of them was that the left-wing blogs tended to drag the Democratic Party over to the left, because that's where the Democratic-oriented blogs were. And ultimately, in Barone's view, damaged the party's prospects when it came to a national election. And at the same time, the right-wing blogs did a pretty effective job of discrediting the mainstream media in certain cases, like the so-called rather gate being the most obvious example, because I do think that the whole incident with the fake memos, whatever the underlying facts of that were, certainly did end up creating the impression that the mainstream media were out to get Bush, because it was pretty shocking that CBS went with those memos when apparently some of their own experts were telling them that there's something very suspect about them. It was just that there was certainly a great deal of irresponsibility. Now, I will not pronounce on whether that was political bias or just the rush to get a hot story out. I certainly do think that the media were pretty tough on Clinton as well. So I don't think that there is necessarily a kind of tendency to go easy on Democratic presidents. Anyways, yeah, so I don't really know if I completely agree with Barron's observation, but it seems to me that it's pretty solid. I think there's a lot to that. And again, I don't know what's going to happen in the next few years with that. And right now, I think the majority of the blogs are still right of center. We're probably going to see more blogs kind of on the left side of the spectrum. I don't know if we're going to see any kind of movement toward the center. Because again, right now, I think the tendency is toward polarization, and that is unfortunate. Now, I think the media in a way are going back to an older model of being more partisan, which I think is also in many ways is the European model of the press. In Europe, you will see a pretty clear division where there are some newspapers that are quite overtly on the left or on the right. And those newspapers are quite explicitly in competition with each other politically and ideologically. And that was actually also the case in the United States, I would say, until probably about 50 years ago. I mean, you still see a lot of newspapers which have the words Republican and Democrat and they're in their names. They don't really mean anything today politically, but those newspapers started out as, in some ways, kind of party publications that were reflecting a party line. I think we're in a way, we're going back to that and kind of away from this ideal of kind of quasi-Olympian objectivity that arose in the 1950s and 60s. And again, that's kind of a mixed bag because on the one hand, I actually agree with a lot of the conservative critique that this alleged objectivity often served as a cover for not even really conscious liberal bias, quote unquote, but a kind of a set of unconscious assumptions that often went unexamined and were often taken to be the truth. For instance, I'm actually picking out a position that I myself agree with, the position that being in support of abortion rights is the progressive and humanitarian view. I mean, I agree with that, but I do think that when that becomes a kind of unconscious assumption of the media and when that is reflected in the way that the media cover the pro-life and pro-choice movements, I think that that does become a problem. I mean, I think that if that is your view, you're kind of consciously confronted and then kind of deal with it. But yeah, I think that those kind of unconscious assumptions did influence media coverage a lot. And I think we're probably going to see kind of more overt politicization on the one hand and maybe less of this kind of subtle and unconscious bias on the other hand. On the negative side, I do think that it is a good thing for the media to at least try to strive toward objectivity. And I think that if the ideal of objective news coverage goes completely by the wayside and it's kind of assumed by everyone that you kind of inject your political views into your coverage, I think that is going to be very unfortunate for the media. Now, I want to say a little bit about what I think in the past election have been some of the kind of labels and preconceptions that I think we have seen in the mainstream media. I think a lot of the time what happens is that there is a certain script. And then everything that happens, all of the news kind of gets tailored to that script. And then the perceptions of various stories kind of basically are squeezed into that. One interesting example, I think, is the coverage of the religion and the church and state issues. And during the campaign, we heard a lot about the right and President Bush specifically mixing, blurring the lines between church and state. And again, I have a lot of issues with that. But I think what's interesting is that we saw a lot of talk, a lot of coverage about the role of religious groups in the Bush campaign and the recruiting in churches and so forth. And there was some question raised about the tax-exempt status of churches that were essentially being used as political platforms. But what I found interesting is that at the same time, there was very little attention being paid to the role of the longstanding role of African-American churches in the Democratic Party. And I remember coming across a story, a news story, about a rally, I believe, in Los Angeles that was held in an African-American church in which the minister said something along the lines of John Kerry has been chosen by God to help us defeat Bush. And it just seemed really interesting to me that this kind of rhetoric in the Democratic Party was getting so little attention. And again, the coverage of these campaign stories was in a way kind of squeezed into these stereotypes that Republicans are the ones who mix church and state. The same thing, I think, happened with the red state, blue state labels. How many times do I have left, by the way? Sorry, I don't have a watch with me. Yeah, the red state, blue state labels is actually something that started out right after the 2000 election, which I think, was that the first time that they used the red state, blue state designation? Or OK, because I remember reading that before that, they used to kind of switch them. Like sometimes the Democrats would actually be the blue state, and the Republicans would be the red state. Yeah, and I'm sorry, on the way around. Right, yeah. OK, yeah, I do think that they color-coded them before, but it wasn't a question of always using the same color for the same party. So I think after 2000, they just kind of ran with that. And then we got this label of blue state, red state. And one thing that I find really infuriating about that is that people make these assumptions that, OK, if Bush got the majority of votes in a particular state, the whole state is labeled a red state. And basically, there's this assumption that everyone in that state is a red state person. Well, winning a state could mean that you got 50.1% of the vote. In a lot of the states, the election was really pretty close, both in 2000 and in 2004. So I think that the tendency of labeling entire regions as fitting a specific ideological pattern I think is very simplistic. The red state, blue state designation also, I think, seriously underestimates the extent to which people don't really fall into a kind of neat ideological package. A lot of people who voted for Bush, I can't remember the exact figure, but I think something like close to 40% of Bush voters support abortion rights. I think about a third of Bush voters support gay marriage. A lot of people, I mean, I have spoken to people who are pro-gay marriage bisexual atheists. Well, I mean, I've spoken to one person in that category who voted for Bush. And I mean, you know, but I'm sure that there are more. I mean, I've spoken to people who, well, I don't know. It would be interesting to do a kind of poll on that. I mean, I've certainly spoken to a number of atheists who voted for Bush. So I think that this perception that if you're a Bush voter, you must be this fundamentalist, Bible-thumping anti-gay marriage person, I think in many cases is quite false. I mean, 25% of gays voted for Bush. I think one way in which the media, I think, did fail is to give adequate coverage to people who don't fit the stereotypes. And I think the same thing, by the way, can be said on the other side. I'm sure that there are many church-going, socially conservative people who voted for Kerry for all sorts of reasons related to foreign policy, related to economic issues. I think that there was and still is, I think, way, way too much of a tendency to just put people into these ideological boxes and not really look at people outside the box. And I think that is one area where the media could do a much better job. I do want to talk a little bit about the post-election climate. OK, got it. So right now, the big story is the sort of media manipulation by the White House. We've had, first, we had the story with Armstrong Williams, who's the conservative columnist who was paid $250,000 to promote, I believe, Bush's no-child-loved-behind policy. And now, of course, we have this new story with Jeff Gannon, or Jim Guckard, who is this person who was apparently, well, I think we're still learning the details of exactly how he got into the White House press room using a false name, which obviously is pretty bizarre in the age of heightened security that we live in. Now, I wrote a column today by Maureen Dowd basically saying that this is extremely scary, and the Republicans are basically are not just tampering with the freedom of the press, but kind of reinventing the press by creating these faux journalists who are actually kind of mouthpieces for the Republicans. I have to say that, personally, this whole thing, both the Armstrong Williams incident and especially the Jeff Gannon incident, strike me as not so much insidious as just incredibly stupid. OK, Armstrong Williams, you pay, OK, it's not a huge amount of money by government standards, but you pay a substantial sum of money for someone to promote your policies when they probably would have done it for free. The guy is a pro Bush columnist. I'm sure he would have written pretty much 80% of the same stuff if they hadn't paid him. I mean, that is just bizarre. And then, of course, we have this Jeff Gannon person. I mean, OK, what it sounds like is that the guy may have had a deal with the White House where they would call on him to ask Bush stuff more questions. I mean, was it really worth it? And couldn't they find someone who wasn't moonlighting as a stud service person or whatever you want to call it? I mean, at the very least, if they wanted to use somebody for the purpose of pitching softball questions to Bush, they could have found somebody who wasn't going to get involved in a big sex scandal and who didn't have nude photos of themselves and sexual postures on the internet. So I mean, it just, again, it strikes me as, I mean, this idea that the Republicans are these evil geniuses of media manipulation. I don't really see any genius there. I mean, I see something kind of on the other side of the spectrum, intelligence-wise. So I think that this is going to be, this is obviously going to be, it already is a huge embarrassment. I certainly think that the Jeff Gannon scandal is something that needs to be paid more attention to. As far as just quickly wrapping up, again, I do want to remind people that as far as the kind of crossing of lines between journalists and politicians, it has happened before in the respectable media as well. I mean, some very respected journalists like Bill Moyer, Chris Matthews, Sydney Blumenthal had previously worked as either speech writers or consultants or staff members for various politicians. I mean, Henrik Hertzberg, the editor of the New Yorker and previously the New Republic, used to be a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter. So I mean, I think, again, the crossing of lines between politics and the media is really not something entirely new. And I think there is a bit of a double standard there when it comes to the right. But anyway, I mean, certainly I think that the Republicans could have done a better job of it if they were going to cross those lines. So anyway, that's just some random observations on the latest event. I'd like to thank both our speakers for staying within their time limits to allow what is always the highlight of a communication forum events, passionate, argumentative, but always civil and respectful interaction with our audience. Let me ask those of you who have questions or comments to come to the two microphones that are on either side of the aisle and pose your questions or comments. William Iricchio. Yeah, hi. A comment and a question. A comment for Kathy. I mean, just to follow up on your last bit of discussion, I think Maureen Dowd's point was also that she was denied security clearance after having been in the White House circle since the 80s. So it wasn't just that someone was let in with a double name and a sort of dodging past, but that people, that were legitimate reporters, in fact, were kicked out of the circle. And that's significant. And I think the other thing. No, I agree with you. I agree with you on that. And to underscore your left-right difference and the bias being on the right in terms of critique. Just to continue, I think the operative word you used to describe people like Bill Moyers, et cetera, was the past tense were. They were in the employ of political organizations, not at the same time they were reporters. And I think that's significant. The question is for Terrence, and has to do with the question of agency. I was struck a couple of times by your description that stories seem to have a life of their own. There are ways in which the, you talk to some of the paper was that the press in a certain way was just following what was happening. That it wasn't in a certain sense setting the agenda that people would respond to. So that some issues emerge out in front and stay there longer than perhaps they ought to. The trivial issues are able to dominate the attention of the press for weeks on end, while significant issues are kind of underplayed. I'm curious as to where, as someone who's in the business of producing news, how does that happen? Is it a perception of what people, what the audience wants? Or is it, as Kathy suggested, something that the politicians themselves dictate by keeping it in front and center of their agenda? Where's the agency here? Does the press not have a leadership role in terms of setting that agenda for the public? They do pick, I believe news organizations do pick from among the things that are in front of them and already central in the campaign. So there is a somewhat of an agenda setting function. But in a case like that, just to take the Swiftboat veterans, for example, it was a news story. I'm not arguing that it wasn't. It was brought about by allegations in paid advertisements, incidentally very skillfully placed in only a few inexpensive markets, but picked up widely and replayed repeatedly by mass news organizations who did the work for them. You can cause a controversy for $700,000, which is a pretty modest buy in terms of political advertising. And that's about what they spent. What I am concerned about is that too much time was spent regurgitating the allegations, what the motivations might be of those, how the Kerry campaign was dealing with it, were they too slow to respond, what was the price of that slowness. Instead of stopping and trying to analyze the substance of the charges and do detailed reporting, that was finally done. I think I can recall two excellent long takeouts on that by the Washington Post and the New York Times, both of which found very little substance to the allegations and basically found that they did not hold water. But they walked back the cat. They went through the allegations and what was the evidence and what were the Purple Heart citations and so forth. And they tried to construct the record as best one can 30 years later based on the available evidence. But it took a long time. It took those two news organizations, despite their size and their staff, it took them weeks to get to the essence of the charges. And in the meantime, it was constant fodder on all news cable networks and certainly on talk radio. And that's where I believe news organizations fell down. You can't just keep repeating and regurgitating the same stuff over and over again, simply because you don't have the time or the talent or the staff and the resources to go after the essence of the charge and establish to the best of your ability whether it's true or not. And that's the more important function. And too often, it gets neglected in favor of this other, which is just talk. Could I just make a quick comment to that? OK, first of all, on the question of were the media able to set the agenda, I think this is where you would have many people basically saying, well, why should the media set the agenda? Who elected the media? I think in a way it is the candidates who set the agenda. And in the sweat boat case, again, I do think that a major share of responsibility lies with the Kerry campaign for not being prepared to deal with those charges. A lot of those people were people that they'd known about for months. They didn't really bother to do their legwork. And the other side did. So I think obviously the media may have been slow to respond. But I think that if the Kerry campaign had those materials ready for them and had maybe done some investigative work of their own, they could have, I think, kept a lot of that in check. So I think, again, I don't think the media really bear all of the blame here. Over on this side. Yes. May I ask you to identify yourselves, people? This event, of course, is being audio and video recorded. And if you identify yourselves, it will be helpful to the worldwide audience that will see this eventually. Yes. I'm Linda. And I'm support staff here at MIT. And I just wanted to say I agree with Ms. Young that the Kerry campaign should have foreseen the Swift Bowl ad controversy. But on the other hand, it was also my experience that the media was very slow to uncover the details of the ad. In the beginning, a lot of the articles in the newspaper outlining the inconsistencies in the ad were buried maybe in the fourth or fifth page of the paper. Or if you went to factcheck.org, you could get that information. But you wonder how many people would do that. So in general, I think I agree that the media was slow on the take-up on that. My second comment was on the red state, blue state situation. My sister is an artist. And I have been talking to her about this some. And red is a very dominant, vibrant color suggesting power. And blue is more passive. And so I wonder whether the red state, blue state, is sort of a media creation in itself. And if it hasn't been alternated in the past, perhaps it should be in the future. I do believe that it was alternated in the past. But what's really funny is, in terms of red being this really positive color, I mean, it's not that long ago that red was basically a synonym for communist, which is really ironic, considering that now it's this Republican color. That's certainly what it means to my generation. Right. It's very. And I have never thought about the respective properties of red versus blue. Nor have really do I know the origins. My impression is that it began as a graphic distinction on television screens, on election night coverage. I don't really remember if it was 2000 or 1996, or it doesn't really matter. But it became sort of set in stone in 2000 when the election was so close. And we looked at those maps and we came. And so, of course, you're right, Kathy, that many of these states are very close and that they only become red states by virtue of a percentage or two. But your complaint there has to be addressed to the electoral college, not to the depictions of it. That's our way, our system works. Well, I don't have a problem, necessarily, with the fact that the state, the entire state, basically is counted as going unanimously for Bush. But I'm saying that in terms of media analysis, I think we in the media should know better than to lump everyone who lives in a red state or blue state together as being this monolithic mass. And I think that is something that often has happened. And there's a lot of stereotyping on both sides. And again, I do think that the media partly perpetrate that. I don't disagree at all. It's more of this shorthanding I was talking about. It's a shorthand reference for a state carried by President Bush in the recent election. And that's all it really is. As to the power or passivity of the colors, I'll defer to you. May I encourage both speakers at the microphones and the speakers at our table to be succinct? We have a lot of people who want to make comments and have questions. And the more the briefer we are and the more pointed we are, the more exciting the discussion. Yes? Well, here's a brief one. Identify yourself. I'm Joellen Easton. I graduate student in comparative media studies. And I suppose this question is mostly for Terrence. Could you contextualize the resignation of PBS president Pat Mitchell in the context of what we're talking about today? Yeah, let me correct the verb there. She's not resigning. She's filling out her term, which has another 15 months to go. And merely advised the station managers at a meeting on Tuesday of this week that she had said this before, that she was going to, this is her second term, she'd completed in that. And she would not want to continue after that. But there's a bigger issue here that was raised on the front page of both the New York Times and the Washington Post today, which is the changing world in which the public broadcasting system is operating today. Changing in terms of corporate underwriters who are less willing to support public broadcasting for a variety of reasons. A changed atmosphere in which the political perspective of different broadcasts is being examined much more critically. And finally, a sort of a struggle for its soul, for PBS. What is the role of public broadcasting in a 200 channel universe where its cultural and educational roles, which were very important at the beginning, have been at least complemented, if not supplemented, by many channels from discovery to arts and entertainment to you name them. There are now a lot of history channel, et cetera. So I think the public broadcasting system has a great deal to offer. It's very important, should be preserved, should receive, in my opinion, some financial independence, a trust fund in effect that would separate it from political considerations. But I think it does need to define itself for itself better if it's to go forward and be effective. And I certainly hope it does. Hi, my name is John, and I'm MIT retiree. I have a basically bad opinion about media, but I'll just choose one. During the presidential campaign, there was a constant coverage of two candidates. And basically each candidate was very close to each other's ideas. And they repeated those five ideas over and over and over, and I stopped watching it a long time before the elections. And why they didn't cover the third party and fourth and fifth party candidates? If they were cooks, people could decide for themselves that they're cooks. But at least some new ideas would come surface. And is there a script? Is there a group? Think about media. What is it that they are avoiding other candidates like a third rail electric guard, you know? I have a, I should be brief, and you pick it up, Kathy. I, news organizations have an additional obligation, though. They have, they know there's a limited amount of time and attention the public is willing to pay. And so they have to focus it where they believe it matters most. And I, and there was some coverage of Ralph Nader and other, and the other candidates, but not much. Your point is very well taken. It's a balancing act. How much are you going to give to candidates that can introduce new ideas into the debate, if they do, and can add to the total that way, but who are not going to win? And you can't divorce yourself from the political reality of what's going to happen. And therefore, I think you have to cover them, but you also have to know that you have limited time and attention, and husband it carefully. Yeah, I think once again, the issue is not so much with the media, as I think with the political structure in the United States. We do have basically a two-party system. The political system is really built in such a way that it's very, very difficult for a, well, I would say, you know, pretty much impossible for a third-party candidate to be elected. I mean, you know, Ross Perot was the one who came closest to actually, you know, getting a respectable number of votes, but even he didn't come anywhere close to winning. I think there's, so yeah, I certainly agree with what Terence said about there being limited time. You know, third-party candidates are generally not included in the debates, although I suppose that is partly the media's responsibility since the media organized the debates, but there you really do get into the question of, you know, if you open up the debate to third-party candidates, how many people are you gonna have up there on the podium? And, you know, is there some kind of minimal, I think it really does get into the question of time and immediate resources. Actually, you know, the commission on presidential debates is the one that sets the threshold of you have to have a certain percentage of the opinion polls to be included, it's not the media, it's the commission. Right, okay, so yeah, that just kind of further proves my point. I think the media really, again, in a way kind of follow the agenda that is set by the politicians. Amy McCree, Technology and Culture Forum. So, some of my earliest memories when I was growing up are of the Watergate hearings and I'm part of a generation that's very cynical about government, it takes a lot to get us to trust when it comes to political life in the country. And the students that I work with here at MIT seem to have the same degree of cynicism about the media. A lot of the students that I talked with this fall and the students that I work with still simply don't get news from the mainstream media. They watch John Stewart, they go to the BBC, or they go to alternative media sites, some of them religious, some of them secular, but not any of the sort of corporately owned media sites, nor do they go to PBS very often or NPR. And so this concerns me quite a bit in terms of the future of democracy and people's knowledge about what's happening in politics and making good decisions as voters. A lot of the students that I talked to just sort of tuned out pretty early in the election process because they felt like they were sort of being manipulated, being sold on things when they turned to mainstream media. So I'm just wondering if you could comment on that and what you would say to those students to sort of get them to re-engage and what the media might do to restore the faith of younger citizens and to get them back as readers and as listeners. That's a really good question. I think one way to I think re-engage the younger generation is probably for the media, for the mainstream media to kind of get into some of the areas where the new media have been kind of rising. Like, I think that we should see probably more blogging by mainstream media people. I think one of the issues in addition to just this perception of manipulation and kind of general alienation, I think one issue is kind of speed of news. I think the younger generation generally is used to kind of everything happening at really high speed and I think that is part of I think the appeal of blogging this kind of instant news. Other than that, I think greater diversity of voices in the media certainly would help and I'm talking about not just diversity of gender, ethnicity, et cetera, but diversity of viewpoints. I think that would certainly help because I think part of the problem is this perception that you're getting this kind of monolithic mainstream kind of liberal centrist, fairly bland set of opinions and this is maybe where I was talking before about this kind of tension between partisanship and objectivity. I mean, I think younger people probably more so than previous generations are very skeptical of this kind of attitude of this Olympian objectivity where the journalist is just this supposedly completely neutral observer just reporting the facts and not injecting their opinion. I think a lot of the younger generation kind of has trouble believing that people can really keep their opinions out of journalism. So maybe the answer is not so much to have this, to try to reclaim this kind of Olympian stance as to have more competing viewpoints and kind of hope that in the competition of these viewpoints the truth will eventually emerge. I would just add, I agree with that, I would add one other word, interactivity, that somehow mainstream media has got to be able to talk back and forth with its audience and get an exchange going that has not been true in the past is maybe not sufficiently true now and is crucial to going forward and building a kind of confidence. For the longest time it was believed that younger people traditionally don't read newspapers, don't partake of mainstream news until the notion was they get a little bit older into their late 20s or whatever, they get married, have a child, a mortgage and worry some more about some of the issues that are in the paper and then begin and become customers and build the base. I'm not certain that model's gonna continue and therefore I think they have to, that's why I say interactivity, they have to begin to communicate more effectively with the audience and find a way to establish what they're really, what people in the audience are concerned about and address those things and write about those things. Hi, my name is Oliver, I'm a support staff here at MIT. I found it interesting that the subject of today's talk was 2004 election and you guys both spoke very eloquently about the campaign and what happened after the election but nothing was really spoken as far as I can remember about what actually happens on November 2nd and I remember feeling very distinctly in 2000 that my God, we don't necessarily have one person, one vote in this country as long as not every vote counts and that was like a huge realization to me and I don't think I was alone in that sort of awakening feeling and I was paying attention very intently this time around to find out what the coverage would be like of what happens on November 2nd and I didn't feel that the coverage was really adequate. I still have a lot of questions about the de-bold machines and about the fact that in many minority communities you had people waiting online for six, seven, eight, nine hours, it seems to me as long as you have that you don't have legitimate government and I didn't really feel like there was enough coverage of that in the media. There was some. The election night was interesting in that the largest news organizations did not repeat the fiasco of four years earlier and miscalled the election, in fact they held their fire in the face of exit polls that were quite faulty based on a faulty sample and were suggesting through the afternoon that John Kerry was going to win and they had that information as the evening newscast went on the air and started to bring in returns after seven and eight PM Eastern and yet they held back. They did not make any faulty projections. As to the coverage of irregularities, there was some but I believe there was a basic conclusion reached and I don't know if you disagree with it, that the irregularities to use that word or abuses were not enough to change the outcome. That seemed to be the consensus position that was arrived at that. Despite all the problems that you just cited of long lines and mechanical breakdowns and other things that in this case there was enough of a margin that it wouldn't have made the difference. Yeah there was actually a very well researched I thought piece on salon.com which is hardly a pro-bush publication to put it mildly which looked at a lot of those charges and basically said look we really wish it were true but it's just not enough to change the outcome. And again I wanna return to what seems to be my kind of mantra this evening which is the agenda in many ways is said by the politicians. I mean if the Kerry campaign had chosen to challenge the election results that would have been a huge story but I mean the Kerry campaign decided that there wasn't enough there to bring a challenge to the election results and hence it did not end up being a huge story. Hi my name is Christian Vakari I'm a visiting graduate student from the University of Milan. Mrs. Young has brought it up a couple of times so I wanted to address the issue of the increasing partisanship in the media and this is not the golden age for American parties there's a lot of independence out there there's supposed to be the fastest growing kind of political population and yet the media becoming much more partisan now than it used to be in the 50s and 60s where a lot of more Americans identified with the parties. The same with young generations they are largely apolitical or they don't know yet a lot of them just don't pay much attention or they have not developed a political attitude yet which is so firm and yet they don't seem to believe that there is objectivity and they'd rather go to some more partisan and ideological media. Why is that? Is that a failure in the traditional and institutional media? Is it a way to garner some new marketplaces for media that are see their audiences shrinking? What it is from the perspective of journalists? Could I take that first? Sure, go ahead. Yeah, I think part of the reason maybe that there was growing partisanship is that I think the people who are less partisan tend to be more laid back, apathetic, less involved. Because you do have these populations on both the fairly extreme left and well, I don't wanna use words like extreme because that has all these negative connotations but basically further away from the center to both the left and the right people with really strong opinions and I think because those people feel more strongly about things, I think they're much more likely to seek out media outlets that essentially support their views, media outlets where they would feel at home politically. So I think that really accounts partly for the polarization that's... But I think you're mixing two things. On the one hand, there is a greater polarization in the public, that's clear, almost cultural clash in this country. On the other hand, on the other hand, there is obvious disaffection among younger people with mainstream media, I agree with you on that Amy. But they're not the same thing. The polarization, this divided country is divided on some of the issues we've been discussing and it's come down, split almost in the middle in two elections now. You can't get them any closer than this. So it is divided in at least the choices it makes for president and high office. But this other tendency that Kathy referred to which is interesting, which is you go to the news that supports your views is a phenomenon that has certainly increased in the last 10 to 15 years and requires some real study. I agree that people for a variety of reasons go to those outlets that reflect where they stand. I think they're doing so not for information. But for reaffirmation of the wisdom of their view. And sometimes for entertainment, it's a form of entertainment. Not in question how wonderful it is, but I mean to hear people echoing your views on controversial issues. I think it's also maybe feeling kind of a part of a community, especially in some of the blogs that have these open comments where people basically talk to each other. And again, I do think that part of the problem is that it becomes a kind of echo chamber where you only talk to like-minded people. And then you kind of come in for a rude surprise when you emerge out into the real world. Or come out on the short end of an election. Yeah, yeah, right. Which side do we go to now? Is it? Yeah, okay. I'm Blossom Hogue, I work here at MIT and I also am very active with the Sierra Club. I certainly agree that Kerry's campaign was not the most organized that it should have been. And probably I question that he was the right candidate even for the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, the environmentalists, I think also should have that charge that they as much time and effort that they put in to getting out there and working on campaigns, it didn't make the difference. And probably the religious right was able to bring out more of the young people and counteract the environmentalists. But the question is, I mean, environmental issues, I haven't heard either one of you speak of them. It was certainly not brought out in the campaign. Here we are, again, we've not signed the Kyoto protocol. This is a travesty. And yes, the campaign and issues are dictated by the commission and by the campaigns. But I think the media can delve and massage and go into other areas than just what is being dictated to be brought to the forefront. And I'd like to have your comments on that. I'm actually curious what you think whether you believe, what would it have taken to arouse the environmental community more than it was in this last election? You had an administration that had rolled back virtually every significant piece of environmental legislation and promised to do more. And yet it did not, you're right. It did not become front and central in the campaign. And the voice of those who were alarmed by that, those voices were not as loud or passionate or paid attention to as one might expect. I'm not, you say maybe Kerry wasn't the best candidate. Well, who was better? That's always the question you have to ask yourself in that regard. But what? Al Gore. Okay, all right. Well, I mean, that's an, you know, that's a plausible. Man came either one in 2000 or came very close to it, depending on how you define it. And in any event, won the popular vote. So, you know, you can do, but where was? Kind of a third party in the same, in that way that they aren't really brought to the forefront by the media and the dialogue isn't there. And that's one of the big problems. But they have money, they have organization, they have the capacity to participate in the process. And we put a lot of people out there in most of the states, but I agree, it wasn't enough. But Blossom, your point really is that the, your question really is why did the media not cover more of the environmental argument, despite whether or not the candidates were addressing the question. Correct. I mean, the environmentalist supported Kerry because of his environmental background and stance. And yet that never came out anywhere. And it never got to be an issue somehow. And I'm not sure how we go about changing that. I think, you know, part of the problem I think is that in this election, though, as Terrence has said, you know, Iraq kind of ended up sucking the hair out of everything else, so to speak. A lot of other issues ended up being treated as secondary because, you know, in many ways, this did end up being an election about the war. And there were, I mean, I guess the public does generally have a limited amount of, you know, issues that it can pay attention to at the same time. And in this election, the environment kind of ended up not being one of the issues on the front burner. And again, I think part of that is the candidates fault and that, I don't remember Kerry making the environment, all that big an issue in his campaign. So. Actually, I don't think it was, Iroca. I think it was a 9-11 election and the aftermath and how this country was dealing with that. And since Iraq has very little to do with 9-11, it was almost a separate subject. But it did, but it did push, I agree that it did push terribly important issues like the environment and others down in the public attention meter or whatever you wanna call it. Right, I would actually say that it was, it was the Iraq election among Democrats and the 9-11 election for Republicans. Cause I think for, that I think was the real divide. Cause I think for the Democrats, it really was mostly a referendum on the war in Iraq. And I think for a lot of Republicans, I think. Well, not just Republicans, but Bush voters who obviously include a lot of independents. And by the way, I think that the argument that it was really about moral values as a gay marriage and so forth, as opposed to the national security and terrorism on the war in Iraq, that eventually didn't hold up. I think that that was kind of the initial impression that was created by some of the poll analysis. But I think that when you add up some of the different questions like national security plus the war in Iraq, plus some other related issues, I think you do end up with a very different picture. And I do think that for most of the electorate that was primarily about those issues. You mean the Massachusetts State Legislature didn't lose it for John Kerry? I got it wrong. You know, I wanna take the moderator's prerogative to mention that we have about 15, 16 minutes left. So there's time for questions. But also to make a brief observation, this is not a conclusion that I draw only from our discourse this afternoon, although it is reinforced by this. But I fear that the tendency on maybe both the right and the left, but certainly among Democrats and among those, that nearly 50% of the country who feel that this election was a catastrophic error, that the impulse to blame the media for what happened is a very strong one. But it may well be that the one conclusion to draw from what we've already heard is that the problem is with the democratic process. It isn't the media that's failing, but the democratic process as it's structured in the United States that's failing, that there are not, there isn't a kind of European model in which there are a range of different parties that you can vote for. There isn't a parliamentary model that would allow for different sorts of voices to come out. The sort of simplifications that Cathy was describing are inherent in a two-party system. And many of the difficulties that are being described here are not functions, it seems to me, of media coverage so much as they are a function of the way the process itself operates. Could I quickly comment on that? Just in terms of the oversimplification, I think one really underestimated phenomenon is the number of people who really do feel kind of politically homeless at the moment because they feel very alienated by some aspects of both parties' platforms. I mean, there are a lot of fiscally conservative people who are somewhat hawkish on foreign policy who at the same time are just appalled by the rise of the religious right and the stance on abortion and gay rights and stem cell research, et cetera. And at the same time, there are also a lot of socially conservative Democrats who support the economic program of the Democratic Party and the foreign policy program, but at the same time feel very alienated on those social issues. So I think there are a lot of people who usually do end up voting one way or the other, or maybe not, but who really are kind of being missed by this polarizing discourse, where everybody is kind of packaged into these neat little boxes labeled red or blue. I'm Alexandra, I'm on staff here at the Media Lab, and a lot of the topics that you've been covering sort of come into the same ball when you talk about alienation. I think that the candidates just kept adjusting the same points over and over and over again, and they were so close together that it was hard to sort of differentiate. And yet each could have made that differentiation with things that they had expertise in. The environment is a huge example. Both Kerry and Al Gore had a lot of interest and a lot of experience, and were very eloquent on issues of the environment, and yet didn't bring it up. And I would question 9-11 as determining that because I don't think Al Gore bought it up very much during his campaign when he could have made it a big differentiating point, and Kerry certainly could have too. So I wonder, are they so concerned about how they're gonna be perceived, or how their messages are gonna be picked up by the media or the public that they refrain from adjusting it at all? It's a matter of proportion. I mean, they do bring it up. They do make speeches about the environment and challenging their opponent's position, and so forth, and they're covered, and the debate moves on. So it's a matter of, but what catches your attention, your memory, and I understand that, is that it was barely brought up. Well, because it was drowned out, basically, by the other bigger issues or themes. I shouldn't even say bigger, just other issues and themes in the campaign. Candidates repeat again and again what they believe are the four, five, or six basic points that they're trying to get across to the public. Rightly or wrongly, they believe in repetition, and believe that that's the way you get it across. And so that, I think, accounts for the repetitious nature of much of what they do and say in advertising, in speeches, in points made in the debates. And that's a, that's why it all sounds the same. Yeah, I think also the other factored not to be underestimated is that beyond a certain point, the environmental message can be alienating to a part of the electorate. And then not, obviously, not the basic message of environmental protection, but if you look at, for instance, some of the things that Al Gore said in the Earth and the Balance book, he was basically arguing that we need to radically restructure our lives and our society and kind of dramatically scale down and alter consumption for the sake of the environment. And that is a message that is gonna be pretty controversial. So, and I think it's something that can be very easily used by the other side to say that the Democrats wanna sacrifice your job to save the spotted out. And that, I think, is part of the reason that it's not, maybe, that it's not brought up as much as you would like to because it's not quite as automatically a winner as it may, at first glance, appear to be. So. Hi, I'm Ann Weber. I'm down from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I'm a writer, and I'm actually writing an article this weekend for a newspaper on the new media. And I'd like to ask a question that is based on several of both of your comments. Mrs. Young, you had mentioned that one of the things that could help media is to offer a greater diversity of voices. And Mr. Smith, you had mentioned that, for example, in the cases of swiftboat controversy, one of the reasons the media couldn't do a quick and effective review of these claims was because of resources. Given that, would you like to comment on the impact of media conglomeration on the coverage of the campaign and on the continuing coverage of the administration? What's the single most striking trend in the media, I mean, in that world of the last 15 years? The largest voices are now held among the fewest number of owners. And the consolidation continues. It's part of the economic pressures on the industry. It's also, the point has been made that, say, television news is a victim of its own success in that it has 60 minutes and other broadcasts prove that it can be extremely profitable. And as they began to bring in money and as the networks were acquired by much larger conglomerates, the news division became simply another profit center, another cog in the larger wheel and was told to produce the revenues and do so on smaller and smaller budgets. The budgets themselves actually increased because of the increasing cost, but percentage, on a percentage basis, they go down. I think where you see it as a problem in political coverage, just staying with the election, is not in what you might call the established opinion press. From generations, we know that the nation is a liberal magazine. We know that the National Review is a largely conservative magazine. There's no confusion among the audience. There's no concern there. The problem arises when opinion is inserted under the guise of objectivity. When you say to your viewers over and over again, that you are fair and balanced when you are neither, that's the problem. That's where the deception arises, not the clearly labeled opinion press. Yeah, well, in terms of conglomeration specifically, I'm actually not sure that, you know, ownership, that kind of, you know, fewer or owners necessarily means more uniformity of views because you could have, you know, more spread out ownership with, you know, basically most of the editors, most of the producers, most of the journalists coming from the same kind of cultural and political background, and I think you would, you know, that would give you a certain amount of uniformity regardless of who the owners are. I think that one problem that I actually do see, and it's not really so much conglomeration as in a lot of cities, for instance, if you look at the print media, a lot of, you know, two, three, four newspaper cities, what used to be, you know, in the past two, three, four newspaper cities are now basically one newspaper city, two of the most. So I think the closing of newspapers, which, you know, diverse editorial positions I think is a problem. I mean, ownership, again, well, for instance, before I wrote for the Boston Globe, I used to write for the Detroit News. At one point at the Detroit News, this was in the early, no, actually late 90s, the Detroit News basically merged its business operations with the Detroit Free Press. I mean, they basically, they had the same ownership. They're in the same building? Yeah, they're in the same building. Plus, you know, the Detroit News is recognizably, you know, with a more conservative slant and the Detroit Free Press is fairly liberal. So, you know, I think that owners generally recognize that, you know, if it's in their interest in terms of, you know, profit to provide a platform for diverse views, you know, they will generally do that. So I don't know that conglomeration, per se, is a problem, but I do think that in this regard the rise of the blogs and, you know, the rise of the intranet-based media really is quite refreshing because the startup costs are really very low. And it certainly does bring a lot of different voices into the fold who would not have been heard before. And I think that is one of the positive developments, definitely. Yes, hi, my name is Raika Murthy. I'm a student with CMS, Comparative Media Studies. I had a question, but I actually decided to drop it because of a recurring theme that I've heard and what Kathy was saying that I find pretty intriguing. You said at one point early on who elected the media, and then you've kind of continued to say throughout the course of the evening that the media doesn't set the agenda, the politicians do. For any number of reasons, I find that actually quite troubling and I would love to hear a clarification because from my point of view, being elected, that kind of a statement assumes that the media has to know its place as an inferior place beneath politicians who have been publicly elected. It also assumes that being elected is a complete expression of the voice of the people. It also kind of implies that the media is a monolithic party in and of itself, and we all know that that is not the case. So I just would love to hear, I want to know if more of your colleagues, if you feel that other people share the same view of the media's role in politics and to hear maybe if you have a clarification on your statement. Sure. Well, I think that when the question is asked why didn't the media set the agenda, I think that does in a way presume that the media are a fairly monolithic body that would have the same idea basically of what the agenda is. Now, in terms of should the media know their place, well, I certainly think that the media, part of the media's role is to be watchdogs. And of course, now we have the blogs functioning as watchdogs watching the media. So it's just kind of getting more and more complicated with all these different layers of monitoring and fact checking. But yeah, I think certainly the media have a very important role as watchdogs in terms of setting the agenda. I mean, I don't know that, I mean, who sets the agenda is a really, really complicated question. I think ultimately in an ideal world, of course, the people would set the agenda in terms of what their concerns are, but of course those concerns are largely dictated, or at least shaped by what ends up being reported in the media. So I think there is, there's a very, very complicated and kind of often sometimes symbiotic, sometimes adversarial relationship between the media, the public, and the politicians. Just one really quick comment. I do think that in recent decades until maybe the past few years, I do think that there was something of this media monolith which really did believe that, and to some extent still does, that part of its role is to not just report the news, not just examine the news, but actually set the agenda and promote certain political values. And I think to some extent, if you really think about it, that really does clash with objectivity though, because then, I mean, if you're promoting a certain agenda, it just seems to me that that's not entirely compatible with being objective. So, I don't know if that answers your question. When you ask the other part of your question, who elected the media? Of course no one elects the media. The only people who elect this newspaper or that broadcaster or whatever are the people who pay a dollar to buy The New York Times or turn on the television to this channel versus that. They elect who or which organization to watch, to believe, and to return to. That's who elects the media. Hi, I'm Steve Rofi. I'm a teaching assistant in the literature department. I've got two questions that I think are interrelated. One is to address to Mr. Smith because it's another uncovered election story. Why was it apparently taken for granted that it was okay for the representative of the Republican Party who was running to be president of all the people to only address audiences that were made up of invited people and that, you know, anybody who wasn't ready to sign a loyalty oath to the Republican Party was ejected? The second question is, we had polls throughout the period that showed up to approximately 40% of the people polled, believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, you know, believed all of those bullshit stories about Iraq and war on terror being synonymous with each other. How would a responsible major media entity have developed strategies to reduce that level of disinformation? Well, on the WMD issue, it's really no surprise that in the face of international inspections of our own teams going to try to find these weapons, that the public believed that such weapons existed and in fact even had been found. And the reason they did is that it was clearly intimated by the administration and those in favor of the war. And they continued in the face of the absence of these weapons to say that the matter was still unresolved and that there certainly were, there was partial evidence and we'd have to, I mean, so that's where they got the impression that weapons either were there or remained to be found because it was being suggested by, not only by the president, the vice president, although he was a leader in this department, but in those wishing to justify the war. And so that was the, I believe, is a partial explanation for why they, 8% of the public continues to believe that in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And what was the earlier point, Steve? What can the media do to counteract that perception? I think that was, wasn't that the point? No, the first part, Steve. The first part. Well, okay. Actually, you haven't answered the question, which was how would the media develop a responsible strategy to address that level of incomprehension or whatever. And the first part had to do with why did... With the way the audiences for Bush's campaign were self-selected. Oh, I'm sorry. That was the first question. Yeah, yeah. Let me go to that for a moment. It's a, it is a not entirely original technique that this administration has raised to a level I have never heard of. The president travels in a bubble that is not just security. He goes to events where tickets are issued and only to the Republican faithful and only even nowadays on this little campaign on social security to those who agree with him on social security. And then up on the stage, next to him sits Mr. So-and-so, who's going, is convinced that this is a terrific idea and will interact with him. It's part of a strategy of building support. You want to have coverage of these events or sets as they may be in which there appears to be support. Look at that hall full of people. They're all applauding. Must be a great idea. And so it's incredibly simplistic. It's insulting to the intelligence of the larger audience, but it is a rather trite and true political technique and it's used generally during campaigns. Now it's being used generally as a MO for presidential events. Certainly as a result, the president never hears any criticism. I am convinced the reason that George W. Bush was so off his game in the first debate when John Kerry came out very aggressively going after him, accusing him of lying and distorting and so forth. You know, presidents don't hear that. He had gone four years of constant applause ringing in his ear. And so they just don't hear it and he was clearly taken aback. Well, he found his feet in the second and third debates, but it was very striking to me in the first. I'm sorry, as to how the media is supposed to persuade the public that black is black and not white in the face of this kind of thing. I don't know what you can do, but keep reporting it and hope that you get through. Well, you could imagine a responsible network refusing to cover a staged event that was a circus event. Well, they do. I mean, look, they go out and they cover the first two or three of those, and then the coverage drops off sharply. I want to thank the audience and thank the speakers.