 Good afternoon. My name is Amy McCreath. I'm the coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this event, New Roles for Established Media. This is the second of a two-part conversation that may turn into a three-part conversation on democracy and the media and how the role of the media may or may not be changing and having an impact on our political system as we approach next week's election. As I said, this is the second of what we have as a two-part series. And our hope is to do a sort of post-mortem event next February to look back on the election and take a look at what happened and the role that the media did play. So please stay posted for that. Watch for that. This series is being brought to you as a joint project of the Technology and Culture Forum and the MIT Communications Forum. And I want to thank David Thorburn and the people at the Communications Forum. It's been a real pleasure to work with you on this really important series. We're very glad to have with us this evening three excellent panelists to lead this conversation and a great moderator to help keep us on track. And in a moment, I'll introduce to you that moderator and we'll get started. I do want to let you know, though, as we begin, that Amy Mitchell, one of our presenters this evening, has provided us with a handout. And some of you may have picked that up on your way in. It's a summary of a report that her group has just published this week. If you didn't get a copy of it, you can also download it from the website of the Communications Forum, which looks like this. If you go to the MIT Communications Forum website and click right here, you will go to the page about today's event. And then at the bottom of the page, you can click here on the title of the report and get a copy of it for yourself. So if you didn't get a hard copy today, that's how you can get a copy after the event. Our format this evening will be that each of the speakers will speak for about 15 minutes or so, 15 or 20 minutes, and then we'll have plenty of time for questions from you afterwards. We're scheduled to go until 7 p.m. And so we should have at least an hour for conversation. If you have a question, please do come down to either the microphone on this aisle or the microphone here on this aisle so that we can record your voice and your excellent, wise question. And so that all of us can hear your excellent, wise question. And with that, let me introduce the moderator of this evening's conversation. Stephen Van Evera is a professor of political science here at MIT. And his specialty is international relations and U.S. foreign policy. He teaches classes here at MIT on the causes and prevention of war and on national security and international relations. And we're really glad that he's agreed to shepherd this conversation this evening. So thank you, Steve. Thanks, Amy. I just want to introduce all three of our panelists and remind you how to do your Q&A when we get to Q&A. All I want to remind you there is that we're recording this for MIT World, which is the spot on the website where you can go to see past events at MIT where you can find them on streaming video. And so when we get to Q&A time, use the mics so that MIT World will catch your questions. Tonight we've got three panelists. They're all terrific, and thanks so much for coming over to MIT in the order in which they're going to speak. First is going to be Amy Mitchell. She's the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, DC, where she oversees research and empirical studies that come out of that project. She's also the editor of a book that came out in 2003 called Thinking Clearly, Cases in Journalistic Decision Making. And she's going to speak first. Then we're going to have Alex Jones, who's a very distinguished journalist. Worked for nine years at the New York Times, covering the press from 1983 to 92. He won a Pulitzer Prize there in 1987. He's been a Neiman fellow at Harvard. And you often heard him on NPR, where he's the host of NPR's show on the media. And he's also host and executive director of the PBS TV show Media Matters. And so we're very glad he's here tonight. And lastly, Mark Dierkevich, who's the media writer for, I should point to who's who. Can you read their names? Mark Dierkevich, Alex Jones, Amy Mitchell. Lastly, Mark Dierkevich, who is media writer for the Boston Globe. He's been doing that since 1987. He earlier was media critic for the Phoenix, Boston Phoenix. And you've often seen him on channel two on the Beat the Press program, which is once a week, right, with Emily Rooney, right? There you go. So at 7 o'clock, you can either choose to listen to Tom Ashbrook or Mark Dierkevich. I have to watch this episode if you don't want to. Is that true? Yeah. OK, great. OK. So there's more options coming our way. So Amy, you're first. And I suggested maybe 20 minutes for each. And then we'll have a lot of time for Q&A. Amy Mitchell. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here this evening, even though I am a St. Louis native and a big baseball fan. So congratulations, I guess. The question of today's forum, our new media transforming today's news that we're receiving and the electoral system. Clearly, the role of the press in our society is a crucial one. Since our country's birth, the role of journalism has been defined often as providing citizens with information so that they can govern themselves. The election is perhaps the pinnacle of citizen's decision-making power. And new forms of media and the new 24-hour news influence the press practices and reporting about the election, as well as the quality and the type of information that we get. So what kinds of trends have these media set? How have they helped? In the political process, they certainly have offered some good. Internet links to voter guides and background information about the candidates are clearly an asset, as are more availability of verbatim candidate speeches. Blogs are an opportunity to hear from those outside the mainstream press and to offer our own voices in response. Even cable can help by getting information to citizens quickly. What we have now is more of an on-demand news consumer. Getting news, even Mark's news, election or other, when and in what form we want. And this can be an asset. But these innovations must necessarily come after the most fundamental role of the press, that is reporting, providing the information. Here, the new media don't seem to be raising the caliber very much. In fact, what we've recently seen from the newest form, blogs, is mostly a furthering of tendencies established in cable and the mainstream press. As the introductory remarks mention, there are copies of a study that we just released yesterday that looks at coverage during the debate period, that is the first two weeks of October. The study, the main part of the study, looked at newspapers, network, evening and morning news and two cable shows. It finds an amplification of the tendencies that emerged in the 2000 campaign, a strong preponderance towards reporting about inside politics. 55% of stories focused on political internals like the candidate's performance or the campaign tactics to latest strategies. This was a 14 point increase over 2000. In coverage specifically about the debate, political internals jumped to 79% of all the coverage. Policy discussions in contrast were largely absent. Just 13% of the coverage focused on explaining policy, almost exactly the same as in 2000. And again, in debate coverage, the picture got worse. Just 4% of the coverage. So in these four debates, when citizens are supposed to be learning the differences and where each of the candidates would take the country over the next four years, less than one in 20 stories actually examined policies. In addition to the frames of stories, we looked at something else. Who did these stories predominantly impact? Based on how the stories were put together, who is most affected by the events described? Is it citizens, politicians, interest groups? About three quarters of the coverage we studied was written in a way that mostly impacted politicians. Just 20% primarily impacted citizens. This concept of impact can be a little bit hard to grasp, so I'll just take a second to try to explain it. If you think about it, any topic, whatever you're writing about, can be developed in umpteen different ways. Think about a story about a car crash on first and main street. It could be written as a way of discussing the teenager that was driving and the rise in teenage car fatalities. It could lead to a discussion about the intersection. It's one that many citizens have complained of being dangerous, or perhaps discuss the fact that it took the police an hour to get there, a sure sign of the governor's recent budget cuts. One example in this study is a print story on the eve of the second debate that was devoted to outlining how different events in the news had added, quote unquote, new ammunition for the carry campaign in this upcoming debate. So again, we saw 74% mostly impacting politicians versus just 20% that mostly impacted citizens. Compared with 2000, this is a 7% decline in citizen impact and an increase in the politician impact. So we have politics over policy, politicians over citizens. Then we ask, how do the media differ? Are the newer media altering these tendencies, changing the nature of reporting? Are they getting better? The short answer in this study seems to be no. Television was more prone than newspapers to frames of inside baseball. They were more likely to produce stories that impacted politicians over citizens. In cable, we looked at just two programs, CNN's News Night with Aaron Brown and Fox's news program with Britt Hume, but we saw many of the same tendencies. So we then did a separate examination of the newest media phenomena, the blogs. We looked at five of the most popular blogs to see if their focus over these two weeks differed from that of the mainstream press. Overall, we found them to be conspicuously similar to the mainstream press and what they covered, the tone of that coverage, and even in the angle that the writers took. The vast majority of debate postings were focused on inside politics, fully 70%. These are mostly evaluations of the candidate's performance often in real time, throughout the campaign, you get these continuous postings of the latest comment that one of the candidates made. A mere 6% of all the debate-related postings focused on policies of one candidate or another. These findings seem to suggest that the blogosphere may not be changing the media agenda as much as adding more pointed, personal, and frankly blunt voices. Excuse me. In other words, furthering the growth of opinion news, but in an even more one-sided way than the cable talk shows. So that brings us back around to the most basic question excuse me, of how much a citizen is aided by increased amounts of information and more convenient access if the information itself is less useful or at least less geared towards the needs of citizens. I'll now just take a minute to address another question that was raised in the forum's overview, which is a question about Fox News's highest ratings during the Republican Convention. And it seems to me that the bigger question is the choice of the networks not covering it, choosing not to cover the bulk of the conventions. And what this signified was that the prestige, in many ways, and the influence of the news divisions at these networks are no longer important. So as the networks end up ceding TV news to cable, what difference might that make? For one, different ways of giving the news in cable and in network will provide a different outcome. Network news is primarily built around packages. The carefully written, edited, produced packages. In a 2003 study that we did, 84% of network news came out as packages. Cable, on the other hand, is a live extemporaneous medium. Just 11% of their coverage was edited in what we studied in 2003. What's lost in this live coverage, in this live medium, is the time to double check, to verify the time to report. And I think what we'll see is even more of that if you look at what's coming out in the blogosphere. So a Fox's convention audience may not be all about Fox. It certainly does seem to be significant. Thanks, and I'll look forward to the other comments. Thanks, Amy, I guess this is working. Next, Alex Jones. Hello, glad to be with you as well. You have now heard, I'm sure, so many times that it's boring that this is an election of enormous, perhaps transcendent importance in terms of our own lives, anyway. I would argue that the election, this election, is also of an extreme important nature to the media in this country, not in as clear cutaway as the Bush-Carry demarcation. We know that after election night next week, sooner or later after election night next week, we will be on one path or the other, it will be quite clear. With the media, I think that the election mostly has given us a moment to look at what has happened since even 2000 and where we are going. You heard the excellent analysis, content analysis that Amy gave you. What I'm gonna give you is more impressionistic, perhaps, but I think that it captures, for me anyway, some of the themes that I see emerging that are very, they're genuinely troubling, I think. They are ones that are fundamentally recognizable to you, I suspect, but it may not be that you have put these in quite this context. We'll see. Let me begin with the question of how good a job have the media done. This is a perennial question about this time for elections and it really is the question that really is being asked is how poor a job has the media done. I mean, there's always the presumption of failure and it's fair because the fact is that we look at these kind of job reviews and they are inevitably filled with things left undone and roads taken that perhaps should not have been and as Amy described, emphasis that was misplaced. But I'd like to come at it from a somewhat different perspective and ask the question, do the people in this country know enough to make up their minds about who to vote for? Which is really the point of campaign coverage, it seems to me. For this we need to begin with a concept that you may have heard of called rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is the mechanism that we all employ to do some screening. We decide if an issue is something we need to know more about and therefore need to take the time to learn more about or if it is something that we satisfy ourselves that we know enough about to make up our minds and the likelihood that we can't do anything about something increases greatly the likelihood that we would not take the time to learn in great detail about the plight of Ecuador right now or even something that's much more timely as what's going on in Sudan. The idea of rational ignorance simply says that we use our time and our attention, which is limited in the way that we spend our money. We spend it in the way that we consider to be wisest. And so we here now in this election are presented with a highly, highly politicized body of voters. Predictions are that this will be an election that will have a higher vote than any vote since 1960 and may exceed 1960. The vote is being made by people who for the most part have made up their minds already and have already said they've made up their minds in most cases even weeks ago. There are still some people, there obviously are things changing all the time. We see the variations in polling. I was told today that in the state of Iowa virtually every person who is eligible to vote is now registered. I mean almost 100% registration in Iowa. I think what that says is that there is a body of people out there who have satisfied themselves for whatever reasons and on whatever basis that they know enough to make up their minds about who should be president. Then you take that to the next level and you try to plumb what they know and whether they know enough by any kind of objective standard to feel that way. The most amazing set of statistics that I've yet seen in this election were released about a week ago by the program on international policy attitudes at the University of Maryland. This organization tracks what people, what voters, prospective voters say they, say who they're gonna vote for, who they're inclined to vote for and what they believe to be that person's platform, what he stands for, what he's for and what he's against. And what they found was that while the people who say they're gonna vote for Kerry have a reasonably good idea of what Kerry is for and what he's against, what he stands for in his campaign and what he is against in his campaign, the people who say they're gonna vote for George Bush, not all of them, but significant numbers of them, have some astonishing ideas about what George Bush's policies are. For instance, over half of them believe, all the, over half of the people who say they are probably going to vote for George Bush believe that George Bush supports the Kyoto treaties. They believe that he is for the environmental treaties that he is very much against. 70% of them, according to this data, believe that he supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Even more remarkably to me, 70% of those who say they're gonna vote for Bush believe that Bush had the support of world public opinion when he invaded Iraq. And 90%, well, let me put it this way, only 10% of those who say they're gonna vote for George Bush seem to understand and say they understand that if a vote were taken throughout the world, George Bush would lose. That they understand that he is not the popular choice of the rest of the world, which leaves 90% of George Bush supporters and prospective voters who apparently believe that if it was a question, they would say no, the world supports George Bush for this election. Now, the reason I mention this is not to sort of mock George Bush supporters. I don't, that's not my meaning. I don't think that that's a fair thing. I think they have made up their minds about George Bush on other issues, they do know enough about to feel comfortable with. But the point is that the media effort in this regard has informed the Kerry people, but has not apparently informed the Bush people, at least in areas that seem obvious to those of us, and I would imagine that includes virtually everybody in this room, that has to have followed this election carefully. Does that mean that the media has failed or that there is really something hopeless about the process of thinking that putting things in the newspaper and on television in a factual sense are going to alter the fundamental point, which is who are you for and who are you against? The power that this seems to me to suggest is that the vote does not depend on having the right understanding of an issue. It shows that for many people that this is an emotional issue and that what they gather from the media is not necessarily the facts, but impressions, which brings us to what they're seeing on television and what they're reading on the web and what they're reading in newspapers. If you go back to the campaign of 2000, it seems to me that it was almost like a campaign of antique nature. The New York Times and the Washington Post and the major newspapers had a very, very powerful role in defining what became the meta-narrative of the campaign, which was widely criticized, but nevertheless, the fundamental power to define George Bush as dumb and Al Gore as a liar stemmed largely from the reporting that was done by the mainstream media and then was picked up and amplified by cable news. The flow went from mostly newspapers which put the resources in to do the reporting. Television has historically picked that up and used that and that has sort of migrated in the time of cable news to cable news. Now, that's all been stood on its head in the four years since that election. Blogging existed, of course, in the year 2000, but nothing compared to what it is now, really, nothing. The idea that Matt Drudge when he outed Bill Clinton as far as Monica Lewinsky was concerned is a reflection of what's going on today I think is completely wrong. What's happened that is important in the four years since 2000 is that blogging, especially blogging of a political nature, blogging focused on politics and public policy has grown into this incredibly, rapidly expanding network of people who are willing to give an enormous amount of energy and intention to it, often are highly informed and are very opinionated and most important are being read, are being read, not necessarily by most people in this country but by journalists and especially by the people who decide what is news for cable television. Cable television has 24 hours to fill up. It's a very competitive environment. They are trying to make as much money as they can which means they're gonna spend as little as they can on doing real reporting. They're looking for the story of the day or maybe two of the day and so for that reason when a great story emerges and often it is now emerging from the blogosphere it can go straight from the blogosphere to the cable news channel. That's what happened essentially with the Swift Boat story. The Swift Boat story was a story that had standing because the people who were saying it were not crazy people. I mean the thing is they were people who had standing. They were former naval officers so they had an inherent believability but the story had never been checked. That was a standard that did not apply, not apply to cable news. It applied to the New York Times or the Washington Post or ABC but it did not apply to the blog and it did not apply to cable news and so it was on the air on cable news being beaten to death. Not necessarily on the basis of it being true but on the basis of it being talked about and by people sort of saying it and maybe somebody was saying it was not true but there was no arbiter of truth that emerged until about 10 days after it appeared when the New York Times and the Washington Post finally published stories that take time to do and what has happened in the course of this 2004 election and it's one of the most important things I believe is that the news organizations that still have the resources and will to report are being totally manipulated by the blog and cable news. It's been turned around. Now the Washington Post and the New York Times spend an enormous amount of their energy fact checking, fact checking and I think that that's something that is going to only increase. I think that when you have on the blog a sphere the vehicle for fact checking mainstream journalists that can work very well. I mean the CBS Dan Rather phony document story. I think that was a blogger triumph because it was one of those moments when people who sat out there who had expertise looked at it saw something wrong and instantly it was out there and the mainstream media are being faced on the best side with that kind of fact checking but what has happened is also that the news cycle and how information gets turned into front page highly impressionistic news has changed its direction from the mainstream to cable news to a bubbling up in many cases, not always of course but bubbling up in many cases from the blogosphere and making it directly to cable news which then migrates its way into the mainstream news businesses. Now as that's happening the question is what's happening with the news business? I mean the thing is this is the journalistic side of it but a lot of it's being driven by something I'm not gonna talk in detail about tonight but it's something that you need to fundamentally understand which is that what's happening now in the new technological age is that the audience has gone from being a mass audience to a tiny fragmented audience that means that in order to make money you have a cutthroat competitive environment everybody is desperately trying to attract and to attract an audience the vehicle you fundamentally use in this country is to invest your whatever you have with as much entertainment pizzazz as much snap, crackle, and pop, as much violence, argument what not as you can and you spend as little as you can also on reporting which is why it's only the major newspapers in this country that now devote the resources to reporting and their reporting is now increasingly I think going to be spent on fact checking stuff that is already in circulation. So let me talk very briefly about Sinclair Broadcasting because that's also a very big part of the business side of this and also the journalistic part I'm sure that some of you probably were unhappy about what happened with Sinclair, I was overjoyed I was thrilled that Sinclair did something so bald and palpably abusive of the fact that they had been able in this administration to benefit from changes in FCC regulations that allowed them to put together 60-some television stations and Michael Powell, the head of the FCC, blithely assured these thousands of people that tried to persuade him that this was a bad idea that it would make no difference, how could it? Well, I think we have now seen a clear demonstration that it can make a big difference when an owner chooses to exercise that ownership of the public broadcasting airwaves to manipulate a political message. The Kerry administration, if there is one, is already declared itself to be against those kinds of changes in the cross ownership and consolidation of ownership rules. If the Bush administration is reelected I think you can expect that that will not happen. Certainly Sinclair and its brothers very much are for increasing the consolidation. That is not what I would be for. It's not what Kerry is for. It's one of the things that I think is really at stake. I think that we have also, in this election, moved from partisanship. We use partisanship a lot now in the media and we talk about how partisan the media have become as opposed to the sort of tradition of objectivity that has been the tradition throughout most of the 20th century in this country. But I would submit that we have taken a very quick leap only probably in the last year from something that was partisan to something that was an active effort to intimidate. I think that there has been a demonstration on the right that this was a tactic that worked pretty well. I think the Bush administration has tried it. I think that this is on both sides. The Middle East have tried it. Now the left has embraced it and the traffic, the email traffic, the abuse of email traffic that finds its way to every reporter who is publicly reporting one thing or another no matter what the side, from whatever the other side is, is something that I think you all probably would find almost unimaginable. Dan Ocrint, the public editor of the New York Times is at the Shorenstein Center where I'm director at the Kennedy School this week. And he talked about how Adam Nagourney, the chief political correspondent of the New York Times, got an email recently from someone who was on the left, who was critical of the Bush administration, hostile to Iraq, thought that Adam Nagourney's peace was not sufficiently tough on Bush and said, I hope your son gets his brains blown out in a war that a Republican president is running. I mean, it's that kind of thing. Now that was the only part of it that Dan Ocrint could publish because the rest of it couldn't be published at all. I can tell you, I get it. I know that Mark gets it. I don't know whether you get it, Amy, but I can tell you this is a ratcheting up in a big way of the effort to intimidate because I can tell you, just like terrorism and just like negative campaigning, negative ads, why do they do it? Because it works, because I can tell you if you're a reporter and you're out there and you know that if you write a tough story, you're gonna absolutely get your brains beaten out on the web from people who are gonna write you and call you and who knows what. I cannot believe that that's not going to have an impact. I think we've all seen that there was an effort to intimidate the media after 9-11. It worked pretty well. I think that the idea that that is not something that is going to be ratcheted up after this election, I fear that it is going to be and I don't know how the journalists in this country are going to react to it. I think that essentially what there's been is an effort to discredit the mainstream media especially. I think that the New York Times has certainly contributed to that by its own mistakes, but what the New York Times has done to its credit, as far as I'm concerned, is to admit its mistakes, to put them out there, to try to deal with them, not to everyone's satisfaction, but certainly in a way that has made them more credible to me. I'm not sure that's the way that's perceived by other people, though. I'm not sure that the loss of credibility that the mainstream media has now suffered is not put us in a situation where there is no arbiter of truth that everyone on both sides or most people on both sides of this political argument accept. The most credible source of information today, I believe, is factcheck.org, which was created for this election by the Annenberg Foundation. That's a terrible thing, in my opinion. I think, though, that we're moving in a direction in which there's going to have to be a mechanism found either through the mainstream media, either through different standards for blogs, either for this country growing up and journalists growing up and dealing with these things head on and straightforwardly, or else we're going to be in an environment of sort of spiraling efforts to build audiences at any cost and a very, very fevered and abusive political environment in which the media will be both the vehicle for it and the victim of it, and I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Mark is next. Thank you. Nice to see everybody here. Want to talk about a couple of things. One point that Alex made that I think is really worth reiterating about the intimidation factor and what the sort of media environment is like these days. At the Shorenstein Center where Alex is director, they hosted a panel discussion of the major television anchors on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. And when it got thrown, I believe, got thrown open to the public question and answer period, somebody basically, no, actually Alex asked a question about sort of the he said, she said journalism that kind of dominates campaign coverage in this era, which is a great example, obviously, to the swift boat claims, which is that journalistic organizations, particularly on television, no longer feel that their job is to vet the truth or decide which side is making more accurate or inaccurate claims, but simply to air both claims and that represents good journalism. And he asked essentially why there wasn't more intervention on the part of organizations with journalistic resources to say, no, so-and-so is more accurate on this one or statistics back this or what we know suggests this or that. And it was fascinating, then rather, basically in no uncertain term said that in this kind of environment, you are so like in a partisan polarized country. You are so likely to be bombarded with angry phone calls and angry emails should you, even with journalistic backing, essentially affirm one side or the other's versions of events that you will quote unquote catch hell. And that was the word he used. And he said there are fewer and fewer of us in this business who are brave enough to do that. Peter Jennings, for his part, talked about an environment in which somebody came up to him at an airport and said, why don't you get out of this country? You America hater. And said that he bemoaned the ability of vocal critics of the media to quote unquote affect the corporate suites in news organizations. Giving life to a great deal of what Alex said. On Amy, I want to say one thing about Amy. The Project for Excellent Journalism, which is where she works and issues reports. And I actually wrote about the report that she just discussed with you. I picked another part of it to sort of focus on, but it's a great resource. As a media critic, we all intuitively know that we're doing things wrong. Most of the time we have to rely on smart people to sort of speculate and tell us why we're doing things wrong. But the Project for Excellent Journalism is one of those few places that actually creates empirical evidence of why we're doing things wrong, which is a God's end for people who have to cover the business. There are actually numbers and content analyses. And we can actually provide real evidence about why we're doing things wrong. And I'm not being facetious about that. I appreciate it. A couple of things I wanted to talk about. New roles for the established media is the topic here. And I'm gonna go a little bit over some of the territory that Alex mentioned, because I think it's, one of the things we understand, and I think we understand about this campaign, is there are certainly new roles and powerful roles for the non-established media in this campaign. When I try and sit here and think about, you know, the defining moment that's been created by the traditional media, something that moved votes, a story that broke, something that happened that changed the course of the election or, and it's very hard to. But I can think of things in the non-traditional media that very much fall into that category. Alex mentioned the blogosphere. I'm not a huge fan. It is the democratization of journalism. But think of the phenomenon of what happened with the 60 minutes erroneous report on George Bush's service record based on what turned out to be, if not inaccurate or phony documents, certainly documents of dubious credibility, and will await Richard Thornberg and Lou Bacardi's verdict on that, the outside panel, that's investigating what happened. We won't find out what actually happened until after the election. But think, but he is absolutely right in that essentially what happened here was that perhaps the most prestigious television news program and vehicle in the history of the country, 60 minutes, okay, still the gold standard for television journalism produced a report from a top anchor and a top producer. And according to a timeline that I saw, one minute before the program actually got off the air at 8.59 p.m. on September 8th, somebody out there in the blogosphere noting a problem with the typeface in these memos essentially put out the word that there was a problem with this story. Now, what we have here is an incredible phenomenon. I mean, you know, all of us in this room probably have had a situation where somebody has some newspaper, television outlet, has done a story about something you've actually known something about. An incident, a situation, a neighborhood, a community, okay? For most of us, at some point, the reaction is gonna be, no, Martha, that's not what happened, you know? And basically, you know, up to five years ago you would have turned to whoever you're watching TV was and said, that's wrong, those guys got it wrong, I was there. Well now all you do is go into your room and turn on the computer and say the same thing. And essentially what's happened after all the dominoes fell is that some guy out there with a pretty astute knowledge of Smith corona typewriters and things like that essentially is able to create an earthquake under the long time CBS anchor and the most prestigious news program on television. That's democratization. Not everything that's on the blogosphere is accurate. A lot of it is ideologically motivated but the idea that now every news organization in America is open to a Vox Pop fact check on every issue that they write about is a dramatic sea change in how we do business. Alex also mentioned Matt Drudge, the man who claims to be the Bob Woodward of modern journalism because he stole a story from Newsweek that they had worked on for about a year indicating that Bill Clinton had had an affair with an intern. That's a little bit like the ants walking away with your cupcake at a picnic and saying they baked it. But Drudge was also the source essentially of the one big now debunked scandal story that broke in this campaign, which was the John Kerry infidelity rumor that hit the newsstands in February of this year. It was a story that was actually stopped because not only did John Kerry deny it but actually the woman involved came out and issued an official denial after a few days too. Even in this media atmosphere, two formal denials usually does it, okay. But before that happened, thanks to Matt Drudge who started the rumor and friendly ideological allies in behind the talk radio microphone, people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the rumor, apparently not true by all we know, got into essentially every house in America simply by dint of this quote unquote new media combination of people who don't really care whether the story is accurate or not but make a decision based on whether or not it's out there and whether or not people are talking about it. That story created a great challenge for the traditional mainstream media about how to handle something sort of that sticky and I actually think that the mainstream media pretty much passed by flying colors but it was not a story that was generated in that milieu at all. It was a story that came essentially from non-traditional media using very non-traditional standards. Another non-traditional factor in my mind I use the word media broadly in this campaign are documentary filmmakers. Michael Moore, okay. And by the way, I put quotes around the word documentary. I think there are people at Frontline and Nova and places like that that get a big headache when Michael Moore calls what he did a documentary. It's effective political propaganda with some truth in it. There's no doubt about that. It's a great movie. People probably know that it did the astounding, perform the astounding feat of actually being the biggest box office earner the weekend it opened, of any movie, period, commercial or otherwise when it first opened. Michael Moore threw himself, thrust himself dramatically into the middle of the presidential campaign. I mean, when John McCain singles you out at the Republican National Convention and points to you and you are standing there and the crowd is chanting four more years and you're going two more months, you know, you are a player. Now, whether or not, you know, he's gonna have done anything but preach the converted, I don't know, but he is not the only documentary filmmaker that's had an impact. A fellow by the name of Robert Greenwald with Hollywood credentials, made a couple of documentaries in this campaign season. One about the war in Iraq called Iraq Uncovered and one that was a direct attack on another media organization, the Fox News Channel of We Report, you decide fair and balanced fame. Now home to Bill O'Reilly, the lawsuit-burdened, top-rated primetime cable star, called Outfoxed, which was a direct and somewhat persuasive attack on the Fox News Channel. The Sinclair Broadcasting Corporation, which decided to get involved in overtly partisan politics in this campaign, used an anti-carry documentary by a former Washington Times reporter as its quote-unquote news material or matter. So in a way that I think there was also, for some of you who may have seen it, a fairly, I think of all of them, probably the most impressive and journalistically sound documentary called Control Room, about Al Jazeera's coverage of the war in Iraq that I think may have had some influence on people who have watched this election. The other area of sort of non-traditional media obviously is talk radio. Now talk radio has been a wholly owned and subsidiary of conservative politics for a long time, certainly since the late 80s, early 90s, when the Rush Limbaugh era flowered, and Bill Clinton was a target-rich environment, and across the talk radio dial, conservatives flourished. And they have, and they continue to, to this campaign, the Swift Boat ad, the initial ad that was taken out by the Swift Boat veterans for truth, raising questions about John Kerry's wartime efforts and record. Questions that were, most of which were debunked, as was the group, by subsequent reporting in the New York Times and Washington Post, although it took a while. The original ad buy for that first ad was done in a few markets in three medium-sized states. Period, I think it was Ohio, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. A tiny, tiny, tiny ad buy in a year in which literally tens of millions of dollars have been spent on television advertising. But yet, when the Annenberg people came out and surveyed it, they found that 57% of the people in the country had either heard about the ad or seen it. That's what's called an echo chamber effect. How does that happen? Well, it happens because you don't have to actually be in the market where the ad airs. If people on talk radio and the cable news networks are going to talk about it 24 hours a day, you just get that megaphone effect so that sooner or later, whether it's true or false, no longer matters, you're going to have heard about it. I think there were two different reasons why talk radio, primarily conservative, had an ideological reason for wanting to embarrass John Kerry. The cable news networks, Fox Not Withstanding, as Alex said, have a financial reason for wanting to do it. You've got 24, seven news hole, a gigantic news hole that is infinite, so you're gonna take any controversy you can find and essentially stretch it out with the he said, she said, here's a good idea, here's how journalism works. Let's get Mr. A to say the sunrise in the east and Mr. B to say the sunrise in the west and you can decide based on the persuasiveness of their arguments. And so we won't know what the final sort of tally on how this campaign played out will be until after Tuesday, but if John Kerry loses, I think there could be some post-mortems that suggest that the Swiftboat vet ad and their campaign against him was a key factor. And the fact that most of America found out about it is a function of a media environment that's fragmented and changed and no longer needs traditional journalistic standards to turn a story into something that we all know and hear about. The report, part of the report that Amy and the Project for Excellence in Journalism put out this week also had something also very interesting in it. It looked at the tone of coverage for John Kerry and President Bush in a two week period, October 1st through October 14th that was essentially encompassed the three debates. And it actually found that John Kerry by a significant margin had done better in the press reports that there had been much more positive coverage of John Kerry. Now as it turns out in 2000 in this period, there was George Bush had done better than Al Gore, although not as well as John Kerry had done in 2004. There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that at least 40% of the coverage I think was essentially directly about the debates. And then after the performances in the debates, even coverage of other issues, the debate performances spilled over into that kind of coverage. And basically for those of you who filed even the snap polls that were done to gauge sort of the public's reaction, I mean John Kerry was largely seen certainly as the winner of the first and third debate and he held his own in the second debate. So he was the recipient of positive coverage for a number of reasons, not all were certain about, but certainly a lot of it had to do with the quality of his performances in the debate. But I guarantee you that that report is also going to be seen as fodder for people on the right who believe that there is liberal bias in the news media. And to me, one of the other outstanding, and I don't mean that in a positive sense, but memorable, notable aspects of sort of where the media is in this campaign is a partisan polarized electorate, okay, beginning to just sort of no longer, see everything that is done by the news media in the context of slant one way or the other. And we have a number of notable instances. Conservatives are furious, many conservatives and many Bush supporters believe that the 60 Minutes Report, which was certainly sloppy journalistically and maybe ethically flawed, was essentially a hit job by a liberal journalist out to smear George Bush. Dan Rather, it has been a target for conservative critics of the media for a long, long time. So the right yells about that. On the other hand, the left has had their share of fodder, Sinclair, obviously with what they did, got overtly involved in partisan politics, a major media organization with television, 62 television stations throughout the country, deciding essentially to try and influence the outcome of an election, which is a pretty incredible situation. Now the truth is, in some ways this did turn out well. There was a lot of pressure for the FCC to get involved. I think there are a lot of First Amendment advocates who say that's not the way to go. And in some way, shape or form, the marketplace actually reacted to what Sinclair did. Advertisers pulled out, shareholders threatened the lawsuit, there was tremendous public pressure on the Sinclair folks, and they actually altered their programming and really trimmed their sales, not because the government told them to do, which they would have obviously seen as another case of sort of overweening liberal government, but because the marketplace, something that they obviously believe in, told them to cut it out. Minor things, Mark Halpern is the political director of ABC News. I don't know how many of you know it, but he wrote a memo to his cohorts at ABC recently, basically saying this. Yes, George Bush and John Kerry both lie about each other during the presidential campaign. However, it is my belief that the distortions about John Kerry are a more integral part of the Bush campaign than the other way around. And I think we need to be careful of the idea that we're going to treat all charges and counter charges and claims and counter claims equally. So essentially what he was suggesting was that the Bush campaign's quote unquote distortions about Kerry be closely scrutinized for accuracy by a news organization that had the power and the resources to do so. That memo was leaked. Obviously I would guess by someone at ABC who wasn't exactly comfortable with those particular sentiments. And again, fodder for the right who believes that ABC is out to get George Bush. On the other hand, Carl Cameron, the Fox News Channel's political correspondent, made a little boo-boo earlier in this campaign when he actually posted a phony story about John Kerry on the Fox News website in which the Massachusetts Senator was quoted as preening and boasting about his manicure on debate night and his physical appearance. And apparently in this story said, hey, voters and women should like me. I'm a metrosexual, George Bush is a cowboy. It was not a true story. It was a made up story posted on the Fox News Channel website by someone who had to apologize later. I would even argue that basically that the John Kerry, as I said earlier, infidelity rumor was essentially a concoction brewed by a group of largely conservatives who really wanted to do in John Kerry. So we've got enough fodder on the left and the right not that we need anymore to suggest that we've got a sort of a very polarized electorate that seems to be telling us that they don't trust the concept of objectivity among by the mainstream media anymore. And one of the organizations that does a lot of polling in this regard is the Pew Research Center. And they recently released some interesting polls. 90% of those who responded said that they believe that journalists often or sometimes let their own political preferences influence that way they report news. That's a high number. Interestingly enough, when the Committee for Concerned Journalists, which is sort of a brother or sister organization of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, interviewed 500 of their own journalists and said, tell me what you think some of the problems in campaign journalism are. The third biggest problem that emerged was bias in news coverage. What's happening here? One of the things that I fear and that I think may be one of the enduring stories of this campaign, and I know Alex doesn't exactly agree with me, we've discussed this a little bit, is I fear a trend where essentially with the public saying they have lost confidence in the objectivity of the news media, which I frankly believe means that a polarized public no longer wants to put up with a messenger it does not agree with on potent issues. I think we're moving toward what one scholar called kind of a cafeteria style news consumerism, which is the days of Walter Cronkite essentially bringing down the tablets from Mount Sinai every night and everybody in the country believing it are long gone. And in a universe in which all of us have more choices than ever before, we're gonna start picking and choosing based on who's message we like. I'll just give you one example, and this again comes from a pre-research survey. In the new poll, voters who said they get most of their campaign news from Fox News, a frequent target of liberal critics, said they support Bush over Kerry by 70% to 21%. At the same time, Kerry led Bush by 67% to 26% among viewers who relied on CNN and let that has been in the crosshairs of conservative critics. So we don't only have red and blue states now, we have red and blue media, okay? And that may be a situation that calms down or goes away once all the angst and anger and everything else that accompanies this campaign goes away, but I'm not sure. I think with more media choice than ever, we are inexorably moving towards this style of news use. And what that says to me is just two things and then I'll quit. One is some smart guy, pretty soon, who may be a liberal or maybe a conservative is gonna look at the success of the Fox News channel, which by the way is a tremendous business success story and say, you know what we need? We need a Fox News channel of the left. And that'll be the next news organization. It'll be, we report you decide, but Eric Alterman will host all the shows and there won't be any Republicans allowed on and they'll probably actually do pretty well in a niche market. The other bigger problem for us as a society is if we go this way, we are going to have fewer and fewer shared truths. Everything will be up to for debate, including where the sun rises every morning. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. If folks have either questions or if you wanna make a short statement and ask the panel to react, that's fine. Use the mics please. I'd like to ask about it. If you wanna identify yourself too. My name's Edwin Taylor. I'm a retired physicist. I'd like to ask about individual, personal media. I understand it was well known what the Abu Ghraab preditations were, but I didn't hear about it and we all heard about it and were horrified when the pictures came out. Those were privately taken pictures. If I am a police officer who wants to club a Hispanic or an African American, I'm gonna think twice because somebody's got a little camera there. In addition, there's the individuals who pick up things that others don't like the bulge on the back of George Bush's suit. So is there, and of course, this is sporadic. It is not professional, it's not organized, but it seems to me to be a significant, I think Abu Ghraab is a significant contribution to the dialogue that's going on now. Who wants to respond? Well, I think it's important to bear in mind that the Abu Ghraab photographs were made available through CBS News. The tradition of mainstream journalists getting materials from individuals like those photographs that were taken, that's not something new. On the other hand, I think you're quite right that the idea of a world of people with instant cameras and videos and phones that will take pictures and things like that suggests that there's going to be a very, they were having now an increasing problem of people going into locker rooms and taking pictures of people and putting them on the web, things like that. I mean, they're kind of odd things that are starting to pop up as problems that we've never really had before because people can be in a situation where they don't know they're having a photograph taken and a photograph can be taken and put on the web and spread virally in a matter of hours. So I think that you're right, that it is a new world of mourning that makes everybody who wants to participate as a journalist or a recorder or a photographer or a blogger or anything else, that certainly can happen. But there is also the problem that goes along with that of a kind of cacophony without anyone there acting as gatekeeper. And I think that what we're probably gonna come to rather quickly is the recognized need that gatekeepers have had and still continue to serve if they do their job properly. But they've got to be gatekeepers that people have confidence in. And as Mark said, we're now in a world, in this country at the moment, of sort of separate realities. And it's very hard to find an honest broker for information if you're talking about two separate realities that don't really seem to have anything in common much. I'll give you just one quick example at the Boston Globe that I know about, which is after the last week's unfortunate tragic incident in the wake of the celebration after the American League Championship Series that left one student dead in this city, the photographs that the Globe actually used were taken by not their photographer, but by a student who went to the event and essentially just recorded what happened. And I actually interviewed him for the story and he was very torn about whether he was ever wanted those photographs to actually, I mean, he did offer them the Globe. We used them, but the truth was his motivation was not in any way, shape, or form professional. What he really said to me was the only reason I took those photographs and brought them to the Globe was because I wanted to make sure there was going to be accountability. So in some ways it was classic sort of citizen journalism. Other questions? Just sort of a series of themes that you all brought up, but just to discuss them maybe in a different way. So I think that there's some issues regarding the structure of our democracy that affect the structure, what's happening in the electorate and the media. One of those is the two-party system, which I think helps people see the world in black and white. You have to choose. You're either one or the other. You don't have a variety of options. And the fact that people are often hereditary voters, you are what your parents are, and the parties can count on voters in that sense, maybe less now than they used to. Another theme is, I'm just gonna check my little things here. I get edgy in front of microphones. The access of journalists. So you mentioned that journalists are bullied by the public, but then again their access in Washington is determined by whether or not they're nice to powerful people. If you write a mean story about somebody, you might not be asked back to the next press conference. And so what does that mean for journalists too? I mean they might be afraid of emails, but at the same time, they have to give up their job integrity in order to do their job. So that's another question. And the other thing is personality politics. We always vote for people. And that helps us be a bit more frivolous, I think. If we voted on issues, we might have a different reaction to discussions of policy, the fact that we're always voting for one candidate or another helps us, might help the media and the electorate think more about people's hairdos than about what the policy points are. So if you could just have some things to say on this. I wanted to add to your middle question there, which is about this question of official domination of the news. And if you could comment on how many ways and to what degree it matters that the press can be hurt by officialdom. The Times had a story a few weeks ago, months ago on one of their folk who was covering the Justice Department who had his credentials withdrawn because the story was implying while the credentials were withdrawn because he was covering the Justice Department in ways that weren't welcome in the Justice Department. Of course, the administration said that wasn't true. There's a long tradition in analysis of press coverage, especially of defense and foreign affairs, that that's his own where official domination of the news is very pronounced because there's a single source. If you're a journalist, you've got one place to go to get your news, which is the DOD and the State Department, or if you're covering Iraq, you have to go to the CPA in Iraq. So what about that? And then the parallel issue is bribing the press. I'm running away with your questions here, but this question of deal cutting between the press and officialdom, if you continue with consolidation in the media, to what extent are we gonna see sort of sweetheart relationships which have been alleged, for example, between Clear Channel and the media. There's been some argument saying that because Clear Channel got real big and became a player that could actually negotiate with the American government, there was a negotiation and some understanding that Clear Channel would, in exchange for being consolidated, would cover the news in a way that was friendly. So, comments. Speak to the issue of relying on officials for your information, what happens if you don't get it. We did do a look at coverage during the war in Afghanistan. And one of the things we saw, which is quite interesting, we tried to get at this question of how much of the information that's getting out is information that is on the side of the administration is coming with the viewpoint that the administration has on the war versus outsider information, even foreign, from Afghanistan. And what we found was a huge preponderance of information that was coming from the administration's point of view. And then, as the war continued, less and less information overall. And what happened was the journalists, by and large, had one source to go to, the Pentagon. And during that war, the Pentagon really cracked down and wasn't giving out very much information. And journalists then had very little to report. They had little else to go to. Part of that is due to the fact that foreign bureaus aren't very common anymore. And many journalists don't have a big Rolodex of sources to go to for information of that nature. They didn't know who else to turn to to get reliable information. So they were relying on the Pentagon. And when that Pentagon isn't giving out information, whether it's because they don't like you or for another reason, it certainly affects the coverage and the information that citizens are gonna get. I would only say, in addition to that, that there's obviously always tension between journalists and sources and the administration and the journalists and so forth. I mean, it's a tug of war. It always is. This, I think, this administration most journalists believe is the most hostile and the most willing to punish journalists. But, you know, so be it. I mean, I think that that's just part of the game. I think that the journalists from the major news organizations have, you know, since the war in Iraq turned and they began really doing their job, I think that they have been, you know, they have been doing their job. But I mean, the New York Times is very unpopular with the Bush administration and David Sanger, who's their White House correspondent had a hell of a hard time getting George Bush to sit down with him. Okay, that's part of it. But I think that the sophistication of people who consume news is important. And I think that they need to be on guard. They need to be aware of the concept of, you know, of having intimidation or payoffs or sweetheart deals and all these kinds of things. All of these things are there. I think that what has been added to that mix, though, is this sort of extra party ideological brow beating that I think is taking a toll with a different kind of toll from the one you're talking about. I'll address a couple of these points really quickly in terms of sources and relying on the government. I think one of the sort of interesting things about the Times' famous page 810 Apology or sort of editor's note saying essentially that they were way too gullible in printing and believing, you know, reports of possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein and the run up to the war, which obviously was a major feeling on the part of the media to do a better job on that. Essentially, if you read what they said, what they were saying is there's a sort of circular, you know, circular relationship here. You know, the administration provided dubious sources. We talked to dubious sources. We wrote dubious stories. You know, it sort of went around in a circle there and then they took responsibility for it as they should have. The sweetheart relationships, the question you raised, you know, it would be pretty hard to prove that a news organization is making a specific decision because it's got an ongoing negotiation with the FCC although obviously there are issues of interest that they do have with the government. But I think perhaps the more salient point is look at the makeup of these organizations. They are, you know, journalism organizations, media outlets are not owned by companies that now are just in the journalism business. If they were, that would be their core product, their only product, they would live and die with it, okay, and that would be where the reputation is. Media outlets are owned by companies that own everything. They are in 50 different businesses. They are in 100 different businesses. The journalism piece of that company is just, in many cases, is just one line on a ledger's sheet. What is that? Right, right. Well, yeah, television and but magazines, I mean Time Warner, but primarily television. And what does that mean? It means when a war comes, somebody may be thinking we can't afford to be unpopular because it could affect a whole range of our businesses. That's something to think about. And finally, on the issue of sort of personnel, this is one of my classic whiny, cranky complaints about political journalism. Political journalism is done, election coverage is done by very good people, really. I mean, in my paper I think that, but the truth is they're done by people who understand election journalism and understand politics, which means they understand polls, they understand ads, they understand consultants, they understand strategy, they understand what works and doesn't work. Political journalism, campaign journalism is very rarely written by people who actually have expertise in the issues that are at play. Why, when healthcare becomes an issue, isn't the science reporter covering it? Why, when the environment, both sides, Bush says he's a good steward of the environment and Kerry says no, you're not. Why isn't the environmental reporter covering that aspect of the campaign? For that matter, why isn't the drama critic covering debates? So part of the problem there is really you don't have the right people, necessarily, covering the things they know the most about. You folks have questions, comments? Excuse me, I'm Henry Rubin, I'm a professor of sociology and media studies at Tufts. And part of my question has to do with young people who I see in my classroom who don't have a sense of time that you were referring to to do in-depth reporting at the mainstream papers. When they do their research papers for me, they go to the web and they think they're doing research. When they look at my reading, my syllabus, and they see something that was before 2000, they think it's ancient news. How would you suggest addressing this sense of time and how it's changing the news cycle for reaching out to young people and getting them to understand the difference between, say, a mainstream source and a blog. How can we look to a future when these young people are raised in this digital society? They don't see anything else there. They will be the next generation. If they don't understand the difference, I think we're lost. So how would you approach teaching young people how to discriminate between different kinds of news standards? I think you've put your finger on, I think it's a very good question and a difficult question. Because there's no, you know, young people are raised on a different set of behaviors than someone my age or even your age. I think that the worst thing that American journalism does is tell episodically what's going on without creating genuine context for things. And I think, honestly, that they really missed the boat here. I think most people really like a good story. I mean, they go to the movies, they like a good story. Well, one of the best stories and one of the most fascinating stories is going back to find out what really happened to something. And I think that a news organization that, for instance, the cable news people or the mainstream newspapers for that matter or any newspaper, ought to make it a practice, a common practice, a feature, really, of picking a topic, of going back and saying, this is what we reported, but this is what really happened. I mean, journalism, as someone said, is done on horseback. It really is the very rough first draft. And almost always, in my experience, it's wrong. It's wrong in some important ways, usually. But we don't really go back, we may go back and correct the specific errors or if it's some, you know, particularly explosive moment, we may go try to set the record straight after a fashion. But we really don't go back and say, you know, this is what we thought was gonna happen. This is what we said was gonna happen. This did not happen. What happened instead was this and this is why. In other words, allow the media, allow news to be the vehicle for teaching about what happened and also as a cautionary tale, how you should interpret and read the news that you're getting. And I think, to a certain extent, this would allow the students that you have to really kind of focus on that. One of the things that I do for the class that I teach is to try to, well, I assign my students as their main research paper, going to some incident and really digging in to what happened, how it was reported, why it was reported that way. Really trying to find out how it was reported relative to what later became clear something closer to the truth was. I would subscribe to that. But I think it's a, you know, if you think that you're going to get kids to easily be interested in these things, probably not. But I still think it's possible. Certainly it's worth trying. Not as a plug, but as something that might help as a teaching aid. We've started something on our website which we call etymologies, which are very much along the lines of what you were talking about, where we take a story, one of our staffers, who's a journalist, takes a story and traces it from the very beginning, the very first appearance in the press and traces it all the way through exactly what happened. And then we did it for Jessica Lynch, we did it for Abergrabb, and that may be a helpful tool to offer to students and then suggest that they take a story and try to do that on their own as well. But I certainly think that that's the way to get young people to appreciate depth and understanding, as well as looking back at some of the journalism of the past that was certainly done through a great shoe leather reporting. Just one further thing. I mean, when you're doing this, one of the things you can do is tell your students that they should identify specific journalists, specific stories, and then go back and ask the journalist why they did what they did. I think you'll find frequently journalists are willing to talk about things like that, especially with students who are interested in journalism and it really can be quite helpful to both the reporter and to the student. In most cases, journalists will blame their editor. I wanna ask Amy, when you do the acknowledges, how often does it in fact turn out, as Alex says, that the first draft was significantly far from the final draft? Primarily, it's stories that turned out to be problematic in one way or another, but certainly the beginning and as the first appearance of it was not what ended up being the truth in the end. For instance, I have every reason to believe that last night's score was probably incorrect, I think. Over here. Hi, John Hawkinson. All of you in your initial presentations painted a pretty bleak picture of what was going on with our world and especially print media and how it's much less successful at covering real issues, not completely in of its own fault, but to some extent, its own fault. So where do we go from here? What solutions do you see our world evolving to solve these problems or are we just completely doomed? There's an easy one. Well, if you got the impression, I was saying that the problem is the print media and not the other media, you misunderstood what I was saying. No, no, not at all, but that the other media caused the print media to have this problem and the print media has that problem now, it's not of its own making. Well, I mean, I consider the print media, especially the major surviving major newspapers to be the only real journalistic, serious journalistic resource and also NPR and a few isolated other cases. But I think that, I mean, it's a very interesting question because obviously you're right, I do think there's a very big problem. I think the problem is that there's a dwindling amount of money that's going to be spent on real reporting. That I think is the core problem, that's the worst problem because that, I mean, when I say reporting, I mean reporting on serious things, reporting on politics, policy issues, things that are not ones that have a natural, you know, advertiser base like sports and celebrities reporting and so forth. And I think that what you're going to find is something that you've already started to see, which is that news organizations are not gonna be willing to put the bill to do this kind of reporting. So it's gonna be foundations, it's gonna be universities, it's gonna be endowed reporterships, it's gonna be volunteers who will support somebody going to do a piece of work. I mean, I think that there are things now that are cropping up that are going to be considered to be in the public service, which have been in the past part of the sort of contract that the news organizations in this country had with the public, that they are now basically increasingly walking away from. You know, that is one of the sort of the occupational hazards having when you're a media critic, which is that you depress your audience all the time. And you know, the joke I've always made is that there'll be, you know, it's always said that cockroaches would be the only species to survive, you know, in nuclear holocaust. And I actually say it's cockroaches and media critics because somebody would have to describe how poorly the end of the world was covered. So we do tend to sort of be a drag when you listen to us, which is just because that's sort of our line of work. But two upbeat things I would say is an increasingly confusing world when it comes to information and what to believe. There is a backlash for, you know, refereeing, for somebody to get to the bottom of it, for, and if it's slowly occurring, it will occur I think in greater numbers and people will start to rely on brands and brand names and people they ultimately think they can trust to make sense, hopefully, of some of the more confusing elements of the world. And one of the interesting things that's happened since 9-11 is the reemergence of two reporters, Cy Hirsch and Bob Woodward, who are essentially relics from the 60s. You know, both men, you know, in their 60s, I believe Woodward's in his 60s now, you know, who are sort of old-style reporters who have come back in vogue. The other thing I would say that's somewhat positive is that news organizations, and it may not happen in television or it may, but it certainly has to happen in print, need to maintain their standards. And I will say this, in the aftermath of the Jason Blair particularly scandal and the Jack Kelly scandal at USA Today, I can tell you personally that the sort of the rules, the regulations and the standards of the Boston Globe and a lot of other papers in the country have been toughened. And so rather than sort of, you know, in some way sort of falling into a, hey, everybody else is doing it quick and dirty, it's much tougher now than it was when I started to get an anonymous source into the Boston Globe, you know, somebody making an hominem attack without putting their name on it. Unless they're in Washington? No, well, even then, even then actually. So that's the good news. Over here. My name's Dave Lewitt, I'm a social psychologist, Alliance for Democracy. I'm concerned about the, whether or how survey research can be misleading or the reporting of survey research can be misleading. Particularly thinking about the responses of the Bush supporters that Alex Jones mentioned to policy issues and how wrong they had it about what Bush was really doing or was standing for. And I just wonder whether these surveys asked follow-up questions in any depth about why people believed that Bush supported environmental, good environmental measures and so forth. I actually do have an answer for that. It's kind of fascinating. It's one of the, it's actually rather encouraging in a way. The reason these Bush supporters believed that he supported these issues is because they supported those issues. If you tended to believe that supporting the Kyoto Treaty was a good idea, you believe George Bush thought it was a good idea. If you thought that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was a good idea, you projected that onto George Bush. And it suggests to me that a lot of the reasons people are voting for George Bush are not because they agree with him on policy questions, at least not on some policy questions. And that the way people feel about issues themselves in this country is something that we share more than we seem to feel like we do in these appalling red and blue states, which I think is one of the great disservices of our media to create. I feel like this idea of dividing the country into red and blue states is becoming more pernicious and more really damaging to us all the time. Because it's, I mean, it makes sense in a way because of the Electoral College, but I think that basically, if you're red and living in a blue state or vice versa, you feel like you've practically ceased to exist as far as the rest of your countrymen are concerned. And I think that's a bad idea. But what I'm saying is that the people who, this panel of the survey was trying to get at did ask them those questions and that seemed to be what was going on. Just a word on surveys in general and your concern about their use. I think there are two things that have been happening in the world of surveys over the last several years. One is extreme proliferation of them, every organization doing their own survey, putting out their own numbers, as well as the way the surveys are being used. I think those are two issues and two different issues. I do think that journalists over the last four years perhaps have gotten a lot more educated in the use of polls and understanding what makes a solid poll, a solid poll, the total number of people you've surveyed, the geographic distribution, the race distribution. Journalists that call about our content analysis now more and more are asking me, what was my sampling error? What was my, other questions, which I think five years ago they weren't as educated asking about. So I think they are getting better about picking and choosing which kinds of surveys they're reporting on, at least in the mainstream press and the established press, I think in some of the more partisan areas of information giving, they choose because it's the numbers they wanna put out. And so it's up to the individual to be careful about what they consume and what they believe. In addition to that, there's the purpose of surveys in the first place. It's not to, they're not to be used as facts. They're not to be used as the answer. It's the same thing with content analysis. All of it is meant as indicators, as ways to help guide our thinking, to help educate us. And Andrew Kohut, who's the head of the Pew Research Center, would be the first one to preach that and to say that too many times surveys are used in this day and age as the answer, as the answer to what's happening as opposed to something to help guide our thinking. Over here, more questions. Thank you, Steve Brown, MIT staff. My question relates to rational ignorance and how we could help the voters more constructively practice rational ignorance. I wonder if the coverage that we're seeing in the changes from 2000 to 2004 are driven by the relative campaign's belief that the majority of voters don't feel equipped to decide how to vote based on a candidate's skills and positions and instead make their decisions of who they feel comfortable with. For example, good morning America interview of a voter asking why she was for Bush. And she said, I'd really like to have him over to dinner better than I would like to have Kerry. So the question is, how can we help voters increase their self-confidence? So they feel equipped to make their decision based on skills and issues and not just on who they feel comfortable with. I'll just tell you what I think. I don't really know that there is a serious, great answer. The things that I have read about this election are that the people who are for George Bush, not all of them obviously, but many of them, voted for George Bush in the year 2000, made a kind of an emotional commitment to George Bush after 9-11, made another emotional commitment to George Bush over the invasion of Iraq and find it very difficult to go back on that. I mean basically to say, you know, I was wrong three times I guess here. I mean it's a human thing. And I think that what you're getting at is a very important problem because I think it gets to the heart of some of the frustration of people on all sides of questions. They don't understand why if this information is out there, people don't change their minds. And frequently you'll have situations where the information simply won't matter. I mean the New York Times and every other news organization in the country can be beating the devil out of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair and all the other things, but his approval ratings remain very high. It doesn't just work for George Bush. It's something that people attach to a leader especially. It makes a big difference. And I think my intuition here, and I speak of it purely that way, is that much of the support for George Bush is emotional support whereas much of the opposition to George Bush is rooted in a more of an analytical kind of way of looking at things. And that may flatter one of those people on that side of the argument. But I think that the fact is that this survey found that the people at least who were for John Kerry had a pretty accurate rendering and understanding of what his positions were. I think that speaks here. But I think that we're in a particularly volatile emotional environment. And I don't know that there's anything that you could see tomorrow in the newspaper that would make you change your mind about who you're gonna vote for, be it Bush or Kerry. I'm trying to imagine. I mean, if there was a terrorist attack, that piece of news might change things. If maybe for some people if there was some big development in the war on terror. But I mean, if you were told for instance something terrible about George Bush or terrible about John Kerry, if you were supporting either of those people, how likely would you be to change your mind? If you're for John Kerry, you could easily imagine a George Bush person changing their mind. But if I told you that John Kerry actually had, beaten up his wife in his first marriage and put her in the hospital, would that make you change your mind about voting for John Kerry? I doubt it. And I think it works. People are fixed, they make a decision. Once that decision is made, it's hard to go back. And George Bush benefits from the fact that a big part of this country made the decision to support him over the past several years. And that's very hard to turn around. I would just, I mean, there are a lot of factors that go into why people select. And you do hear things like, I'd like to have a beer with, I think he'd be the better guy to have a beer with. I hear things like, I don't want this guy in my TV set for the next four years, you know? And before we make fun of that, the only thing I'd say is, sometimes I think the American electorate looks and appears to be very sophisticated. You mentioned Clinton, for example. I think a poll done during his second campaign against Bob Dole was actually fascinating in that a majority of the Americans poll said that they actually believe that Bob Dole was the better man in the traditional moral sense. But they wanted Clinton to be president. And for the first time, I mean, you're old enough, you can remember Nelson Rockefeller was never gonna be able to run for president because he had an amicable divorce, you know? Now he had a guy who had had all his own personal problems and the American public had said, you know what, we can separate between an effective president and what we think of the character issues. The other thing that's tricky about picking a president is you can't simply, it's very difficult and tricky to go on a checklist of issues on a strictly intellectual way. And school yourself about the candidates and say, okay, I like this guy better because I like what he says. Go back and see what kind of candidate George Bush was in 2000, a humble foreign policy against nation-building, okay? We all thought this was gonna be an inward-looking small-bore presidency. Now no one could have predicted 9-11, but maybe we oughta have known more about George Bush, the man, to know that he would have thrown all those tenants away and adopted a diametrically opposed position vis-a-vis the world if we had understood him better. Jimmy Carter, you know? I mean, it was one thing, his presidency was one thing to understand the issues about Jimmy Carter. It was another thing for the American public to be able to predict how poorly he would cope with adversity or how poor a leader he would be with a country in moments of adversity. So you never want a situation where, you know, you want a kind of a legal voter's checklist where everybody says, well, I like him on this, this, this, this, and this, because the presidency doesn't work out. My name is Norm Framelli, I teach ethics at Boston University, very appreciative of the panel, and I wanna pick up on some of the questions that have been, you know, already offered. I have some great concerns about this polarization that Alex talks about, and it seems to me there's something that's easier to cover when it's deeply polarized, and it's also easier to cover if you can identify with a person rather than an issue, particularly if the issue's complex. And I think one of the difficulties is, and whether it's the mainline media or not, when you get a two-page report in the New York Times, extensive report, you know, how do we make complexity more accessible? Accessible, because the issues are very complicated. That's one of the reasons why the one-liners work so well. I mean, you can latch on to something, and it's deeply troubling to me and a lot of others, because when the issues are complex, simply simplifying doesn't make them less complex, but the problem is they're not accessible. And I'm wondering the role of the media, all aspects of the media. I'm very concerned that the proliferation of different kinds of technologies is leading toward greater polarization rather than, you know, the kind of reconciliation that's gonna be needed after Tuesday, because this country's gonna be deeply divided no matter who wins. And the question is, what kinds of things can be done and how do we move? Well, I think that, again, this is a very, you put your finger on a very important problem as far as I'm concerned, certainly. I think that Americans yearn for being united. At the same time, they vote with their feet in terms of their attention for conflict. I think that for most Americans, if you ask them where they are politically, they have some line that they have drawn in their own minds and they're on one side of that or they're on the other side of that. I mean, it's something that most Americans are clear in that sense about. But what happens when you find yourself making that choice in our media environment is that you may be on this side of the line, but you suddenly find yourself abruptly shoved all the way over here for the people who speak for you, or if you're on this side of the line, it works similarly the other way. It's sort of the crossfire effect. I mean, everything is put in the most extreme terms, and the idea of reason discourse while it may sound appealing is not something that draws the ratings. What draws the ratings are O'Reilly and Hannity and Combs and Crossfire and things like that. I don't know how many of you had the good fortune to see John Stewart absolutely deadly, seriously, bringing those two clowns on Crossfire to heal about what they were doing and what it was costing the country. But it was one of John Stewart's very, very best moments. And I think that the problem is that in the economic environment I'm talking about, with this battle for ratings and this furious economic drive to get as big an audience as you can, if people think it will attract an audience, then that's what they're gonna do. And the television wisdom is that anything that is not full of conflict and sharp and edge and harsh language and that kind of in-your-face behavior, that's boring if it's not like that. And that's a terrible thing. But we say we don't like it, but then we certainly do watch it. Very, David Thorburn, MIT. In my lifetime, it seems to me, certainly in my adult lifetime, this is the election in which the role of religion has been the most powerful. And I wonder whether that problem is something that the panel would like to address. It seems to me a very significant factor that hasn't yet been really talked about directly and maybe helps to explain this terrible polarization we're talking about. The role not only that religion plays in a kind of explicit sense, but the implicit assumptions that voters may be making about religious questions that are connected to religion. Mark's gotta go. You wanna do it? I'll try to address that briefly and then had one comment on the issue of complexity in the news. I think religion is another area of polarization, but one that perhaps is not as conscious. It's not as allowed to be as much on the surface as we see. It's so easy now for people to grab on to blue versus red. Whereas religion is something that's more of an underline. A lot of people aren't sure exactly what they feel about it, exactly how much they want it to be attached to where the country goes, to the role of this leader, to decisions that are made. I think there's a big question mark in our country about how closely attached religion should be to politics. It's an area that's continued to receive debate over and over again. So the question of John Kerry and his willingness or lack thereof to discuss religion is an important indicator that that's an area where people are not comfortable, are not sure. The extent to which they're making, they're voting decisions based on that, I'm not sure about. I don't know that survey data would suggest that religion is tied so much to how people are voting. Certainly there's a core group and I think perhaps eight years ago, the evangelical rise was a greater influence than it is in the election today. In general, the issues of complexity and covering those areas in the news is one where again, I think the availability of the new technology, what kinds of things are offered by having 24 hours to fill with information, by having a blog that you could put out all kinds of information on. The capability to cover complex issues is enormous today. There's all kinds of background, all kinds of graphics you can develop, all kinds of ways that you can explain complex issues to individuals, especially those that are interested in them. And unfortunately, as Alex says, the money isn't there. People aren't willing to devote the time even to develop those, let alone test them or experiment with them. I have one thought about the religion thing that I don't know whether you'll agree with it or not, but I think to a certain extent, it's a canard in this respect. It's not that I don't think the evangelicals are one of Karl Rove's aces in the whole. I mean, obviously this has been one of the things that George Bush has used very well. He has great support among evangelicals and many evangelicals who are poor people in the South or black people who theoretically would have other reasons you would think to vote for, a Democrat will vote for George Bush because of that. However, I think the idea that the issue of religion is becoming the Trump of everything else, the thing that is going to be the only real meaningful criteria for a lot of people, I just don't buy it. At least it's not been proved to me yet. What I mean is this. We have had this war without real costs. There has been no tax. There has been no draft. We have, except for the people who have lost their own loved ones or had their relatives and friends serving, we've basically all been watching it, but none of us have it been touched by it, really, not at all. If George Bush were to say, you know, I need a draft in order to wage this war, I think his prospects of being re-elected no matter what he said about God's will and how God told him to do the draft, I think they would go plummeting through the floor because I think that the thing that George Bush has tried to do that's been, that has sort of empowered this issue of evangelical support is that he's created an environment in which there is no cost that the evangelical voters would perceive to be one that did Trump even that. Now, evangelical beliefs will trust, will Trump an environment of relative, you know, economic unhappiness, but it's far cry from a depression. We've got 5% unemployment. That's really not, that's pretty normal, really, in our country. So we're not in a situation that has put to a test how powerful this religious conviction is as opposed to something else. And until we really see it stand up and knock a really powerful disincentive in the other direction out, I'm not persuaded that it's going to be the sort of super powerful force that I know some people fear it is. Over here. Hi, I'm Alessandro, an Italian journalist and a student. I have a question about the political system of electing the President of the United States. In Colorado, people are going to vote for a proportional distribution of the state votes to elect the President of the United States. I don't know, maybe this referendum will pass. May other states in the future reform of the winner takes out system change for a proportional distribution of their own votes for the President? And may these change all media system and may one day all media stop dividing your country in red states and blue states. Thank you. I think that the, you know, there's been an opposition to the electoral system that we have in this country for a long time. And back in the 1960s, it was really about 1969. There was an effort, I mean, the Senate passed a law that would, that had it gone forward, would have really brought, it would have had to pass two thirds of the Senate and then been ratified. It would have changed the Constitution. So it's not an easy thing to do. But the, I just heard literally today, Alex Kezar, who's on the faculty of the Kennedy School talk about this and he put it to interest groups not necessarily on the basis of small states, but purely on the basis of now political entities on both sides that would perceive their short-term interest to be damaged by either doing it proportionately or keeping it the way it is. I mean, I think that the Democrats in a particular state believe that it's likely that they're gonna continue to control the politics of that state. They're not gonna want it to go away because it gives them a disproportionate power relative to the electoral system. So I asked, or someone asked Alex Kezar what circumstances would make it ripe for change? And he said that if this year George Bush should win the popular vote, but John Kerry win the electoral vote and therefore the presidency, then basically the Democrats would have had it happen to them once, the Republicans would have had it happen to them once, and maybe they'd do something about it. I'd like to ask a couple of questions. First, I'd like to press Alex further and invite Amy also to talk about this question of how official carrots and sticks affect coverage. Alex, you were saying, hey, the threat to exclude a troublesome journalist from press conferences is all part of the game and this pulling and hauling is part of the warp and woof of the relationship. But that still leaves the question, how much influence does that have on press coverage? How frightening is the threat of retaliation from the state to journalists? Recently we had an interesting event on the net that many people noticed which was a Wall Street Journal reporter in Baghdad sent an email to some of her friends about the situation. And her email was a lot more gloomy. It painted a much gloomier picture than the mainstream presses painting. She was talking about how basically she couldn't do her job anymore and how her life was in danger all the time. And that fits the sort of, I listen a lot to folk who are in Iraq and it fits what they tell me that things are worse over there than the media generally has painted. So raising the question, well, why is this? Some of my folks who are close to it have been telling me that since July 1st, since the handover, the American operation over there has basically stopped updating their websites, has stopped holding press conferences. They're pretending as if the war is now in the Iraqis' hands and they're telling journalists, hey, you wanna cover this war, go talk to the Iraqis, the sources are dried up. And so the amount of coverage on the situation has diminished. And well, in any event, I guess I'm saying, can you explain what many people saw as the gap between what this Wall Street Journal reporter was describing and the mainstream coverage of the situation there? Second question I had was, okay, sure. I would say that what you've just described is the difference between a reported story and a blog. A blog has all the appearance of being the heartfelt belief of the person writing, but it is not based necessarily on reported information. It's not sourced, it's not necessary to demonstrate that it's true. You're simply saying it's your opinion. It's what you think. And it's very, very persuasive and believable. It's also very, very subject to manipulation. I mean, what if you found out after the fact that that was written by a PR firm that somehow managed to get that done? I mean, all I'm saying is that the best thing about blogs is that their believability is so high, but that is because people believe that the people writing them are at least speaking sincerely, the sincerity of bloggers, if not the accuracy. It's not so much that people believe that bloggers are accurate, but they do believe they're sincere. I think that is a dangerous thing for us to imagine is always true or even mostly true in an environment when there is as much talent in PR out there as there is right now and that this is such a beautiful opportunity, especially at a remove and often anonymously to take advantage of that. What a reported story is, is something that has to adhere to journalistic standards in the Wall Street Journal, which is the news organization we're talking about. You can't get stuff in the Wall Street Journal without it being supported by evidence and you are held accountable for that and if you turn out to be reporting erroneously, then theoretically you can be called on it. Now, does that mean that there has been sometimes a misrepresentation or a diminished sort of a story that does not capture the reporter's vision of what they have experienced and in the same way in their reporting as it is in their personal letters home? Absolutely, but I can tell you as a reporter that a reporter writing home is writing about a personal experience that may or may not reflect the reality beyond their worm's eye view. It's not something they have to prove. It's something that they feel and while it may be persuasive to you when you get it and read it as a personal missive from someone you've intuitively maybe you know or in this case who you're inclined to believe, it's not the same thing as reported journalism and I would caution that it is dangerous to believe that journalism is inferior to such a piece of information. I am an old fashioned person perhaps in this but I would trust the journalism more. I'll add one example and then another point. I think another example of the Wall Street Journal case is what happened with embedded reporting. Certainly it offered a lot in terms of visuals, in terms of feeling like we were experiencing to a certain extent what the soldiers and other people there were going through but what we found out after you'd go through a slew of watching these embedded reporters is that a lot of the facts were wrong. They would announce incorrect numbers of deaths, incorrect other information which the Pentagon hadn't released yet. The reporters were saying that because they were there and they were seeing things but it hadn't gone through the checks of reporting. So whether there was some tremendous journalism through embedded reporting in the sense of giving us some experience and visuals and color we couldn't otherwise get the facts that certainly wasn't the best place to go for the facts and in terms of the back and forth you're talking about between government officials and the reporters I would just add to remember that the administration and those that are in the public positions have to sustain their public image as well and if they aren't speaking to the press the public doesn't usually like that. So they often feel compelled and know that there's a certain amount of information they have to give out so it is attention. It's like the three branches of government. There's a constant tension of going back and forth I think that does need to be respected to a certain extent. Over here. I'm Norman Beecher, just an old grad and I would like to comment that it's remarkable how little difference there is between probably what's going on in Iraq and what we know. If you went back to World War II you find a completely different situation. Nothing that comes out of Iraq would have ever come out from the front in Europe or the Pacific in those days because it was very much a necessity, it was felt to be a necessity to maintain the propaganda, to maintain the courageous image as we were getting beaten around the head and ears for a couple of years before we began to take hold. And I think that it is remarkable how much information we're getting but it's just a different situation. I think you've made a very, very good point and I think that there was official censorship during World War I that was sort of of an informal but observed censorship during World War II. I mean the journalists who covered World War II were in the army. I mean they wore uniforms and traveled around that way and what happened was Vietnam changed that. Vietnam was reported in a very different kind of way and it was the first time that war reporting was really, in this century anyway, was really reported as it happened. Oddly enough, reporting on the Civil War was probably much better than reporting on World War I or World War II when it comes to really reflecting what was going on in the horrors of the war. It's seven o'clock so I think it's witching time. So we should thank the panel. Miller time, witching time, it's time. Thank you.