 Good afternoon. My name is Amy McCreath, and I'm the coordinator of Technology and Culture Forum at MIT and the Episcopal Chaplain at MIT. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's event. Technology and Culture Forum is one of the three sponsors of this event. The other two are the Communications Forum at MIT and the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. It's a great pleasure to be working alongside those two groups on this event, which is, it turns out, the third in a three-part series, which began over a year ago. Last fall, we did two forums together. Both of them were about media and the elections. The first centered on traditional media and its role in the elections, and the second was on new media. And both of those were wonderful, lively discussions where we heard lots of views on a really important issue. So this forum has been sort of a long time in the genesis, but I'm glad that it took a while to come together because things have gotten even more interesting and the landscape has gotten even more complex and there's infinitely more even now to talk about regarding race and politics in the media. And we're very fortunate this evening to have two tremendous people with us to help us take a look at this topic and begin to get a sense of what's going on and why. So without much more introduction, I want to ask you to give a round of applause, sorry, to our moderator for this evening's conversation. David Thorburn is the director of the communications forum at MIT and a professor of literature at MIT. And he's going to introduce our two speakers and help moderate the conversation this evening. So with that, let's give a round of applause to David. Thank you very much, Amy. One of the joys of collaborating with various outfits at MIT is the other kinds of connections you make and I always think of Amy as the spiritual advisor to the communications forum. And even though I don't attend church or synagogue or any such thing, I think of Amy as my spiritual representative as many at MIT. It's a great pleasure to introduce our two speakers today. Our format will be the usual communications forum format in which the three of us will sort of engage in a kind of conversation for the first part of the session and then we will switch over to what is almost always the liveliest and most interesting part of the forum, question and answer session with you and the audience. So I urge you to sharpen your wits and sharpen your tongues and we will give all of you plenty of time to interact with the speakers. Let me briefly introduce our speakers today. To my far right is my colleague Jay Philip Thompson, who's an associate professor of urban planning and politics at MIT and the author most recently of a book entitled Double Trouble, Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Search for a Deep Democracy. I love the phrase deep democracy. When Philip and I were in conversations about this forum and there were some folks we were trying to get to join us that we were unable to, I called him at one point or he called me at one point to say was someone that we had hoped to get wasn't available and in the middle of the conversation, while we were working on the conversation, he said, listen, I can't talk for too long now because I'm preparing congressional testimony and I'm appearing tomorrow morning, so leave me alone. I hope your testimony was successful Philip, but it's a mark of the influence that his work has had that he is regularly involved in such a significant work, non-scholarly work as well as significant scholarship. I suppose in some degree all of you know who Juan Williams is, so I won't take too long in introducing him, but I do wanna mention a couple of things. As most of you know, he's the senior correspondent for National Public Radio and a political analyst for the Fox News Channel. He's a regular panelist on the Weekly News Affairs Program Fox News Sunday and a regular on the O'Reilly Factor, perhaps his most problematic job, some of us feel. Juan Williams began his professional career at the Washington Post and worked at the Washington Post in a variety of capacities for over 23 years. He served as an editorial writer, an op-ed columnist and the White House correspondent and national correspondent. What is less widely known about him, although people who pay attention to the bestseller list might realize this, is that he's also a prolific writer. And among his books is a biography of Thurgood Marshall that was recently re-released with an updated epilogue in 2008. He's the author of the essays in a book of photographs and essays titled Black Farmers in America, and the photographs are by John Ficara and that was published in 2006. I'm not gonna list all his titles because he's more prolific than most tenured professors. But I do wanna mention one other important book that many of you have heard of. He's the author of the book Eyes on the Prize, America's Civil Rights Years, 1954 to 65, a companion volume to the television series that many of you may have heard of. And he's published a range of other books on aspects of the black experience. So he's especially well-qualified, not just because of his experience as a journalist, but because of his work as a writer to address the kinds of broad questions we're going to be talking about in today's forum. With those introductions behind us, let me begin by asking Juan Williams to talk a bit about, given his long career as a journalist, about the ways in which he thinks the world of journalism has, if it has, opened more fully to minorities and especially to African-Americans. When one reflects on it, I mean, the fact is that he's an immensely prominent and influential journalist. 30 years ago, it would be very unlikely that an African-American would occupy the kind of distinguished position that Mr. Williams occupies in American society today. And I thought we might begin, Juan, by asking you to talk a bit about your own experiences coming up as a journalist and how you think the world of journalism has changed. Oh, Professor Thorberg, Professor Thompson, thank you for joining me, and I appreciate the invitation to be with all of you tonight. Look forward to the interactive part of this session with the audience going back and forth. You know, for me, getting out of Washington and being in touch with all of you here is a real pleasure. It really is a pleasure to be around people who have good questions, serious questions, and important dialogue, so thank you all for coming. I guess I would start off by making this sort of a biographical answer and say that, you know, my mom used to come home off the subway in New York and we lived in Brooklyn. And she worked as a garment worker in Lower Manhattan. And so she would bring me newspapers as a child, newspapers that were left on the subway by businessmen, even some newspapers that were left by businessmen going over to New Jersey. So I'd see the New Jersey papers as well as the New York City papers. And we're talking here about 1960s. And so we're talking about a time when New York City had, I believe, seven newspapers. Unlike today, you think of New York and you think of the New York Times and New York Post and New York Daily News. Then you had just a plethora of titles, Herald, World, Telegram, Journal American, all this at work. And for me, one of the great pleasures of being a kid at that time for me was baseball. And I used to read different sportswriters in different publications and compare them and think, well, this guy got in the locker room. He knows what he's talking about. And this guy looks like he was drunk or this guy's having a fight with his wife. He doesn't care. He didn't even understand the key point in the game. And so for me, this was like, wow, wouldn't it be great to be a journalist? You get a ticket to the game. You get inside the action. It's an opportunity to help people to properly explicate what seems to be just entertainment. It actually is a matter of skill and strategy and quite a fascinating game. Now, part of this then, this experience, was noticing, of course, that there were no people of color telling these stories. There were then, just coming into the picture, this was after the years of Jackie Robinson, obviously, but just coming into the picture were more players of color, no managers of color, obviously no owners of color and certainly no newspaper publishers of color. What struck me in this mix was the absence. The only time that I would see or hear about a journalist of color was when I saw a copy of the Amsterdam News, which was published in Harlem. And then sometimes on Sundays, there would be a community affairs program that would occur on some of the channels and it would be with a black host and they would seem to be paying attention to issues of concern to the black community. But for the most part, it was sort of a fantasy of mine to think, well, how could I break through? Now, I was the editor of my junior high school paper, editor of my high school paper. I worked, when I went off to a prep school, I worked as a journalist covering things like NAACP meetings or issues in the black community because they didn't have any reporters who went into the black part of Poughkeepsie, New York. And so I didn't play football or anything like that and occasionally I would go off and they wouldn't pay me for doing these stories, but they would give me a byline and for me, that was worth more than the money. I was just thrilled to go out and be able to write a story that would end up in the local paper. And then when I went off to college, I went to Haverford College in Pennsylvania. So the first year I did not work on the paper because I was concerned about meeting the academic requirements of that institution. But that summer I applied to work at the big city paper which was then an afternoon daily call of Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. It was the biggest paper in the city at that time. And again, it's just telling as we sit here in 2009, we don't even have afternoon papers in the United States today, but imagine in this city, Philadelphia, then I guess might still be, but about the fourth biggest city in the country, the biggest paper is the afternoon paper. And I applied for a job there and just sent recommendations and clips from my work elsewhere and did not put my age or a picture and got the internship. And I remember when I showed up, of course I was the only intern of color and I was younger than mostly interns who were either graduate students or seniors in college. And I remember the managing editor when he came in to meet with us called me out of the room and said, which one are you and how old are you? And I said who I was and that I was 19 years old. I think I was 18 actually. And he said something, one of these lines that gets seared into your memory, he said to me, this is not a babysitting operation and you lied to us about your age. And I said, I didn't lie, I just didn't put it in there. And he then asked me to leave. But it turns out there were people at Haverford who knew people who worked as journalists at this publication and they called back and said, you know, hey, the kid has summer housing here, you hired him, why don't you give him a chance? And so they gave me a job for two weeks. The deal was, well, we'll give him a tryout for two weeks. And then the issue was never raised again and I finished that summer. Then they hired me to work two days a week during the school years of sophomore and then they hired me the next summer and then they hired me again three days during the week for my junior year. Then I got a Dow Jones newspaper fund internship and I went to work at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island. And again, just to come back to your theme, there were some black journalists, very few in number, at the Philadelphia Bulletin. I can think of one woman who was on the city desk who was like, to me, the black Brenda Starr at the time. And then there was a very good boxing writer in the sports department, but that was it. And at The Providence Journal, there were none. So for me, it often felt as if, remember, at this time I had a big fro, I didn't look like this, right? I had a big fro, I'm skinny as a reed, I often come in with purple cons on. I look like a dandelion, the big fro and the skinniness. And I remember people in Philadelphia, because at one point, during one of my stints there, I was the number two guy at City Hall. And I remember Frank Rizzo and the people at the police department, they just had no concept how to deal with a black journalist, especially one that was young and had this big afro and was asking all these questions, just had never dealt with anybody of color in the position to tell the story and to hold them to account in that fashion. And it made for an interesting tension, again, that made it very clear to me that they were, I don't, threatened is the word that comes to mind, but I think threatened is too strong a word, but that for them, it was a shifting of relationship to a person of color. And that they were going to, they could not, they had to expect that there were questions that were gonna be forthcoming that they had not dealt with before, since the person with the pen was a person of color. And of course that got back to management, would had to make sometimes difficult decisions. So, and then after that, then I got an internship at the Washington Post and the person who selected me for that internship, it turns out, was a black city editor. And that black city editor was close to the man who at the time was the prince of the Washington Post, a man named Don Graham who went on to be the publisher of the paper. His mother, Catherine Graham obviously was the publisher at that time, but they had both gone to Harvard, they had both worked in Vietnam, and that's how Herb had made his way to Herb Denton. The city editor had made his way to the Washington Post, and then Herb was someone who was looking for promising journalist of color to bring into this institution. And I was the lucky beneficiary of his decision to bring me on. And this was a difficult time in the history of the Post because right after the riots and the assassination of Dr. King in 68, the Post and I think other major American institutions had a wave of black journalists come in. They brought them in realizing that there had been such rank discrimination and that they just looked out of touch and they were unable to properly cover minority communities in crisis. But what happened was, it's so telling, oftentimes those journalists were not given bylines or not put in charge of writing, they were sent out to gather information or go into these minority communities where white journalists might feel threatened or uncomfortable, and then they would feed the information back to the white journalist who would write the stories. And the black journalists felt they weren't moving up, weren't being promoted in these newsrooms, and then they had filed a lawsuit at the Washington Post against management. And that heard my mentor had been outside of that group. And so he was being, there was tension among the black journalists over this kind of issue. And then I come now along after graduating from Haverford in 76, and I'm sort of a second wave of black journalists coming in and Herb is looking for people who have had substantial experience in training as journalists, so that they will be in position to move up and to compete more successfully against their white peers in the newsroom and to really blow past some of these barriers. So that's the situation I come into, and of course I come into Washington, D.C., a city that is predominantly black and a city going through all sorts of power struggles of its own over its relationship to the federal government. So this is, I think I feel like I've spoken too long here, so I'm gonna stop, but that's the sort of, that's the basin of my, or the roots of my experience or my growth as an American journalist. One thing that strikes me from the account you're giving is that old cliche from Marx about when history repeats itself a second time, it's farce, right? Because what you're describing in a way sounds like something more contemporary where a situation in which various news organizations become terribly uneasy about the inadequate way in which they're covering racial materials, and they, one of the things I was thinking about was I hope some of you notice this because it seemed very obvious to me, right after Obama's election, many more African-American faces started to appear as television anchors. No one said anything about it, none of the networks acknowledged what they were doing, but it seems to me as if it was a sort of reenactment of what you've described in which the sort of established authorities became so uneasy about the ways in which they were sort of failing to cover things that they did this sort of reach out. And I'm wondering if, or let me pose the question in a broader way that has to do with the way we've formulated our argument for this forum. You may recall the basic description of this forum goes like this, the election of an African-American president in 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event, but has Obama's ascension transformed anything? Many people's answer to that question changed in the summer when Skip Gates was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the United States clearer now or murkier following the media tsunami of Gatesgate and has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media's coverage of politics? Let's begin with those questions. Well, it's sort of a broad agenda, but let me just go to the question of has this brought more voices of color into the picture, the election of President Obama? I think the most obvious consequence of Obama's election is if you look at the number of commentators of color, I think that has increased. I think if you look at some of the political discussions, especially on cable networks, notably on CNN, I would point to, I think you see more faces of color and younger people suddenly represented. And it's interesting at the White House these days you have correspondence there from essence and the like. Never people who would never have had a seat at the table, but it's also that they never asked for a seat at the table. Now with Obama there, I think with the celebrity quotient, you get lots of publications that market to audiences of color wanting to be there at the White House because they realize their readership, their audience is fascinated and tied in emotionally to the doings of the Obama administration. But when you said you see more anchors, I was wondering what you were looking at because I don't see more anchors. I meant the commentators. Yeah, I don't see any more anchors of color. And even, you know, I occupy a very strange terrain in that the Sunday morning talk shows in Washington are pretty much a conversation among elite white males. And I'm the only person of color who is there every week. My friend Donna Brazil pops up, I say once every two or three weeks on the ABC program with George Stephanopoulos. Once in a while, you might see Michelle Naras who's also with NPR or Jean Robinson, the Washington Post columnist pop up on Meet the Press. But in general, it's a conversation among older white males on Sunday mornings which is kind of the time that Washington gets dressed up to address our most influential audiences and talk to our most powerful players. And if you then go backwards from that and start thinking about things like the nightly news programs, the news there in terms of breakthrough is women, white women breaking through, Diane Sawyer being the latest, but of course, Katie Couric a few years ago to join into that elite fraternity. But there's no people of color who present the nightly news as anchors in this country. And when I get involved in conversations about hosting shows and this comes up in my life, I would say almost, if not annually, twice annually, essentially it always comes down to, well, is the audience going to relate to a black male as the lead dog, if you will, in this conversation? And I tell you the most chilling conversation that this kind I've ever had was with an executive at a black cable network who said, you know, black men especially who would identify with you like to watch sports and pornography, but we're not convinced they're gonna watch the news. And I said, you know, that's crazy, I can't walk a block in this country and I'm talking about blocking any neighborhood much less going to an airport or go to the gym without people saying, hey, you're Juan Williams and here's what I think. And why aren't you telling, why aren't you saying what I think? And they are just as likely to be black men as anybody else who see a face that they recognize from TV or a voice that they know is on the radio talking about politics. But again, in terms of the game that the executives play and even executives at organizations that are focused on the minority audience, there's just not a belief that the minority audience is going to respond to a high level of political discourse in this country. I think if you look at the history of BET, for example, it's just pretty stark in terms of the absence of news product. And the failure to invest in news product there to me is sinful. TV one hasn't had no news product even to the point of being embarrassed about failing to cover something like the funeral of Coretta Scott King and other events like that. They're now starting I think just last week or two weeks ago to try to have a Sunday morning program. I used to host a show called America's Black Forum which would air in the early mornings on Saturday and Sunday, often in community or community service, I forget what that slot is called and it used to be required by FCC of broadcasters but that's been done away with. But anyway, this program had come out of that era and then I had taken over as host James Brown who does CBS football was another host for a while. And so we would do stories of issues and concern, major newsmakers in the black and Hispanic community but that show was bought now I guess two years ago and what they did was they wanted to make it more hip hop, more celebrity oriented and they believed that would help that show to move up. The show is just about falling off the map I think as a result. I don't follow it very closely but it just doesn't have the presence that it used to have in the marketplace but the key here again is to my mind, the failure of institutions, major American media institutions to meet, you know, it's the difference between catering to an audience and pandering to an audience. And I think in many cases rather than cater or even raise the standards of news consumption and relevance of news for the minority community, they have chosen to pander to what I think are the lowest instincts in terms of that community. So you will have no trouble if you go home tonight in turning on music videos and comedians and sporting events and, you know, light sex content type productions but you will have a hell of a time if you're trying to find news content that is aimed at the minority community, black, Hispanic, Asian in the United States. Let's pursue this idea about the issue of minority news sources for a moment. I hope we'll return to the sort of questions having to do with major media in a moment but one of the things that has been argued fairly urgently by some observers of the universe of journalism in the United States has been that with the decline of newspapers because of the problems about advertising rates and the way in which the internet has undermined their readership in so many ways and the idea that newspapers are a dying phenomenon or at least a declining, a deeply declining one, one argument has been made that one of the effects of this has been especially bad for minority communities because the small newspapers, the newspapers that are aimed at minority communities are suffering even more and some of them are going out of business, can't find finances and I'm wondering what your impression is of that problem not just with regard to minority newspapers but other forms in which minority voices can be systematically heard and I hope you'll come in on this, Phil. Why don't you start, Phil? No, no, you're the expert on this. No, I'm not the expert, that's why I was trying to effectively see the table because I didn't have much to say. When it comes to smaller journals and obviously I've worked for my experiences with The Washington Post, I do op-eds for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA, I work for mainstream white publications and then of course Fox News and NPR again, mainstream overwhelmingly in terms of their audience and their leadership white organizations. So I don't have a tremendous wealth of experience in this area but I can, as an observer and as a consumer of this news, when I look at what has come of minority newspapers and minority broadcast in the country, here's what I see. I see that minority newspapers are pretty much on the edge, if not going out of business in terms of the old style and here I'm thinking of things like Amsterdam News that I grew up with or Pittsburgh Courier or Baltimore Afro-American, Washington Afro-American that used to be major voices in their community. I mean, they used to be the Bible. When I do work research in terms of historical research, I have to go to black newspapers to understand what's going on in terms of movement politics, in terms of life in the black community. There's nothing comparable to my mind. You don't, until you hit the brown decision in 54, even in such august journals as The New York Times, you are not getting coverage of the minority community. It's really tragic to see things like obituaries in which people don't even have names but are referred to as Aunt Sarah who was made in Mr. David Thorberg's home. That's their own, and that's the reason would be that he's a professor at MIT and therefore his servant is being given some acknowledgement in our paper today and that would be the only basis. Her humanity, her life, her family life would be, if not an afterthought secondary. So that moment when you had minority newspapers playing such a key role was also reflected then, began to decline, I should say, after 54 and has been going downhill and downhill even more rapidly with the emergence of a black middle class in the country in the course of the 1980s and into the 1990s so much so that it's for me now, something that occasionally I pick up the Afro-American in Washington or the Washington Informer. These are small black oriented newspapers. They do not have the resources. In fact, Ben Jealous who's now head of the NAACP at one point was head of something called the Negro Newspaper Public Association. Isn't NNPA, wasn't it used to be NNPA Negro? Yeah, okay, but it's changed now to be black newspaper. And he was trying to find some way to revive this group of newspapers by bringing them together sort of economies of scale so that they could benefit through collaboration, publishing agreements and the like. But it was very difficult to try to bring new life into these publications. Some of them are still struggling along. But overall, especially in New York, Philadelphia, DC, again an afterthought even in the black middle class communities. The other part of this though is that whereas you have such a small representation in terms of the newspaper world, you had a bigger representation in terms of things like Jet Magazine, Ebony Essence is a very successful, has been a very successful publication. So there's magazines that have grown, especially grown with the growth of the black middle class in the country. And then you have black radio, and black radio has absolutely been thriving. I mean you have tremendous success with people like Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey as morning voices to the black community. And I would say what's really curious to me is if you look for black talk show hosts you can now find them on Sirius and XM and there's specific bands dedicated to that content. It may be that one of the old saying from Dr. King about how 11 o'clock on Sunday morning used to be the most segregated hour in American life as people went to churches. Now I think you might say that when people are tuning into their talk show host you may come across again a world that is almost completely segregated. Who chooses to listen to the right wing talk show host versus who chooses to listen to black talk show? I don't think the white community has come up with an answer for Limbaugh. Maybe Ed Schultz who's now in MSNBC might be in that universe. They tried Air America and the like. Now Senator Al Frank and tried for a while. Never quite got it but in the black community black talk show host oftentimes local black talk show host are quite dominant and influential. I'm thinking here of is it Michael Bayston who was so key in terms of generating support for the Jenna Six and calling attention to that issue, getting people to go down to Louisiana to March. Again that's the power of local black radio as a platform. And I don't think that has been, in fact I think that has been growing not being deluded in modern America today. So are we- Wait a second, wait a second. You gotta take some of the weight here. I was gonna pose a question for Phil but go ahead Phil. No I agree with that. I would only add that when I was growing up I grew up in Philadelphia. The inquire had a lot of news coverage the Philadelphia inquire did. In there were black journals. When I went to college we all read the black scholar which was dialogue amongst black activists at one colleges basically analyzing all kinds of issues. There's nothing like that now. There was a newspaper out of DC that we used to read called the African World. Edited by Milton Coleman who I think ended up at the Washington Post at one time. And it used to cover the debates that were going on amongst black students actually and community activists over pan-Africanism versus revolutionary nationalism versus cultural nationalism versus all different kinds of views being aired out in the newspapers. And we read those things assiduously. And you don't see anything like that anymore. So one implication of our conversation is that the decline of newspapers maybe from certain angles is even more serious for the minority community than it is for the majority. That they're with the exception of these radio talk show folks who are reaching a niche community not the broader community. It seems as if there's less coverage of minority affairs less attention to pressing social problems having to do with African-Americans and minorities generally than there had been before. Do you think that's really the case? I would not put it on the internet though. I think the decline started before the internet. You mean you're talking about the source of the problem, yes. And there was a documentary film by Stanley Nelson called Soldiers Without Swords about the history of the black press that I would recommend. And one of the things I remember growing up from my grandparents, they read the black papers religiously. And in the film, they show black sleeping car porters on trains going through cotton fields in Mississippi where the Chicago defender was illegal. And the porters were throwing off bundles of the newspapers in the cotton fields. And then there were people who knew where the drops were who would pick up the papers. And there were a quarter million papers a week being distributed throughout the South in that way. And it gave me some insight into my grandparents about why it was the newspaper was just so important to them. Well, it gives me some insight into the power of journalism at a certain time. Yes, that's very interesting. And there's no equivalent to that in terms of print. I get has to do with the real sources, not so much the internet, but the decline of print in general. Well, I think for them, the newspaper was where you got really vital information about how the community is gonna advance or what's happening to the community and other places. And something Juan said that was interesting to me is that the black middle class maybe doesn't need that or feels that it can get information from other sources to satisfy those needs or perhaps there's a need for newspapers that address communities that are not middle class that have particular needs, but don't feel that any black paper is speaking directly to them about their needs. And that may be another source of declining interest. Well, you know what's, you take the Washington Post, for example, again, you're talking about a local, a city that's predominantly black, but of course the paper serves the region and especially those white suburbs. That's where the bulk of the circulation is to be found. But the inner city is clearly mostly black. And that newspaper covers news in the black community, obviously local news, but in terms of even national controversies. For example, you wouldn't have to find a black newspaper over the last few days to have read about Darien Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death in Chicago. You don't have to go to a black publication to get this now. In the 1950s and pre, before the 50s, you would have had to go to a black publication to hear about a black child dying, even if it was a particularly violent death. But now, in big city newspapers, you will get that coverage as a crisis situation. Obviously, if you have a black president, you're gonna get coverage of the president. You don't have to go to a specialty publication in terms of minority racial interests. That's in the big city paper. And again, if they're serving a population such as the population in Washington, D.C., and they're trying to hold circulation in any way they can, they'd be foolish not to include this content. But as I said, you see it in the New York Times, you see it in USA Today, it's there. And again, this is a departure and for this generation here in the audience tonight, you might think, well, gosh, you mean that there was a time when they wouldn't cover something like this? Yes, and not too far in the past. But I would say I worked in New York politics for about 10 years. And you're hearing a lot of coverage now about Charlie Rangel and his house in the Dominican Republic and things like that. And that's being covered everywhere. Within Harlem, there's been a lot of criticism for Charlie Rangel, not about things like that, but about what his prominence in Congress has not meant for local residents. And that's the kind of thing that at one time in history, you'd find a lot of back and forth in things like the Black Scholar or things like local papers. And the Amsterdam News used to have more reporters who covered these sorts of opinions. No one knows what the head of Johnson houses, there's public housing project in East Harlem, the head of the residents association thinks about Charlie Rangel. That's not in the New York Times, that's not in the daily news. It's nowhere, but in the community, that's a real issue. And so I think there's been a change. It's true. You will read about a shooting or a kid being killed in high school in a mainstream newspaper. You'll read about Charlie Rangel and his financial problems in the Dominican Republic now. But the voice of the community and the debates that I heard all the time, while working in politics in New York, I don't see in those papers. Right, right. Do you think it's possible that if it doesn't exist now that these kinds of voices might re-emerge? They've partly re-emerged, as Juan suggests, in talk radio. But do you think they might re-emerge on the internet that there might be ways that these community voices could aggregate maybe in ways they haven't yet done, but that might be possible? It seems theoretically the case that that should work, but I guess part of the problem has to do with access to the net and how often people have the habit of going on to it and using it in that way. But it would see, people would argue that some of what traditional newspapers have done is migrating in willy-nilly and inadequately in odd fashion to the net. These communal voices aren't there yet? Well, I'll start this. I think there are a lot of possibilities that have not been realized. And the internet being an example and there are some legal barriers, but I think there are some mindset barriers. And I'll give you an example. I used to be in charge of management for New York City public housing and about five years ago I got a call from someone who works for IBM who told me that the New York City Housing Authority was installing fiber optic cable to every single unit of housing in the Housing Authority in New York, which is 200,000 units, about 600,000 people are reached. And the optic cable would not only carry the security, video stream so they could buzz in people into the buildings, but it would carry cable news, as well as the internet and everything else. And IBM was bidding for the contract to install the fiber optics, but they asked me, why aren't the residents organizing, since they already have a residence association citywide, why aren't they forcing the information carriers, Time Warner and others to compete over the contract for who's gonna provide that information for 200,000 households. And we had some students here at the time, Randall Pinkett, who then went on the apprentice and won and sort of dropped this project. But for a while, he was working on this and he did a study and he estimated that agreement, that contract might be worth about 30 to 50 million a year for the residence association. So we then began talking to the residents, wow, you could have your own show. You could have your own news program for public housing. People will wanna come on your program, politicians and others. You could do a lot of things with this and with $30 million a year, we're talking about real quality. We're not talking about what we see, the sixth grade class and their annual glee club or whatever. We're talking about real quality, you could do this. Point being, there are opportunities to use media creatively to do things, I believe, that communities really aren't, there's not like a movement and we aren't even educating our students here who could be doing these things to actually take advantage of these kinds of opportunities that exist. So yes, I think it's largely theoretical at this point. Second thing I would say is this, there is a class divide in Black America now that's different. There have always been class divides but it's different and I'm not sure how this is gonna be mediated and I just think we can't talk about Black Americans like as one group and I just wanna give a personal example since you talked about your biography. I just wanna, I published this book in 2006 and it's an academic book and I have a cousin, a younger cousin, I'm from Philadelphia, I have a younger cousin who's a criminal and she runs a successful criminal enterprise and she's a lot younger than me and she, she sent her- She's probably richer than you too. She drives a much nicer car. She sent herself to Temple University, paid for it herself and she said, nobody was offering scholarships when I was trying to go to college. You all got scholarships, there are no such things so don't judge me, this is how I did it and in 2006, the same time I published my book, she published a book and out of her criminal enterprise, she started a publishing company and she publishes other criminals and they sort of change the names and write about their own lives and their own experiences and then she did a lot of marketing of the book and her book is on the Barnes and Noble's list, way down there, mine isn't. But my aunt decided- So what's the moral that- No, here's my moral- Criminal behavior pays better than profession. No, no, no, here it is. My family, even though we were poor, it was drilled into me, college, graduate school, make something of yourself, publish a book and so my family wanted to have this celebration of like, okay, you're a professor, you did a book, a second, that's what we want. But my aunt, whose granddaughter is the criminal, her book just came out so my aunt said, no, we're gonna have a joint book party for both of you and I have to say the contradictions were really evident right in the room, you know? It's a really different life experience. My cousin is every bit as smart as I am but her whole circle, a whole generation within my own family, they are completely in a different world than that, you know, my world. And I can't say that you're gonna reach both of these worlds on the same medium in the same way. That seems a very important thing to say. I even wonder sometimes if the coverage both on television and the national news programs and in the major national papers is insofar as it contains stories about African-Americans, it often seems to me as if it's about middle class African-Americans, not about working class people, not about the large number of unemployed, and in that sense, it seems to me there's one of the problems is, of course, that the readers are, newspapers reach out to their readers and the readers may be middle class and that may be a part of the issue. So is one conclusion we could draw here that despite the fact that we're not, things have certainly changed. I mean, the fact that you're a professor and you're a prominent commentator and recognizable in airports is certainly a change from what it would have been like 30 years ago, 50 years ago, no one would argue that. But one of the ironies is that with all the fact that we do have so many more, so many prominent minorities, has it, how substantially do you think it's actually changed social conditions in the real world? I'll start and I wanna tell another story. I used to teach at Columbia University after working in the city government and I used to tell some of my students, like Ben Jellis at the time, don't think you can do off campus the same things you can do on campus because Columbia University is in Harlem. And on campus I'd often walk in dormitories and I'd smell marijuana. If you walked, the police never came on campus and broke down doors and arrested people for marijuana on campus, never, ever. That didn't happen. You walk one block off campus. If there are police, if they smell marijuana, you're busted, there were Rockefeller drug laws, mandatory sentencing, hard time. And so I would tell black students, you're in a zone here, but you have to understand this is a protected space and you're still black. And if you walk one block off this campus, you're getting busted if you're doing some of the things you do on this campus. That's the reality. And so yes, you do have blacks at MIT and at Columbia and some in positions, that is true. But however, you walk one block off and there's a different thing going on there. And I would say it's a little different from the past as well. I mean, you could call it racial targeting or that sort of thing, but when I was growing up, you didn't have prison as a way of life. My family, they call it camp. They don't even call it prison. Where is Johnny? Well, he's at camp. It's a very serious thing. And so I think both things have happened in the last 20 to 30 years and Bruce Weston at Harvard did a study. He said, if you drop out of high school and you're an African-American male, you have a 60% chance of doing hard time before you turn 35. And that's about half that don't finish high school and drop out and 60% of that number. That's a different from when I was growing up. So both things have changed. And I say there's a kind of class divide that's different than when I grew up. Do either of you think that these realities are being adequately covered in the mainstream press? Do you think that the New York Times or NBC News has been adequate in their response to these kinds of issues? Well, there's several things I wanna say and I'll come to this in a second, but I think that the key point here is that all these major publications in terms of American newspapers, in terms of broadcast media are struggling to hold audience. And so what you're seeing overwhelmingly is that these audiences are becoming more fragmented and therefore, if you're a news executive, you are more focused on maintaining a niche inside a broadcasting or news publishing. What does this mean? Well, it means that, for example, just take a look any evening on your cable spectrum and what you'll see is MSNBC going far left. You'll see Fox News going far right. CNN struggling for some identity and losing numbers like bleeding. C-SPAN does pretty well, but of course, they're not rated and they're just public service, but I'm talking about in the commercial realm. You think about what's there in terms of American women. I know my wife watches endless hours of CSI law and order. They know exactly where you can find a woman's eyeballs and then there's for young males, I guess there's Spike and for kids, Nickelodeon and the like, Disney Channel. Huge ratings for these things, but again, breaking down the audience in a way that prevents, to my mind as a journalist, the common telling, the common sharing of an American experience of the telling of a tale. Now, I say that with full realization that for most of American life, we have not had the common sharing, but the audience has been an elite. In other words, these are stories about powerful people that are being told to powerful people, people who have money, who have the ability to go out and buy the products that are being advertised in the course of these news productions. What happens then in terms of minority news today is that minority news, if you look at publications like Ebony, Jet Essence and like, oftentimes they become vanity publications. It's not the case that they are taking on difficult issues about social crisis or speaking to the most compelling but sometimes tawdry stories of life in minority America and especially among the poor. To the contrary, they are exercises in saying, look, here is so-and-so who's just been promoted to vice president of X company and is an exemplar. Or here is a fabulously rich music star or singer and their lavish new house and the way that they're living large. That is in their publication, that's what they're featuring and if you're even talking about sort of national politics, something like Ebony didn't cover it for most of its life, Jet Magazine had Simeon Booker and I think it's called Washington Wire or Ticker or something like that and they have just little bulletins about the activities and oftentimes the social activities of prominent black politicians in Washington on the national level. So when you're talking about, well, do we get sufficient coverage of critical issues in white newspapers? I would say we don't get critical, important coverage of these issues in any publications for the most part and even today in what remains of the black press, they don't cover some of these crises with any sense of urgency and what you get and we've talked about the radio oftentimes being sort of a daily drum in the black community, the morning, especially the morning radio shows, you get sort of a collection of people saying, yeah, well, this is kind of the established popular opinion, this is the way we think this is going but there is no commitment to putting feet on the ground in terms of investing money and placing journalists in position to tell you critical stories time and again with any sense of dispatch, with any sense of trying to dig deep into a story and find systemic and identity of political power players who have their finger on levers that are causing distress in these lower income communities, it just doesn't exist. Another point to be made here is, as we were talking about the internet, is that you will see now obviously you have tremendous disparities in terms of internet access especially in minority and poor communities but what you're seeing is the black middle class and especially black intellectuals, they are creating space on the internet and so a publication like The Washington Post now has the root and there are other similar publications I think AOL had, I forget the name of these sites but places where what you're seeing is educated pretty much younger black people gathering to have the kind of conversations that you spoke about coming out of the black scholar at a time. So that's occurring but if you're talking to me about lower income people of any color using the internet as a place where they could organize, where they could mobilize, where they could create common identity and common purpose, I don't see it. I could be out of the loop but I tend to be aware if not involved and I just don't see it at this point. I would mention that a young friend of mine, his name is James Bernard, some years ago he founded a magazine called The Source and James went to Brown, went to Harvard Law School, he's African-American from Nashville but The Source, if I don't know if any of you have ever heard of that magazine in the audience, it was really directed at, and I get this all mixed up, the hip hop generation or the X, I forget, Y, X, I don't know which one, but since he had legal training, he actually scrutinized the contracts of a lot of these rappers, he wrote in the magazine how they didn't own the cars that they drive around in, they didn't own the houses, that this company was paying for this and that company for that, then he critiqued their lyrics and said, well what does it mean, if you're saying this is a bitch and black women are bitches, then what does that say about you? What does that say about your children? He would say things like that in the magazine and he had a real following, he got death threats, he had to go underground, he had to back away from the magazine and he's not publishing it right now. That is I think one sign that there's a real problem. The community itself doesn't want to hear bad news. No, some in the community do, but there's an element in the community that is intolerant of discourse and that's a real problem and there's not a lot of conversation about that, there's no coverage of that. Let me just pick up on this, in my life as a journalist, obviously when I identify what I think of as points of crisis in the minority community and write about it, it creates tremendous discomfort in the minority community. You would think that from my perspective as the journalist there would be an appreciation of the idea, well wait a second, someone who commands an audience who has a pen, who has a voice is paying attention, but to the contrary, the response is oftentimes why are you holding us up to scrutiny and to criticism in the white world? And why are you airing dirty laundry might be the shorthand for saying this. The most recent book that I wrote picked up on Bill Cosby's themes and the book's title tells you what book was called Enough, Phony Leaders, Dead End Movements, Culture of Failure in Black America and What We Can Do About It. Now when you write a book that talks about some of the points that you were touching on, half of our children not graduating from high school, 60% of the people in jail being people of color, when you start writing about 50% of the Hispanic population being born to single mothers, 70% in the black community, breakdown of the black family, there are people who say, you know, I don't wanna hear about this. This is not what I, and these are the same people who will say, you know, I want to read another story about Michelle Obama's fashions. But they don't wanna hear about reality when it comes to the struggles that are occurring in the black community. And the exception would be to say, well, if there is an example where there's a white policeman involved, then I'll hear about that story. But if it's the story about the problems that are bedeviling and I think crippling so much of the black community, let's say failure to appreciate value of education. People, there is not much of a market for this story. In fact, you will be hounded as you describe your friend. And you will be, and in my case, you know, it's easy to pick on me. You can say, well, gee, you know, you work for Fox. You work for NPR, you work for the Washington Post, you know, people will raise all kinds of things. Even if you were running the source. I think it's only Fox that people would ask me about. Even if you were running the source, which is intended to serve that generation, people would say, well, that's contrary to what we were picking up the source for. You are putting us down. And I, you know, this is not about the white newspaper per se. This is about the sensibilities in the black community and in that middle-class black community. Remember that, again, these publications, these broadcast outlets, in terms of serving that middle-class black community, is trying to give air or voice to issues that, oftentimes, not just escape that middle-class community, but are problematic for the poor and the poor are not the ones reading those papers or watching those broadcasts. Can I add one thing? I think there's a strata in the black community. Ironically, many of them benefited from civil rights legislation, such as black elected officials, who represent majority black districts and they want turnout to be as low as possible. They want the people, the only people they want voting are the three people that voted for them last time. And they don't want issues, they don't want people excited. And then you have some others who make a living. I brought in the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when I worked at public housing to talk about, to address public housing residents, and they decided to talk about reducing sentences for black crack dealers because they were getting longer sentences than white powder dealers. And this is what they chose to talk about to the public housing audience. And the public housing audience almost grabbed them physically because they wanted, if you were giving them ropes, they'd have strung up the crack dealers, like from trees. That is not what they wanted to hear from the Legal Defense Fund that was supposed to be quote unquote representing them. This is such an important point. And as a journalist, I find if you're dealing with the leadership, the leadership will say it's about crack cocaine versus powdered cocaine and sentencing. And you say, well, wait a second, have you talked to people who say they don't want any kind of cocaine that if you put crack cocaine houses in a community, it not only drives down residential housing values, it just creates street crime, it leads to all sorts of dereliction. People don't want it. That's the issue about whether this drug deal or that drug deal is getting a heavier sentence is not the issue for the people in the commit, it's hard to sell. What I agree and I think that one of the shortcomings of the civil rights movement was really dealing with the economy. And underlying a lot of tension right now is a real absence of focus on elected leadership, of elected leadership, black leadership, and others to address fundamental problems like jobs, fundamental, people can't pay their mortgages and raise their families, those kinds of things. And instead of dealing with that, a lot of officials move on to other issues like skip gates being chased off, arrested off of his porch. I know that's unfortunate, but you know what? That is not a vital issue in black America. It is just not a vital issue. What is really concerning to me is there was an election this week in New York and in several sections of the city, turnout was actually zero. This was a runoff. And in some of the poorest sections of the city, turnout actually was zero. And John Liu was running for city comptroller. The city comptroller of New York controls about $60 billion. And he is the sole decision maker on where that money is invested, $60 billion. This should be a, New York, black unemployment in New York is almost 20% officially. This should have been a major issue, a major issue. And there's been so little discourse, so little conversation, so little education about this issue turnout actually hit zero. To me, that is like the underlying kind of dynamic. One could also say, I think, that it marks a failure of journalism broadly, that this kind of question is, these kinds of questions were not systematically publicized to make New York citizens more aware of what was going on in the election. I think there was a piece in the times today about it, or maybe it was yesterday, but something like 2% of the population voted in that election. Shocking thing. We're gonna make our transition now to the open mic section where you folks ask questions and make quick comments, so get your questions ready. I thought that while you're getting ready for that, it's often the case if I just say, we're opening it to questions, there's five minutes of dead silence. So imagine this is the dead silent moment and I'll ask a transition question. Not usually when I'm around, people kind of jump at me. But one issue that's come up a little bit in the conversation here, I wanted to ask Juan about. Many people have made comments to me about this over the last few weeks because they knew you were coming. And I'm sure you've faced this question before, but let me put this in the least controversial way I can. Do you find or have you experienced any tension in your roles as an NPR commentator and as a Fox commentator? Do you sense that the cultures of those two news environments make different demands? Sure, they're hugely different. Obviously one is a visual medium, one is an oral medium, so radio versus TV have tremendously different demands to make on me as a journalist. And then the fact is that Fox is a cable outfit and that it competes in this very aggressive commercial arena and has identified itself as a conservative outlet. This is very different than the kind of sensibilities that operate at NPR. NPR's problems are that people would identify it as a liberal outfit and that it struggles against that identification, makes every effort possible not to fall into that niche. Obviously it fails sometimes, but there's a real effort to try to be a neutral source of news. And Fox has no such aspiration. What you get in terms of the dynamic of the presentation is again, on cable news, the idea is to be as provocative, argumentative as possible. You want the visual to be as appealing, sexy, outrageous, violent as possible. That's a different universe than NPR where my kids say, Dad, can you change the channel? This is boring. It sounds like they're droning on and on here. That's a different universe and a different sense of what you're trying to achieve in reaching the audience and the whole business about storytelling. A different sense of time, how much time is available for any segment on TV versus how much time is available for any segment, especially on our longer news magazine shows on NPR, there is a real battle over time when you come to things like Morning Edition and all things considered, but we can have extended interviews if you're tuning into NPR and you hear Terry Gross on Fresh Air, that kind of length for an interview just doesn't exist anywhere on TV, much less the cable dial. So there's huge differences that I would point to things like people don't even know who the hosts are on NPR. You definitely know in terms of primetime real estate, you know who Bill O'Reilly is, you know who Sean Hannity is, you know those primetime players. That's, again, a huge difference in terms of personalities driving the news and driving the presentation and the spin of the news versus what's going on on national public radio. So huge differences that I think are pretty obvious to anybody who comes in contact with them. And for me, what it means oftentimes as a voice in these arenas, for example, if I'm on NPR, I might be, you know, like tomorrow morning I'll be talking with Steve Inskiep and we're gonna be talking about sort of the liberal politics and its response to Obama over the last few weeks. You know, and it'll be a one-on-one conversation with someone that, you know, is trying to pull out of me as because I have great sources and I'm in contact with all these players, pull out of me an understanding of how the White House is reacting and how the political players on the left are reacting. If I was doing that on Fox, I would be likely in conversation not only with the anchor, but maybe another person. And the anchor, of course, would be more likely to be someone who leaned to the right and they might have someone who was a right-wing ideologue on and they might go first and then they come to me and then I'm trying to like deconstruct what I think is the spin and distortion that the other person has put forward before I even get to trying to make my point and we're involved in a fight in which they're trying to picture the left in sort of, you know, demonic terms and I'm saying, wait a second, I don't think that that's the whole story here, I think there's some real issues beneath it. So again, the role I play there is much more of the foil and the other, the voice that comes in and says, wait a second, here's my vision of it, which differs from yours, versus the role I'm playing on NPR, which is someone who has depth of understanding sources, level of experience that would help the audience to have perspective and context for the flow of news that they are consuming. We're ready for questions, people. There are microphones here. It would be helpful if you gave your name because this is being recorded and you'll be known for all of eternity on our archives. I'm just gonna jump in here because it's kind of a follow up, oh, sorry, I'm Madeleine, I'm a graduate student in the Comparative Media Studies Department here. A follow up about your experiences working at NPR. This isn't quite the theme, but I'm very interested in your opinion. In these forums, we often talk about the sort of decline of newspapers and the decline of media and, admittedly, I live in a bubble, I listen to NPR all the time. But it seems like NPR is doing a good job of weathering the storm from at least the outside. It seems like things are going okay for radio shows and I was wondering if that was just my opinion as an outsider who doesn't know anything or if you have any view about the survival of radio journalism. Well, first, thank you so much for listening to NPR. We love our audience. I'm sorry? Terrific. We have a very loyal audience and it's been a growing audience. After 9-11, NPR saw a spike in listeners and we have been able to maintain, hold on to those listeners for the most part, there's been a slight decline over the last two quarters, I believe, but it's been slight. So what you see is there's a tremendous rush to the kind of journalism on radio that's provided by NPR. Now, I will say that I think that this is an oasis in terms of radio land. I think in your question, it sounded as if you had NPR as synonymous with all radio journalism and I don't think that, I don't think you're gonna find much like NPR anywhere else on the radio dial that what you get are these talk shows where I think people are seeking to be outrageous, provocateurs, mostly from the right. And in terms of news content, maybe the top of the hour news from CBS or Bloomberg or Fox or somebody, but it's just, it's basically reading the headlines and it doesn't have the kind of depth and it certainly doesn't have the investment in putting correspondence around the country or overseas that you will see with national public radio. Now, you spoke about the economic crisis that's afflicting all of American journalism and suggested, well, you guys seem to be thriving. Well, from the inside perspective, we have just laid off about 8% of our staff at national public radio and the ability to move around to pay for things, again, has been limited by the impact of the recession, major gifts, investments and the kind of dividends that would come off of that money. It's not there, in some cases, that money has declined in absolute value given what's happened on Wall Street and that impacts our ability to function. So that is impacting the journalism from my perspective as a journalist. I notice it, I feel it. I'm just thrilled that you don't feel it, that you still feel that the product is something that can give you driveway moments where you wanna stay in the car and listen to NPR. That's our goal and we hope that you're getting more of it. Well, I just wanna say that I think that some of the, in a lot of ways, radio, particularly right wing radio, has become the real political party, sort of networks in society in that political parties don't really exist as real organizations anymore. They're more campaigns and then money's raised for a campaign around a particular candidate. But as organizations that sort of organize dialogue about politics on an ongoing basis, they don't really do that. And on the right, you have radio ideologues that actually do mobilize people. And a lot of people sort of identify with some of these right wing radio hosts. And then on the left, I don't think you have a similar sort of thing as Juan was saying earlier. I'm not saying there should be like a left wing ideological kind of equivalent to right wing ideologues. Because I think the whole thing is a little bit dangerous actually. And one of the things I really hoped for or hoped would happen out of Obama's campaign was that all of these volunteer groups and all of these participatory groups that were coming together across the country and there were thousands of them would somehow continue. And that they would organize dialogues in communities independent of not just like take orders from, you know, Rahm Emanuel or something, but they would actually organize dialogues and around important issues and function as a real party might. And the Obama folks have dropped it. I mean, they send emails out and things like that. But no one has really picked up on that momentum, the excitement and enthusiasm that I saw from people who participated in that, lots of young people, it's been dropped. And I think that's a dangerous thing in an economic crisis with two wars, a lot of contentious issues being debated and important issues being debated. And we really don't have good forums, I don't think, for people to come together and really work these issues through. And it's different sitting in a chair listening to someone talk to you as opposed to really being in a forum where you can have depth and complexity and nuance and so forth. And I think all of those things are critical for a democracy. Thank you for your comments, really fascinating. I'm Ian Condry, I teach in comparative media studies here at MIT. And my question is about journalism in terms of editors, especially and sort of the discourses of what counts as news. I spent a few years working for a Japanese newspaper and I work on Japanese media. And one of the things that struck me is that being outside of the media, it's very easy for us to criticize the media. But once you're inside it, it's a really much more complex system where it's hard to know where exactly the pressure points ought to be to change things. And one of the things I've noticed, especially watching coverage of Japan over the years, is how the stories of Japan that seem to actually get published, and this is one of the things I experienced working for the newspapers that a lot more stories are written than are actually published. And sort of getting through the editors and up the chain to actually getting in the paper was quite a trick. And that it seems that a lot of the stories that are published fit into already accepted discourses of what the news is and how we should spin things. And I don't know if that's your experience, but if so, I'm wondering about the ways that those might change. I mean, in Japan case, it's anything about those wacky Japanese seems to be the one that gets through the most easy. They got all these crows in Tokyo and they're terrified of crows or you've got a woman who makes a costume that turns into a vending machine so she can run away from robbers. And there's a kind of way of thinking about Japan as being this other thing and those stories get through and a lot of other things seem to get missed. And so this question of sort of the important stories not getting through and whereas Gates Gates and the celebrity factor plays a big role, it seems to me, in the stories that do get through. So I guess I'm curious if there are ways in which what's decided is news and is not news is changing and if so, sort of how that process could be improved to deal more directly with the important issues that are facing, especially the black community in America. Thank you. Professor Conradry, it's sort of across lines here that I hear this complaint. For example, you hear complaints about, as we think about Africa, for example, news from Africa, that it just fits into stereotypes of Africa. It doesn't really bring you a sense of the dynamic of life in Africa. It doesn't even bring you stories about Darfur. In a measure that would be commensurate with the tragedy that's taking place there. And so why don't we pay more attention? Or in the examples that you offered about Japan, why is it that we seem to go for what seems comical versus again, quality of life in what is a major power, industrial and economic power in the world? But the fact is that what you're doing if you're the editor of one of these publications and I'm talking about New York Times as well as a smaller paper in the Midwest, is you are creating a publication for your readers and what they're interested in is news that directly affects them as much as possible. So if you are writing about Japan, if they see that it's something that's kind of quirky and humorous, okay. But how many readers are truly sufficiently interested in Japanese politics to be curious about the inside baseball of the arguments that have taken place that led to a transition recently in political power that was a generational shift for Japan? Maybe one story when the election is done at most, but in terms of the regular coverage and a proper appreciation of the importance of this story, you're never going to get it in an American paper. This leads me to a larger point about being inside American papers at this moment when there's so much economic pressure that if you do focus group with American readers, what you see is that they are interested basically in local news. That's they want the sports page, the guys will get the sports page. We cannot get young women to read the newspaper and don't care what newspaper it is. Young women will say they're busy with relationships, they're busy with school. They'll say the newspaper seems to repeat itself a lot, that it's cyclical. They were writing about Obama and the healthcare yesterday and I see it's the same damn thing today. And I'll wait, the biggest newspaper for them might be the Thursday or Sunday paper with the coupons. But in terms of the news content, that's not what's driving them. So we have a hard time getting young women to read the paper at all. Young men will be drawn in by the sports page and the question is whether or not they ever make the transition to the front. And the struggle, the overall struggle is again to meet the desire to read about themselves in the paper. They want local news, they want local sports, they want more of that. They do not want more in-depth coverage of international news, sad to say, and they don't particularly have an appetite even for national news coverage. It's local news, maybe state news, but that's what is going to result in the sale of more newspapers. And one last point on this, when I ask young people, where do you get your news from? They say things like John Stuart, Stephen Colbert, Oprah, Leno Letterman, Howard Stern, you know, some of the comic people who are the dish jockeys in the morning, the shock jocks in the morning and all that. And they, you know, even if they say, oh yeah, but I watch cable, they'll start talking about Rachel Maddow or Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs. And I think to myself, oh my gosh, you know, they haven't talked about one reporter yet. Somebody who actually goes out, talks to people, gets news, collects news and tries to present it in a way that I think is impartial. They haven't talked about one such person yet. So that's the audience. Now, if you're the editor and you know that's the audience, you wanna serve that audience. You don't have to be a bad person or Craven to say I'm simply trying to hold this audience. How do I hold this audience? Well, it's not by giving them more about the intricacies of Japanese politics. That's not gonna hold their eyeballs or hold their attention. So the implication of this one is that the for-profit model is no good. That's true. But it's also, I thought that you were gonna say the implication of this is that the audience, what the audience wants to me is very curious. The audience will sit in front of me and setting like this and say, you know, why is the news media failing us? Why isn't the news media doing a better job? And then I think to myself, you know, what do you watch? What do you read? Or what do you fail to read? Over on this side. Hello, my name is Joanna, I'm a reporter. And I'm interested in knowing your opinion about the ways in which the media reflect intellectual black community and how the intellectual black people appear in the media, what is the image? And I would also like to know your opinion about the ways in which we can better reflect our multiracial societies. Black intellectuals in the media. In the media. And multiracial societies. Well, we were just having a conversation, Professor Thompson, about areas, especially on the internet, where I think there is more communities of black intellectuals reacting, following the news, having conversations with each other. So that occurs, I think, on the internet to some extent, not to any large extent, but it is there. I think it's present. If you were seeking it, you could find it. If you're talking about in the course of mainstream or mostly news organizations or news products that are oriented for a mainstream, mostly white audience, then I think the whole question of intellectual thought is really in short supply. I don't care what color it is. If you think, I often think of news as related to ideas, news is related to events, and I think at the bottom of this, I would put news as related to personalities. We have lots of news as related to personalities. People relate to other people, they're curious, et cetera. In terms of events, if you look at the way that news is presented, it's oftentimes in terms of a key meeting, a key rally or march, a key decision has been made, a key paper has been issued in Washington or something like that, a key report, those are events. But in terms of ideas, in terms of coverage of ideas, it is scant, because again, you're talking about what is going on in larger streams and it may be difficult to personify to put it in terms of a human being, which is the way that most people apprehend the news coming out of mainstream media in the country. So if you're then breaking it down and saying, well, what's going on in terms of black intellectuals in the country, then you'd go back to personalities. For example, one of the powers of Professor Gates at Harvard is that he is a celebrity personality, so that when he engages in his work as a professor, he has a greater chance to get into that mainstream media and idea. But they would largely couch it in terms of some work or effort that's being done by a celebrity black professor at Harvard University. Similarly, Cornell West shifting from Harvard to Princeton or something, gets more attention than any work that Professor Gates and Professor West may have engaged in. He hasn't done any lately. Well, I didn't want to get into it, are you? No, I mean, he hasn't written it. That's why he shifted. And you think about, again, in areas of, let's say, critical theories of race relations in the country, it would have to reach the point where it was a matter of policy argument that was going to be implemented before I think it would become evident in the kind of coverage that you would see in a mainstream newspaper or here in radio or television. It's pretty rare. I have noticed some interest on some of my black colleagues in doing more public media. So Melissa Harris Lacewell at Princeton was on CNN a lot recently. Carol Swain, who's a friend of a professor over there, has been on CNN and other networks recently. Larry Bobo at Harvard has been writing for The Root. And I encourage that trend because I think a lot of professors, by the time they get tenure, well, when they're trying to get tenure, they're writing for journals that 12 of their colleagues read and write letters on their tenure cases. And they're conditioned not to write in ways that a popular audience could actually interpret what they're saying. And then by the time they get tenure, they think that's how you do things. And I encourage this trend of black professors and students even getting really engaged with issues that are being talked about and debated in Washington or in their state houses or whatever. I personally have found that newspapers are interested in having you write something like that. I wrote something for the Boston Globe recently that the mayor's office asked me to write because they said somebody has to like, it was around green jobs. And the building trades actually went to the Globe and got the Globe not to do the article. But I thought that was fun because- It sounds like a news story itself. Well, you know, this is Boston. And there have been historic issues between the building trades and minority communities over jobs and who gets publicly funded construction jobs. And they just didn't want this sort of, you know, this kind of out there for the public. But we have a lot of people at this campus and on other campuses who are working on these issues. And the city should know what the data is. And they should know the history. And I think those of us in universities have an obligation, actually. We're subsidized, by the way, sitting here, even though we're a private university, we don't pay taxes. I think we have an obligation to use some of our skills that we've gained for the public. So I want to encourage that. And I think it could be, I don't want to say transformative, but I think it could actually help a lot in addressing economic issues or other things that I mentioned were problems that elected officials aren't talking enough about. I think it could help on accountability issues, you know, because sometimes we can say things, we're not going to get fired by getting in the face of an elected official or something like that. So I think it's important. Where we have about a little less than 20 minutes left, let me encourage, especially we on the panel, but also you who ask questions to be concise. Good evening. My name is Zindale Brooks. And I'm actually a student in civil engineering here at MIT. And I have a question on this lack of a compelling black news media forum. What role has Oprah played in all of this? Has she improved the situation at all, or has she brought us to the edge of an abyss? Well, I guess you assume that Oprah is a newscaster. Of course. She's opened the path for what forum? Since what she said wasn't on the mic, she said what the questioner said was that Oprah has such a powerful voice and created a kind of forum that might have gone in an information or a news direction, but hasn't. Is that right? Well, I don't think that she opened that path. I think that what she does is a show, again, if you think about what she's trying to do, she's trying to reach women, middle-aged, overwhelmingly white women, with a program that can compete with the other talk shows of the day. And she has had extraordinary, astounding success. And she is tremendously effective. And her new magazine, Oprah the Oh the Magazine, just tremendous, and her book clubs. But it is for that American, middle-aged, white, suburban woman audience at heart. That's what she does. I don't think of it as a news program. Now, it can be a highly informative program. It can be a sensitive program. It can be one that prompts you to cry or to laugh. That's the best of Oprah. And occasionally she might turn attention to something that she views as an important news story and try to help you to appreciate it, especially by, again, featuring personalities that then come on the show and make the issue real for that audience. But again, from my perspective, and I hope I'm not coming across as some old contankerous coot, but I don't think she's a news person. I don't think that's what she's trying to do. I think she's trying to cater to, I think she does the best of those talk shows aimed at American women. And she does an astounding job of that. But that, to me, is different than saying that I would hold her to account for not doing more news or not doing more serious discussions. Opening that form, I think, is what you meant when you said open that form. That's not her goal, and that's not what she's competing to offer to advertisers who pay her highly for holding that audience. I'm Victoria, I'm a freshman here. And I heard you talk about how you have these roles in your Fox News and other places and how they sort of lead to a packaged media style, especially with the competition between the three networks. I was wondering how the spin of the news and the drive to characterize it, or no, character, yeah, that's what I'm trying to say, and use buzzwords all the times, limits or effects, the depth of discussion of minority topics, especially with the rise of a lot of minority commentators. Well, that's interesting. What I'm saying is that you do have, if for example, if you're on cable television news, and again, the time is gonna be tight, and you're gonna have people using sound bites and visuals to advantage in the course of a debate. You have got, if you can speak in visual terms, in other words, create pictures with your words, especially play to pictures that might be being shown as you are speaking, you are in an advantage, right? That's to your advantage. If you said buzzwords, I think in terms of sound bites are things that are going to really stick in the person who's listening, who's having visual input as well as intellectual input, your voice, your words, that you have to be aware of it if you're in that environment, similarly or dissimilarly, if you are on the radio, and again, you're trying to create those word pictures too, but you have a different kind of environment and you're not in course of debate where you are being contradicted or someone else is firing off at you or interrupting you. It's a different reality, and it's a different experience for the consumer of news in that environment. So you're saying, well, how does that impact depth of discussion about minority news in the country? This is an example. Again, she's not on the mic, so I'm going to partly repeat you. The example she chose was from the John Stuart show, and you can respond, that's enough to... No, but for me, again, sitting here with this MIT audience, I hear about Oprah, I hear about John Stuart, but what they're doing in his case is he is making fun of the politicians, and he's showing how, in fact... The news media. I'm sorry. News anchors, news media, but I think he's making fun of a political class, and what you're seeing there is he's saying, you know, look, these people repeat the same kind of mess, they all get locked into the same language time, and again, isn't that funny? But is it revealing? Is it truly going to the essence of the discussion? Debate, I think even by his own standards, he says, you know, what I do is phony news. I'm not doing the news. How can you think this is the news? Well, let me tell you, he's fooling a lot of people. A lot of people buy into that. But I thought that you were saying also, how does this impact coverage of news as it relates to the minority community? I think that's a very important subject, because again, given the high percentage of stereotypes that exist about people of color, immigrants, women in American society, a lot of these, the kind of sound bites, a lot of the kind of pithy language that gets used in that environment, I think does not allow us to really come to grips with the issue, so that people sort of automatically take sides. I think people are very sensitive about, well, if I say this, it may come across to somebody as racist or somebody may shout back, that's a racist or that's a racial statement. And there is, as a result, a lack of that kind of important discourse. You just heard Professor Thompson talking about some really critical issues, but you would never hear that kind of thing because either they would be talking about the celebrity or what the celebrity said, or is it outrageous, or is it offensive, as opposed to the actual content and how it is impacting or the consequences having on the lives of people in a community. Which side are we on this left? The longer I stand here, the longer my question gets in my head, but my name's Sandra Larsen, I'm a freelance writer, so you've talked about some interesting things about a debate among blacks and how that might have declined. But from a perspective of mainstream media, I wanna know what coverage you think is actually most lacking, and maybe the better question is, which would be more important, say, in terms of the African-American community, to cover more issues that are uniquely African-American or to just more routinely include African-American examples and opinions and characters in stories that are more general. And maybe, I was wondering if you had a couple of examples about a national issue, anything from how people are paying for college education to the foreclosure crisis to global warming, issues that are just reported generally, would it be more important to focus in on a specific aspect of it that means something to a minority community or just to always include people of all types when reporting a story? Well, a lot of this is generational. For example, there was a time when people of color were not included in sort of mainstream coverage of politics or the economy, child care or whatever. You know, because again, most of the audience for New York Times or CBS News or NPR is white people. And so they're trying, they're relating to that audience. And then there came a day when you would see black faces pop up left and right or faces of color of any kind, or you would see women pop up and you'd say, well, look, now there is a greater awareness of the diversity of the audience and of people and of the society. And of course that's shifting as we see, now I think it's a third of the American population made up of people of color. That's shifting as you see women come into more positions of prominence in American life, whether it's Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court where you just had a, you know, the president basically considered only women for that position. I mean, so the idea of, you know, look at the highest, most qualified legal minds in the country and look at this group of women, that's different. But that's separate from the kind of intentional use of saying we want to make a presentation here that would suggest that we are aware of racial difference and we want to highlight people of color or women in this presentation. That kind of intentional coverage, I think, occurs occasionally. It often seems tendentious or heavy handed in some ways. And again, it's speaking to the sensibilities of that overwhelmingly white audience. But when you get into these stories, especially about poor people, it's handled in what I consider to be a very intriguing way in that too often poor is conflated with minority and then all of a sudden you think, well, gee, everybody on welfare in the country is black or you think everybody who's involved with school violence is black or something like that. Then you think, well, wait a minute, now you've gone from one extreme to another and you are in fact distorting this story or you're not covering this story fear, you know, like the people sometimes you'll see in coverage of something like homelessness, they'll be showing you lots of white people on the street and you think, wait a second, when I'm going on the street, I see a disproportionate share of people of color among the homeless. How come when they, but on TV they may be saying, you know, we don't want to get any complaints from anybody that says you only show people of color who are homeless. That's the kind of dilemma that the editor or the editorial director can get caught in as they try to present that story. I would just add that I think there are a couple of important issues that it would be helpful if they dug more into black communities, for example, and told the story a bit differently. So, for example, in studies have shown, in black communities, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether a black person has health insurance or doesn't have health insurance in terms of how often they see a doctor. And that's not true of the white community and the black community makes no difference whatsoever. This is in studies. And the reason is because most black communities have no primary healthcare system whatsoever. And so there are no doctors except at the hospital. So if you get sick, whether you have insurance or whether you don't have insurance, you have to go to the hospital and wait in the emergency room and it takes a long time. A lot of people just get frustrated with that. They don't go unless they're really, really sick. So the whole focus on public option, no public option, single pair, no single pair, it's defined as like this is the cutting edge thing that's like gonna make the difference for everybody and whether or not they get to see doctors. That's not the full story. And in minority communities, particularly black communities, that's not even the main part of the story. And so that's one example and another would be mortgage foreclosure, which foreclosures are seven times higher in black communities. And how did that happen? Well, that's kind of an important story that you don't hear a lot about. How did it end up seven times higher in black communities? And it's an interesting story about black brokers working for big mortgage brokerage companies selling junk in black communities. And it raises a real issue about if you're in the black community, where do you go for reliable information? Because I did focus groups with a lot of these women who lost their homes and a lot of them trusted these brokers because they were black and because they felt they wouldn't get screwed by these folks. Because historical ties, identity, all this sort of thing, and they were getting screwed. So I think that's an important story, personally. Again, we only have four minutes left, people, so let's be very brief, both questions and answers. Okay, so first, my name's Adjo Boacci. I am a freshman here. And I wanted to draw attention to a reality first then ask my question. You talked about how it's difficult for you being in the media to get certain issues out into the public. Maybe not in a forum such as NPR, where you can kind of talk about your own in-depth knowledge, but maybe in print media, the newspaper, where you have to go through an editorial board or Fox News, where the time segment is shortened. But in saying that it's difficult for you to get your specific issues out there, you also then want and criticize another form of media that portrays issues in a way that people who might not necessarily listen to NPR or go and read the entire newspaper would be exposed to certain issues that they might not have. So... You mean like non-news sources like the John Stewart show or Oprah? Yes, yeah. So I kind of wanted to ask you what you think the responsibility of media is. Seeing that not all people are going to pay attention to the issues that are happening in Japan or are exposed to the world. So how do you think media should appeal to all of these different groups? The poor, the middle class, the upper class. Exposing the truths that you seem to want to discuss. Because in my opinion, I think Oprah does bring the news to people. She does it in a different way than a philosophical black scholar magazine might, but she brings the news to a group of people that might not have seen it in a way that they would be interested in hearing. So what's the responsibility of media? What would you like it to do? What would I like it to do? Let me just say that on Fox News, I don't have any trouble saying what I believe or what I think is kind of the heart of the news. I can say what I want to say. I'm saying it in a more combative environment and on NPR, again, time constraints exist. It's just, again, I think it's a more deliberative and direct form where I'm in conversation with someone and I'm not having to be argumentative. I don't think that the visuals are distracting. I don't think there's someone sitting there who has collagen in her lips and shiny legs. I'm able to just have this more direct conversation. Now with Oprah, again, what I said to the previous questioner on this topic was Oprah will typically personify an issue. She'll say, here's a person who went through a personal struggle and an issue and here's her story for the first time speaking to you today. And then, of course, there may be celebrities involved with it and celebrities who've made it their cause and you can see pictures of the celebrities traveling into this ailing and distressed community, you know, that kind of thing. And you're saying, well, that makes it good for the audience. Now we can appreciate and understand it. But from my perspective as a professional journalist, my perspective is if I can get time and I can tell this story in such a way that really speaks to why people, let's say, are victimized by predatory lending, I'm not trying to talk down to you. I'm not trying to say that I don't expect that you are going to be able to understand this unless I make the lead about a specific mother although that could be the way to do the story. But that's just one of the ways to do it. And I think that you have an obligation as a highly educated American to be an informed consumer of news. If you're waiting on Oprah to get to it, there are lots of stories she won't get to because she's busy with Whitney Houston. And I love Oprah, I just think Oprah's doing great stuff and she does bring some stories to attention that otherwise would not have mass exposure. But God bless her, she's not responsible for you picking up a copy of The New York Times once in a while and seeing these stories as real reporters are trying to tell them to you in terms of the political interplay that is causing these stories to occur way before Oprah's producers also pick up The New York Times, then try to figure out a way to package it that would appeal to you as you are watching TV and catching the Oprah show in the afternoon. So I just want all of you to have a sense of your obligation to be informed consumers of news and be able to distinguish between what is personality-driven presentations even from someone with a very high and positive level of consciousness like Ms. Winfrey versus other presentations that may not be so high-minding. We're actually one minute over, we will stop at 7.05, there are three questioners. I hope we can get to all of you but you have to be very brief and so do you. Right, well, hopefully. We stop at 7.05 regardless. Isn't it 7.05 right now? It's 7.01. Okay. The official clock is in the back if you're interested. I see. So I guess my question is, I'd like to ask what is the role of identity or image in media consumption? I think that's something you guys both touched on. So for example, of course, someone like John Stewart who is presenting himself as a somewhat cynical and sophisticated consumer of news to people who perceive themselves that way. And or for example, like the black middle class, like you said, perhaps not so interested in the New York Comptroller election because perhaps they perceive themselves as being unrelated to these issues. So how in media do you then engage people who don't have a self-image of themselves in these sort of issues, you know, poverty or these sort of things? And how do you engage them so that they're actually interested in this news because as you said, otherwise they won't listen to it. You only have one sentence to answer. Maybe we should take all three questions. Well, let me just try. I'll just try very quickly and say, again, what you can try to do is bring a face, a human face to the story. I think if you made it plain upfront in the way that Professor Thompson did, the connection between the power of that office to control billions of dollars that could lead to contracts and where those contracts go and are they going into your community, into your pocket, are they going into somebody else's pocket? Then you could make it real. That's the best that you can do is to give it attention. And again, you might see some publications or broadcast that would literally launch a crusade about it and say, hey, there's this office, people aren't paying attention, but it has tremendous power in your community. But that would be a rarity. It's more often the case that they would do it a one-time hit and say, hey, look at the connection between monies that are going to be allocated and the power of this person that will be elected. That's the best you can do. Again, it's interesting in these questions. You guys always put the onus on the media and I'm thinking that's great. We're trying, but strikingly, it's the audience that prefers the cynical, ironic attitude and doesn't pay attention to the in-depth kind of issues that I think are available, but oftentimes go unattended and unappreciated by the audience. On the right. So given the audience's rather shallow personality-based interest in the news, how do you see your societal impact in terms of the information you've put out there for people? My societal impact? I hold myself to pretty high standards in terms of trying to do serious journalism and trying to help people have an understanding of how power works. I go back to books like The Power Broker about Robert Moses and you see the impact of someone who in his case was an elected official, but decisions that he made. So my fascination is with who gets their garbage picked up, who gets their streets paved, who gets to send their kids to good schools, who feels safe on the streets in their neighborhoods, gets good police protection, gets good fire protection. What are the basics of your life? So if you're hearing me on Fox, if you're hearing me on NPR, what I hope I'm doing is giving you information that makes you a more informed voter, a more informed activist in your community, someone that helps you to have a better understanding of the forces at work that are leading to decisions and policies, regulations that are impacting your life. And otherwise, why would you listen? You have to trust me and expect that I'm delivering something of value that expands your base of knowledge about a political dynamic. And if I do that, then I'm doing my job. Final question. Well, I just want to say MIT has some of the brightest engineers and scientists in the world and it is one of the most socially ignorant places I've ever been in my life. And so I would say to all of us, and it's a little scary, because people are making devices here that have big social impacts and there's very little consciousness about any of these things we're talking about here tonight. So I think this isn't just a question for journalists in terms of what are you doing to have a societal impact. I mean, what are each of you doing on this campus to have an impact? Mr. Boyd. Actually, I don't have a question, I have comments. Okay. I'm Nolan Bowie. I teach at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I teach courses concerning information communications. I'm a former public interest communications lawyer. I used to run a law firm funded by the Ford Foundation that allowed me to sue the FCC and the government and media companies and what have you. But that was way back then when there were regulations. What I'd like to do is David concluded his initial remarks in summing up Field in One's comments by saying perhaps we've heard examples of the failure of journalism. Not only do I think that journalism is failed but I think the market for good journalism and news has failed but also I think that there's a failure of government and of democracy itself. Because in a democracy, citizens need to be informed and one of the roles of the media is to inform them and act as a watchdog. I'd like to suggest some references for members of the audience who would like a better understanding of race, politics, and American. Nolan, you have to do this in 30 seconds. We're already two minutes over our absolute time. Well, I mentioned that in 1968, for example, or 1976, no, 1968, there was a number of blacks, African Americans hired as reporters in newsrooms. There wasn't just in Washington, it was across the country. And the reason was that was the year that the so-called Kerner Commission Report was published and that was a blue ribbon committee headed by Otto Kerner pointed by Lyndon Johnson to study the causes of civil disturbances in American cities. It was referred to as the United States Riot Commission Report and they concluded on that that white racism was the primary cause and there was a whole chapter on the role of the media and it showed that the media either undercovered, didn't cover or miscovered the black communities and immediately afterwards all of a sudden black people all over the country were qualified when the day before that was published, they were not. The FCC even changed its rules and began to require employment accounts and reporting. And by 72 it said for the first time that discrimination in employment by broadcasters was not in the public interest, which implies that before then maybe it was. In any event, I'd like to recommend three resources that those members of the audience who would like to further study this issue, one being the Kerner Commission Report itself. It had no teeth but it had great recommendations. The other two, one is the Pew Annual Report stated the news media 2009, which you can pull off the internet and find out that it's not just radio or television or newspapers, but also cable news and even internet news which is losing audiences. Perhaps people don't want to know, they're so distracted by other important concerns and moreover perhaps the media is not giving them what they need. The other one is one just published on Friday and I'm holding a copy of it here, it's called the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. I think it's something that everyone ought to read. I don't have time to go into details, but that should be a start. Thank you, Noel. We have to stop. I want to thank the audience and thank our speakers. It was a pleasure. Nice to meet you. Good to be with you. Nice to meet you.