Moderator Marty Kaplan, Associate Dean of the Annenberg School, explained that the morning session would ask four simple questions: What is this phenomenon that we're talking about? What caused it? Is it getting worse? And so what?

In answer, former daytime TV Talk Show Host, Phil Donahue, who introduced in 1967 a new form of American television, said the problem is not changing definitions of news. He has great confidence in the power of journalism. Rather, much of the problem today stems from the corporatization of news outlets:

"I do think we're spending a little too much time wringing our hands -- journalists especially -- worrying about what is a journalist. We do have a number of very, very successful so-called mainstream, serious journalists from serious papers who have begun to strut about and essentially say 'I'm the news and you're not.'

"My first job was with the proverbial 259 watt radio station, the year was 1958, and I had a Norelco tape recorder with real vacuum tubes in it. I couldn't get over how I could stop the Mayor in the hallway like that... The Mayor would pay attention to me. I began to appreciate the enormous power of this thing called journalism...

"I took no test. I didn't have to pee in a bottle. Anybody in this wonderful country can be a journalist. That's the point. If anybody can be a journalist, including me, it promotes the possibility that we will have more and more people gathering information so that somewhere in the collective middle of this vast cacophony of voices and copy, will be found the truth.

"Our problem today is that this collective middle has become occupied by fewer and fewer corporations; larger and larger in size; much more concerned about the price of their stock than they are about sticking their nose under the tent. Extremely concerned about being loved, respected, and admired. Very, very tentative as we enter the millennium. With how much enthusiasm is ABC News going to pursue another food story after Food Lion's verdict against the agency? Nothing, nothing in that verdict said that anything that ABC News reported was false. They got the story right...

"We, I am sure, have people running into the green room now, producers, and saying to guests before the show -- "Don't mention any corporations." And if we have two of the big three networks owned by nuclear power companies, with how much enthusiasm can we expect them to pursue stories that don't flatter the nuclear power industry?

"CBS and Westinghouse, and NBC and General Electric will dutifully report all penalties assessed their parent corporation. I assure you of that... What we don't know is what documentary will not be produced. ... We had a very tentative coverage, for example, of the Persian Gulf War. Schwarzkopf said to the press, "Get behind that rope," and we did. The Pentagon told all the networks to "get out of Baghdad" and they did, with the one exception of CNN.

We have the total corporatization of the news business today, and we cannot overlook the consequence. Nobody's in a room trying to decide how to dupe you. Nobody's that evil. It is rather a process that is internalized, a kind of boardroom view that is internalized by the working press who are not likely to cover or expose the S&L scandal. Missed it. Missed HUD. Missed IranScam."

NBC News Vice President David Corvo, whose mandate includes programming development for MSNBC and CNBC, responded to Donahue by saying that owners and managers of mass media today need others to alert them to emerging trends in tastes and programming because of the inherent conservatism and risk of assembling mass audience. In a period of fragmentation, the networks, he suggested, were no longer innovators of new forms of journalism as much as assimilators:

"I would agree with [Phil] and say we need Phil Donahue and Matt Drudge and everybody else who is in the mix to have a richer journalistic stew out there. I remember when Phil was still doing his show, there were sometimes comments, 'Is Phil Donahue a journalist or not a journalist?' He was doing incredibly important journalism a lot of the time on his program, and that is exactly the antidote to corporate news ownership.

"I work for NBC... These big companies are like battleships going down the middle of a gulf or something, and when we fire our guns they're pretty loud, but we don't change direction very well. It's the size of our dissemination, probably, that gives us power. But we need everybody else around bumping into us on the sides, shooting their guns at us, pushing us left, pushing us right -- and I don't mean in a political way. I mean trying to point us in the right direction so we cover stories that we do miss, and we miss a lot of them. But it's the whole landscape of journalists that seems to me very important, and to some degree under threat.

"I would just as soon tolerate some people on the Internet who may not quite have the journalistic standards that some of us have learned over the years just to be out there as troublemakers. I would rather have that than have them silenced...

"I would say the other concentration that's a concern, and my colleague Jonathan Alter has written about this ... is that like entertainment, news is being covered in a greater degree these days as blockbusters. . . You see several stories covered in massive amounts by everybody, and a lot of little stories that used to sneak in there on network broadcasts and elsewhere, and in the newspapers, getting pushed out. It's a desire to capture, obviously, the audience and the audience's attention with these blockbuster stories. There certainly is an audience for them. But I think some of the smaller, some of the more difficult stories are being pushed out for that. That's why, again, we need as broad a landscape of journalists as possible."

Judy Muller, a correspondent for ABC's World News Tonight, Nightline and This Week with Sam and Cokie worried that in the search for audience and acceptability, key values of journalism are being lost, especially by the next generation of journalists. This legacy handed down from one generation to the next may be one of the key concerns.

"I was thinking if [Fred Friendly's] "Harvest of Shame" were produced today, it would probably be with a consumer reporter from a magazine show and it would be "Harvest of Shame On You" and he or she would be dressed as a migrant worker, and it would be all about how tough it was for he or she to pick crops that day. That makes me sad... The focus groups and the ratings drive and the competition are such pressures against that kind of quality and issue-oriented piece that it dismays me.

"I remember I did a 20/20 piece recently, and I was talking to a producer who said well, we've got this side of it. We've got her all lined up. She's exclusive. I said what about the other side? When can we talk to them? Well, we can't talk to them. Dateline has them. I said oh, well should I end the piece by saying, "For the rest of the story tune into Dateline tomorrow night"? It was frustrating. That's what happens. The "get" is what it's all about... Telling a good story is what this is about, and you have to keep the news value and the accuracy and the perspective in it.

"So as far as entertainment goes, if what you're doing is telling a story well-- the craft of journalism-then I'm all for it. I think the best journalists are storytellers -- the Kuralts, the Edward R. Murrows. That's what they did well. That's okay. So I think in our rush to judgment we ought to remember that that's what the best people do.

"I am a little worried about the younger generation. At 20/20 . . . a young intern was helping me screen tapes. She sees of one of my interviews. She says, you know what you do really well? I'm kind of puffing up and hoping she'll comment on my interviewing skills. She said, "You've got that listening shot down really well. You really look like you're listening." I said that's because I am listening. She goes "Yeah, I know, that's what I mean. You really look like it." This is a new journalist coming up who thinks it's about performance, about the reporter and how the reporter looks in the piece...

"Hollywood's a hard place to cover. It's especially difficult if you're owned by Disney. I can't tell you how many times I've thought of doing a story and I'll think wait a minute, is that one of our movies? ... It's a chilling effect in reverse. I think I can't do that because people will say you're doing the story because you work for Disney..."

Bill Whittaker is a Los Angeles correspondent for CBS News. What is troubles him is not the intermingling of entertainment and news, but the fact that the bottom-line is everything:

"I would just like to make sure that we put our hand wringing into some sort of perspective. Richard was talking about at least we don't have yet the Westinghouse Evening News or the General Electric Evening News, but there was a time when there was the "Camel News" and the anchors would sit up and smoke a cigarette and deliver the news and then turn to the camera and do a commercial for Camel, and then come back and continue delivering the news. Even Edward R. Murrow, working for Mr. Friendly, had a broadcast where he took his cameras into the homes of the rich and famous and showed us around and had people playing the piano and showing their artwork.

"What seems to be so troubling now is that we live in a time of almost hyper-capitalism, and the bottom line is everything in every industry. It's a bit unreal if not naive to expect or even hope that the major broadcasters owned by major corporations would not come under those same pressures.

"I have read that Don Hewitt said that ... in addition to all the good things that he believes 60 Minutes has done, one of the bad things that 60 Minutes did was that it made money, and that for the first time, news producers and news divisions came to see that news could make a profit. Before then it wasn't expected to. Those pressures were taken off of news. It was supposed to be a loss leader and you did it because it was a good thing to do and your anchor was your prestige person up in front. Now all news operations and broadcasts are expected to make money. That's what I see as the big problem...

"But that said, I think there is more good news available today than perhaps there's ever been. It just may not be on the traditional providers like the network news broadcasts...

"If the broadcasters aren't covering the national political conventions, you can see gavel to gavel on CSPAN. You've got NPR. You've got 60 Minutes. There's Nightline. There's the Internet. There are all sorts of outlets out there. I think that all of this ends up putting more of the burden on us, on news consumers to be wiser about how we go about getting the news."

"I also wanted to talk about what David was saying about people turning to us now for the big story. ...We see a jump in ratings and revenue when we cover the big story, so that prompts us to look for that next big story. If something's coming along that even has the scent of a big story, we jump all over it hoping that it's going to be the next Princes Di or the next OJ because that's where the attention comes from. It's almost to the point now where we don't seem to be able to help ourselves."

Bernie Weinraub has covered Hollywood for the New York Times since 1991 reminds us of the questionable journalism relationships that existed in the past:

"Maybe I should play the devil's advocate just one second in saying well, the Committee of Concerned Journalists is a terrific organization. It would have been even more terrific had it been created in the 1950s or '60s. It seems to me journalism then, and I don't know if there were any meetings like this back then, the way it was practiced was in many ways far more pernicious and far more dangerous in a real way than it is today. Then you had the top newspapers and magazines in the country, the top journalists ... the top editors ... and the top columnists, people who were very powerful, who were in collusion with the government, in bed with the government, apologized for the government, advised the government... What changed that, we all know, was probably the Vietnam War and Watergate, but ... that was, as I say, far worse than all the excesses, and there are plenty of excesses that are taking place today."

Marty Kaplan: "Mr. Donahue, you spoke passionately about the chilling effect on journalists of the corporatization of the news. I'm wondering whether you believe there is an additional problem to be dealt with ... which is the trivialization that Richard mentioned in his opening remarks. Has there been a shift in choice of topic away from the Bosnia and campaign finance end of the spectrum and toward the Marv Albert end of the spectrum, which has been caused by other things in the last generation or so of television and the media business?"

Phil Donahue: "Yes. Absolutely. If we want to have a revolutionary change in the journalism game as it is now expressing itself in our culture, we have to change the rules.

"When I had a television program I was no less concerned about my ratings than the New York Times was about their circulation. If you are the local news director and you take it upon yourself to do the right thing and lead with Bosnia while your competition is leading with a bloody auto accident, you're going to lose...

"So let us understand the pressures that are inevitably going to pertain to a business that literally lives or dies according to the size of the crowd that it draws. As long as that is the coin of the realm, you're going to have OJ leading your newscast. And Jon Bennett Ramsey as well. ... now we've got a federal prosecutor providing the nation with a national peep show. Who among us is going to say they're not watching that? It bothers us, but we're watching it."

Marty Kaplan: "Does anyone on the panel think there is hope for something which is not like that, which could draw ratings or circulation?"

David Corvo: "I don't think we have to necessarily feel guilty about the fact that we want an audience and we want to serve the audience...

"There was lots of coverage of Bosnia. . . . And the fact of the matter is the audience did not show any true interest in the Bosnia story. They were force fed that story... I don't think that it's stupid to take notice of that fact, that if we're trying to serve our audience, the people who are loyal to us, the people who turn to us, and they're giving us a message that this story is not all that important to them, to pay some attention to that. ... That isn't to say that we don't over-cover certain stories, for crying out loud, because it's easier to do it and it's safer to do it, but I don't want to practice journalism in an empty church. I don't think that's the idea of journalism. The idea of journalism is to circulate stories and ideas. We're not writing history -- that's a different assignment. Our assignment is to talk to people...

"I think a story that's being undercovered right now that's of enormous importance is the Asian economic crisis, and that's a really difficult television story. It isn't because people aren't taking a crack at it particularly, it's just tough. It's hard to get your viewers really interested in a story like that...

"Eric Severeid once said ... people live on two levels. They worry about large world issues -- in his time it was the Cold War and whether we were going to kill ourselves with nuclear weapons -- and at the same time they live on a second level, they assume a future. They buy a second car, they build a patio or whatever, they have babies. It's our job to try to see if we can make those two intersect on some of the more difficult stories."

Judy Muller: "I agree in large part with David... I know at ABC there are good newsmen and women in charge of many of our [programs] who [do not] want to just hand everything over to focus groups. They want to keep the Bosnia stories in, but they also know the realities, and they are trying to balance against incredible pressure.

"I think a lot of it has to do with proportion. I covered two OJ Simpson trials for Nightline... We reported what went on in the courtroom, basically. And it was a hell of a story... Not to cover the OJ Simpson case would have been derelict. But .. It doesn't always deserve to be a lead. Jon Bennett Ramsey doesn't. Monica Lewinsky doesn't."

Bill Whittaker: "I did the second Rodney King trial, the third Rodney King trial, the Reginald Denny beating trial. I missed the Menendez, thank goodness. But I'll tell you, at the Reginald Denny beating trial, we did the very same thing. We had a trailer set up at the courthouse, we had a scaffolding put up, we did live reports from the courthouse. It just so happened we were the only ones there, and no one was saying then, oh, this is outrageous coverage, you're doing too much. The guy was pulled out of the truck and beaten on national TV, and people wanted to know, or at least we felt people wanted to know what had happened. We covered it the same way we covered OJ, but we got no criticism for that type of coverage, and of course that trial only lasted three months instead of nine. It makes a big difference.

Marty Kaplan: "You mentioned in your opening comments, Bernie, the ways in which newspapers have been in bed with politicians and government officials in the past. You cover a beat -- entertainment -- in which notoriously there have been various kinds of arrangements made between those who cover for various organs and those who want the coverage. Do you find that?"

Bernie Weinraub: "Well, it still happens -- all the time. You have very respected magazines like Vanity Fair or Premier or some of the others who make deals ... with studio public relations and PR people on who the writers of the story should be. A writer may be too tough and the PR person may feel that person will be too tough on Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner or one of those people. So I think it still goes on, and I think there still is a lot of bad journalism practiced, but I think a lot of the bad journalism is practiced on the part of editors and people who run magazines and even newspapers."

Marty Kaplan: "One of definitions of what we're talking about has to do with the trivialization of topic. Another has to do with emphasis and proportion. A third, which we haven't talked about yet but I'd like to raise, has to do with the manner and style of treatment of any kind of story.

"David, for example, on those Bosnia programs which you had to force-feed the public, were there nevertheless all the jump cuts and chyrons and graphic and techniques that are pioneered, perhaps, in an entertainment medium to grab people's attention? Is that an issue? Is that a problem? Is that a strength?"

David Corvo: "Well, I would use those techniques if I thought they worked for a story.

"I'll tell you, the technique that primarily is employed in so many network news programs, hasn't changed since Don Hewitt and some others invented it 40 years ago. I think that was a problem. They're basically white guys standing on the steps of the Capitol belaboring the obvious on a lot of stories, which they got out of the New York Times earlier that day. . . .

One of the things we tried to do [on Bosnia] was send some producers for a longer period of time and try to get them to do the stories a little bit more like magazine stories, which is to say find some people, follow them for awhile. We actually even did some hidden camera where they were trying to chase down some of the bad guys who had not been caught. Remember, the UN can't find them, but we found them... We tried to really put some contemporary production values into the stories and make them a little richer, which is not usually, by the way, graphics and fast cutting."

Marty Kaplan: "What about some of the other techniques of presentation which were pioneered in MTV or by our modern celebrity culture?"

David Corvo: "Well, to mention MTV, the sort of stuff they do, a lot of the fast cutting and constantly changing their graphics and things, I tried to do a show like that and absolutely nobody watched it. ... But there are techniques of narrative storytelling that probably certainly came out of fiction that are used on network news magazines particularly. You don't do an inverted pyramid telling a 15 minute story...

"A lot of glitz, sort of the ET kind of look, works for some particular kinds of programs. I think it probably works for ET because these stories are not done in depth, and they're fast, and there's a lot of graphics and it moves quickly. If you're surfing down the channel, you see all this stuff going on and it might get your attention."

Marty Kaplan: "But if you tell stories, and if narratives grab the human imagination...? Earlier we mentioned, I think you mentioned the Asian financial crisis. Potentially one can demonize one of the leaders of one of those countries, and some stories have done that in order to tell the story.

"Doesn't it disadvantage the complicated, the abstract, the impersonal? Or does it challenge journalism to make the important interesting?"

Judy Muller: "Well, Robert Krulwich ... did a story on the Asian market crisis which... bordered a little bit on talking down to the audience, but not quite. It was why should you care? That was the whole premise. He made me care. He made me understand. It can be done well..."

Tom Rosenstiel: "What do you think is the relationship between what television chooses to promote and what it doesn't? Is that a major factor, or is it irrelevant to what people watch?"

David Corvo: "Well promotion, which is to say advertising your stories with what's coming up the next day or the next week, is essential to retaining viewership -- particularly in magazine shows...

"Something like the Bosnia story, if you've got great video that makes sense in 20 seconds, you might promote that. But that's the same thing as a newspaper putting on the top of page one what's inside to try to grab people's attention. You're going to put the picture of Paul Newman, and not necessarily the Asia economic story from the business page on the front to try to get people's attention to buy the damn newspaper."

Phil Donahue: "...Bernie is right. The media is tap dancing 100 miles an hour trying to figure out what it is that you will read, or watch. That's what we get paid to do. That's why Kevin Costner is on the cover of Time Magazine. That's why Roger the Rabbit is on the cover of Newsweek, and Bette Midler. That's why Time and Newsweek are beginning to look more like People magazine, because we know the issue will fly off the newsstand, and who wants to put the Time and Newsweek editors in jail for that? They're hopeful that maybe some of the stuff that they're paying some talented people to write and to cover will be read by the public, because Kevin Costner's on the cover and not B.B. Netanyahu."

Marty Kaplan: "Don Hewitt gave a widely noted speech in November. I just want to quote a passage from it. "Looking at the glut of television news magazines, there isn't anyone in this room," he was at a business function, "who believes the men who run CBS, NBC, and ABC woke up one morning and said to themselves, you know, 'I don't think television is doing enough to inform the American people.' What they woke up one morning and said to themselves was, 'Can you frigging believe the money that 60 Minutes makes?'""

David Corvo: "I think Don Hewitt's explanation of the history of prime time news magazines and everything is a little shaded towards his own experience...

"It's true that there wasn't the pressure on news divisions then to achieve the kind of revenues that are currently demanded, and Don got a chance to do the first news magazine because the news division was really concerned that -- they all were -- they couldn't get into prime time. It was getting tougher and tougher. As the prime time ... shows became popular ... it was tougher and tougher for news divisions to get air time, so they were looking for ways to do it. Don wrote a famous memo to Dick Salant, and in the memo he said, 'Just give me 60 minutes to try this kind of thing.' Dick circled it and said, 'All right, do it, because you're a pain in the neck.'"

"The networks continued to lose documentary time. I think in 1962, there were about 250 documentaries on the air in prime time, and that was the height. It started falling after that. News magazines were a way to grab the territory back. Now what you do with that territory is another question, and we should be held up to scrutiny if we do it poorly. At Dateline NBC, we're going to do 230 hours of prime time ourselves next year. We're going to do probably 20 full hours that look a lot like documentaries, but I'll be damned if we'll call them that...

"It's not all just revenue. News divisions are filled with people who want to be on the air. Who want to tell stories. Who want to tell them to large audiences, and are fighting with the entertainment guys and the sports guys and everyone else who has access to air, to grab as much air time as they can and be as creative about it as possible."

Marty Kaplan: We've been talking about what this issue is and what caused it. Another question is, is there more of it than there used to be? ... Is there any empirical research which could be done to help us to answer that question? Happily, the Committee of Concerned Journalists did do a study for us, and we're going to now add something as grubby as empirical data to our conversation."

Tom Rosenstiel, vice-chair of the Committee presented the study. The entire study can be found on our web site. Tom remarked on some of the findings:

"The study had two parts. One was longitudinal: we looked at network news, newspapers, and print news magazines at three points in time, 1977, '87 and '97.

"The second part of the study looked at a larger universe of the media in the fall of 1997. We took six weeks and we looked at every prime time news magazine, everything that was in the print news magazines, every nightly newscast, and several more newspapers. All together we looked at about 6,000 stories that had been published over 20 years. I think we found mainly three things.

"First of all, there has been a change in the topics that are covered in the news and in the character of certain news outlets. For instance, one of the things we found is that Time and Newsweek are seven times more likely to have the same cover as People in 1997 as they were in 1977. Interestingly, People does more coverage of social trends, like child abuse, than they did 20 years ago, but those were not the covers that they had in common with Time and Newsweek.

The changes in topics covered has moved to a softer topics from traditional and perhaps limited hard news. [From] '77 to '97, the number of stories about government dropped by about 40 percent from one in three to one in five. The number of stories about foreign affairs dropped to 25 percent -- from one in four to one in six. The number of stories about celebrity entertainment, celebrity crime, tripled from one in 50 stories to one out of every 14...

"What was a more pervasive shift that we found over the 20 years was not what was covered, but how it was covered. When Judy talked about how would "Harvest of Shame" being done today ... that is, I would say, the deepest finding that we uncovered in this. There was a dramatic shift towards a more feature-oriented approach to covering any topic. We broke things down into sort of what is the emphasis of the story? What does most of the story deal with?

"Twenty years ago, traditional topics like policy, ideas, political process, war and peace, internal strategy, or taking a second in-depth look at this phenomenon or trend, outweighed a softer approach to the news by two to one. Thirty percent of the stories were focused on these traditional approaches while 15 percent focused on the personality, scandal, the bizarre or simply human interest, which we define as a story that's simply interesting but isn't tied to any particular event.

"Twenty years later, this softer feature focus outweighed the more traditional focus by two to one. Today, 43 percent of the stories have this kind of feature focus, whereas 25 percent have the more traditional focus...

"...I think the deeper question also may be not simply is it a focus on personality or lifestyle, because as people have said, I think very eloquently, we're tap dancing as fast as we can to see what will people watch. I think the question becomes, in these new featurized ways of telling stories, are we ... being fair ... honest or factual? Have we crossed some sort of more fundamental line about what we sort of know we should be doing in the way that we try and cater to the audience?

"The other third big finding in the study was that the media universe is dividing into niches which is probably a natural thing to do. But what you know about society may vary widely based on where you get your news from. If we just take a look at prime time network news magazines, we found some interesting things. One of them is what they don't cover.

"If you look at sort of the traditional topics of news which means the combined areas of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security, politics, or social welfare, ...those topics comprise only eight percent of everything that we captured on all the prime time news magazines that we watched.... That includes 60 Minutes, which interestingly, provided the bulk of that kind of coverage.

"Over 55 percent focused around lifestyle behavior, and celebrity entertainment. By lifestyle behavior we mean stories such as how to flirt, curfews for kids, celebrity entertainment I think is obvious.

"Crime and justice, which is big tent crime stories, were another 23 percent of what was in the prime time magazines. So in all, 78 percent fell into these basically lifestyle behavior, celebrity entertainment, and big weird crimes.

We found print news magazines had gone from being a medium that focused very heavily, more heavily than any other 20 years ago, on writing about ideas. Eighteen percent of the covers of the news magazines were about ideas... Today that's dropped to five percent. The print magazines have shifted very heavily in the direction of celebrity entertainment.

"Network news is a strange hybrid -- a heavy dose of foreign affairs and politics combined with a heavy dose of news you can use about your health and your money. Not shifting over into celebrity entertainment to quite the same degree. And newspapers have remained sort of the province of the traditional news definitions.

"...So the coverage of OJ or Jean Benet or any of these other topics, may not, our study would suggest ... reflect what is the character of the American public as much as it is, what can the American media do with limited resources and limited imagination and the realities of a short leash on when they can miss the target. How can they collect some portion of the audience in an efficient way in real life and not in a perfect world with a perfect amount of resources."

Bernie Weinraub: "If people say they want entertainment, they want stimulation, we may not be the best people to deliver that. So even though they say that, it may be that ... in the long term strategy, it's a big mistake to go in that direction because other people can do it so much better than we can. And at the same time ... maybe the American people only hire us to do the kind of fourth estate, first amendment job of watching government and politics ... and that we killed the golden goose by spending the last 25 years ... telling the American public these guys are all bums... Then perhaps at least in these kind of short term strategies, they respond by not caring about public affairs or more serious things. We respond by trying to give them suburban living tips or entertainment, which can be done much better, perhaps, by people other than us."

Bill Whittaker: "If we look up and find that we're not doing the job, we will find that others will. ...If we're not giving people what they either need or what they want, there will be someone who will provide that service. Maybe it will be the Internet. Maybe it will pop up in places we don't see yet.

"David was talking about preaching to an empty church, and that none of us can afford to do that, none of the broadcasters can afford to do that. My fear is, though, that in trying to get more people into the tent, that we follow this path that we seem to be running down now-- preaching a lot of insignificant information to a lot of people, but the nuts and bolts of American society, of democracy, things people really need, are not going to be in that mix. We will end up with two societies separate and unequal. We'll have the information rich, who have been able to find the real information elsewhere, and the information poor, who are just going to be mightily entertained."

Bernard Weinraub: "Do we all accept now the imperative that news has to make money? That there is simply no public service aspect to it? Because obviously, for a long, long time the television people's business, news business, did not make money..."

David Corvo: "I wouldn't say it doesn't exist anymore, but the two are at war. They're fighting each other."

Bernie Weinraub: "Who's winning?"

Judy Muller: "Money."

David Corvo: "Right now, money. In the past it's true that the news divisions were not expected to make the kinds of money they're expected to make now, but the news divisions didn't exist solely because the people who ran the television networks thought, you know what? This is an important public service. They were scared of being regulated by Congress and by other things... They put forward their news divisions as a way of showing they were doing public service as a public relations effort, to some degree.

"...Let's face it. [William] Paley was very, very, very smart. If you read, for instance, the CBS News policy and standards, which is how people ought to conduct themselves in the field and wherever else, it's written as much for Congress as it is for journalists. And it's a great document for journalists, by the way, but it was also written with another audience in mind...

"The news divisions, of course, have to fight with their corporate masters as everybody else does, because not everything that we do can automatically turn into revenue. In fact, the coverage of these big stories costs news divisions a lot of money. It doesn't make them any money. Whether it's the Gulf War or Iraq or Princess Diana. Those things don't, in the short run, make you any money at all. They cost you money..."

Marty Kaplan: "Does anyone on the panel believe that there is a mass constituency for hard news, solid, informative, information, uncompromising, stuff you need to know, that is a broad enough audience to power a mass medium?"

Judy Muller: "I'd sure like to believe it. I know a lot of us sit around saying let's put on a show, and all we have to do is find a place to put it.

"I think the NPR audience, the PBS audience ... numbers aren't huge, but they're people who buy products, they're upwardly mobile, generally professional or college educated people, and I think it's a great audience. I do stuff for NPR all the time, and it's some of the most satisfying stuff I do because the feedback is huge. PBS is the same way.

Again, though, I think Dateline and 20/20 do a mix of things in the way that magazines and newspapers do. I can tune into Dateline on any given night and see at least one piece that I think is really substantive and well done, and then they'll come back with something that's light and fluffy. Sure. But I think there's a real fight to keep those things on. I don't think we've given up yet."

Joel Connabel a broadcast student at Annenberg, produced a video package sampling recent stories from network news programs. Then, joining the discussion, author, social critic and USC professor, Leo Braudy argued that even hard news is a sort of entertainment. What matters is the form of entertainment that shapes the story:

"One thing that strikes me is in fact that part of the agenda here is a kind of crisis in journalism... I've heard different words going around... Is it an industry or a business in that way and therefore has to be run, and to what extent by the dictates of money? Is it a craft in which there are certain principles that have to be followed? Or is it a profession? The difference between a profession and an occupation and a craft is that somehow the professions -- law, medicine, clergy, maybe even academics to a certain extent -- there has to be trust there...

"One of the things that's happened ... [is] the pushing towards performance of all areas of American life, and to trust the person who is delivering the message, not the profession. I think the kind of mistrust ... has spread to the journalism profession as well...

"I think it's sort of silly to talk about information and entertainment as if there's a problem. Everything is entertainment. Everything we see as an audience has an entertaining aspect to it. Even hard news is entertainment of a sort. It's entertainment for the brain, let's say, perhaps not as much as entertainment for the emotions, but it is entertainment.

"One question that I would ask here, what are the forms of entertainment that govern the shape of the news? One of those forms is the desire to find out what's happening below the surface.

"It's the creation of an audience that likes to think of itself as being in the know -- a knowing audience. Whether that's real knowledge or not is an important question. What's the form of being in the know? It's to somehow present the story as a secret. You have to be the knowing reporter and to let the knowing audience in on it. And unfortunately, more and more as time goes on, the secret is usually something scandalous or salacious. The reporter gets under the surface of things to find out this deep, dark secret. Even if there isn't anything below the surface, or even if what's under the surface is irrelevant. Or even if you haven't done a good job of reporting what's on the surface, you still want to get below the surface here because it seems, again, and I think it's representation, it's about seaming, that you're reporting real news.

"Another kind of cultural aspect to this, and one of the problems in defining journalism as a profession, is that stories aren't just stories about facts and information. They're also stories about cultural moments. Journalists, both print and TV journalists, are reporting kinds of situations that have a truth value, but they also have a kind of more amorphous cultural value...

"So the question is, and it's an impossible question, not to wring our hands as many people have said, but what can we do about it? Just saying that I'm not like all those other journalists, that I'm self conscious, I'm ethical, and I'm moral and I'm different counts. It counts individually. But what are the problems for the profession in general. I come back to what I started with. I think it is a crisis for the profession, and it is potentially a profession because that element of trust is so important."

Film and television critic Elvis Mitchell argued that the real popularization of journalism came from tabloid muckraking. What is different today, however, is tabloid has taken on a different meaning, not engagement, but amusement. It is not good for journalism to cover a broader range of society. But the shift in coverage today is not really cultural reporting, it is celebrity entertainment, journalism as a kind of monologue by the establishment, perhaps even an elaborate form of marketing, rather than a dialogue with citizens--and it washes over us like a warm bath.

"First, I want to say that "tabloid (journalism) was a great tradition in this country...It was muckraking, getting into the dirt and digging stuff up and pulling stuff out that nobody reported before and then chasing a story. But once the word tabloid became fixed on it, then suddenly we could look down on it... [We try] to say that journalism is this big institution when, in fact, Joseph Pulitzer said journalism is 90 percent entertainment and 10 percent news. We've lost sight of what it is we have to do.

"There's also, I think we forget here, a disposable element to journalism, and so we can't grade it as if every story has such import...

"There's been a lot of talk about entertainment reporting. I went and looked at some old 20/20s and they were really bad. But what's interesting about that is when it comes to celebrity journalism, there's not the kind of distance or judgment or criterion of criticism that there is for anything else. When Barbara Walters is talking to Arafat, it's something different; whereas, when she talks to David Bowie, it's what kind of pomegranate would you be if you were a pomegranate? These are great stories.

It is as if we define culture in journalism as celebrity entertainment--as amusement rather than culture. "The advent of rap didn't get covered because, as I think David said earlier, most TV news are white guys standing in front of the steps reporting for the New York Times. Basically, a whole segment of our culture is being left out. Because popular culture is as much a thermometer as anything else. When you look at rap, I think it's kind of a cultural reportage. . . . It's talking about a lot of stuff that means a lot to a group of people who aren't covered. A lot of this kind of stuff is not either understood by the journalist establishment or it's condescending because it's entertainment.

"Well this stuff is very important. One of the biggest, most interesting stories in pop culture, the Hong Kong Cinema, which is run by a mob... the Yakiza, [is] an incredible story. This is a great piece of journalism for somebody to get to. But instead, it's much more interesting to talk about the Hong Kong directors when they come to the United States and they make movies with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage and whomever...

"...One thing I think we've kind of ignored here today is the two worst words in journalism -- USA Today, which was the first newspaper to take its lead from television. And by that I mean the sort of PM Magazine TV, the late '70s, which turned everything into a feature story... Everything is personalized in a way that makes it easy to relate to and along that line, easy to dismiss. ...

"I remember a great Newsweek story. In 1975 when Newsweek still had some import, some currency, [there was] a [cover] news story on Robert Redford, where somebody said, "I bet even his sweat smells good." I thought, this is the end of journalism as we know it in these magazines. How can you take Newsweek seriously again after that? ...

"But I think what we (have stopped) doing here is we stop looking on journalism as a kind of discourse. It's become kind of a monologue, a one-sided conversation. We owe it to ourselves to put ourselves in that conversation so we can go out, if I can be considered to be a journalist, and dig up this stuff and cover these stories and ask ourselves these questions as we're hearing it.

Otherwise, "This (journalism) is the worst kind of entertainment. We want the stuff to wash over us like a warm bath," an amusement to divert us rather than something to engage us.

Joel Connabel: "One of the things I discovered from interviewing all these reporters, some of the reporters used two words as synonyms, which I don't think they are -- entertainment and interesting. They said in order for a story to be interesting it had to be entertaining for the viewer and vice versa. In order for it to be entertaining, it has to be interesting. I don't think that's necessarily true... I mean when you watch Charlie Rose he can be very interesting, but he's not so entertaining. But I'm still captivated by what he has to say."

Leo Braudy: [In] Dwight Macdonald's old essay on mass cult and mid cult ... the problem in the '50s was Life Magazine, as he saw it. And the problem with Life Magazine was they had an article on Winston Churchill on one page, and they had an article about a dancing horse on another page, and Dwight McDonald's view ... was that in fact this reduced Winston Churchill to the level of the dancing horse, that everything became the same.

"I think in part, it does a disservice to us. Sometimes you're interested in a dancing horse and sometimes you're interested in Winston Churchill. People have all sorts of different kinds of interests in different parts of their minds. I think the question comes back to the audience on how discerning the audience is. The show may flatten out the difference between Yasser Arafat and David Bowie, but is that how the audience takes it?"

Elvis Mitchell: "Don't you think, though, when it becomes a matter of presentation, that USA Today does flatten out the entire experience so it all becomes part of a pie chart, that's the real definition of what McDonald was reaching out at midcult. That's what happens when it becomes that kind of a [barbarization].

"And everything, too, when television and journalism, and entertainment become part of the same sentence and they're all, to some extent, mutually exclusive terms. So that Oprah Winfrey is looked upon as a journalist, which is not to say she doesn't serve a purpose, but she's not a journalist. So when what she said is not treated as an opinion, but something that's an assault on business, which then becomes an abridgement of free speech, it's suddenly like being in a Zucker Brothers movie, you know? ... There's no judgment being rendered about this stuff...."

Marty Kaplan: "Phil Donahue, is Oprah Winfrey a journalist?"

Phil Donahue: "I think the guy that ran into the bar at Chernobyl and said, "The thing blew", is a journalist. (Laughter) ... But we get the journalism and the television that we deserve. What you're seeing, for example, on day time television, is a reflection of this culture. It's like a canary in the mine and everybody's mad at the canary.

"Look at these young people on the talk shows. There's information there. Listen to how they speak. Listen to what attracts them. Listen to their vocabulary. These are our children. These are the products of our public school system that the entire corporate establishment has turned its back on. And yet we rail at the rise of Jerry Springer. I think we should be instructed by what we see on day time television, and certainly part of the answer may be a more focused effort on why our kids are more interested in Madonna than Managua; why they don't know what 8x7 is when they graduate from high school; why they can't find Vietnam on a map. Then we all sit around and say gee, ain't it awful if you look at television today.

"The system is working. These programs are finding their audience, and it is the coveted demographic, as you know. Young people are the people that the sponsors want to reach..."

Elvis Mitchell: "I don't think we get the TV we deserve. I think we get the TV we're given. There are a lot of people making those decisions who live in a very small world who don't see this stuff. So it takes rap, which basically started in 1979, almost 20 years to be recognized as something that is the voice of people who have something to say. People who were living that life you were talking about 20 years ago, who were slowing being frozen out as grants were being eliminated... This stuff was all being detailed in rap. That's why I'm saying the popular culture is as much a kind of journalism as anything else. Charles Dickens considered himself to be a journalist, and he was doing that very same thing."

David Corvo: "I think that one of the things that's happened is the story list certainly has changed. While people are complaining mostly about stories that they think should not be covered or are over-covered, there were vast numbers of stories that never were covered by the network news operations. Somehow we defined ourselves and got trapped as the front page of the newspaper, to a large degree, maybe with our morning shows excepted. And things like sexual harassment, child abuse, alcoholism, even that story that had the funny opening on 20/20 about the teenage driving -- teenagers kill more people on the highways than anybody else. I didn't see that particular story, but that's a hell of a good story to do. Those kinds of stories would have never been on Walter Cronkite's show. It's not to say that Walter wasn't doing good stories, but we just didn't think that was the province of network programs...

"What Elvis was saying, I agree with, there are whole other kinds of stories that we don't get to at all. And pop culture is under-covered, if anything. That's the main export this country's got right now ... and we don't cover it very well. We don't know how to in the course of most mainstream TV news."

Judy Muller: "I think one of the reasons that the OJ Simpson trial was important was because it, once again, peeled back the curtain that showed how disparate white and black views in this country are. It served a purpose for that reason."

Audience Question: "Mr. Donahue praises democracy and I'm wondering if he also appreciates the distinction between democracy and republic. Thomas Jefferson really pointed out that in a republic we are not afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate error so long as reason is left free to correct it... There are two aspects of this. You put forward an idea and it's either based on observation and is true, or if it's incorrect, somebody else is going to correct it. I don't find that the media really does much of that. It goes for the telling of the story ... that is shallow and not deep because it doesn't pursue the notion of truth."

Phil Donahue: "Let us consider the stories that media will not pursue... You can't, for example, even discuss the legalization of drugs if you're running for office. Now there may be some areas, but not many. Imagine the land of the free, the country that boasts of its first amendment, is almost silent about the fact that we have tripled our prison population since 1980. It's the largest growth industry on earth -- penology.... We are executing three a night in Texas and Arkansas.

"And I am arguing that as a first amendment issue the Radio and Television News Directors Association should be fighting to get in there.... There is no question about the fact that this is a public event, and if you're off-put by the horror of this kind of television event, why aren't you complaining about, for example, security cameras that record innocent clerks being executed by people who come in to rob them? Why do we show a young woman, a 26 year old woman with a three year old daughter in a downhill run at Lillehammer hit a tree and died right before our very eyes.

"If we give a Pulitzer prize to a guy who takes a picture of a Vietnamese citizen putting a bullet through the brain of another citizen, why do we become so pious when it comes to the matter of, for example, capital punishment, one of the central agonies of this nation's life right now? ... The reason we had Attica is because the press wasn't allowed in."

Bill Whitaker: "That's why I would argue that the system therefore is not working. ...Yes on women's issues and spousal abuse and the things that are talked about on daytime TV, certainly we are talking the hell out of it. But there are other issues that because they are not entertaining and because they don't have that spark that would catch someone's attention, get overlooked."

Marty Kaplan: "And will you get on if you do those stories?"

Judy Muller: "Sure, if you do them in a way that fits the format. ... Can I just get back to this gentleman's question for one moment? If you think it's a goal of a reporter to be objective ... I would say that's an abdication of the reporter's intelligence and responsibility. I see that all the time in various ways, whether it's politically correct pressure in the OJ trial, for instance, presenting some theory that comes up by the defense as a perfectly plausible defense when you could easily poke holes in it. Nobody did because they were afraid of looking biased. I think often we abdicate our responsibilities as journalists by trying to look so objective that we give up our brain power."

Audience Question: "Have you resigned yourselves to the fact that young people aren't watching the news? And if you haven't, then what steps are you taking to engage us and to draw us in and to reconnect us?"

David Corvo: "There's a long pattern, both in print and in television, that young people don't watch as much news or read magazines or newspapers at the same level as their parents. Generally about 25... [People start looking for more information.] It doesn't have to all come from Tom Brokaw, and it doesn't."

Bernie Weinraub: "In the most recent [newspaper] surveys, who are the reporters and editors of the print press in this country? Five years ago the average age of those people was 32. Today the average age is 37, which means it's the same people, the only change in them is that they're older and a little more alienated from youth culture or younger culture. Someone here can disagree, but I don't think you're going to get a hell of a lot of help from us."

Judy Muller: "I think that pandering to [young people] backfires. A case in point, we hired this young reporter who's fine, but the point of hiring him I think was to draw in this audience with sort of this Gen X technique, and he carries a hand-held camera ... Its all of this kind of revolving camera work and fast cuts and all this stuff.

"After the first one of these aired, my daughter who is 24 years old and is now working at CBS News with Bill, called me and she said, 'What the hell was that I just saw on your network?' I said that's our new Gen X reporter. He's supposed to pull you in. She said, 'Well, if I want to watch MTV, I'll watch MTV. If I want to hear a coherent story, I'll watch the news.'

"I think that, as a former school teacher, I know that if you pander to your students they won't rise to any expectations, because you don't have any."

Bernie Weinraub: "As newspapers have moved more toward computer technology, it takes them longer to get stories out. It used to be ... you'd get a story and you could turn it around, there were five or six editions to the paper, you'd get something out that day. Now working in a newspaper I can tell you that a lot of times they don't want to spend the money to close a late story. So what that's going to mean is that people are going to turn more and more to computers and a lot of stuff that I think essentially is hearsay, will become information. That stuff will then turn up in magazines because if you write a magazine piece you can have a piece of physical print in front of you to prove that this is where you got this information or misinformation from. Then that badly reported piece of information ends up on the network news one night or something like that."

Tom Rosenstiel: "[This discussion] in part gets to the question of whether we're getting the news we deserve or the news we're given. Increasingly, we are getting a cultural frame in the journalism we're getting. That's what the study found. Less an account of what happened yesterday and more kind of spun, "here's what it means." The frame that we're getting increasingly is scandal, it's good or bad for your life, or this is weird and you should be afraid of it.

"For instance, the amount of stories that emphasize scandal increased from two percent of all the stories to 13 percent of all the stories. The amount of stories that focused on the bizarre, "this is really weird," went from .1 percent 20 years ago, to almost six percent of every story today. "Is this good or bad for my life" doubled from 4.2 to 9 percent.

"... You do a story about teen driving, and it's not a story about necessarily teen driving. It's a story about holy moly, don't go on the road, there are teenagers out there."

Audience Question: "I intern in a television station that's local in Los Angeles, and I've seen how they push aside stories that are unfamiliar to them. But I also work at a local urban music station and I see that music is the way that artists express themselves on what's out there in the streets. So I wanted to ask Elvis, what would you suggest to the media that they could do to get more of what's going on out there in streets into the news, besides the murders and the deaths and these lifestyles that are extravagant."

Elvis Mitchell: "It's like there are like hundreds of worlds. I wish ... this institution that is journalism would see that they all intersect. And that this information by being about people, but being idiosyncratic, can be universal. I guess it's just a matter of some of these institutions shaking away that fear. It gets to the point where, I've been at Spin, I've been at Rolling Stone. They're just as afraid to break this stuff... It's funny. They all want to cover it after everybody else has covered it, because if it doesn't get written about in the Times or it's not on CBS News then it's not important. That's a real danger I think."

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