 I'm David Thorburn, the director of the forum. I know most of your faces here, so I feel I don't need to introduce myself. I will briefly introduce the speakers in a moment. But first, I'd like to remind the audience here, as well as the audience listening and viewing, that our next two forums return to our normal space in the Media Lab, in the basement of the Media Lab, in the Bartos Theater. The next forum to be held on April 1st, not any intentionally symbolic purpose to that date. At that forum, we have Betsy Frank of the MTV Networks speaking about the way in which audiences have been fragmenting and changing, and how her outfit has been exploiting niche marketing in a new kind of way on television. And then that's on April 1st, from 5 to 7 in the Bartos Theater. And then on April 8th, a week later, we have what ought to be an interesting session in which the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti, known to many of us as the Silver Fox, will deliver Hollywood's rant against digital piracy. And I hope that there'll be many of you in the audience ready for sensible responses and interesting dialogue. The moderator of the Valenti event will be my colleague from Brandeis, Tom Dardy, who is the author of a number of significant books on American cinema, including some that deal with aspects of censorship. So he's a particularly appropriate moderator and respondent. I think both of those forums should continue the kind of conversation we've been having about the way in which the media escape, as some have called it, has been altering. And our speakers today will address that question. As most of you should realize, tonight's event is being videotaped for MIT World. And what that means, essentially, is that when you ask questions, be sure you speak into the microphone so it's picked up by the recording devices. Microphones will be circulated during the question and answer segment. And what we hope will actually happen is that you'll sort of pass the microphone around amongst you in this audience. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce our speakers today. They'll speak in the order in which I introduce them. Mark Jerkowitz, the man to my immediate right, is the media writer for the Boston Globe. And before that, he spent two years as the newspaper's ombuds person. Prior to that, he worked as a media critic for the Boston Phoenix and is also very well known in the Boston area in his previous incarnation as a radio talk show host. Some of you will probably recognize Mark because he's become a regular panelist, I think actually the most articulate of those panelists, on the weekly Beat the Press program on WGBH TV. Mark also teaches media ethics at Northeastern and Tufts University. He'll speak first. Then our second speaker is Jeffrey Dworkin. And I'm especially happy to be able to welcome him here. He's National Public Radio's first ombuds person. And in that job, he investigates and responds to questions from the public regarding editorial standards at NPR. He writes a weekly internet column for NPR online. And some of his most recent columns are very interesting. I think maybe that some of you in the audience will want to ask him to expand on some of the issues that he's been dealing with recently in his column. Before he became ombudsman in February 2000 at NPR, he served as the vice president of NPR for news and information. And before that was a reporter and managing editor for CBC Radio News and Information, a division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he had responsibility for all radio networks. So both of our speakers today have experience in a range of media, especially radio and print journalism. And my expectation is that we should have a lively discussion. I have spoken to the speakers about our plan to sort of stick to time. Each will speak for 20 minutes. I will give them signals. And when we come to the end of their full 20 minutes, if they don't stop speaking, I'll cut off their microphone. So we're counting on short speeches and vivid dialogue and argument. Mark. Thank you. Everybody can hear me okay? First of all, you probably don't know how rare it is to have two living former ombudsmen in the same room. You know, it's a... I didn't know I was former. I'm sorry, just two living ombudsmen. Sorry about that. Unless you know something I don't know. It's a very... And I know that Jeff will talk more about than I do. It's a very, actually, it's a rare job in the journalism procession. Very rare job in broadcasting in particular and in the newspaper world where I came from. There are roughly about 1500 dailies in America. There are about 30 ombudsmen. So they're kind of an endangered species. The other thing I get a little bit of a kick out of is, you know, being here at MIT. Again, I don't want to speak for Jeffrey, but you're looking at a very, you know, old tech kind of guy. We were asked by David if we wanted to do any sort of high tech presentations and, you know, that's way beyond my ken. All I... Past talking and moving my lips, that's about as high tech as I get. The abstract tonight is to talk about how new sources of information are interacting and competing with traditional forms of journalism. Are we less informed today amid a torrent of voices and technologies offering as so-called news than citizens in old and free digital days? How has the role of printed radio journalism changed? It's the advent of the web and the 24-7 operations of the cable TV networks. Which, of course, is really sort of the issue that of the day for us in journalism. You know, there are kind of rust-belt industries in journalism. Broadcast television is one of them. The newspaper industry is one of them. They're old media. They're old technologies. They are steadily but certainly surely and, you know, almost inexorably losing viewers and circulation over time. The quote, unquote, new media, the digital media, cable television, cable news, and the internet are the young technologies. The internet is certainly growing. Cable has been a growing phenomenon. Cable has been a growing phenomenon for 20 years, although there's some evidence that their audience is topping off. But you really have sort of a contest between classic old media and new media. I think it's important to understand that it's not just about technology. It's about what technology means for the journalism. I teach a media ethics course at Tufts in Northeastern. And I, you know, I'm looking at these 18 and 19 year olds and I explained to them what it was like when I grew up and basically you had two new sources. Walter Cronkite, who came on the air, I can't remember, it was a 6, 30 or 7 o'clock in those days. And for 25 minutes Uncle Walter told every American like before or after dinner depending on how early you ate exactly what went on in the world that day. You believed it, too. Everything he said. Not many of it competing viewpoints in those days. Walter came on every 24 hours, okay? He was out at 6, 30 on Tuesday, he'd be out at 6, 30 on Wednesday. That's as often as he showed up on the air. The other thing that you supplemented your news die with was what I could call the Daily View Goal. That was your hometown newspaper, okay? Depending on whether you got it in the evening or evening news papers almost don't exist in America anymore today. Or in the morning, it also arrived once a day, okay? So essentially you had them, what we would have to call it, a 24 hour news cycle. You got your news every 24 hours. It was updated. This is what happened yesterday. This is what happened in the 24 hours since we last spoke to you. That's how America got it. And the way I recall it is, if something truly big was happening and you wanted to sort of follow when those days we were laughing about what we call breaking news, listen to the radio and you could get news reports every half hour on the hour. And so really, really, we're breathlessly waiting to hear something every half an hour. You can get a little bit of news. But that was under very usual circumstances, all right? Today, obviously, we don't have a 24 hour news cycle. We have the internet and cable news and they have two things in common. First and foremost, there is no news. It's an instantaneous news cycle. There is no break in the news. There's never any reason for the news to stop. No one ever says, time out, we're not gonna tell you anything for the next minute, two minutes, three minutes, 10 minutes, hour, hour and a half. It's a constant, steady, endless stream of instantaneous information, whether it's good news, bad news, or even really news, another question. The other thing that is different between new media and old media is what we call in business the news hole, okay? The news hole used to be finite. What's the news hole? That's the amount of space, literally you have, to deliver your information. It is, in the old media, finite. You bought today's Boston Globe. If it's 68 pages, that's, you've got 68 pages minus whatever ads are in there and tell whatever we want to tell people that day. Sometimes we don't tell them everything we want. Sometimes we have to find stories that we never thought we'd actually pull out of the old file. But there is a finite amount of information we can provide you in that newspaper, okay? Television news, broadcast news was the same thing. I mean, it's still, you know, rather Jennings broke, I think at 22 minutes basically, or at 21 minutes or whatever it is now to tell you everything that they want to tell you. That's a finite news hole. That means there's prioritization, there's a certain amount of information they can give you. Again, in the new media, there is an infinite news hole. There is no end to the, well, there may be an end. You guys would know better than me, but as far as I can tell, there's no real end to the amount of space on the internet for information. Nor is there an end to the amount of material that can be regurgitated to you through the 24-7 cable networks that go on and on and on and on and never stop. They never take a breath. So God only knows, I mean, to feed the beast, that beast, to constantly give you a steady stream of material every single hour of every single day is infinity, you know, as far as that goes. So what we really have are technological changes that have meant fundamental changes in the way that journalism is delivered and the quality of that journalism. Now one question that was asked, it's interesting, you know, no doubt obviously we have more access to things, information that we ever had before. It feels that way, okay? I'll take a little bit of a detour here. One of the interesting issues that I'm not gonna go into great detail here with in recent years that's become a political issue this year is the consolidation of the news media. The fact that more and more media outlets are owned by a handful of giant companies, okay? And that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission over the years has essentially slowly, prematurely deregulated almost all the rules that put up barriers to this kind of sort of wholesale ownership of everything. What's interesting about this is that this year, for the first time after the FCC met in June and changed a few more rules, it actually became a political issue. There's evidence that the American people started paying attention, Congress started paying attention, interest groups started paying attention, but up till now, although it's a very significant issue about the quality of information you get, there's never been any genuine grassroots feeling about the issue among most of the American public. It's very hard to educate them. It's hard for them to know that the New York Times owns the Boston Globe. It's hard for them to know that the same company that owns HBO owns Time Magazine, okay? That's a lot of work. That's a lot of hard work to figure out what that means and what the implications are. And one of the reasons that it's been hard work and why it's a very difficult public issue is because of what people intuit, okay? You sit there with your remote clicker and you sit there with your mouse and you say, I've got more variety than I've ever seen in my life before. Don't tell me about consolidation of media. I have 800 channels on my digital cable. I can go anywhere I want in the world and the internet. And it's very hard to convince people that you're living in a consolidating world when you seem to have that many choices. So we do. We have an infinite amount of access to streams of information that we never had before. But are we better informed? I actually did, I just did a story for the Globe on the 25th anniversary of C-SPAN. And I, you know, trying to figure out how to write about C-SPAN is not an easy situation. And I asked a question, sort of the question I asked is, you know, did C-SPAN make America better? One, you know, one might argue that, you know, the fact that you're giving citizens real access to the inner workings of government and the fact that the actual people in government know they're being watched ought to, you know, make for some kind of better civic life. But by almost all, you know, at least anecdotal evidence that we have, our civic life isn't better today than it was in the era of old media, despite all the choices we have. Our discourse is coarser. Our public discourse is coarser. Our politics are more polarized. Our political participation is not better than it was, in my opinion. And frankly, if you ask now, I would guess that there are, despite all the new sorts of information we have, I would guess that there are a few people in the country now who could pick out Afghanistan on a map or name three Supreme Court justices and there were 25 years ago. So if we, are we better informed? Good question. I think if we, there's not much empirical evidence that we are better informed about the things we might consider important. On the other hand, I can guarantee you this, how many people heard about a rumor about an affair John Kerry might have had a couple of weeks ago? Okay, guess what? In the old Walter Cronkite Daily Bugle Day, forget about it. Never would have reached anybody's ears in this room. Never would have heard about it. Turns out the rumor's not true. So what, okay, we're sorry about it. Everybody heard about the rumor. Everybody heard about it almost all over the country. That's one of the things that the new media is good for. So if we consider that to be better educated, then we certainly are on that level. I don't want to be too cynical though. I want to talk about cable news for a minute. It's hard not to be too cynical. I know, I know. Particularly when you're a media critic or a buzzer, my God. To me, I understood the impact of cable, CNN came on the scene in 1980, we know that. MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, which sort of make up the other elements of the news channel, Troika, came in late 1996, in late 1990s, roughly 1996. I understood what cable television was meant to the news universe in the first Gulf War in 1991. And I think if you really think back to those first couple nights of the war, okay, when the Scuds were flying, and I remember what's his name, Kent, who was even nicknamed the Scud Stunt because he stood on top of a building and whizzed by his ear somewhere in Saudi Arabia. And we all, we didn't have any idea what Sodom had in his arsenal and whether or not Israel was gonna be here and what the implications in the early hours of the war was gonna be. I don't know about you, but I think most of America spent the first 48 hours of that war glued, glued to CNN. And I can literally remember people walking around with dark circles under their eyes for three or four or five days as you got to see a war in real time for the first time ever. And I remember feeling how insignificant the newspaper that landed on my doorstep that next morning was. Why did it matter? What were they gonna tell me about the most important thing that was going on in the world that I didn't already know? To me, in some ways, that was a seminal event. And the truth is, it has made a tremendous impact on the newspaper industry, I will tell you right now, because if you really focus, newspapers at that point, the industry I'm in recognized that they were soon going to be shoved out for the most part of the breaking news business, okay? They were no longer gonna be the vehicle to tell you what had happened where you hadn't heard anywhere else. Yes, there's enterprise reporting, there's investigations, there's things you're never gonna find out. But in terms of the big things in the world, newspapers at that moment, I think realize they're breaking news mortality. And if you look at the sweep of time since then, you will see in your own newspaper, and particularly on front pages all over the country, an inexorable trend towards softer pieces, feature pieces, trend pieces, lifestyle coverage, all the people in my business realized our business was changing. And I think they realized that if they hadn't realized it sooner, which I'm sure they had, they certainly realized it that day in 1991. Now today, Cable, the real question is what kind of a thread is Cable to the broadcast news? Universe, the ones we older people grew up on, the ones where the anchors still make multi-million dollar salaries, Broca, Rather, Jennings are still the giant names, sort of the magic names. And it's interesting, that audience, as much audience share as the Nightly News programs have lost, and it's been very dramatic in recent years, for one reason, who the heck is home at that hour anymore if you work, but when it used to be, as much audience share as they have lost, their audience still essentially are much, many times larger than the biggest audience you will ever get for any given Cable news show. But what's interesting is, you wouldn't necessarily perceive that if you followed sort of the cultural dialogue in this country, because the truth of the matter is that inside the media industry where I work, and even at the water cooler, it's Cable news that seems to drive the discussion. I mean, I can tell you media critics like myself are much more interested in the hissing contest between CNN and the Fox News channel, and Roger Ailes in the old days, Ted Turner, than we are in covering who's gonna succeed, Dan Rather. But, okay, but more importantly, it drives the water cooler conversation too. The things that Cable news focuses in on, the mega stories that they have focused in on the last few years are really the things we talk about now as a society for better or worse. O.J., the Washington area sniper, Jack O., God forbid when the Jackson trial starts, okay. SARS, remember that last year, finally flicked off the radar screen, but it had Martha Stewart right now, Elyon Gonzalez, okay. The kinds of stories that became the mega Cable stories that were on hour after hour are really the stories that are sort of cemented in our mind in our national culture. And network news is kind of a cultural afterthought there. The key element to Cable news and the way it's behaving these days is the mega story. Once you know that when Cable news comes up with a story they like, they stick what we call a chiron on it. That's like a little headline, like the sniper episode or war interact. Once they come up with that name, you know we're not going anywhere else. You know, for the next 20 days, this is all we're gonna have. And what they do with these, they want these mega stories. And they want these mega stories for a number of reasons, but some of them are economic. Okay, think about it. You run a Cable news station. On a normal day, when things are going on all over the world, you've gotta pay the bar tabs, the food bills, the hotel bills, the transportation costs, a far-flung correspondence all over the world who might have to report stories. Ah, get yourself an OJ case and suddenly it becomes a simpler story. Put one person at the courthouse and bring in 850 debating lawyers into your studio to argue about the case and what happened. That they most of them will do it for free by the way because their mom gets to see them on TV. So they're more than happy to just show up. A few of them like Jeffrey Toobin get real money. And you've got yourself a formula for a mega story that you can do on the cheap. And the truth is there's a formula for these stories. There's news, there's quasi-news, and then there's talking heads. And what I mean by that is let's take the infamous sniper case, which is my favorite. There was news in a sniper case whenever there'd be a shooting or there'd actually be a real news development in the case. Then there was quasi-news, okay? My favorite quasi-news headline of all the time. You know, once when we were, again, a little younger, you watch television and suddenly the screen went blank and somebody said, and then came out and said, this is a news bulletin from CBS News or this is breaking news or how your heart used to leap into your throat. Think of how the term breaking news has been devalued in recent years when you watch cable news now. My favorite breaking news headline of all time during the sniper case, chief moose to hold press conference in 47 minutes. Okay. That in this day and age qualifies as breaking news. And when there's no news or quasi-news, then you bring in the talking heads. And again, to use the sniper cases as an example, I never knew there were so many retired homicide detectives in New York still walking the face of the earth, none of whom actually figured out the case, but all of them got in their 15 minutes of fame. I'm gonna close here. I was gonna talk about the internet but we can do that in the discussion. I wanna say one other thing about cable news and the big stories that they foist upon us. And I guarantee you, you can see where we're, we're gonna have the mega trials, we're gonna have Kobe, okay? We're gonna have Lacey Peterson, we're gonna have Michael Jackson. You can see that I can tell you right now that's gonna fill up a huge part of our national water cooler conversation. And I wanna remind everybody what the big story, the big cable news driven story was in America in the days just before the two planes hit the tower, the World Trade Center. Anybody remember? Gary Connick, okay? Not even a very, not even an afterthought, not even a footnote, not even a guy who's probably gotten an inch of copy. Gary Connick was the biggest story in this country before he was a criminal. Thanks to cable news networks. I'll stop right there. Jeffrey. Well, that's depressing. Yeah. And the, an even more depressing thing is that I agreed with everything that Mark has said. Let me try to come at some of the issues that Mark has raised so well from another angle. I think that what we're seeing now is a kind of image of news that is really kind of the Potemkin news network. It's not real news. It's just kind of pretend news. And this is, I believe sort of deliberate that we're now living in this environment of Potemkin news because it makes money and it makes sense for people who want to make money. The difficulty goes back to 1985 or 86. And there's a wonderful story about Richard Salant who ran CBS News in the mid-80s. Dick Salant was an accountant who was asked to run the news department and to run CBS News in a way that was responsible, et cetera, et cetera. In some time in 1986, he was called to a meeting at Black Rock headquarters over on 6th Avenue in New York. And he came back to the news department over on 57th and West 10th. And he called in all staff meeting. And they all gathered around and he said, well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. What do you want first? I said, well, give us the good news first. He said, okay, the good news is is that for the first time in the history of CBS News, the news division has made a profit. And that's the bad news because Salant knew that forever after, CBS News would become a profit center for CBS Inc. And it did. And that as over the next few years, the accountants moved in and said, what do we have to do to maximize our profits and to grow our audience as the phrase goes? Couple of things happened at that time. New technology came in that simplified news gathering. Media mergers started to happen in the 1990s where people looked around at news organizations and said, how the hell are we gonna pay for this? The next thing that happened was that news doctors were brought in. News doctors were consultants, usually from organizations like McKinsey or KPMG, Pete Marwick as it was known before, who would do a study of the news organization to determine what was it exactly that these news organizations did? What did they do that their audiences wanted? What did they do that cost more money and what did they do that cost less money? So while that study was going on, while new technology was being introduced, another thing happened which was we won the Cold War and suddenly the compulsion to do foreign news seemed to diminish in a remarkable way. So through the 1990s, as these news doctors were going through news organizations at a time when foreign news seemed to be less useful and news gathering specifically became seen as very expensive at a time when news organizations were expected to have a return which was not expected to be less than 20 to 25% per annum. McKinsey was particularly effective at this and as they investigated not only NBC but the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they came up with a very interesting conclusion. They discovered curiously enough that the thing that cost the most money to do was the thing that the audiences wanted least of all. So let's get rid of those expensive things that the audience doesn't want, particularly foreign news. So in 1992, NBC shut its Moscow Bureau. News organizations were eviscerated and different kinds of programming were put in place in order to minimize costs and maximize profits. That frankly was the story of the go-go 90s when it came to news organizations. The arrival of cable, as Mark was talking about, allowed for a proliferation of programs or streams of programming that in fact weren't really news. They were really kind of discussions at best and food fights at worst. People would be brought into studio to argue about various things and the rise of the commentariat, the opinion makers, the kind of bloviators who would go on television and create a talk radio as well as a real phenomenon did something really remarkable that we're seeing today. It took away the value of fact-based reporting and created faith-based reporting, faith-based journalism, just opinion disguised as news and that people would come out and say, I have had my news fix for the day, but in fact they weren't getting any news in the traditional sense. They weren't getting reporting because reporting was seen to be too expensive. I think it's probably, there'll be some scholarly monographs that are written over the next little while which shows that reality television is really a kind of the diss staff side of this kind of talking head programming which is disguised as journalism but in fact is nothing but a kind of entertainment. A couple of things happened through the 90s as well that as domestic news became more important for these news organizations than foreign news, the rise of the great stories like O.J. Simpson became a way of filling airtime for not very much money. And the interesting thing that has come out of this is that we have this illusion that we have a tremendous amount of choice but in fact we have, I think, less choice all the time. There are fewer and fewer news organizations that are actually involved in news gathering. There are some exceptions. I think the Boston Globe still is committed to that as is the parent company, The New York Times. CNN is still doing that and frankly NPR is still doing that. Whether we do it well enough is something that I'm sure people have opinions on and we can discuss that. So we found ourselves in the late 1990s in a kind of remarkable situation where we had less information around than ever before but more options at the same time. We had fewer people actually engaged in reporting than ever before but we had more and more people giving their opinions about the news. A study has just come out by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, which is really depressing. It has concluded that over the last 10 years the number of people engaged in reporting has declined substantially. For example, in radio. The number of people who are engaged in news and news gathering in radio has declined by 44% in the last five years. There's a great story that I heard last fall. I was out in Minnesota talking to some people of Minnesota Public Radio, which as you may know is one of the great providers of news and information still around. And Bill Buesenberg who runs MPR News said that a small town in South Dakota the previous spring had a train derailment in that town. There were toxic chemicals spewed and a gas started to spill out over the town and people called what said we have to evacuate our town. Let's call the local radio station which had been there since the 1920s and have them announce that there is an emergency breaking news, the town should be evacuated as a matter of some urgency. So that's a great idea and they called the station and they called the station and the phone was picked up in San Antonio which was the nearest place where the programming was coming from. There in radio, commercial radio has basically abandoned the idea of local news and local service. They've abandoned the idea of giving communities local information that may be important to those communities. I think that public radio is, I have to say, that's why I work in it, is still committed to being a local presence in a way that commercial broadcasting is not. And I think that we're now seeing that during the, when 9-11 happened, a lot of people felt that they were informationally undefended. There was this sense of why is this happening? Why do they hate us so much? Who are these people? What is Al Qaeda? All of the kinds of issues that commercial broadcasting should have been, they're providing that information to listeners they weren't. So there was this tremendous sense of confusion in the mind of the public. And this was a kind of a deliberate intellectual disarming of American life. This was done with foreknowledge and the understanding that people don't need this information. They don't need to, we don't need to have as our role in commercial broadcasting the idea that we have an affirmative obligation to provide high quality news, information and cultural programming because we believe that our audience has had our citizens as well as listeners. To take CBS as another example, in the mid 1980s into the late 1980s until the news doctors got ahold of that esteemed network, CBS had 38 foreign correspondents in 28 cities. They now have five foreign correspondents in four cities. Where they get their news from is actually really interesting. One of the things that has happened is that there are organizations like Reuters and the BBC and UPITN that will provide visuals of events that will be fed in a kind of syndicated feed to CBS in London where the reporter will do what's known as a meltdown which will take the visuals from other sources, visuals that they have not gathered themselves and they will write a voiceover of it based on what the wires are saying or what the BBC is saying and they will feed that to New York and call that foreign reporting. That's where we have ended up at this point. So we are in a particularly dire situation now I feel that we are left at a time of it really is, as Bill McKibben called it, the age of missing information. There is a lot that's going on out there. We don't know what it is. And I was watching, I don't know why, MSNBC last night and Eric Alterman was on. I don't know if he writes for The Nation. He wrote a book called What Liberal Media? It's actually, I think, a pretty good analysis of how we are left with fewer and fewer journalistic resources that are committed to telling different narratives. When it comes to, for example, the Middle East, the idea that there may be two narratives becomes very difficult for American media because the pressure not to tell the story is at least as compelling as the pressure to tell a story. So we are, Eric Alterman was talking with Dennis Miller, which was sort of sublime and ridiculous. And Alterman, who was trying to explain just why there is such a limited amount of discussion and debate because of the financial interests of large media corporations to keep people uninformed and to keep them entertained because it's cheaper to do. It's not because they may be nasty and evil and be involved in some great conspiracy to keep people in the dark, but they are involved in a deliberate business plan to maximize their profits. And the best way they can do that is by not spending money on things that cost a lot. So Alterman, who I happen to agree with, was saying this, talking about, really, there isn't a liberal media per se. It's actually pretty conservative. And people in the audience started guffawing loudly. I was sort of taken aback by how incredible that statement was to the people in that audience. And of course, Dennis Miller made fun of him and did all the usual things that people who are in that position do. It was pretty depressing. We're at a point now where people feel like they have to go into kind of an informational defensive crutch that they'll get their information from a couple of places and they'll rely on that because the idea that there could be, as Walter Cronkite did, a place where a news organization was an agent of community that there were shared informational values, that's disappeared. And it becomes increasingly difficult for us to provide a variety of different information sources just so that people can say, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's interesting. What we have now as a result of almost 20 years of this kind of thin gruel of information is that people distrust us more than ever before, that the idea that we could provide balanced information is just not believed. So we have, we've reached a point now where we're giving people kind of informational comfort food. People seem to at least they write to me frequently and I got 50,000 emails last year excluding porn, spam, viagra ads and African dictators, deposed African dictators asking for money. And saying, I don't want to, you must be that dictator. Well, they offer me money, but they have to, they have to say, I'll be out in a moment. I can keep to a deadline. So we're at a point now where we are really at an age of missing information. And people will now say, well, I heard something on the BBC or I read something on the internet and it must be true because I haven't heard it anywhere else in American media. And they've got in some cases a good point and in other cases it's kind of, it's Gresham's law of information where bad information drives out good information. And so we're kind of living in a land of great informational impoverishment. And I think we have to figure out a way of giving ourselves more nutrition over the next little while. Thank you very much. We're now at what is always my favorite part of our sessions, questions and answer. People in the audience, you're not restricted only to questions, you can make statements and offer judgments, but try to be very concise. And while you're sort of gathering your energies and focusing your minds, Jimmy, good to see you. I thought you were at another circumstance, but while you're doing that, let me pose a sort of general question to both of our speakers. You're both painting a very, very depressing picture here. I have a sort of, and I'm sure we'll come back to this question, but let me pose a skeptical question about the perspectives you're both taking. Do you think really that journalism in the 19th century in the United States was really better than the journalism we have now? Is there really some golden age behind the period of decay and decadence we're in now that somehow stands as a sort of judgment on where we are? Or hasn't always, or the alternative perspective would be, hasn't news in some sense always been a commodity in the United States? Well, I think I first was an early version of Rupert Urdo, and you provide the pictures, I'll provide the war. This is still a value in tabloid journalism. I think that what we are missing now, and this is actually maybe a good thing about, I think we are living in an age of greater journalistic democracy thanks to the net, thanks to blogs. That doesn't necessarily mean that the quality of that journalism is always as high as it should be, but there is a vigor to internet journalism that I think shows a lot of promise. We have to figure out, we in the old media, have to figure out how we can live with it and work with it and learn from it and not strangle it in its crib. And I think that we're also missing a certain elite quality of news that in a generation ago, in the 70s, I guess that's a generation ago now, people had high expectations that news would provide something of quality, and they don't have that now. And I think we have to somehow marry that sharp elbow democracy of the internet with the high standards that elite journalism has always been able to provide but is now increasingly ignored. Certainly, it's been cyclical. There's no doubt about it. Journalism, there are many periods in the past where journalism has the penny press, the overtly political press, the partisan press, the war-mongering press, the tabloid, the yellow journalism press. But I think that a lot of us at the profession thought that at some point, post World War II, that the profession had matured in a way, that objectivity, knowledge had become a real goal, that political objectivity, that the journalism profession itself became a profession. I mean, you talk to people who've been around this business. In some ways, journalists are an elite class today, at least if you work for a major newspaper, broadcast outlet, they weren't. I mean, journalism was a trade. It was not a profession the old days. There were rough-hewn guys who did a lot of drinking covered fires. Now we have journalism schools where we learn ethics, we come out better trained, we come out with a higher sense of mission. I think all of this was supposed to point to a moment where we had sort of out, that we were moving to some kind of an ideal of genuine, serious, objective journalism. And maybe we certainly are in another cycle because we don't know how the relationships between old and new media are going to play out with the internet as the biggest wildcard. But the one point that is important to understand, and we're both pessimistic, because frankly, part of our jobs, I mean, we are sort of the Jeremiah of our profession. Our jobs are to look at what's wrong with journalism, and that's a very small corner of people who do that. But if you look at the public's esteem for journalism, when they are asked basic questions, are journalists honest? Do they care? Do they have good values? We're down there now with ambulance chasers and insurance salesmen. If there are anybody in the profession in this audience, I don't mean it in this audience. And the best illustration I have of what's happened in the sort of public view of the profession in recent years is I take two movies. All the President's Men, I don't know, what year was that, 1978, something like that? Something like that, yeah. Okay, All the President's Men, Watergate was the thing that took people of my generation, we all wanted to come to the funeral center. Why? We went to see the movie. And Robert Redford and Dustin Hartman were playing journalists. Two of the best actors in America. They were heroes, they were heroic. Bradley's the only thing that's, you know, the guy playing Ben Bradley who was Jason Robins. The only thing that's at stake here is the future of democracy, the First Amendment. It was lofty, it was great. And we had, and now, they remade a Watergate movie a couple years ago called Dick. Anybody in this audience see it? Okay, it was a comedy. It was a spoof of Watergate. The actor who played Bob Woodward was Will Ferrell from Sang Live. And of all the characters in this spoof, which included Nixon, you know, it is the worst, and two teenage girls were apparently the masterminds behind the White House. The most bumbling, idiotic, the characters who were portrayed most, you know, in the most possible ridicule fashion were the two, Woodward and Bernstein. As preening, idiotic, moronic, you know, stumbling, bumbling, and you know, obviously it's only pop culture there was only two movies, but in my mind, it sort of crystallized the public's view of journalism has changed in 20 or so odd years. Hi, so you guys spoke a lot about the issues of control and access with the Old Guard. And I actually had some questions, if you could expand a little bit more, you brought up the idea of blogging. And I see blogging as a way that citizens have started to participate in journalism. And although it is likely a lower quality at the moment, my question is, do you feel like it's at least exerting pressure on some of the bigger conglomerates to start providing services that people don't get from blogging? So maybe forcing people to start going back to foreign reporting and things like that. And the other thing I wanted to mention very quickly is if you're interested in this topic, Harvard Law School is having a symposium on it all weekend, so please come and check us out at jolt.harvard.edu. But yeah, if you could speak about the blogging, because I'm very interested in sort of how new technologies might help save us and perhaps reverse the conglomerate problem a little bit. Go ahead. I would say a couple of things about blogging, which is obviously an interesting phenomenon and a very red hot. I mean, the truth is one way that old media is gonna react to blogging is by creating their own blogs, okay, which is what they tend to do anyway. So now, for example, ABC, you could call, has something that we could call roughly a blog, it's called The Note, every day on their website and it's this sort of snarky insider view of what's going on in politics that they would never ever dream of putting on their air. Right. Okay, not in a million years. Now it's not democratized the way blogging is, but one of the things that I'm frankly worried about in the broader issue of the net is what you're starting to see is that the net's turning out in some ways to be like a lot of American industries, which is that the big companies are dominating, pushing out the independents who have trouble coming up with an economic model that works. I think in the study that you talked about from the Project for Excellency Journalism, they found out that 6, 70% of the most popular news websites are owned by the 20 biggest companies that already exist, that's a problem. But having said that, right now, interestingly enough, I think blogging and some of the interesting things that are happening on the way, their biggest impact is actually on the mainstream journalists who are actually paying the most attention to it. The blogosphere takes credit for bringing down Trent Lott after his remarks at the Strom Thurman birthday party. Now, that's a little exaggerated, but that was a story that the mainstream media missed. And the NPR reported it. Except for NPR. And then ignored it for about three days. Missed or didn't treat with everything it deserves. And the blogosphere helped keep that alive. Things like the note, things like there's a website that everybody in my profession considers the Bible. It's Jim Romanesco's media gossip page that everybody in the journalism world goes to. And so ironically enough, some of the new things that are happening on the web, the most wrapped audience, is actually the mainstream journalists who are paying attention to this and starting to incorporate some elements of that information in their stories. And it's become a place where journalism and opinion kind of intersect in a way that's really interesting. Sometimes it's maddening because it's so ridiculous and absurd and who are these people and how could they say these things about us? But it's actually really an interesting phenomenon. And we ignore it at our peril, as I did for a while, thinking that all this flow of email traffic that I was getting from people who were outraged and every message was written in the same way. I started to think that their complaints were not, couldn't be taken seriously until it suddenly dawned on me that this just may be another way that people are sharing information. So what if they didn't hear the report on all things considered? But they got together through this blog and exchanged opinions and information and said, God damn it, we're gonna act about this because we're really, we're upset. So if they didn't get it perfectly accurate because they're hearing it from a second source, we're gonna have to learn how to live with this and give the blogists the feedback that they need to say, well, you're right up to 80%, but here's the 20% where you may be misinformed or uninformed. And this is where the dialogue can happen and should happen, I think. I have a two-part question. One, I would be at this moment jumping off a cliff at the depressing story except for the two islands of the New York Times, National Public Radio, the sibling Boston Globe, do you have any prediction on when those islands are going to be hit by a tsunami? And second, I used to do some television reporting in the early 70s when there was a very strong FCC requirement on the part of television stations to report community affairs. And that was, at that time, a very strong dictate from above that we shall do that and whether it costs money or not because they wanted to retain their license. How much of a part of that is because of the diminishment, if not the total abandonment of that standard on the part of the FCC? Well, we can be bipartisan on this. The FCC has been defanged first by the Reagan administration and then by the Clinton administration. The Reagan administration dropped the fairness doctrine which said that broadcasters have an affirmative obligation to present at least two sides of any issue, not just one. And then the 1996 Telecommunications Act basically allowed for, tried to take advantage of the changing technology but ended up basically creating a, there was no legal impediment for media conglomerates. And I think that it's kind of a race to the bottom in some places and that it's forcing listeners, viewers and readers to be more selective as to where they're gonna get their information. They can get it from the kind of mainstream which feels like trying to take a drink from a fire hose some days because it's just so much stuff out there. And the rest of the audience and the readership go online to find what the BBC is saying and they will read the New York Times and the Globe and they will listen to NPR. I think it's actually no accident that the NPR audience, the public radio audience has grown phenomenally in the last seven years. It's doubled in the last seven years. We now have an audience of 30 million listeners a week. Only Rush Limbaugh has a larger audience. Why aren't the commercial networks seeing that as a phenomenon and seeing it as an economic motherload? Because they'll have to invest in their news organizations and they're not prepared to do that yet. But that doesn't mean that at some point they won't. I think that Bill Gates and Ted Turner could probably say, you know what? We're gonna create another version of public broadcasting and we've got the money to do it. And they could, I mean, we're successful partly because I think we do an okay job. And we do actually not a bad job. But we also don't have any competition. I'd take the first part of the question about these islands and how long will they survive. I wrote one of these futuristic stories for the Globe in 1997, I think that said, where were you beginning your news from in 10 years? And I had, you know, in one scenario, the wind whistling through the shattered glass of the, you know, darkened Boston Globe facility. So, and frankly, I can remember sitting seriously among print journalists and newspaper men at seminars, maybe a decade ago, where people would start talking about the internet and what it was going to mean and what it was going to do. And print journalists would put their head in their hands and look up like a meteor was about to come and just demolish their world. We know that hasn't happened. But I do think what will happen to some of the beloved is that the brand will live on indefinitely. But it will live on in different forms. You know, every news organization worth its salt, including NPR and the New York Times has a huge investment in their website and how they are delivering news through the web. There's absolutely no doubt about it. One of the things that's fascinating to me in the newspaper business, the thing that keeps every newspaper executive in the country awake at night is that no one at the age of 30 reads us. And for the first time, we're convinced that they're not actually not gonna read us after they buy a house and have kids and have to send their kids to the public school system and all that. They're never gonna read us. And we're freaking out about it. And one of the things that mainstream media organizations are doing is they are creating spin-off newspapers for young readers. Okay, let me give you, here in Boston, you guys see the Metro? Okay, you know what it is? Your world in 15 minutes, no more than 100 words per story. That's happening all over the country. The Washington Post, one of the finest newspapers in America, this past year created a publication that looks a lot like the Metro called The Express. Why? Because they want young people to read the newspaper. It's nothing like The Washington Post. If the next generation grows up reading the Express as opposed to The Washington Post, it's gonna be wildly different. But it's part of the Post brand. Arthur Solzberger Jr., who's the CEO and chairman of The Times, the New York Times company, which owns us, has said publicly, I am agnostic about the way information is delivered. So the truth is any media company that's run by anybody that's got a shareholder somewhere is thinking about it, keeping the brand alive and making that brand resonate and mean good journalism. But there are gonna be a lot of different pipes that they're gonna shoot that information out at to you and it may not look a lot like what it does now. Let me raise an issue here, good sir. I think that media critics by and large pay too much attention to television. They don't have an audience. What audience they have continues to diminish. Yet somehow, Lisa de Morales in The Washington Post every day does a column every day on what was on television. Nobody's watching it. There's a really interesting, the scales fell from my eyes a few years ago when the Madeleine Albright and a few others from the state, from the Clinton administration were gonna hold a town hall meeting in Ohio to talk about American policy towards the Balkans. They were gonna bomb Slobodan Milosevic. Do you remember that? It seems like such a simpler time. So they had a range to have, they called CNN to say, will you broadcast our town hall at three o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon? And CNN said, sure, we have nothing better to do. And we called, I was running NPR news at the time and I called the White House and I said, we'd like to broadcast this as well. We think it's an important event because, and they said, why should we bother with you? This is television. We only want CNN to do this. We're gonna give them exclusive access to Madeleine Albright and the town hall meeting. And I said, do you know how many people watch CNN at three o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon? I said, no. Said, 335,000 people nationally watch CNN at that time of day. At that time of day, you have an audience on public radio of three million people. He said, oh, we didn't know that. The interesting thing is that... I think I'm sorry that you told him that. Well, that could be. But I mean, CNN, which is a good news organization. As good as it used to be. Not as good as it used to be, perhaps. But the average age of their viewer is 65. And they have a fraction of the audience of public broadcasting. The average age of a listener to NPR is 47. Now, that's not necessarily a wonderful thing. It should be younger. It should be more diverse and all this. But the image is that television somehow rules the cultural roost. But I think that many media columnists actually are harkening back to a kind of a golden era of television rather than looking at what the reality of the media is now. Well, we even have a radio columnist on newspaper. We have dramatically decreased our coverage of... But you're wrong when you say people are watching The Apprentice. You just don't know about it. This is true. Hi, Mark. Henry Jenkins. I wanted to follow up on your comparison between all the president's men and Dick, which it seemed to me was a bit of a setup since Dick was a spoof from Warner Getem movies. And obviously the most sacred element in a spoof is what gets the roughest treatment. So making fun of Warner Burn seems to be knocking the sacred cow. I thought you were going to set it up as a comparison to Shattered Glass, the recent film, which does take you inside the newsroom, is a drama, does pose questions about journalism today, and poses a contrasting image to the image we had in the 1970s. But I would suggest not all together an unheroic one. It is if we're talking about Glass himself who lied through his columns, he clearly is a sort of a villain in the piece, although treated sympathetically. But if you round him the notion of both the editor who struggles with the difficult set of emotional and personal decisions to write what's been wrong within the publication. And if you look at the other reporter who broke the Glass story and who used the internet and the wide range of sources the internet provides to question the establishment press. You have an alternative media image of what the news media is doing today that's pretty powerful. And it seems to me maybe better for democracy for us to say the press makes mistakes is you've got to read it carefully. You've got to be aware that it could lie to you. But there are also good people inside it struggling to get at the truth. And there are alternative sources including the internet which are challenging the established media and trying to write the course that it's set up for itself. So I'm wondering if we couldn't get a more complex picture by looking at shattered Glass and something that's more in keeping with the more optimistic reading of the media environment we're seeing described here. That's the best review of shattered Glass I've heard. Of course, by the way, Stephen Glass is obviously in the world of journalistic scoundrels been completely eclipsed now by Jason Blair. So that he himself is only a footnote. I, and let's hope they don't make a movie about Jason Blair because there won't be anything heroic about that. I saw the movie as well. I thought it was a terrific movie. I'm not sure all of it was 100% journalistically accurate. I also, they resisted the impulse to try and psychoanalyze Glass which I think made him a little, you know, made him, if not heroic at least treated like a human being. The problem, and the only reason I use Dick as opposed to shattered Glass is, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'd hate to compare the box office receipts. I mean, and you know, shattered Glass was a terrific movie. I interviewed the director. He cared about journalism. He spent a lot of time in the New Republic. He understood it. And I agree with you, it's just a shame that more people didn't see the damn movie which I knew was frankly gonna happen because the truth is journalism movies, not that this is all that relevant to the discussion, fail. It is very hard to make a movie that's really about the inner workings of journalism. They fail as a commercial success, not as a critical success. Even The Insider, which in some ways I consider to be the most high glitz, high powered, legitimate Hollywood effort to deal with a serious journalistic issue, the influence of money on a news organization and the crown jewel in that news organization which was 60 minutes treatment of the tobacco water, the tobacco whistleblower, Wigan, Jeffrey Wigan, did poorly, stunningly. My name's Rebecca McKinnon. I'm a Shorenstein fellow over at the Kennedy School and before coming to the Kennedy School I've worked for over a decade in television news overseas. And my question relates back to this whole issue of quality journalism and maximization of profits that you were talking about earlier. And do you feel at the end that maximization of profits, especially by a company that's answerable to shareholders and quality journalism are actually compatible? Because NPR, of course, public journalism, the other example you cite, New York Times, a family-owned company not listed on the stock exchange, able to invest in long-term projects, not worried about the immediate share price and so on, not worried about the short-term profit cycle. At the end of the day, do you think that any serious news organization that wants to claim to be doing serious journalism really should not be part of the company that's listed on the stock market? Well, CBS News was able to do that for many, many years. That's because of the FCC requirements. And so, I mean, that's government. Also because Bill Paley, who has his demons and his detractors, also believed in the role of that commercial broadcasters had a role to play in the civic life of the country. So that they could do documentaries like See It Now or Ed Murrow's documentaries, Harvest of Shame. I don't think those documentaries could happen now. And so, I think that in broadcasting, the serious journalism, there's a value to commercial broadcasting and cable. I mean, the instantaneity that Mark refers to is, you know, I was watching the news sitting in the hotel room this afternoon, waiting for Rekha to bring me over here, watching what's gonna, that Pakistanis really find this guy. Are they getting closer to bin Laden? There's a dramatic narrative that television can provide, but they will not provide the kind of substantial documentary investigative journalism that you will find in newspapers, for example, or on frontline on PBS. So we're gonna have to be more discerning. Our level of media literacy is going to have to get higher. We're going, as journalists, we're gonna have to both help our journalists become more accountable to the public and we're gonna have to help the public understand what they're missing and why they need to make increased demands on us for what we can provide. Follow up on that. Do you think there's any room for the public to be willing to pay directly for more quality information? Isn't that what PBS is? Right, but, you know, compared to, say, the BBC, for instance. Well. And, you know, I mean, would there be a larger demand in this country for public service journalism or is it more kind of a niche elite audience? I worry that it's more for a niche elite audience. I think what's happened with great public broadcasters such as the BBC and the CBC is that they have become victims of the siren song of creating a mass market. So that the BBC becomes a provider of seven radio networks, two television networks, a phenomenal internet presence, a digital broadcasting service. And the fallout from the Hutton Inquiry is that maybe the BBC needs to get back to some basics. Maybe it has to figure out, really, what it should do, what it should not do, and start making some choices. The CBC decided at a certain point that it was going to go for a mass market. It was going to be popular. So it became kind of indistinguishable on the radio side from, you know, the sort of middle-class radio audience that does, you know, all-day phone-in shows. It became really quite depressing. So as their audiences decline, as they become, and we can talk about the BBC and its particular problems, the short answer is that in this country, you will never get government funding of public broadcasting. It just won't happen. People are too suspicious of the motivations of the government in any form, except for the military, presumably. And it's just not gonna happen. So NPR now is a private not-for-profit corporation. It receives around one or 2% of its budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Science Foundation. But it basically is a private operation that will not go to the government and say, please give us money. Sorry. Yes, Mike Breen. And my questions are a little wide-ranging. They have a little bit to do with either the macro or the micro aspects of the media. And I was telling the professor before the seminar that I go way back into the 50s when my father was a Boston politician and we had to learn how to read the Boston Globe with a jaundiced viewpoint. And he taught me how to read between the lines. I think it's a critical faculty that the younger people today don't seem to have. And then I progressed on to Marsha McCloan in Toronto, where I was one of his first students back in the late 50s. But the experience I had that I'd like to share with you was a friend of mine became the editor of the editorial page of the Globe in the early 80s. And I walked into his office, you might know him, Marty Nolan. And he was standing there with Marty and Tom Winship. But the funny part was that I had this image of Clark Gable, slow chat, you know, papers strewn all over the place. There was no newspaper on the desk. There was this video display terminal. And they were looking at editorials from around the world. And what got to me was, are you reading, do you get involved in your own product sometimes? You know, as I'm an observer and a pretty interested observer of the media, but I sometimes wonder if any of the media people are, they can't read their own newspapers, but they should be reading their own newspapers. If Jennings watched his own report, as we are, he might realize why we're so turned off by some of the things we're looking at. So it's a long-ranging question, but I think my generation, I'm looking for a more critical, less... So you're saying you think that today's news audience is less skeptical and less critical than previous audience. At the coffee shop, people report what someone says, and I think, you know, like, that's supposed to be an absolute truth representation of some particular factor. And I've learned how to interpolate what is being said. And I don't think people do that enough. And I think the young people coming along, they're disappointed in something that was said. I'm not that disappointed. It was someone's attempt to represent some particular idea or some particular thing that they had run into. But I never take it without a critical perspective. And I think some of that is missing today on all the factors on the media. I wonder if you want to comment on that. Quick responses. Um, it's a very... I think part of the willingness... I think part of the problem is something that we alluded to earlier, which is, just that there's so many people now, and I don't think it's just newspapers, they come out of the radio, they come out of the television, they come out of your computer, that tell you what the world is about, okay? And that so you hear things without any sort of... Again, without any sort of decision on what the common truths are. And there's so many oracles out there now who are swearing to you that they've got the truth. And I think people have sort of adopted this mentality. Well, I heard this guy say it. And there's no vetting. There's no vetting. And this is a little off the point. But my favorite sort of idea of what's happened to journalism on television, cable television, was during the Elian Gonzalez case when Larry King decided to have the day actually that the feds came and took Elian away. Larry had one of his... Now, Larry, I don't know if you call him a journalist, I'm not sure what you call him. He's an interviewer. He throws a lot of softballs out there, but he gets people in the news on his show. Well, that was a tumultuous day in the end of a very intriguing news story with a lot of different elements to it. So this was what passed for television journalism. First came on three people or four people who were sympathetic to the family that had been in Florida that had had Elian. And they said things like, well, you know, when they showed the picture of Elian once he was back in his dad's custody, you perhaps you saw there, he had a haircut, something was docked dirty. I think he had a band-aid on at one point. Remember, he was drugged. Clearly, if you look at that photograph, you can tell he's been drugged and something happened to him since he's been in his father's hands. Then on came the other three people who were sympathetic to the father in the US government's position who said, perhaps you don't know that Elian Gonzalez was physically abused while in the custody of his relatives in Florida. Okay, now you're a news consumer, okay? You're watching that program. Somebody tells you Elian Gonzalez was physically abused by the United States government, his father's custody. The next guy comes on and says, Elian Gonzalez was physically abused by his family in Florida. And you know, it's like the Fox slogan. We report you decide. There's no attempt to do journalism, which is finding the truth. In Larry's mind, he had a good program that day because, and it was balanced because one side got to a legendary atrocity and the other side got to a legendary atrocity. And guess what? What kind of decision are you gonna make? I would say pretty much based on who you thought was in the right and the macro issue. And I think that's part of the problem with the culture today. And I think this is the kind of de-editorization of news through the 90s that a lot of news organizations, especially broadcasters, just said, what do we need all these people for? The technology has become incredibly simplified. Digital broadcasting is here. What do we need all these producers and editors that are costing money? We've got a nice person who can talk. Let's put them on the radio and put them on television. We don't need anyone to check his scripts. We'll hire him to do that job. The other, I mean, it's just, it's incredibly less labor-intensive than it once was. And this study from the Council for Excellence in Journalism that we were referring to has done a study that on radio, at least, five years ago, a radio reporter was responsible for 1.5 stories a day. The radio reporter is now responsible for 1.8 stories a day. This is a 20% increase in output. We've become an incredibly efficient industry. Next thing you know will be outsourced off shore. And you're gonna get NPR news from, who knows where? No, that's a little joke. But it is, the technology has changed the way we do things. It is true that you can pull together a newscast using digital technology. I remember when we had at the CBC a morning newscast that ran for 12 and a half minutes. Don't ask why it was that number. And we used to have four or five editors plus a news reader come in starting at midnight to pull it together for a first edition at 5 a.m. When we digitalized the newsroom, the first editor came in at midnight and he had the whole show on a night where nothing broke overnight. But he had the whole show wrapped up by three o'clock in the morning. So you had three other people who were coming in and sitting there doing nothing. Now the right answer to that is great, let's send them out to do more reporting. But instead, the CBC in its wisdom said let's fire them. And that's what they did. Hi, this is a question specifically for Mr. Dworkin. I've been following the debate online about the controversy over the firing of Sandra Singlow by KCRW. Why don't you explain it to the audience? Sandra Singlow is a radio columnist who is on KCRW, an NPR affiliate. She was doing a column in which she had a swear word that was supposed to be bleeped out by an engineer. The engineer forgot to bleep out the swear word. Ms. Lowe was fired by KCRW. They have since asked her to come back and she has declined. So there's been a lot of debate online about what this happened. And I've been reading your responses on the NPR website to the controversy. And I know it's not the policy of NPR to comment on the decisions of its affiliates, but I was depressed to read in your column that there was reticence on the part of some people at NPR to take a stand on this as a free speech issue because they didn't want to be lumped in with the likes of Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge. And I guess my question is, aside from the Sarah Jones case and about the Song Year Revolution, what you wrote about today, do you see NPR taking a stand or pushing the boundaries in its own kind of tasteful way? Taking a stand against the FCC's recent crackdown and the kind of chilly climate about around free speech right now? I don't think so. I don't think that, and I'm not speaking, I just a word of clarification. I'm not in management at NPR. I'm independent of management. I exist as an agent of the listener, but I'm paid by NPR, so it's a curious circumstance to be in. So I am not speaking for NPR or public radio. This is only my 25 cent theory. I worry a little bit that public radio is not willing to step out and talk about these important issues. Partly because I don't think it wants to be a target by people who are hostile to the issues around public broadcasting. NPR does not, the other clarification I would like to make is that NPR, unlike commercial broadcasters, does not have affiliates. It is a no-no word in, we have member stations, but every station is independent, and they can make the decisions that they want as KCRW did with Sandra at Singlow. It has nothing to do with NPR, and NPR has no right or obligation to tell KCRW what to do. The fact that I wrote a column about a station event has been seen with some trepidation, shall we say, by some inside NPR, that I've kind of gone where no NPR person has gone before, and so I'm in a little bit of trouble. But that's what being an ombudsman's all about. Getting people to think about these ideas, and I think that this is something that public radio should address and figure out a way that it can do it for the benefit of the listeners and the values of public radio journalism. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Well, look, I mean, I think this topic is worth a little bit of expansion because it opens up the whole question of the relatively recent, let's call it the charade that's being in the Congress and by the FCC about indecency and about decency in the media. I wonder if both of you would comment about this. Well, the cynic in me says that Michael Powell, who has a familial connection to the Bush administration, has raised this issue in an election year and I'd be interested to see if if he is still the head of the FCC after the election, if he raises it again, I rather doubt he will. It's a harmonic conversion, it's an election year, it's a no-lose issue for a politician and unfortunately, for those of us who care about it, first and then we had Janet Jackson's breast and that was the catalyst for all the, I mean, there are interesting issues to be discussed about and indecency, by the way, if you've ever gone to the FCC and tried to figure out what their definition of indecency is, good luck to you in the Red Sox. It's pretty much like trying to spear Mercury with it. My sense is they should just listen to Hannity or the limbaugh and they would know what indecency was. But I actually happen to have their regulations here. It's lovely. Parents' place obscene and indecent broadcasts. I mean, it's very... There are legitimate issues about what's happened to broadcast television over the past years in terms of language and issues and the family hour and should there be some safe haven where children under the age of 15 could actually watch some sitcom at eight o'clock and that's a fairly legitimate issue but what's fascinating to watch here is the elaborate charade since the Janet Jackson episode and the plethora of hearings that have been held. And there is now a significantly beefed up find and of course what you had was Clear Channel which is a company that owns over 1200 radio stations. One of these great consolidating companies now that in the wake of, in the days after 9-11 inside their company circulated a list of songs that may no longer be appropriate in the new era after 9-11. One of them was John Levin's Imagine, like who knows what's going on there but one of these corporate owners and their boss or one of their radio bosses fires Bubba the Love Sponge who is an obscene little guy and maybe should or shouldn't be on the radio that's up to somebody else and decides to make the bold move of taking Howard Stern off six middle market stations. No big skin off his nose, okay? And then goes the next day literally before a congressional committee and says, I'm sorry and look what I've done. I've expunged the horrible Howard Stern from six stations in medium sized markets. Well, one of the other people that got dragged into this was Mel Carmas and the boss of Viacom who owned the two networks that were involved in the Super Bowl fiasco, which owns the two networks that involved the Super Bowl fiasco MTV and CBS. And Mel of course is called on the carpet and is also outraged at what's going on but if you'll notice his Infinity Broadcasting Company isn't taking Howard Stern off of any of the dozens or scores at station on which the money-making stern happens to air his program in his market. So what I would say is regardless of whether you think it's a legitimate issue or not, the first time any one of these media moguls makes a move that's actually against their obvious economic interests, then I'll have some respect for the heartfelt position that they're taking. The list of penalties is actually quite interesting. It goes on for about three pages and talks about NALs, Notice of Apparent Liability and then the FOs, which is not what you think, it's forfeiture orders where a number of broadcasters are forced to pay fines ranging from $7,000 to $755,000. So they've been very active, very active this election year. Now the one other thing I'll say that's very interesting is that Stern himself, and I don't know if there's no Howard Stern fans here or not, but who has been a giant economically in the radio business and whose politics are kind of a little hard to figure out. He once was running for governor of New York at a libertarian ticket that he endorsed Pataki sort of all over the field but there was actually an article done by our television right this morning for reasons that I believe are probably only in his best interest. He has decided to take very personally the FCC crackdown on indecency and has now turned his program, which is usually a haven for strippers and unusual acts and decided to get very political in this election year and is actually over in recent days essentially embarked on his own crusade to make sure that George Bush doesn't get elected. And there's some interest in the political community about the people who listen to Stern and the potential impact he might have by actually turning overtly political over this issue. I question his motivation but it's an interesting phenomenon. Okay, I wanted to ask a question about the New York Times which is usually a bastion of press freedom but we heard two weeks ago our colloquium series from Ted Rawl who was a rather left of center cartoonist whose work came under fire from readers at the New York Times and he has subscribed to the subscription for his cartoon was canceled but the New York Times took the further step of removing all of them from the archives online of the New York Times effectively expunging the history of what the New York Times had printed previously. And I wonder what you might say about the implications of rewriting the newspaper in the digital age kind of a 1984 sort of scenario and whether you think that's gonna be more widespread as newspapers struggle with conflicting readerships. Well, that's interesting. The first thing that comes to mind about expunging the record is there has been this whole series of litigation over the, and the globe was a defendant in a case in which they essentially wanted freelancers at the paper to sign a contract saying that they would turn over the rights to their work both past and future. Okay, the Boston Globe, it would retain the copyright but that the globe would get to use that material in other outlets including their online versions and there's been a tremendous amount of litigation. So the only thing I know for sure the only thing that comes to my mind about that is it may be some legal issue regarding That's my guess. Freelancers who are no longer working for the publication and whether or not because there's also a ruling in the Tassini case and whether or not frankly they would have the right to even have that material online. I don't know, but there may be some legal implications. Yeah, I know nothing about this but so I'll speak like everybody else does. I wrote a column that became part of a lawsuit against NPR and as part of the out-of-court settlement my column from the website was removed. So I mean there may be something of that nature. This has reminded me of a personal experience that I had about two years ago. I published an article, in media studies it's actually something of a famous piece because it was one of the very first pieces in a broad scale place to talk respectfully about fictional television. In 1977 I published an article about a television program about David Janssen, the actor David Janssen about his career as an actor and it was a guest column in what was then the television column space but he was on vacation and I got much more attention from having written that incidentally than anything I ever wrote in a less public environment and the piece continued to be referred to and cited and usually by people who were going back into the Times archives to find it before the Times went online and maybe this was connected to when the Times went online but I received a communication from the New York Times which was sent to all people like me that is to say freelancers, exactly of the sort you were talking about, requiring that I sign away all rights to that piece if I wanted, if I wished it to be included in the Times digital archives. That's a direct result of I think the Tassini case the details of which I'm now not familiar with but there was a favorable ruling to the freelancers on that and that's what's happened. Because otherwise the Times would be forced to pay the freelancers each time that. Every time it was downloaded. Every time it was downloaded. You'd have to pay a cost there and that becomes extremely expensive. Or reach some agreement with. Or arrange for some kind of buyout on each individual case and I think that the law is still evolving on that and I know that the law department at NPR spends an incredible amount of time trying to figure this out with ASCAP and BMI and music rights and can you post a little snippet of music on the website and what happens when somebody downloads that and you have to pay royalties and it's just the net has created lots of opportunities for legal endeavors. And the freelancers in the globe case which the globe ended up just recently winning challenged the validity of a contract that said you know if you want to work for us you're basically you've got you know without additional compensation but while keeping your copyright where you turn over to us the right to use this online and obviously your argument was you know that's a second stream of revenue and they lost that case as a sort of a business contracts case. One implication of what we've been talking about is that sometimes the things that are least obvious are most important and the mere fact that there are archives of the great newspapers in the country that all of us can access or that many people can access in some cases you have to pay to get into the archive but it's an astonishing resource that digital technology certainly makes available and that alone would suggest that there are certain kinds of positive implications that follow from the collaboration of old and new media. Other, yes. The New York Times is, oh sorry Joellen East in a CMS graduate student. The New York Times is one of the agenda sitting papers in the country along with several other large papers. It also has an online site and I don't know if the people who maintain the online site at the time are called the continuous news desk but I know that other papers called online services the continuous news desk and editors and reporters around the country maintain subscriptions to the Times and they read the Times in the morning and they might do a story based on what they read. Do you see today the influence of the print edition changing or waning as you may have the online edition maybe more frequently updated? I mean is the continuous news desk phenomenon changing the influence of these large papers? Do I take that for a story? Well I think it depends how many reporters are filing into it or whether we're just in rewrite hell. I had an argument with one of the editors at NPR because I wanted to put a producer, I want to put five producers outside of Washington in different parts of the country so that they could kind of be there to gather the news that we weren't getting. The editor who was responsible for the Southwest at NPR said well I don't need to have someone out there doing that. I've got the Dallas Morning News on its website every day and I said well that's precisely the point that we're kind of recycling a lot of information that we need to be out there using shoe leather to gather ourselves. It's great to have a continuous news desk but depends what's coming into that news desk. If it's from really good sources or are they just rewriting regional wire copy? I mean I know in the early days they used to call it shovelware when they just shoveled the newspaper online and the technical term I think at the globe for the people who do that is called the pod. Just walk by and say oh there's the pod. If I were in any way entrepreneurial or sort of a visionary I wouldn't be a journalist because I think your skills as a journalist are sort of analytical and I don't consider myself a creative thinker at all. So it's hard for me to understand how these media mesh and I hear the term synergy and I just cringe because I don't think it's ever happened in real life but my gut tells me after listening to people in my own company and elsewhere talk about it is that newspaper companies have not yet figured out how to use the internet. They understand it, they know it's there, they've gone past the stage where the Gold Rush stage where in which basically everybody said we've got to get in the wagons and get to California now before there's nothing left and everybody got there, they put up stakes and now they're sort of figuring out well where do we dig and what do we do and how many reporters do we use? And I think the thing that sort of sits there and stymies them the most is the fact that there is as you know no real model yet for making money for that kind of information online. People have not yet shown a willingness to pay for it. We know the things that make money online and with that sort of big block in the middle of the road I just, I mean my life has changed dramatically simply as a lowly, that's the wrong word, as a journalist for the Boston Globe whose work now can be read by anybody around the world just the mere fact that it's online period has changed my life immeasurably and it's something I wouldn't have even thought about 15 years ago but the idea that these should be supplemental media, that one should work in a way that the other one doesn't that they should provide genuine discreet services that they should be value added to each other I have yet to see evidence that people have figured that out. I mean what the net has done for a number of places is you can, if you read a book review maybe you can click on and buy the book although that creates other kinds of editorial problems because are you only gonna review books that are gonna be sold and that your news organization then gets a cut. This was an issue at the New York Times and their book review segment is that there were links to amazon.com with every book review online. And the people inside the Times said, you know this really doesn't feel right. And frankly NPR sells a lot of chachkas online. So it's those mugs and tote bags, you know. I feel like I didn't necessarily state my question in the way that I was trying to get something out of you. And that if there's a developing story like say there's an explosion in Baghdad and there's a body count the New York Times has published at a specific point during the day. And there's a body count that gets put in print. And if that's updated throughout the day their online site might be able to change that. It does, it does. And it does, and it does. But it doesn't necessarily change everything in every story. It only changes the things that they know they can change or that they have to change. But reporters around the country using the New York Times if they're using the print edition are they being driven or directed differently than they would be if they're using the online edition. I suppose for things more complex than just body counts is. I'm wondering if the possibilities that are opened up by the existence of the online news editions if that changes how the Times and other large papers with both sides can drive the agenda in the country. Sounds like a print question to me. You know, I'm being dense but I'm not sure I'm still not sure I get the question. All right, okay I'm sorry. I think one of the difficulties is how often do you update? For NPR, we are not allowed to put our news magazines on the website until they have been broadcast by the last station in California. And then we can put it on because the customers own the company, the stations own us. They do not want anything to happen that will cause listeners to bypass the station and go directly to the website. So we're in this, this is part of our centrifugal broadcasting organization that we're in. And to show you how odd this was at one point, the other extreme was that in the days of the Cronkite show on CBS, the Los Angeles riots could not be broadcast or reported on by the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles until it had been on the Cronkite show. So this local station was unable to report on a major story in its own city because of the control that was exercised by the network. So we've come a long way but we've got a long way to go. You know, this question about the relationship between older and new media, I don't think has been stated as effectively as we might have done. I guess I partly disagree with what Marcus suggested. For one thing, it is now standard practice when you watch a TV news program to have the news people say, if you want more information about this topic, go to our website. And that is a definite enhancement. It allows them to go much more deeply into certain kinds of questions. And it's an obvious kind of synergy between the two media that is being exploited systematically, both by broadcast media, by television media and also by print media. Yes, NPR does it all the time. It's a very important aspect of NPR's reporting, I think. But much to the dismay of a surprising number of people who contact me and say, I'm not online. Why are you doing this to me? And I don't, and if our audience is average age 47, there must be an awful lot of people out there who don't have computers. Well, that's your network for the CNN audience. No, but I think that it's changing, it's changing rapidly, but I think we can't overstate the fact that the web is accessible to all of our listeners. Hi, I'm John Hawkinson. I'm actually the ombudsman for MIT's student newspaper so you can up your account by a half, Mark. Oh, by the way, Mark is, I have to correct something Mark said. There are actually 60 news ombudsmen in the United States now. 61, wow. In any case, so I'm curious how you see the evolution of errata of factual corrections in the evolving media. Print journalism really seems to be raising the bar. The New York Times publishes more than ever before more corrections, but broadcast news really just ignores it and so much of broadcast news is pushing to be live instead of taped as it evolves. And so there are so many more possibilities for error and we never hear about, you know. Well, there are, we didn't have a corrections policy up until about four years ago when I became the ombudsman and I said, you know, we really need a corrections policy. NPR resisted admitting that they made errors for a long time and we've now used a meat tenderizer on them to kind of get them to be a little more open about these things. There are different levels of admission of errors. You know, we said that Jupiter has five moons and it has six and you know, we can, that's a kind of a small but significant correction that can be done online. There are bigger errors when, for example, we really get something wrong and we've misstated something and then we have to make a factual correction. We reported, you know, that the governor of Oregon is a Democrat, in fact, he's a Republican. That's significant. Then there's the kind of more allegations of media bias where there is a kind of a systematic allegation that we're deliberately getting something wrong and that's kind of harder to do and easier to do at the same time. When it comes to, for example, our coverage of the Middle East, the knowledge of Middle East history on one side or the other goes beyond, in some ways, what a so-called ordinary listener is interested. Yet, when we make those mistakes, we have an affirmative obligation to correct them. Not only do we correct them on the air, we correct them online and if someone's ordering a tape or a transcript, we add a little addendum that says since this story was broadcast, it has been brought to our attention that we said X when we should have said Y, we regret the error. So there's three places where we can make a correction and grovel. I'd put my whole ear, then, now, print hat on for a second here because there's a huge, and I'm not gonna talk about NPR, which obviously does have a policy, but it's night and day. And frankly, in the print world, the earthquake was Jason Blair. I mean, not only did it force the Times, which it had a complete public record of dissing the idea of ever having an ombudsman to hire an ombudsman among a number of reforms that they publicly announced and went through. I can tell you, the Globe's correction policy changed all throughout the print world. I mean, frankly, it's always reactive, and you find there are three or four major plagiarism scandals and then suddenly memos come down from every editor in a country. Of course, everyone in the newsroom understands our plagiarism policy, correct them. You hadn't thought about it for 15 years, but there is a dramatic tightening. I don't know how long it will last since the Blair scandal. Not only that, I think one of the things that stunned people in my end of the business, one of the questions that came out of that was, why didn't anybody who was in a position to know what he was doing tell the Times about it? The people he said he quoted, he didn't quote. And the answer came back, there was actually a survey, and one of the big answers was, the public said, we didn't think you cared. You weren't gonna do anything about it? And the other thing they said is that we didn't know how to penetrate to tell someone. That is what they would call the New York Times, and they would get caught in voicemail hell and there was no one there taking responsibility for it. That was part of the answer. And that's why, that's one of the reasons you haven't done much about it, but the other issue was we don't even think you'd care, you'd want to clean it up. And frankly, I actually went out and interviewed a number of papers that then wrote open letters to their readers saying, please, if you know of something we're doing, what we need to hear from you. And he wanted to talk about opening the floodgates. I mean, 25-year-old charge is a plagiarism surface that had to be investigated by newspapers all over the country. The broadcast, you know- We declared a statute of limitations on our paper. I'm serious, there was one in our paper that was 20 years old that didn't amount to anything, but in the commercial broadcast world, never say you're sorry. I can remember the 1992 Democratic Convention watching a debate between Larry Sabato and Michael Gardner who was then the president of NBC News and when Larry said, why don't you have an on budget. I think Michael Gardner was about to get up from the table, just punch him in the nose. I mean, so it's just, you know, there's just two completely different cultures. Well, and that reminds me of another wonderful anecdote, which is when I was asked to become the ombudsman and I called Joe Lilleveld at the time so I'd met on a couple of occasions professionally, I didn't know him that well, but I called him and I said, you know, they've asked me to do this, what do you think? Do you think this is a good idea? And he said, oh, first of all, it's a great thing for NPR. Secondly, I think it'd be really good for you to do it because it'd be a really interesting professional experience. And, you know, I'd definitely go with it. And I said, how come the Times doesn't have an ombudsman? And he said, we don't need an ombudsman, we have editors. What a story. Words to live by. We have seven minutes left. Let me encourage everyone to be very concise and including our panelists. Yes. Hi, Cristobal Garcia from CMS, a graduate student from CMS. I'm interested in new models of, alternative models of news that combines news and entertainment, especially satire and irony. I have done some research on the Daily Show. There is air in Comedy Central. Now I'm following Real Time with Bill Maher. He's a different kind of satire. Daily Show is more for young audiences. And I did research on how, in the blogging and the practice of the audience, they reconstruct the fake news and the talks and the conversation, how they get some awareness of what's going on. So you can look the same in Bill Maher. You have examples on the web, like the onion, or to a certain extent, slash dot org. So my question is, in the context of lack of information and homogeneous information in mainstream media, what do you think is the role of these new mixing ways of addressing public affairs? A lot of kids, kids, I guess, young folk, you know who you are, get their news from the Daily Show, a surprising number. NPR has tried to do this in its own high-minded way with a program called Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which is kind of a news quiz. But it doesn't have, it has a certain edge, but it does it in a public radio sort of way. Yeah, sure, I think this is a way that you attract a younger audience by getting them to listen or watch political satire. And it's an age-old tried-and-true way that you will attract a younger audience by being smart-ass. And it's good works. Pardon me? No, but it definitely has an appeal to a younger audience in a way that a formal news program does not. And that's okay, as long as you figure out a way of offering people a palette of information, that they can get their information not only from newscasts, but documentaries and opinion and commentary and satire. That's fine. I mean, there is more overt political content, obviously, in my show, which I kind of like in the Daily Show. But the idea of sort of alternative entertainment media as a way of reaching people, politicians have figured that out. I mean, Bill Clinton played the saxophone on Arsenio, and it was a highlight in his 1992 campaign. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy on Jay Leno's show, and it actually became the governor of California. George Bush in 2000, when there were questions about him as sort of a, was he warm and fuzzy enough? We went on Oprah Winfrey's show and out did Al Gore in the warmth and kinder, gentler category by giving her a kiss. And that's not to suggest that those shows are educating us in any meaningful way, but the intersection of pop culture and political information has been around now. I won't go as far back as Richard Nixon saying, sock it to me, I'm laughing in 1968, but for some time. That's true. Tim Jackson, is this on? Yep. Because I tend to read the New York Times with a subscription and read the Globe online and listen to a lot of national public radio shows that I used to hear on national public radio online, on the media, counter spin, even fresh air now, I can't listen to it two o'clock in the afternoon. And because my front page of my local paper sometimes tends to be written by, fall five stories by one reporter, and not very well written at that. My question is when the Times buys the Globe, are there editorial decisions that are made regarding style and content and language to keep it targeted differently or niched differently than the Times? So that the Times readers are different than the Globe readers. And then the other question for national public radio is, why are those shows removed? Even Pacifica I used to listen to a long ago on national public radio, which I would think would also be alternative voices. Right. And then finally the herald ownership of all of the community papers, how has that affected community coverage as you see it? Well, the short answer about the radio is that every station makes its own choices about what it's going to air. It decides that NPR is a predominant, sorry to use the phrase content provider to most public radio stations, then the stations can decide what else they want to air. They want to do their own programming, they want some music, they want some jazz, they want some comedy or they want democracy now. That's not an NPR decision, that's entirely local. So I would urge you to let your local public radio station know what you want to hear. I have, I was just curious why they made those decisions to sort of go with BBCs so often and remove shows like On the Media on Sunday afternoon, which I thought was a terrific show. Is it economic? I don't know. I think that they usually, I can't, I don't know what happens at WBUR. I know that stations put programs on because they will attract an audience that will pay for them. They know that they, most stations know that they can raise about 80% of the money they need to operate their stations by fundraising around morning edition and all things considered. The rest is kind of incidental. And the BBC has been incredibly aggressive about marketing itself in the United States. They've been giving away the world service to public radio stations in order to attract a listenership to it. And in many places it's worked, especially in Boston which has, you know, you as an audience, witty, insouciant and well educated. So I think it's probably economics and it's probably attracting an audience, QED. We like to call ourselves the Athens of America here actually. I thought Athens, Georgia was the Athens of America. I am, to answer your two questions very quickly, I am not privy to the conversations at the upper echelons of the, obviously they don't ask me anything basically, but my feeling is I don't think there's ever been any deliberate effort to, you know, to make sure that times in the globe have separate editorial niches. I think the two operate completely independently for a long time. We didn't even have the Times News Service. I'm not sure we even have it now. I don't think there's any need for the Times in the globe to devise some kind of overt editorial strategy about what one's turf is gonna be as opposed to the other any more than the Times would do so with a Worcester telegram and Gazette, which it also owns now as sort of part of its broader New England corporate strategy. I think that two things do their own thing. Sometimes we compete with them, sometimes we don't. I personally wasn't thrilled when there was a New England edition that came up here from the Times, but I really think they are run independently. I think there's very little thinking about, on the business side, yes, but on the editorial, I don't think there's been any deliberate calibration of here's your turf, here's our turf. That would be, I'd be surprised. I started out in a newspaper that ended up in the CNC chain with the tab newspapers. Pat Purcell owns it now. He's got over a hundred community newspapers. Some, in some cases, he's got two in the same community, which I think in Cambridge is one example. I know there have been complaints over the year. The problem isn't necessarily with the Herald stewardship. The truth is when Fidelity Investments, which was the company that put together this hydro-headed beast in the early 90s, basically took six or seven very good, lively, competitive community newspaper chains that basically didn't like each other and did a good job and fought each other in a Cambridge tab and the Cambridge Chronicle once arch enemies. I mean, I work for the Cambridge tab, I know. The idea that you could sort of forge some big monolith that was gonna work, I think was a bad experience from day one. It never worked for Fidelity. And I'm sure that I know that if you went around to people in communities where there's been, where there were economies of scale and where there's one reporter where there used to be two and things like that, they would have to say that overall, the experiment of combining all those chains into one big company, I'm sure, hasn't worked from an editorial standpoint. Because I thought public radio was complicated as... We have one last question. I'm Curtis Priest. I'm Curtis Priest, I'm a research affiliate in CMS. I can't ask this very coherently. I've been trying to work it out of my mind. And maybe I just wanted a yes or no answer, both of you. I like David. And that is, how much fear of lightning is there and how much do you use letters in your newspapers to speak for you? And the reason why I ask this is that about Arthur Schlesinger Jr., about the 1980s, watershed event, basically the entire Congress decided that they didn't want to be informed. They shut down the Office of Technology Assessment. So I got this and he said, look, all you people who do public policy research, you're out of a job, Schlesinger was absolutely right. So about 1980, I saw a whole different way of happening. And so I see this, we talk about false news, we talk about sound bites and so forth versus depth. And I assert that any time there's depth, there's political ramifications to that depth. So whether it's the advertisers or the owners or whoever, that's the lightning I'm talking about. How much do you, how much do you, in the back of your mind as you're writing, do you narrow or write less depth because of possible political ramifications and how much do you use a letter or two to say something you don't dare say? Well, yes or no. Both I'd say. Yes and no. I write this weekly column. I guess I've become a blogger to my great surprise. And I love the emails I get from listeners. They're smart, they've got great hearing. They zero in on the failures and foibles of the coverage and it allows me to use occasionally a ball peen hammer or sometimes a sledge as appropriate. The listeners really do my job for me in a remarkable way. I'm very grateful to them. So yeah, sure. Thank you very much. Keep writing. I would say quick, just very quick. I don't think journal, the people I would know and I would work with, I don't think they think of the political ramifications but behavior is shaped, professional behavior is shaped and it's shaped by the culture and the institution you work for. And that means a lot of different things. Not only what are the acceptable standards, what is the tone of your publication, what is the tone of your media outlet, what's it about. But also internal, what do I do to get a better gig? How do I get noticed? And is there self-censorship when you're choosing how to do your story? I guess there is. I mean, self-censorship, another description of self-censorship is editing. I know one thing. I can't use the four letter words I used to use at the Boston Phoenix when I'm at the Boston Club. I'll just briefly say, David knows, I presented a paper at American, it's gonna be printed in the American Law Review, fortunately, but I'm undergoing, the American University is extremely right-wing, extremely moneyed, and my paper has given them all kinds of conniptions. And so we're working out. That's good. But we're working out, well, what can Dr. Priest say and what may he not say because we have all our donors to think about. You know what? I think sometimes that's a little, that's a nervousness that's often overstated. I think we should keep raising shit and do it for the best of reasons, and occasionally for not great reasons. But we have to be in a position where we encourage a kind of fearlessness and not let what we think the underwriters or the advertisers are gonna say, you know what? They're not probably in 90% of the cases, they're not gonna say squat. I'd like to thank the audience and thank the speakers.