 I'd like to welcome you to this session of the MIT Communications Forum, run in collaboration with two distinguished institutions at MIT, the Center for the Future of Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum. This is the first of two forums this semester devoted to the campaign and the media. The second one will be held after the election on Thursday, November 13th and I hope those of you who are attentive to today's discourse may return and raise some of the questions that return to some of the questions that are raised today. I guess I should introduce myself. I'm David Thorburn, the Director of the Communications Forum at MIT. In addition to the second campaign and the media forum, I'd also like to announce two other forums that we're going to be holding in October, actually on a Tuesday and a Thursday, unusually for us, almost all of our events are on Thursday. But here are two events juxtaposed against each other. Their broad topic is the culture of the book in the digital age and they will involve conversations with two distinguished humanists, both paradoxically from Harvard. One Stephen Greenblatt, the Kogan Professor of Humanities at Harvard, and the second, and he'll be visiting it here on Tuesday, October 14th. And then on the 16th, two days later, with a slight twist, the conversation will continue with the eminent historian Robert Darnton, who is also today the Director of Libraries at Harvard University. And we're looking forward to those conversations. Both of these scholars are eminent in their fields and are attentive to the, what we might call the fundamental migration of print culture into digital formats. And that'll be one of our central topics in those conversations. And I hope some of you will make time to attend those events as well. It falls to me now merely to introduce our distinguished panel and our distinguished moderator. I'll start with the moderator. Ellen Hume is the Research Director for the MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media. She was a White House and Political Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, a national reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and a regular commentator on PBS's Washington Week in Review. And CNN's show Reliable Sources. Our speakers are John Carroll, on the end there. A Professor of Mass Communications at Boston University and senior media analyst for WBUR FM. In an earlier incarnation, he was a radio commentator for WGBH and a reporter for WGBH TV's Beat the Press, a weekly media review program, on which we still see him, I think. Prior to joining the BU faculty, John Carroll was the executive producer of Greater Boston WGBH TV's Nightly News and Public Affairs program. Ellen Goodman is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. And her work appears regularly in the Boston Globe. She previously worked at the Detroit Free Press and Newsweek. In 2007, she was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she studied gender and the news. Hardly think she needed to study it since it's been a recurring topic in her wonderful columns over the years. Tom Rosenstiel, an old friend of the forums, is director of the Washington based Project for Excellence in Journalism, where he is the editor and principal author of its annual report on the state of the news media. He was a journalist for more than 20 years and is a former media critic for the Los Angeles Times and Chief Congressional Correspondent for Newsweek Magazine. He's the author with Bill Kovac of The Elements of Journalism, What News People Should Know and the Public Should Expect. It's a pleasure to turn the podium over to Ellen Hume. Thank you, David. Is this on? Yes, mainstream media, New York Times, broadcast television. My goodness, what a group. Okay, so if you think they've been doing a great job covering the campaign, raise your hand. Oh dear, one person, that's what our conversation is about tonight. We're going to be taking it apart with the people who look at it professionally, who've participated in it over the years. And with you. So for the first hour, we're going to talk. And then for the second hour, it's your turn. And we hope that you'll come up with your questions and comments and inform us about what we should be talking about. But I wanted to start, first of all, with some data. We are at MIT after all. And Tom Rosenstiel professionally now collects data and deep information about what actually is happening with media coverage. And one of the first questions I think we have to think about tonight is what media are we talking about? It used to be just the broadcast networks and the newspapers and maybe some radio. But now, of course, we're talking about a landscape that's populated with the Daily Show and with Rush Limbaugh and with all kinds of cable stuff. I mean, one of our friends from CNN used to say that the talk shows start with a lie and they discuss it for an hour as if it's true. What are we talking about here? Talk show culture, we're talking about advertorials, we're talking about entertainment mixing with journalism. And so when we talk tonight about the media, we're going to be looking at this whole rich landscape that doesn't just include a few resources. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, I think. And we're going to be looking at that a little bit. But let's start with who's covering this campaign. We've got tens of thousands of people calling themselves journalists. I don't know how many were at the conventions this year, but it's usually in the thousands. And I think that the 50 or so journalists of all kinds who found themselves arrested at the Republican National Convention, which I know is an issue for some of you here, they didn't get a lot of coverage in the mainstream media. That the police in a forum afterwards in Minneapolis said, we just didn't have any idea there'd be that many journalists. Thousands of people calling themselves journalists. Who is the journalist today? That's one of the issues that we have to be thinking about. In the old days when we were, some of us were on the campaign trail actually covering candidates together, we would find there was this sort of demonic marathon dance where the politicians and the journalists would be locked together in this effort to deliver a campaign to the public. But it was sometimes a sparring thing, sometimes it was a dance. And we always seemed to be trying to find who could be the lead, who would set the agenda, who would lead the conversation, who would set the narrative for the campaign for the public. And so one of the things I hope we'll talk about today too also is, where is the narrative of this election? It keeps changing dramatically. But people, I think, vote culturally rather than on the issues so much. They vote for projection of themselves and what they want to be and what they want to see. And it's that cultural narrative, that story that often trumps the facts, the dry facts that journalists try to put forward half the time. So let's start with Tom, since you're the keeper of the numbers in so many ways, and who's really dominating the coverage of this election? What media are really creating that narrative, that upper hand? And what can you tell us about how they've been doing with the election coverage this time? Well, the thing that's interesting about presidential campaigns is that they really, I think, reveal the sort of the culture, the changes, and the lack of changes in the media because the media are so heavily concentrated on one story for so long. And so if we're gonna delve into the personal lives of candidates, that begins usually in a presidential campaign, et cetera, et cetera. What we see in this election is, first of all, that there isn't a model of journalism the way there used to be. When you and I met in 84 and 88 on campaigns, the mainstream press was a fairly homogeneous group in terms of the press values that it had and what the business that thought it was in. Newspapers, to a large extent, still reflect that old model of journalism, a journalism of verification that is based on going out and reporting. And when we think of stories that have been broken this year, or things that have been unearthed about Sarah Palin, about Barack Obama, about any candidate, that's tens, not in every case, but in most cases, that has tended to come from this reputorial media, which is basically print, for the most part, still. Cable, and print is dedicated a lot of its time to the campaign, but not in the same way that other media have. Cable news in our study this year has devoted 62% of its time to the presidential election, and yet I would venture to say not a single story has been broken on Cable, reputorially, that I can think of, at least. So what is Cable doing? It's essentially a conversation. Most of that time is talk show and another piece of data, 80% of the time on Cable news is extemporaneous, it's live, it's conversation that's unedited, unvetted, and to a significant degree, uncontrolled, unscripted. So one of the things that we're seeing in the media this year is patterns that haven't changed, 65% of the news hole that we've studied, and this is hundreds of stories every week from 48 different news outlets, 65% of that has been tactics, strategy, horse race. The same pattern that we've seen for two generations. Despite all the criticism over the years, it still continues. 20%, just under 21% has been about policy. 3% has examined the public record of the candidates, and 8% has been about their personal biography, who they are, what kind of people they are, their families, et cetera, et cetera. If we had done this study 25 years ago, I'd venture to say that the numbers would be pretty similar. And yet, other things about this media culture are very different. Cable news is now more important than it's ever been, because of the volume of time that it gives to the campaign, and because broadcast television, traditional broadcast television, which was more reputorial, 90% of the time on the network evening news, for instance, are taped, edited packages done by reporters. Since broadcast news has scaled back and has become less important, cable news is now relatively more important. And one of the features that I think we see this year is that cable news has abdicated much of its time to campaign operatives and spin doctors who are basically communicating talking points, but are not necessarily identified as campaign operatives. They may, in fact, be identified as our analysts. But when you see, for instance, on a break where they say, well, we're gonna go to our panel in a moment right after the break, and they do a wide shot of the panel, what are those panelists doing? They're online getting talking points and other things so that they can then deliver the things. We've seen numerous moments where on one channel we'll see an analyst, who's a Republican or a Democrat, uttering comments. And on another channel, we'll see an anchor say, we just got these talking points in from the such and such campaign. And they'll be the same thing that the analyst is saying on another channel. So in some ways, what you have is an old media culture in some platforms that is stuck in patterns that it can't seem to break out of. And in others, you have, I think, a moving away from reporting toward a kind of talk show culture that is, as we know, increasingly ideological in its nature because frankly, MSNBC has discovered that it's finally got some ratings traction by becoming the liberal analog to Fox News. And CNN, which claims to be sort of in the middle, is actually offering a little bit of everything because they have as many talk shows in the evening as the others. So let's take apart some implications of this with the other panelists. If Cable is the lead this time, my own analysis of that is that the studies show that people who tend to be more politically engaged also tend to have a political bias. They're engaged because they care about something and they've decided that they stand for some things. They tend to go to their comfort zone media and we're hearing MSNBC is taking the liberal stance, of course Fox has taken a conservative stance. If Cable turns out to be the leader as a source of news for people, what does that do to this idea that we're going to be brought together as a nation? What happens to news? What happens to politics, John? Well, a couple of things. I never argue with a man who buys numbers by the barrel. So I'm not going to go near what Tom just talked about. But my sense is that this year that the news media are more of a presence and less of a factor than they were previously. I don't get the sense that they're driving as much of the action as they may have in the past. The cable networks, Tom is very generous in his book. He talks about the journalism of assertion, which is sort of what the cable networks do. I call it projectile punditry and I think what they're engaged in is this sort of verbal dance to show that we're still in this tribe. And so aren't you with in our tribe too? And I don't think the cable networks are changing anybody's mind in the least. I think the cable networks are simply reinforcing what people believe when they came to the cable networks. So I think that they make a lot of noise, but I don't think they get very much done. To me, the interesting part is the print journalism and how print journalism has been swallowed by the media and by the news cycle. I think more and more people are looking at this and saying, where is the impact of these stories that print journalism comes out and delivers to people? And what happens to them? Why don't they have more legs as we say in the business? And I think that part of it is the 16 hour news cycle. Basically, every campaign wants to win the next 16 hours. That's their goal. Which is a pretty small bore objective for a presidential campaign. But they want to win the next 16 hours. And so what happens is whatever hits, it has an immediate impact but no lasting impact. And the news media to me is sort of like this self-cleaning oven. And so something comes along, you bake it, you serve it, clean the oven, you bring in the next recipe and serve that out. So I think that from my standpoint anyway, and like I said, I don't have the benefit of numbers, but I look at the media and I think they are not as much of a factor as they were before. And this allows somebody like John McCain, I'm not political about this, I'm not picking on anybody, but John McCain is very clearly running against the media. And it can work for him. It can work for him. He can bypass the media or delegitimize the media. And it happens because of the conditions of the news media now. Because people don't see, I don't think, the value of the traditional news media to their lives and to their decisions anymore. Because I think the decisions are all made. Yeah, I understand what you're saying about John McCain. I mean, he made a choice to withdraw access. He used to be one of the most popular guys of the media. He'd come to the back of the plane. He'd be accessible all the time. And then all of a sudden he changed in his tactics. And of course Sarah Palin is almost impossible to talk to. Although Katie Couric had an interview with her last night. Did you happen to have any observations about how the media and the Republican campaign is going and anything about the Couric interview? Well, yes, but just to go back, I mean, I think one of the interesting things is that of course the print media is now the online media. So the print reporter, it's not just the story has traction. They're trying to get traction on the web. Just this morning, just because I knew I was going to be here today, I thought about how I got the news this morning. And I had the New York Times and the Boston Globe delivered to my door, which is my slow entry into the day with a cup of coffee. And then in my television set, I had T-Vote or DVR'd the president's speech so that I could look at it again because I fell asleep. How could you fall asleep when he's telling you the sky is falling? But he looked so like somebody had hit him upside the head. And I returned. You know, it wasn't a very long speech. It was 15 minutes. So I had the president's speech in my television set. I read, then I read in the newspaper, Campbell Brown's charges of sexism in the coverage or the non-coverage of Sarah Palin. And I wanted to see that. So I went to YouTube. And we haven't even talked about where people get the news and how raw, what is important now can be completely raw because, of course, there is also Sarah Palin on YouTube getting saved from witchcraft by her minister. So these things have this incredible life. Is that a verified video? It's a verified video, as opposed to that. Right. And then I went to my laptop to Google News just to see if anything had happened. And then I was driving to an appointment. And I listened to a half hour of NPR. So all of these things are, and this was a day in which I wasn't writing. So all of these things are leaping on top of each other. And it's almost impossible to deal with them in this discrete way in which we are trying to look at them. Although I would add to what John said about, I would call the cable stations food fight. That was my, and you asked whether it was polarizing us. And I think if you look at how the European model of print journalism has been traditionally, where you are a member of a party and you had a newspaper, a national newspaper that was your party's newspaper. And that's how it was segmented. And that is how cable is being segmented now on this old European model. And people, Republicans are going to Fox. Committed Democrats are going to MSNBC and probably a little bit more to CNN. But we are definitely being segmented. I would throw into that, Harper, that the kind of news is also being segmented. So that we're talking about politics. But politics is almost like a sports channel. That if you're interested in watching the Patriots, you go to NESN. Did I say the right one? NESN, thank you. And if you're interested in politics, you go to three other channels. And by the way, last night, the president's speech was only on cable. So that it was on NPR, OK? No, it was on broadcast. It was on? Oh, yeah, the president still gets a real applause. I apologize. But there have been many of politics has kind of the network's many nights of outsourced politics to cable. Please, jump in. Because I think that the idea of the self-cleaning oven is very interesting. And it goes to what Ellen's saying, too. You have, I think, two things that this sort of particularly added to this. One is the proliferation of discussion, overwhelming facts. And on the one hand, this is a good thing because the purpose of journalism is to promote citizen discussion, right? But now the discussion, in terms of sheer volume, outweighs the factual, reputorial dimension of the media culture. It's an inverted triangle now with the boots on the ground, the reporters. That piece of this inverted triangle is shrinking because newspapers and print people can't afford it. And layer upon layer of ever-expanding commentary on what fewer and fewer people are actually reporting. That's the model now. And two other elements add to that denigration of sort of the culture of fact. One is speed, because the discussion just pours over it. And the facts are sort of so much at the bottom that there's such a pile of discussion on top of it that the original source is lost. And the other is this idea that the political sources have figured out a way to game the system. It's not actually a discussion by journalists or even independent folks. It's a discussion by people who are essentially schooled in trying to denigrate those facts if the facts don't help their side. In a sense, many of you may be aware of the long piece that the New York Times did about how the military analysts that were so omnipresent on television during the early days of the war, when the media was still covering the war, were basically schooled and tantalized by access by the Pentagon. So the Pentagon was in control to a large degree of the message that these folks were delivering. And the networks were eagerly putting them on and didn't much care and did no vetting of this because they wanted to have experts on the air. That same phenomenon, in a sense, has now happened to the campaign with both parties ensuring that their folks are there. And I think that it's essentially campaign spin posing as media that further denigrates the culture of facts. So what I'm hearing is that the mainstream media in this campaign are both more important than before because everything starts with those facts. You can't go anywhere without that. Unless you have a poll. And they're less important because there's so much that is built out from that tiny base. What difference does it make if the mainstream media just go away? If people in this room pay absolutely no attention to the New York Times or CBS or NPR or anything like that, what difference would it make to this campaign? Maybe people would be better informed. How many people think you'd be better informed if the mainstream media just went away? Uh-huh. One person. Two people. OK, corporate media. Well, that's a different question. We'll get to that. You didn't romp us that we can. Let's get to that. Let's talk about that. First of all, what about my question? I think one of the issues here is who's the assignment desk now for the discussion in the media? And the assignment desk used to be the New York Times, the Washington Post. I mean, for better or worse, I can argue about whether that was a good thing or not. But that's what happened. And so the network newscasts would read the Times, and they would say, OK, these are the stories that we should follow up. And there was this cumulative effect of news stories. And the assignment desk is just as likely now to be YouTube, to be Politico, to be John Stuart. Exactly. So what you have is this free-for-all where you had some kind of coherent sort of universe of coverage. Now what you have is this sort of Donnybrook going on out there. And whoever lands on top of it, I think you could make a case that Politico within the Chin Strokarati, Politico, is as influential as any other medium right now, news organization right now. I've seen Politico have more effect on the conversation day to day than I've seen the Times have. But however, that is in a very small universe. I mean, you go outside of these walls and say to people, what's Politico? And they say, I don't know. Some kind of tomato sauce? They don't know. But within the universe, I think that they're a lot more influential than a lot of other sort of traditional mainstream media. And an established media. And just to continue the YouTube-ization of the news, it seems to me that what is being reported, it's really interesting to think about how we talk now, if one of you has a MySpace profile and your future employer looks at it and sees that you are drinking beer and having sex with your girlfriend or boyfriend, it's not going to be very good for your career. But what we have now, because of the proliferation of all kinds of other media out there that has nothing to do with news media, all kinds of other stuff, floats them and jets them out there, that one of the pieces of news now is this collection of stuff that we never had access to. When we did a profile on people a long time ago, we would go out, we'd talk to their kindergarten teacher, we'd talk to their neighbors. But what we didn't have was videotape of them at the ATM machine, videotape of their ministers or anybody of their wedding. But Ellen's just fascinating just in terms of what the collection is. And what John Stewart does, for example, is basically a clip job, an ironic clip job taken of all kinds of things going on. He starts with mainstream media and builds out from it. But what happens if you not only have a glut of information, which can be a plus or it can be a minus, but you have people who are participating? The journalists now become people who say, I went to high school with Sarah Palin or I saw John McCain fall into a pothole or Barack Obama lives next door. I mean, that seems to be part of the journalism landscape now. How can you talk about journalism today without factoring in that everyone's a source and everyone's a publisher? Is that a plus? Is that a minus? How does that work? Well, I think it goes to, I have a sense of a nuance to your idea of who's the assignment editor. And that is, I think that to some extent, the media are not the message, it's the nature of the story that dictates which part of the media culture are important at a given moment. Look at sort of a discreet event. Sarah Palin is a relative unknown, is named vice presidential nominee. You have the blogosphere very quickly scouring the archives of Alaska newspapers that are online, things that you can do from your home. They are the first to unearth that. To unearth what the clips, to unearth stories from the Anchorage Daily News about her mayoral history and her brief gubernatorial history. But there's no street level reporting there other than what's essentially in the archives of local newspapers. And then there's some rumors that circulate and some emails from some eyewitnesses who might know her in Alaska. A week or so later is when we begin to see the fruits of reporting from national media who've run up to Alaska and actually talk to people and done more traditional things. Now, three weeks later, we're beginning to see the surfacing of home videos from her church where this Kenyan pastor protects her from witchcraft and all these other things. And it's the nature of the event. It's not as though the blogosphere has now replaced traditional media. Because the blogosphere is good at certain things and not good at other things. And it's the nature of that story that dictates which media are important. So I think the assignment editor changes with the moment. Ultimately, I'm less concerned about the nature of the medium or who's the journalist and who's not as I am journalists abdicating their time to non-professionals to basically to sources to dictate the terms of the dialogue. That is more bothersome to me because the same technology that opens this up and lets anybody be a journalist also opens it up to the campaigns and the people who want to manipulate the public. And the press, to whatever extent it has a role, that role is to try and be a filter to say that's a lie. That's not true. And that role is weakened by whatever the medium happens to be, that role has been weakened. Because we had someone here who is starting to say that the mainstream media have fallen into this corporate trap. Perhaps it's worse now than it ever was or it hasn't been in the last 40 years. I don't know if you share that view that the advertisers and the ownership of the newspapers and the television networks and radio stations are dictating the content or somehow shaping a propaganda model for news. I don't know how you feel about that. But is there an impact that you honestly can talk about, about that ownership issue, about the pressure that comes from the economic challenge the news organizations are facing? Ellen, you're not in your head. Well, I think what's going on at newspapers basically is flops wet. People are just concerned about the economic model of the newspaper disappearing. And that does not translate into people saying, I have an idea for making this really work and getting more people. We're going to only cover Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter. It doesn't translate into distortion of the story. It translates into anxiety. It translates into overworked reporters now doing three jobs, taking their own pictures, doing blogs and a partridge and a pear tree. It translates that way. But it doesn't translate into shaping the news. Now, I don't know about cable networks, but it seems to me there is a much more deliberate economic decision to go for the audience. And that's not just true of MSNBC, Fox, CNN. It's true of other definitions of audience, like The View, like John Stuart, all of these programs that are, to one degree or another, covering the presidential election in their own fashion have a definite sense of their market. Well, certainly, one has to say that celebrities have become much more the main staple of a lot of journalism, not just cable. And that model seems to be responding to this going for the audience. Yet I was just at the online news association meeting in Washington, and the advice panel on how journalists should save themselves from this economic downturn in the media was to connect with your audience. So there seems to be some sort of disjuncture here between pandering to the audience, which may be the celebrity model of news and looking only at the sex lies of the candidates and so forth, and what audiences are really looking for. On which day? Because, for example, the quick and dirty notion that the audience is looking for celebrity coverage and scandal, that notion, suddenly we're in an economic crisis, and the audience is looking for an explanation. For real news. So it's a question of what you would call, in a presidential campaign, leadership. I want to pick up something that you started, which is, where do you get your news? What do you think is a verified, non-corporate biased, non-liberal or conservative biased? Where do you get your news from, John? Mostly from the commentaries, I write. No, I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding. Let me backtrack for a second, though, because I just wanted to pick up on something that Tom said. I think that one of the issues here, and this has to do with what Tom and Ellen both just said, one of the issues here is what's the unit of value at this point? The unit of value used to be the package. So the unit of value was the Boston Globe, because they put it together for you. The aggregator was the one who had the value to offer. Now the unit of value is the story. So it's changing a couple of things. It's changing the economics of the business, for sure. But it's also changing how people see the world, because they're assembling their own newspaper now. They're assembling their own broadcast. Every morning they wake up, and their Yahoo homepage has the Daily Me up there. And so they see what they want to see. The sort of serendipitous, accidental encounters with things that you didn't know you were interested in until you ran across them have gone away. So where do you get yours? Where do I get mine? I get mine. I don't want to get into one-upmanship, but I go down to my front door, and I have the Globe, the Herald, the Times, and the Wall Street Journal. So I get it from there. I get it from very little from network newscasts. I get it from radio quite a bit. And I get it from cruising the internet, like any other centian 21st century person. And I have my route, just like a milkman's route. I have the places I visit every day. And those are people who I either find interesting, infuriating, or informative. One of the three. Tom, are there any sources that have been cited here? I mean, I'm sure you look at all those. Maybe, I don't know if you read the Herald, because you're not from Boston or the Globe. But what about sources that you think are interesting that you actually think we should all be looking at for this campaign coverage, for this political year? Well, you mentioned Politico. And for those of you who aren't familiar with it, Politico is an interesting model, because it was founded by, with money from the All-Britons who own a local TV station in Washington, D.C. They're not in a surgeon group. And to start it, they hired the political editor of the Washington Post and one of his chief writers. And John Harris, who's the editor of Politico, said, the concept behind Politico is I'm at the Washington Post. I'm the political editor of the Washington Post. If you're interested in political journalism, that's sort of pretty close to the peak. He said, but at the Post, we spend, I may have 12 reporters, which is a huge political staff. He said, but most of the time, what we're doing is writing what the president said yesterday or what they said in the press conference when they came out with the bailout deal and whatever. He said, the number of people who I've got at any given day who are working on an enterprise piece that will change the discussion, just the point that you were making, that will unearth something significant and that is not essentially what everyone else is gonna have. I might have one reporter each day doing that. He said, and there are 800 reporters at the, this was a couple of years ago when there were 800 reporters at the Washington Post. He said, I could have 12 reporters at Politico and we could be doing all enterprise. Everything we do would be off, would be away from that commodity news of writing what everybody else has. And we're only gonna be focused on this one subject so our overhead is gonna be very small. It's all gonna be politics. We don't have to worry about the suburban education beat and the this beat and the that beat. This is the new model, which is corporate in a sense, but it is creating an affinity with an audience with an economic model that is quite a bit smaller. There is a print edition, which circulates largely on Capitol Hill, which brings in most of the revenue, has a very small but elite circulation and they're waiting around five or six, seven years to figure out whether the internet part of it, which is the part that everybody around the country reads. I mean, you don't go to Capitol Hill and pick up the free print copy, you're getting it online. They're gonna wait and figure out whether there's an economic model for the part of it that's really the real heart and soul of it online, which right now is a money loser. So that's a very interesting model and I think we're going to see more of that because it's very niche, the cost overhead is small, but it is really more of this idea that we're gonna go to our affinity group. I get everything from the view, where Oprah is my window on the world or whatever. Oprah vets your day. One thing, just to go to make one other point that I think is worth making, or two other quick points. One is that the effect of this on traditional journalists is they spend a lot more time trying to synthesize stuff that's coming at them. All that stuff that's pouring into your computer is pouring into theirs and it makes traditional journalists less proactive. They're spending less time on the street and more time just trying to absorb it. Less time on the phone, less time talking to people and more time just to keep up. The second thing is that the power shift caused by all this is the one you were describing where the unit of measure is going from the publication to the story or the topic. That's because the power shift is that the consumer of news is becoming their own editor. You're becoming proactive consumer rather than a passive consumer. The idea that Walter Cronkite would end his newscast with and that's the way it is. It's like a Saturday Night Live laugh line today. Another news source. Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that in this new proactive universe that happens is you sort of get the facts from the New York Times, but Bill O'Reilly is the one who tells you what to think about them or how to put them in some sense of order. And that's the role that The Daily Show plays. It's a commentary that helps you decide how do I feel about this? I just want to pick up on that one second and then I want to turn to Ellen to talk about women in the campaign. But I want to ask a follow up on what you were just saying, which is if the narrative is determined as much by the chats on cable or by the comfort zone we all turn to because that happens to reflect what we already think, what do we do with a narrative that takes hold about this election that may not actually be true? What happens when there becomes a narrative about the swift boats in 2004 where the facts sometimes didn't line up with what people took on as the meme? What do you do with that? Frank Rich from this past Sunday? Frank Rich? I don't think that's a good idea. Okay, then I'm going to answer a completely different question. Actually, I just want to throw in very quickly another successful internet model, which is... Can you just answer my question first? I mean, what do we do if the narrative out there isn't true? And journalists, I mean, you're the keeper of the ethics on journalism. You've written a book, literally, about what are our ethics. What do we do when the facts are out there and nobody picks them up? This is a contrary one. I think the Muslim is the... Obama is a Muslim story. Is this year's campaign version of what was in 2004, the big lie was, you know, Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9-11. Right. My favorite statistics is that before 2004, two weeks before the 2004 election, 40% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9-11. And worse yet, we'll get back to that. It was roughly a third of men and almost half of women believed that. So this year, the big lie is Obama's a Muslim. And I think there's some 25% of people still believe that. And it's a little bit of the old line, you know, a lie can be halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots. Or did I screw up this book? I think you got this. You got it. That and the media is out there saying, it's a lie, it's a lie, you know. And it's extremely hard. It's interesting because that was going, that was potentially the sort of swift boat or sort of compelling fiction of this campaign. And about 20%, you're right, do think that. But it's not a huge storyline in mainstream press. It's the 24th biggest story since June 9 when the general election began. It's 1.2% of the news hole that we've studied has been rumors about Obama not being patriotic, tied to Islam, it's not really Christian, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know whether that means it's just not a particularly good lie or whether that means that other things are overwhelming things faster and whether swift boats might not actually happen, you know, the same way because the internet is actually more robust. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe the economic downturn has really trumped all of these stories. Well, I would just add this. Up until last week when the economy really hit this crisis point, there was no dominant narrative to this election. What we see in our data is bouncing from sort of one episode to the next and nothing has really taken over and become a compelling frame through which people have seen this, which really is the first time in many years that I think I've seen that phenomenon. John, you wanted to say something, then I have a question for Ellen. Okay, do I get to quote Frank Rich now? Yes, yes. I have never seen, and again, I don't have numbers, I have never seen the mainstream news media call people liars as much as I have in the past month. I have never seen anything like this. The Associated Press, everybody has been calling, ever since Sarah Palin hit the scene, I mean, I've never seen anything like it and it has zero effect. It doesn't matter. It doesn't change how people look at them. It doesn't change what they say. Now I'm gonna quote Frank Rich, who says, McCain and Palin, and you know, this guy's a partisan, right? Keep repeating the same lies over and over to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it. So we're powerless. We're powerless in the face of John McCain and Sarah Palin. That's a first, right? But I think that this is sort of an extension of George W. Bush's, you know, I feel sorry for you guys in the reality-based community. We're the ones who have the power, we construct the reality that we want to be out there. And I think that this is an extension of it, and I'm stunned, frankly, that again, I don't have numbers, but I don't feel like there's been any real impact. Newsday ran a story that says, the media call McCain and Palin on their trail of lies, a rundown of 25 responses to the media, to the bald-faced lies of McCain and Palin. I mean, you don't get any more blatant than that, and yet it doesn't change anything they say. It doesn't seem to change the dynamic at all. I know you wanna ask a lot of questions, but I disagree with that in part, and I just wanna comment. First of all, politicians have always believed that they can construct their own reality. The perception is reality. That's not anything new. They're far more aggressive and skilled, I think, at sort of trying to denigrate sort of the world of empiricism that journalists aspire to operate in. And I think they have more tools to do it, but I don't think that we're powerless. I mean, I wouldn't give up. Right, I wouldn't give up. You know, if I thought facts really didn't matter. I do think, however, that it's important to know, and it's always been the case, that facts derive their meaning from the context in which the consumer receives them. You know, I see the statue of Saddam fall in Iraq and I could think that's liberation. It reminds me of the fall of the Soviet Union, or I could see the statue fall and think, what are we doing there? This was, I think that picture is staged. This is the wrong war. And my attitude about the war is gonna dictate how I respond to that, and I think that's still true, and I don't think that John, I mean, I think McCain and Palin are engaged, as is Obama in my mind, in trying to distort things and denigrate and is at war with the press. I'm not convinced yet that that's gonna succeed. And I actually, I also, I mean, I have suspect that McCain Camp has overplayed their hand and made the press somewhat more aggressive this year. I think the more vocal attitude that we're hearing from the press in truth squatting the campaign may actually be a result of McCain Camp being overly aggressive to an unprecedented degree in attacking what journalists do. I'm not sure that's gonna be right. I mean, let's wait and see. But I do remember the 2004 election during, I guess it was the third presidential debate, maybe I've got the wrong one, where John Kerry was citing press reports, broadcast reports that were confirming that his Medicare plan had been distorted by the Republican campaign. And he was saying they've indicated, they've checked it out and you guys are distorting my Medicare proposal. And all that President Bush had to do was say, well, you know the broadcast media. He didn't even have to address the substance of the article. All he had to do was play that card, which frankly feeds into 30 to 40 years of a culture war that has been a successful playbook for the Republicans. Let's face it. I mean, Ronald Reagan did this brilliantly. George Bush Sr. did this brilliantly. It was done against Dukakis. It was done against Gore. They were weak in many ways. Let's not go through all those campaigns. But the idea of running against the press has been very successful the Republicans. And I'm surprised you're saying that it might not work this year. I think there's a lot to it that resonates even more because on the liberal side, the people who theoretically should be looking to the press because they're supposed to be the liberal media, they're such anger about the so-called corporate nature of coverage that especially living here in Massachusetts, it's very hard to find anyone at a dinner party who likes the New York Times. Everyone wants to trash it. So I'm not surprised the economic model is in trouble and that a lot of young people are turning to alternative sources because the basic credibility of that source has been tainted. For good or for ill. And we can talk about that more when you guys weigh in, which is gonna be happening very shortly. But because we promised to talk about what was different about this campaign, not just the media different, but the campaign is different, we've had two very strong women running, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. We have Heavens, a man who's half black, half white, Barack Obama. Can you please, Ellen, since you've studied this, you're an expert on this, have the gender and race factors in this campaign influenced the way the media been covering it or there have been stories we've missed, have things been exaggerated. How do you see the report card on the media and their coverage of these historic candidacies? Well, it's clear that race and gender have driven their own narrative through this campaign in a very different way than I've ever seen. I mean, they have framed the stories of this campaign. And I use the word story, literally, because one of the things that the media gets captured by is the story. And Barack Obama's story is a very compelling one and it mostly played out during the primary. Hillary Clinton, the story of her as the potential first woman president, the woman who ran as the most experienced candidate, I mean, for once the woman ran as a commander-in-chief, the woman ran on the experience platform and was beaten by the change platform. I mean, that would have been such an extraordinary change to have her first woman president of the United States, but she was more Clinton than female in the end, according to voters. And he became the change agent. So what started as a very hopeful and dramatic story about the possibility of in this group of candidates we would elect a woman or an African-American in many places became a story of race versus gender. But I want to get to, and then we had out of nowhere Sarah Palin and all of the women who had said about Clinton that she was the most experienced candidate and the young women in the campaign who had been more for Obama had said, we're liberated to vote for the person. Suddenly this group of Clinton voters who were as much turned off by Sarah Palin as attracted, much more turned off, they were the one who were saying suddenly we are liberated enough to vote for the person, not for the gender. But I think in an interesting way to think about the relationship, to think in this context about the relationship between women as consumers of news and women as journalists and women as politicians. I know you want to open it, we can return to that, but there's a very interesting changing line in that. I would just say that women have not been news consumers to the degree that men have been. They have not, we know that women do not have political information. I'm talking about hardcore information, who your senator is traditionally. I mean the Pew people have done that over decades and women just did not have the same kind of information. We also know from studies that when there's a woman running women pay more attention. And so in this campaign women have been much more engaged in the primary and now in this. But what are they engaged in? And I don't have the answer to that but I have impressions of a lot of women who might not have been engaged in politics are engaged and connecting to Clinton in the primary. They're engaged in connecting either for or against Palin in the main election. But the Palin story has become a personal people magazine story to a large degree and a lot of women have tuned into it to discuss in mommy blogs, which are not political blogs on the view which is not theoretically a political show on People Magazine which is not theoretically the nation. They've turned to these places to talk about childcare, whether a mother should be a presidential candidate and how experienced this woman is. No, that's like a very quick and dirty overview but it is really fascinating to see what is going on. At the same time women journalists have done a much better job of covering Sarah Palin. You just look at what's happened. They've done a much better job of the Charlie Gibson interview was nowhere nearly as tough as the Katie Cork interview. And Campbell Brown called its sexist not to question Sarah Palin much more directly. It's so interesting when you talk about the narratives in this election, let's not forget that the McCain narrative which is not about women or black or any of those things is an extraordinary narrative of a very heroic POW. And so in a way it's been this kind of whipsaw which narrative is going to be ascendant and now we've got the economic narrative which seems to be trumping just about everything. Is there anything about this latest to-do about whether there'd be a debate and whether we'd be able to do that and whether we'd come to Washington and drop everything? Is there any sense so far of who's winning that kind of dance among the campaigns? Oh, I was just gonna say I think the dance isn't really as interesting to people. I think it's all about Bush. And it's all about whether you think that the people who are in have so screwed stuff up that you're just going to go for somebody else. That's your take on it, but isn't it also all about Bush trying to help McCain? No, I'm just talking about, we're talking about a small, we're talking about huge groups of decideds. People who are tribes, as John said, belong to the Democratic tribe, they belong to the Republican tribe. And then you're talking about people who are uncertain and may not make up their minds to laugh to the third debate. And what's in that mind, which is of course what every candidate is trying to figure out, what's in that mind and what's in their mind is anxiety. Is anybody gonna help me out of this? Who are these people who got us into this? And it's conceivable that they will say anybody but Bush. And it's also conceivable that they'll say, you know that McCain, he just looks, he's been around a while, you know. So that's what's up for grabs, I think. Why don't you guys start lining up at the microphones while Tom and John respond to that? Just a little, some numbers that I think suggest I mean, interesting. Since June 9, when Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, 67% of the stories that we've studied have been about Obama. 50% have been about McCain. It can be over 100% because stories could actually be about both of them. So Obama's enjoyed this significant advantage in being the candidate that the media are talking about. During most of that period, Obama was losing momentum. And the only week since June 9 when McCain was a more significant newsmaker than Obama, the only week in all those, however many weeks that is, you know, 10 or 15 or something, was last week, which was McCain's worst week when he got all bollocksed up over the economy. By the way, slightly different point, since she was identified as the vice presidential nominee, Palin has been a factor in 50% of the campaign stories. And what's that guy's name? Biden? He's been a factor in 6% of the campaign stories. So it may not always be a good thing if the fact-based media are looking at you. Wow. Handy Hinn, for all you young people out there, always let Tom talk first when it comes to final comments because it gives you a good foundation to talk about. I would just say this whole McCain thing. This is the second time in a month now that McCain has caught Obama flat-footed. And Obama, I think, has been completely taken by surprise and thrown off his game. So I think, you know, if you want to tally up the score. You're talking about the no-debate thing? No-debate. Go to Washington, country first, no-debate. If you want to tally up the score, I think he won the first couple of rounds. This next one's going to be really interesting to see because if this country first thing, which McCain has sort of settled on as his secondary strategy after, you know, we didn't have refrigerators as a POW, if people start to perceive this as sort of a cynical politics as usual use of this gambit, then I think he's going to be the big loser. So I think it's a real high-wire act for him. I'm interested to see how it comes out. Having been wrong virtually 100% of the time during this campaign, I'm always interested to see how things work out. That's a good number. Yeah, yeah. Please don't tell Mark Jerkowitz, okay? I think it's deeply important that we now turn to you because that's in fact the story of the media in the campaign. It's all about you, your input, you're the editors, you're the journalists, you're the sources, and the mainstream media are really at the mercy of the intelligence and the thoughtfulness of each of you. So let's start with you and then we'll go to you next. Hi. Could you identify yourself for us? Sure. My name is Greg PC and I'm just around. My question is, you talked with a unit of measure before, starting as the package, and now being the story. And I wonder if the real unit of measure now is the conversation. I mean, if you look at Politico, you've got the story and then you've got 1,000 comments after the story. And you see that across the web. Whenever a topic comes up, what people are actually going to look for is the discussion that follows the story. And so I wonder, you talk about cable as being really a discussion, a conversational format. Have we become really just consumers of conversation rather than a faxed reportage? Well, I mean, my view on this is that it's that that was what journalism was always about. I mean, the original journalism was literally conversation among citizens in coffee houses in Europe and public houses or what we call bars now in the colonies. And then the first newspapers were people literally writing down what they heard in coffee houses and putting it on paper and then selling it. So there's a back to the future element to this, which I think is tantalizing. But I do think that most of that conversation does start with journalism. I mean, if you go to a blog, what they're linking to are generally original media accounts, which they then denounce or they talk about. And to me, what that means is that the unit of measure here is not the conversation per se, but the episode, the topic. I'm not quite sure what the word is. But it's not really the story as much as it's McCain decides to suspend the debate or Sarah Palin was for the bridge to nowhere before she was gay, whatever. And I'm not sure that the press quite knows how to deal with that, because the conversation is out of their control. The facts are sort of within their control. But it is spinning outside of them, but they're still a part of it. And I just think that's moving on us. We're not sure how. I'd add something in as the recipient of email, which is another kind of comment in theory, what you're saying. But the comment is one-third comment and two-thirds food fight. And I think that's, in general, just to add on to what Tom was saying. I think that's, in general, what it is. It's not like this. And I think that the language of the email that I get anyway has almost been trained by first talk radio and then some of the television stuff. Because people, email stuff, you wouldn't believe that they would never say to you. But it's like it's OK, because that's what email is. Can I just have one other thing? Or no. No. If you want to. This is the second time I want to say this thing. Go ahead. Go ahead. Rudley held me on point. Go ahead. I just want to throw in something about the other model on the internet, which is the Huffington Post. And Eric Alterman wrote a terrific piece in New York a few weeks ago. And he talked about the Huffington Post and what he called the mullet strategy, which was business up front, party in the back. And he said, this is how the Huffington Post is constructed, that the home page and the front of the website is very advertiser friendly, very accessible, very sort of corporate looking. What's going on behind closed doors in the comments page is this wild rumpus that's going on. And that's part of the appeal of the Huffington Post. And that's one of the reasons that it is as successful as it is, is because it juggles those two things, that sort of respectable traditional looking journalism and then the inclination and the desire of people to participate and to be part of this conversation. So I think we may see that going forward more and more, maybe, I don't know. Historians McGurk and Leonard have tracked how when journalism became objective in the Roosevelt era when it started to become progressive and pure and educational and all that, that interest in politics started to decline at the same time. And they've actually linked this sort of neutrality and boringness, the boredom of mainstream media with a decline in participation. So maybe it's not so unhealthy, some of it maybe unhealthy, but maybe it's exciting that people are getting more engaged and they're doing it through alternative media and through, perhaps, excited language. Yes? Hi, I'm Whitney Choutine. Can you pull that mic down there? Yeah, sure, I'm short. Second year CMS graduate student. And I was really interested in this panel, but I'm afraid that a lot of it hasn't lived up to my expectations in part because I feel like a lot of the same arguments are being parroted, which is that the Daily Me thing has been pulled out. The passive active consumer distinction has been pulled out. And none of it, these are ideas that seem to be out there, but they don't really reflect how I consume media and how just about everyone I know and talk to about this consumes media. So that's kind of just my first point. But how do you consume media? Well, I would say that, well, for instance, to the Daily Me point, I read blogs on my Google Reader. And the blogs have all different kinds of content in them, from very academic things to political things. And I share that with other people. They're in my circle of friends. And they'll share that. So it's not that I'm consuming something that's very narrowly focused on my interest. It's that I'm within a network of people. And those people are all sharing different things. I'm exposed to different things all the time. If anything, my exposure to new ideas has vastly increased, not in the way that we thought it would maybe 15 years ago, but it certainly has. But my second point is that I also feel like we've talked a lot about mainstream media or corporate media or however you want to describe it. But we haven't gotten outside the idea of mainstream content. Like we're still talking about what the cable news networks are talking about at night or something. When to me, what's most exciting about this is that we can get exposed to third party candidates. We can get exposed to ideas that are outside of mainstream media. And to me, it doesn't reflect. None of what you're saying reflects that. And I'm wondering what you think about how content might change, how third parties, how alternative voices, alternative decisions might be able to enter into the conversation through new media. Well, I think the fact that we haven't talked about those things reflects the reality of the presidential campaign, which is how this was framed. And what you're suggesting is a possible model for breaking open the confines of politics in the future. But I haven't seen that happen yet. I mean, I do think that you could argue that Obama came from almost nowhere because, not from nowhere from the Senate, but came from being a small chance candidate to being the contender over the internet from the bottom up from certainly the grassroots and the money collection was that. So in a sense, you could say that that's already happening. Now, whether it works for third party candidates, I don't have any idea how that would work in the future. But it's third party candidates. It's still got a tough road to hope. I would say, first of all, I'm not a believer in the phenomenon that the Daily Me is limiting us. There was a lot of fear that the technology would mean that people would only go to what they're interested in. And the research is pretty clear that what social scientists call accidental news acquisition or learning about things you didn't know you were interested has not diminished. It may have increased because one thing that is very big is, as you say, people emailing stuff to each other and sending stuff to each other. That sort of pass-along thing is actually a far more important dimension of the way people are consuming news than people writing their own stuff. That's why I say people are becoming their own editors. The concept of the prosumer that somebody would be a producer-consumer, that's not really happening. It's the conversation is more robust and the notion of the citizen-reporter is diminishing because they have other things to do with their life. I think that all of that has the potential to make the culture far more dynamic. I think the potential for that to change the way we elect our presidents or to change the political culture is far more limited. Any evidence that this campaign has been elevated in its dialogue by all of this escapes me because I don't see an elevated dialogue. And we've got a 72-year-old guy who's been a senator and a guy who, although he wasn't very experienced, was clearly the anti-Hillary alternative, I mean, what's a pretty establishment race? So this event is not an event like the iPhone where citizens can find out what's wrong with it and fix it. This is what it is and it's important, but it's not as open to that culture changing it as a lot of other things in our world. But don't give up trying. And I think your point is very well taken and we look forward to more conversations that fit with what you have to contribute. Thank you very much. I'm gonna do more questions and quicker answers. Is that a good plan? Let's do a quicker panel here on this or maybe one person will respond. If you can ask one person, that would be great. All right, thank you. My name is John Garfunkel, civilities.net, if you wanna find me. Unfortunately, it's a question for Tom again but I'm just picking up something you said earlier and it ties into the last comment. You had pictured a proactive reader now and I'm wondering how much that's really been studied. I've read a lot of from Dan Gilmore and Jay Rosen and the general blog community echoes, sorry, I just spoke, but what you said that every reader is going to multiple sources, they're checking Google, they're going to the second page on Google and they're making up their mind before they forward it on their blog about it. I'm wondering if that's really a reality or if that's just a tiny small percentage of the population. I was canvassing last week, I can tell you and I've read the comments online. It seems like people stick to these myths and we don't quite have the active reader that has been envisioned by a lot of media reformers so I don't know if you have any research on that. Yeah, well the research on it isn't great but it's emerging, Jay is an old friend, Gilmore is a friend, I think that the facts as much as we know them don't back up a lot of what they're suggesting. The fact that the potential is there doesn't mean it's going to happen and that's why I keep trying to make the point, people are becoming their own editors to a greater degree than they used to be and to a much greater degree than they'd been their own reporters. The point here is and it also depends on the story again. At national news outlets, two thirds of the traffic to the New York Times and the Washington Post is now coming through blog links, search engines, people going or ending up there when they were looking for something rather than going to the front page but at a local newspaper the percentages are reversed only a third of the traffic is getting there through search engines and people emailing stuff. They're saying, oh, I want to find out what's going on in South Bend today, I'm going to go to the South Bend newspaper because it's the only source. You mean the online one or the regular one? The online one, the front page of the South Bend Indiana newspaper. So I think it really, if you heard about Sarah Palin doing something you might go to the internet to find out about it but if you want to find out what happened in your local town yesterday, you're just going to consume it in a fairly traditional way where you go to the front page and are, we are more proactive than we used to be but most people don't go to blogs. Okay. Hi, my name is Lana Swartz and I'm a graduate student here in the Comparative Media Studies program. I heard and anyone can take this as they see fit but I heard a couple of mentions of this kind of, that journalists are facing the same information overload that everyone else is, you're getting the same stuff in your inboxes, you're grappling with the extreme amount of information that's out there as well as trying to do traditional reporting. So I'm really curious if you have any ideas about ways that journalists as a profession can reorganize themselves and reorganize their workflow to better deal with that and if you know of any interesting ways that that's happening already. Turning off my email. I don't, I would love to. If this is your thesis topic, would you send me a copy? I would really love to. Some of the functions of journalism are being disaggregated. There's a whole new way now of just gathering data and a lot of journalists find it's very fruitful for them to be crunching it and visualizing it differently. The New York Times has done a very good job on their website of presenting data to us in a way that we as just atomized people gathering one fact at a time would not be able to do. So there is a new role for the journalist, I think. So it's not so much perhaps for good or for ill going out and saying this is what happened today because a lot of people are gonna show that to us on YouTube and in various other ways. But it's saying what did it mean in collecting original documents and verifying it going back to the elements of journalism in the book that Tom wrote. So I think that it's verification, it's visualization. But I also think journalists are basically archaeologists. They have to go down more deeply and they're tour guides. Where are the other resources you might wanna find for this? So I think those are the fruitful areas for journalism in the future. I don't know if that answers your question, but it's my take on where to go if you're trying to be a journalist. And if I can make this one point very quickly. I think because information is in oversupply, that raises the bar and the burden of proof for a journalistic organization or a story to break through and contribute something meaningful. It needs to be stronger. The verification needs to be higher. The level of sourcing needs to be better. Otherwise it will get lost in that conversation. Or it just has to be more outrageous for some media. Right. Sorry. I'm George Mokra, I live in Central Square. Speak up, we can't hear you. And I'm George Mokra, I live in Central Square. And because I have too much time on my hands, I go to Harvard and MIT public events. So there's a lot of this. I wanna ask you about probably Ellen, because she's still in the journalism business. Yeah. There are some dogs that I didn't hear bark. And one of them is Matt Drudge. The other one is Joshua Michael Marshall talking points memo. Another one is the bubble campaign of 2004 where Bush actually had people arrested who were not Republicans coming in. So, you know, but that's not the big dog. The big dog is the mechanisms of election. There are a lot of stories that I've been seeing online but not in the newspapers, not on CNN, not on MSNBC, not on all these other sources about throwing hundreds of thousands or thousands of people off the voting rolls, which I think was the main problem in 2000. People talking about a closed election still and not talking about election integrity. And when I have brought this up over the years at Harvard especially, people look at me as if I'm a conspiracy theorist, right? Well, actually, there was a story. Was it in the Times today about people who had their mortgages foreclosed and were not gonna be able to vote? That's only one of the different stories. No, no, I understand. I understand. It's happening in a variety of different states. No, no, right, right, I wasn't saying it. But I wasn't suggesting that and it's good stuff that hasn't been done. There are a lot of stories that haven't been done. Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. There are stories that haven't been done. That's a very important one. Where the voting machine's fixed in Ohio. Is Florida gonna be able to have the right kind of ballot? It's a terribly important story. What other stories are people, is anybody wanna just shout out? What story are we missing? What are the mainstream media missing? The War in Iraq. The War in Iraq, okay, there's another one. I want the body count. Say it again, what? Body counts. We have to go to memory hole and places like that for that, right? Yeah, absolutely. Good, okay, I hope the mainstream media are listening. Thank you, go ahead. Every one of those stories is being covered. Okay, it's not being covered in every media outlet. But if they're all being covered, now the question is not, are they being covered? The question is, are they getting the volume that you believe they should be getting? And that's an ideological issue as much as a journalistic issue, I think. I mean, you can find this story covered. You're not finding it covered in the places you wanna find it covered in. No, that's not my point. Okay. The fact is, is that all of this is a shadow show, okay? If the votes don't get counted correctly. And that's a boring process and that's a long process and that's a hard process. And it's not just voting machines. It's who gets thrown off the rolls and who gets kept on the rolls? Who is being challenged at the voting booth? And it's very complex, but we talk on this level and actually it's at the nitty-gritty level that real decisions are made. Have you been down to the election commission? I mean, where's your role in this? Where's the role of the citizen in this? You're looking for the mainstream media to go and do your business, you know, go down there? Well, you know what? I mean, I think that there's a responsibility that citizens have to act on their own behalf. Excellent, then I've got no beef with you. I've got no beef with you. But the idea that this is all the work of the mainstream media. The mainstream media is supposed to be the watchdog. It's supposed to be the citizen's representative. There's no question about that. But citizens are supposed to be citizen's representatives as well. And so I'm not sure, 100% of the blame should go to the media. I think, John, you're being way too defensive. I think that George has a good point. I think he has a fine point that he's not getting the volume that he wants. Well, I would defer to this extent. I am surprised that some major news organization hasn't taken upon themselves to systematically really assign this as a major beat and say, you know, is our voting system what it should be? I mean, it never has been, but it didn't matter when people were winning every state by a large margin. Now it's a big problem. And I'm surprised that it hasn't become a crusade for some major news organization. I would add, here's where the, quote, corporate problem in another way comes into play, which is that the investigative teams in big city newspapers no longer exist. So that the possibility that you would have a team of reporters at the Philadelphia Inquirer that would spend a year doing this story has been eliminated. I mean, literally eliminated in that. And now there are these other strange models that are strange to us, unfamiliar, like, you know, if you want a story covered now, there are people who say, okay, get enough people together to pay for it and there'll be a news organization that will cover that story. So it's the privatization of an already private, but you know, the privatization of the stories that you want covered. That's a controversial idea, but it does exist in places. And this is, for me, a perfect example of the kind of story that would lend itself to the new technologies and to crowdsourcing. Because if you could get citizen journalists or just individuals from all the different states to compile their atoms of data in a place, and it could be verified in ways that people found acceptable, and that could be crunched, I think that would be a very powerful form, hybrid form, which I happen to think is the strongest form of journalism today, which combines the wisdom of people out there who have something contribute with the professionals who are editing and thinking about these things full-time. So I think that story is a very important story, and I'm very glad you raised it, and I don't think we can count on citizens to be able to solve that one, but I think they can contribute their information in a way. For example, the Fort Myers paper had people submit their sewer bills to the paper's website. Were you part of that? No, but it's, that's not misreported too. Oh, okay. We'll talk to you about it afterwards. Good, well anyway, the example may be poor one, but the idea is a good one. If we can get individuals to offer their wisdom and their information and crunch it and put it together could be a very powerful form of reporting. So thank you for that, yes. Hi, my name is Deepa, and I'm a fourth year undergraduate here at MIT. I'm studying biology and minoring in political science, and my question is sort of almost twofold. So I'm from Kentucky, and where I'm from is a slightly more liberal part of Kentucky, but nevertheless, I live in a land of single issue voters, which is generally most of America also. And when I spend no less than two and a half hours a day reading news, which mostly consists of reading what a lot of people think about the news, and I would like to think that a lot of my fellow, like my peers, people my age, do similar things in terms of finding a story on Google News and then seeing that there are about 10 different versions of that story and reading three of them and figuring out which one is correct. So in theory, a democratization of the media, such as people who read a lot of blogs and people who look to multiple sources to find the news, is much more prevalent in the younger generation. So my question to you is, well the first part is in 50 years when we become the sort of outdated voter who has been voting for 50 years. Not to say that you're- I hope you're on a panel just like this. A fossilized panel like this one. To say that when my generation, who has, for many of us, this is my first time voting for the president. And so when my basis for voting for someone is based on what all of the New York Times columnists have to say and what much more smaller blogs here and there have to say, what implications do you think that has for sort of the sustainability of a democracy in terms of the sort of second part of the question is if the role of the journalist is going to evolve, who gets to define what the journalist role is in a democracy because the media is not an institution created by the government. It is an institution that was created as a byproduct of people wanting, well, one, to make money and to get information to the people. So because there are no really defined roles of the journalist, whose responsibility is that? Is it the responsibility of media corporations? Is it the responsibility of the people or is it journalists on their own that have to take that role? There's such big questions I can let one person answer. Which one of you wants? I'll take the littlest part of the last one, which is that anybody can call themselves a journalist. It's like anybody can call themselves a writer. The question isn't whether you can call yourself a journalist, the question is whether other people will, whether there are any standards by which other people will allow you into that category. I mean, obviously, this was a big question covering the conventions. Who's a journalist and who isn't and who gets a press pass? But what does it matter? I mean, that's the question. Well, I don't think that what matters is whether, what matters, I'm gonna let, I'm gonna pass this on to Tom because he's done a lot of creating of the standards of what, well, you've written about creating standards of what journalists, good journalism should be. So I'm just gonna pass that right along. The norms of journalism that we now are worried may disappear didn't come from plan of journalism or Mount journalism. They came from the market. They came from what it was that readers and listeners responded to. Who's gonna be a journalist in the future is gonna be determined by either which person attracts an audience or what organizational way there is to aggregate an audience around a range of different writers and talkers. And is there a way to subsidize that? The problem facing the mainstream media today isn't loss of audience. The audience of the New York Times newsroom product is higher than it's ever been and is growing now for the first time in many, many, many years. After years of stagnation, the problem is there's no way to subsidize. The subsidy for that is disappearing. If they can figure that part out, that will go a long way to answer your question of who's a journalist because right now, most of the empirical evidence suggests that there is a growing audience for the values of traditional journalism. It's the revenue side that's the problem. There's also a growing audience for shouting, for blogging, for which there's no economic model either. And a lot of this is gonna get sorted out but it will be determined by what the market, what the audience wants. And I think journalists have to figure out that the informed citizen may not be the citizen who votes based on information but based on a sort of cultural information, a sense of what matters and what values there are. We keep hearing over and over again after these elections that people voted not on issues but on values and on the culture. And that's the piece that is so alien to journalists because their whole discipline has been to nail down the facts and leech out their own sense of culture that goes with it, their own biases. And so that whole model of objectivity, the bad word that we used to use with honor, is under assault and under redefinition but it's an exciting time for both citizens and for journalists. And I think that the future isn't as bleak as some people may be saying. Good for you, you go for it. Nolan. I'm Nolan Bowie. I teach a course at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government titled New Media and Democracy and to also express my bias, I'm a former public interest communications attorney. I have a couple of rhetorical but I think relevant questions to begin. The first is when were the good old days of political coverage by the so-called fact-based corporate mainstream media? And the measure being when were citizens better informed and how do we know? The other question is what's wrong with the old economic model? And I put it in context and that model provided 30 to 60% profits to the industry. And I point out that 98% of the newspapers were monopolies in their own communities and really had no competition particularly for certain types of advertising which sustain them. And television and radio stations were virtual rubber stamps in terms of renewal. I would suggest that power shifts have come about for a number of reasons. One, with deregulation and Wall Street takeover of media properties as basically money-making machines to try to get back to the 30 to 60% profits and looking at the bottom line over traditional news values and democratic role of the media as a watchdog. Could we go to your first question for a second? Because you asked a really big question. Then maybe we can go to your second question. But your first question was when was the golden age when? The golden age of media, the good old days when citizens were better informed and how do we know the fact that they were compared to what? And I have a suggestion in terms of now could you tell us your answer? Well, at least prior to Ronald Reagan becoming president campaigning on getting government off our backs and hiring Mark Fowler to be the chairman of the FCC who defined the public interests as what the public is interested in and began to seriously undermine public interest obligations of broadcasts. For example, in 81 for radio, 83 for television, they eliminated any obligation to air any news or informational programming. And then in 1987 they eliminated issue access by eliminating the fairness doctrine which put on an affirmative obligation of broadcasters to air throughout the broadcast day controversial issues of public importance and then contrasting views. George raised the issue and you responded to it in terms of identifying certain important controversial issues that aren't being discussed at all. There's no obligation to do it on by broadcasters. Therefore, if you look at the news media it became softer and softer and softer to where it is now is practically infotainment or whatever you call it. It's a failure of the traditional media to adapt to the new pool environment of where we have a super abundance of channel capacities and as a consequence, super competition for audiences attention. You have almost unlimited channels and it's much more difficult to even aggregate a mass audience except for like Super Bowl events or maybe presidential debates of someone who were gonna have one. Would you like anyone to respond or? Well, you can respond or I could go on all day if you want. No and always you marshal a lot of very important facts and questions and I'd like to just take some of that if we could instead of trying to digest the whole course is that okay? The notion of a golden age, I know that it was easier for me to try to do honest reporting when I was working 20 years ago than it is for most people today not because they're not doing it but it's just harder. Because of all the things you just said the equal time doctrine isn't there to help us be balanced. As Ellen was saying, we all have to do five jobs at once if we're a journalist today you have to be worrying about putting, posting to a blog when you have no deadlines at all you can either take a lot of time to do a good job or you can rush everything out the door and get it there before it's verified. So yes, there's a lot of policy involved with whether you can have good journals and there's a lot of ownership issues involved with whether you can have good journalism but I still think that you're missing with that kind of comment that you really can't find it in this corporate media world there's enormously courageous journalism going on right now very effective journalism and it's getting lost in the clutter and it may not be lifted up I think this is what John you were trying to say before when I was accusing you of something and that is that it may be one story that runs and it never sees the light of day anywhere but on that one day in that one newspaper but example after example, the New York Times of course is the most empowered newspaper in this country they've done an incredible series of stories about Iraq, about civil liberties and that doesn't seem to get currency during the election but it's not that somebody out there isn't trying to do it I think people are trying to do it. Well I didn't see it as a total failure but it's moving toward failure and there's a big question as to if in fact traditional journalism fails in the market the newspapers fail in the market that there's no one doing reporting then does the government have an obligation to provide subsidies across subsidies because these are public goods Okay that's a good question I think that's going to be it for the question Tom, you've studied whether high quality journalism does better in the market whether we need cross subsidies from the government what about that? A lot of it has to do with the time horizon that the owners of media are focused on there's although the owners of media don't know it there's a huge body of academic research that shows that higher quality journalism does better in the marketplace but when you start investing in higher quality journalism the immediate effect is dampening your return and then five or six years later it pays dividends that go on and on and on and you can charge more for your advertising you can do all kinds of wonderful things financially but first you have to take a hit to get there and the problem facing the news media today is that it is both a shrinking industry in one platform and an emerging industry in another but it has an ownership model by and large that only suits the old platform, the shrinking and that in Wall Street dictates that if your industry is shrinking you should extract as much revenue as you can as quickly as you can and investing for the long term is a waste of money because your business is shrinking and we just don't know what to do that's why you're seeing new buyers come in new owners come in some of whom may be horrible some of whom may be good and we don't know until after they buy the damn thing whether they're good or bad can I just add not to be the skunk of the garden party here but at the risk of doing that I'm not sure government subsidies is the way to go for independent news organizations and I'll just say I mean I'm not sure you want them in the house at all and let me just say from personal experience I worked for a PBS station here in Boston for 11 years PBS gets maybe 15% of its revenue from the government it's a little more it's about closer to 20 but it's not very much 20 it is a shackle on PBS that is unavoidable I mean you are sort of tied to the government in a way that keeps you from doing things that you might otherwise do I think the lack of courage the lack of innovation that you see in PBS these days is a direct result of a couple of things one the tough competition in the marketplace and two a fear of public opinion and a fear of public backlash and so I just wanted to throw in my little editorial on that subject but I also have to say that the frontline series on PBS is still exceptionally good and courageous I mean they're not perfect nobody is but what shocked me when I was teaching at UMass Boston was none of my students had ever heard about it they knew nothing about PBS or NPR and these were immigrants these were students growing up in homes in the Boston area and I think that we haven't mentioned the literacy word but I do think there have to be media literacies considered as part of education to encourage people to be producers of content and to be consumers of content that is more nourishing than a lot of the side shows that we seem to be accepting that's not saying the daily show is a side show I'm not gonna fall into that trap but it's saying that nourishment is available I think not always and it's hard to get but I think it's available my 16 year old daughter who's there's a lot of media in our house you can imagine says PBS that sounds for profoundly boring system right, right I'm sure it's just in terms of the good old days I would, one of my favorite quotes came from Gene Patterson who was the legendary editor of the St. Pete Times and Gene Patterson once said we don't make newspapers to make money we make money to make newspapers I haven't heard that as an editor in 30 years that was not normal 20 years for sure quickly okay, punk broadcasting is only one model there are other models like the BBC there's also, if you think about it government funds public education that's content, that's a model public library, public museums could have it and then there are other kind of approaches to it like where corporations will provide some of this profits to run nonprofits like the Guardian model receiving this operating funding from profits from the independent now the real issue is what kind of content empowers communities and promotes democracy and I don't think we really know about that and currently there's a Knight-Aston commission involved in investigating that during research and having public meetings and also some of the work you do here at MIT with the civic media project is trying to determine some of these issues I know I went to Aspen's test drive for that commission and all that other stuff I, what I would say is I think these things are gonna get explored I also would say that what's happening in the media is gonna get a lot worse before anybody comes up with any answers thank you I'm Flourish Klink and I'm a first year compared to media studies graduate student and my question is actually sort of taking this to a low culture place after we've been in this sort of rarefied atmosphere of PBS and NPR and all that and that is we haven't talked to actually I haven't heard you guys talk at all about sort of the the real dregs of the political discussion online I'm thinking like political law cats and you know photoshopping Sarah Palin's head onto a bikini girl and the thing is though that actually you know you're saying people aren't using the internet for this stuff but like my 75 year old grandfather he doesn't know you know politico from a hole in the ground but let me tell you every time there is Sarah Palin's head photoshopped onto a bikini girl or like some other sort of ad hoc political commentary in that form he sends it right along do you guys, has there been any like study of this at all? you know this this form of communication and commentary? well and it's like the probably the one of the swiftest moving viral emails was from somebody who actually knew Sarah Palin in Wasilla well it doesn't depend on what you're using it for I mean if he's using this as part of his amusement and to be engaged I mean I don't see the damage of that if he's using that to base his voting decision then I'm troubled by that he's using it what he's doing because god knows I get a lot of these not from your grandfather but he's using it to build a tribe and those of us who are the recipients of endless ones of these are what it is it's a internal it's a reinforcement it's a tribal it's a hey we are all in this together occasionally it's sent to someone from another tribe in which case it's a up yours but in this case by and large it's reinforcing tribal connections and feelings remixing is very exciting we have to do a lightning round I've been told that we have to really speed up here so please tell us who you are can you hear me I'm Sarah Hamlin and my tribe is obscure civics about the electoral college so we are I'm helping MIT with a conference October 17th on could you educate journalists about what's behind the scenes at the electoral college and what's interesting is is a very small audience that would care about where those electoral votes come from what the math is should it be reformed because as you say it's all about the personalities the electoral college has no media staff they're just a thing that gathers to make the vote official but this is my question do you see in this electoral cycle we're seeing the first non baby boomer candidates we're seeing strong western states candidates and you're seeing people who are born outside the continental united states not to mention outside of new york city so I wonder um... if you if ellen has any comments about the way women are tuning in say in alaska or the west coast verses hillary new york if you have any comments about that I think tom might have some data as opposed to some comments but I think it's uh... pretty nationalized uh... and then segmented along you know uh... affinity groups uh... but almost not and you can you can make the case that there's a big difference between people in the center of the country and people on the coast that's the traditional way but it's probably a segmented up and down the educational structure the class structure divided by race and gender i mean that there's been a lot of slicing and dicing of this but i think uh... that the tribes are less local and uh... more more divided by these other things but nationally nationally connected but in their own silos and there it is that did i make it was that a coherent and there's also a job that i haven't mentioned which in fairness we need to which is that if you do travel to some of these small towns and wherever they are rural areas and and even in inner city areas a lot of people aren't able to access or aren't accessing this great cornucopia of information and they're being served very poorly by their local media and that's one of the reasons why i think we're so excited uh... here at MIT at the Center for Futures of the Media about looking at some of these grassroots citizen journalism efforts and and websites like H2O town where real conversations are going on where people are contributing uh... where news media have failed uh... and i i do think the future is bright for that but we must remember that a lot of people out there forming political decisions based on very little information despite what we're all talking about as this enormous ocean well, this is my my only half coherently my half coherent description of uh... of tribes that are demographic i mean i thought you were more coherent than you thought you were there's actually a very good website the Christian Science Monitor has they've got something called Patchwork Nation is Dante in the room by any chance it's a very interesting well, he is local or since science monitor, he's here sometimes he's in Washington, but sometimes he's here anyway, it shows it shows county by county, community by community uh... not red and blue but various aspects of uh... culture and politics political orientation so instead of having just swaths of the nation states that go one color or another he's showing what an incredible patchwork it is and that's one reason why old-fashioned politics door-to-door can be perhaps the secret weapon of the whole campaign rather than just media one of the things about that to relate to Ellen's point is the Patchwork Nation shows that you have counties in Alaska that are similar to counties in Alabama rather than Alabama and you know, as part of a region of the country the technology is helping redefine community from not just geopolitical communities but also communities of interest, intellectual definition of community and what you see in media usage is that some of our media usage is tribal and some is not the notion that people are only going to their own ideological media is an oversimplification they get a lot of information from the AP and then they leaven that with their own tribal stuff uh... you know, they go to Fox and they also go to other places actually what you were just talking about was what I was going to ask you which is we are the technocratic elite here I mean you can look at all the millions of views on YouTube but that's the upper echelons of all over the world uh... people have access to the internet and everything which a lot of this country doesn't or choose not to so I was wondering uh... Tom if you had any numbers about the the uptake of these new media technologies and more importantly what are the trends looking like like how long is it going to be before everybody has access to this stuff well uh... what the data show to the extent that there's good data on it and I don't think there's great data but there's a growing body uh... is the fact that the largest chunk of the population is pretty disengaged uses largely traditional media and doesn't use it very much their primary source of information is local TV news uh... and that's pretty horrifying um... then you have about a twenty five percent chunk that is uh... a very uh... eclectic in their media usage and then you've got uh... and and they they're more affluent they're more engaged they're real what we used to call news junkies and then you've got a a new media cohort which is about twelve percent of the population so all together this group of heavy eclectic consumers and the new media consumers are thirty seven you know about a third of the population and that very new media oriented group is young uh... uh... more of the disengaged are older and they're gonna die uh... and the the new group is gonna you know mature but uh... I don't know that technology is ever gonna make it so that more than a third of the population is all that engaged in all that interested in spending their time learning about the outside world other than incidentally you know technology does not change human nature it just services it or the days we were talking before about or your time we were talking before about women being have been uh... weaker consumers of political information but they are much greater consumers for example they as I mentioned they are less likely to know the name of the senator of the senator they are much more likely to know the name of their pediatrician uh... they are I mean and this goes across the the information they have much less information about foreign affairs except when there's a real spike in everybody's interest like at the height of the iraq war but they have greater information about health care and then when you look at how uh... healthcare is divided uh... women have less information of our pay less attention to health care policy and pay much more attention to the health of the health the personal health issues uh... so there's a definite gender divide and fractional fraction fractionalizing if that's a word of how they engage in the political process too and on what grounds and they are the late deciders which means often that they are busy and don't pay attention until uh... until the end and we will see the grounds on which they're paying attention and if they get hooked into um... a story you know I think at the moment they're hooked into the economy as much as everybody else's but they when Sarah Palin came on the scene as I mentioned before they were hooked into the story and uh... uh... and now the story is probably the economy as much as as much as anything else but we'll see because they are the bulk of the late deciders David I'd like to thank the panel for a very lively and informative forum I think it's one of the best forums we've held in many years been impressed by all of you and by your good humor and your willingness to engage what in some cases were difficult questions I have a general question that is partly based on some of the things you've been saying about the increased partisanship of the way media has been operating people going to sites that confirm their beliefs or people going to television channels that are essentially confirmations of what they believe so the increasing partisanship plus the fact that proliferation of news outlets has created a situation in which there's uh... somewhat less likelihood that particular individuals might be subjected to perspectives that are that are alien to them or that are surprising to them plus a number of the other factors that we've been citing that have changed the media landscape so dramatically in the last decade or so I'm wondering whether you believe that this puts an even greater importance in some degree and perhaps grants a greater decisiveness to the debates, to the presidential debates. Do you think that they're likely to play a larger role in the outcome of the election than they might have in previous years because of some of these tendencies you've been describing? Debates are still there to a large degree for people to make mistakes and I think that that's the biggest influence that they could have. I mean that seems to be when you look at the debates at the coverage of the debates and the coverage is something that a lot more people see than the debates themselves who wins the sort of the coverage arm wrestling matches is something that is immediately important but I think that the potential for making a mistake and having an influence on the race is much greater than the potential for actually changing people's minds beyond that I think you get a sense of the person again and I think that that's probably one of the things that the debate provides you with as opposed to information itself. How somebody conducts themselves, how somebody relates, how you relate to that somebody. I would like to think that actual reasoned conversation and argument might actually have some effect on people's perceptions and how they vote. I mean that would be a giant step forward I think. But I'm not sure that that's actually going to happen because the two sides have hardened so much. I mean there's a real, I think Tom writes about this in his book that there used to be a shared set of facts that people would argue from and they would agree on some basic facts and then they would argue from there. I think people don't agree on basic facts anymore and I don't think anybody allows for the possibility that someone who disagrees with them can have a reasonable point of view, a legitimate point of view. I think it's all about legitimate, delegitimizing the opposition and I think that that makes a very hard dynamic for anything positive to what to happen. I'd hate to leave on that note because no, I have to say that I think the debates aren't just about the gaffe. I think there are marvelous opportunities. I mean when I was a political reporter I was desperately trying to crack the fake veneer that campaigns had put on sometimes very decent people who were running for office and they would go through the motion seven times a day in several different locations and you'd wait for that moment when the real person shown through. Well television offers us that opportunity. We don't always get it but in a debate we're all waiting not just for a gaffe but for something real to happen and I don't think it's always a gaffe. It might be a moment of recognition that here's somebody who really understands me or here's somebody who sounds reasonable on a policy and again I go back to my original premise that we're voting culturally more than for issues. So I don't think the debates are to hear what your Iraq policy is but to hear if you sound reasonably okay about making decisions for me about Iraq policy. I think that's how most people watch the debates. I would hate to lose them. I certainly hope we're going to have one tomorrow night but I don't know what all you guys think. I'm not lobbying against debates by the way. I don't want to have to shoulder that burden on top of everything else. It's not just about gaffes. It's not just about gaffes. Anybody else want to make a final comment on that? I think people, the undecided, the relatively small group of undecideds are trying to decide who they trust. Exactly. And I would simply add this. I'm as skeptical as you were John about debates and I blame in part the handlers who over-program these guys so that the real people are largely absent. But I do think that in a media culture that is accelerated in which we see things secondhand and at a very rapid pace any opportunity to see these guys for an extended period of time is extremely important and the debates offer the longest period of time that we will see the two men who would be president and that makes them enormously valuable despite all the limitations. Well, I want to thank you all very much and a patient audience participating with us. Thank you. We have our second forum in this series on November 13. Hope that we'll see you back then. Thank you.