Terry Anzur, co-anchor for the KTLA 10 O'Clock News, moderated the second session and emphasized that Los Angeles television news is a broad category that a covers a range of different kinds of newscasts, good and bad : "One of the biggest challenges in assessing the quality of local news in LA is the sheer quantity of news in LA. We have seven English-language stations and two Spanish-language stations. In the morning hours alone they account for 11 hours of programming, eight in the late afternoon, ten hours in the evening. Add it up, and you'd need more than 24 hours in a day to watch one day's output of local news in Los Angeles. And usually the people who criticize it the most, watch it the least.
"So where to begin? Today is the last day of the all-important February sweeps period. LA news stations get their overnight ratings throughout the year, so they're always very ratings conscious, but the sweeps months of February, May and November are more important, because that's when they determine the advertising rates. That's also when you tend to see more stories about topless parties, cybersex scandals, dirty restaurant raids, you name it -- anything to hold the audience."
The audience and panelists then watched a brief video presentation produced by Annenberg School student Tammy Katzof. Katzof ,who had watched 20 hours of local TV news during February sweeps, showed a highlight tape that ranged from reports on El Nino to identity theft to Monica Lewinsky. The panel discussion commenced after the tape.
Constance Rice, Western Regional Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, believes that for a community to survive and prosper, local news must be put into context so that neighborhoods are honestly represented. :
"We covered this morning a lot of the issues about the nature of the business, how difficult it is to be able to cover issues of substance because you're focused on business values which are getting ratings, making money. The business side of it isn't about covering issues or keeping a democracy glued together or any of the other things that a lot of us would hope that journalism would help to do.
"So when you put it in that context. If you take crime and the violence and the titillation -- who was it this morning that said it was tits, bets, pets, and something else?"
Terry Anzur: "Tits, tots, pets and vets."
Constance Rice: "That was a wonderful one-liner. ... In a city like Los Angeles where we are physically segregated, culturally segregated... There's very little glue amongst us. And you have crime reports. Four years ago I noticed a saturation of crime reports where you had underclass, very poor, African American/Latino male faces, and the gang. Remember, every story was gangs, gangs, shootings, drive-bys. "It wasn't the reporting on that, it was the context that was left out. What I noticed was, when I went to my colleagues who live in Bell Air, and Beverly Hills, and very rich communities, there were gates and barbed wire and private police. I said who are you afraid of? They were afraid of the people that they saw on television. And these are the people who are the safest people in the world, mind you, except maybe in Bogota where they've got armed guards and bulletproof limos. But because they had this enormous hysterical sense of danger from watching news and from having it portrayed with no context.
"There was never any context showing that there were 60 percent unemployment rates for these kids. Why do they go into gangs? What's the underground economy? How many people know that in South Central 80 percent of the economy ... is underground -- it's drugs, it's car theft, and it's guns. So there was no context as to what created this culture...
"The complexities of the issues and the medium don't allow you to get at the stuff, and it harms our ability as a democratic culture in LA to actually achieve what we need to achieve politically, culturally, and in every other way."
Terry Anzur: "Connie's raising the point of all the things that are not covered. My question to Steve Cohen is, can you get a number if you cover that stuff?"
Steve Cohen, News Director of KCOP TV, responded: "Yeah, I think you can. And I think, although I might seem to be the contrarian on this issue, I don't think that numbers, ratings, are derived from the things that our critics think they are. That list, that little litany of cutesy things you said make up ratings I don't think do. And I don't think they do anymore because we're a mature industry. We're just like, in some ways like hamburgers or beer. The ingredients aren't what get you known. It's the packaging and the marketing of the ingredients. Pretty much newscasts in Los Angeles are the same. They are in Denver, too. I think the way you can differentiate yourself is to do the stories you're talking about.
"Last night we did a story on the 30th Anniversary of the Kerner Report. There's a new report that came out on the Kerner Report. What did that tell us about society? Unfortunately, the things you just outlined are still true, we're still a separate nation in our cities, and we certainly cover the cities somewhat separately. But I think you can make a difference by covering politics and government, education, health care -- an enormous issue that everybody cares about. You'll do as good on television in the second segment if you do a story on an HMO that destroyed a family's life because they wouldn't treat a woman who had a heart valve problem, as you will if you do a story on vaginal laser reconstruction."
Terry Anzur: "Oh, come on. Look at that story that was up there from Channel 11. I think it was a story about a sex party or something."
Steve Cohen: "What's the matter with that? What's the matter with multiplicity of voices? If the Fox folks feel that in one broadcast they want to have a story... My favorite story that they did in a sweep was biker babes. Harley ladies scantily clad in leather goods on bicycles. That's a neat story, but they ran it at 10:45 and in the first 40 minutes they did news as good as anybody.
"...News guys should be able to do what they want -- news guys and gals. Put it on the air and let the public decide."
Carole Black, President and General Manager of NBC Channel 4, believes news content should be thought about in terms of what the viewer wants:
"I agree with what Steve's saying. I do think that you can get a number... I come from the viewer perspective. When I came to our television station about 3-1/2 years ago ... our news was if it bleeds it leads. It was very violent. I had stopped watching the news because at 11:30 at night, if I watched the news I felt upset and I wanted to get a good night's sleep.
"... I felt that people are no different that live in Southern California than live anywhere in the country. They want a sense of community, they want a sense of doing things, and they also want to hear good things, too. There needs to be a balance. We do report murders that happen, we do report crime that happens, we absolutely do. And we all do. But I think we started to go softer ... stories like beating the odds, about extraordinary young people under the most difficult circumstances... Our viewers responded to that. We do a feature every week, and we have the Crystal Apple award for the best teachers. We have unsung heroes that we feature every week.
"At first it was really hard to get the news people to want to do this, they were worried about ratings. Long term I think it has helped build us to the point at which I'm happy to say because it does matter because we are a business, we are in the number one leadership position and we weren't before.
"... We also have to realize that news is also about what people not only need to hear but what they want to hear and what's interesting to them. ... It can't be just what we dictate in a given room.
"It's like saying you should all listen to opera. Trust me on this, opera is what you should be listening to. You shouldn't listen to anything else, because opera is a better form of music. I'm sorry, but everybody isn't going to do that."
Terry Anzur: "But then should we all listen to the lowest common denominator?"
Carole Black: "That would be Jerry Springer. (Laughter) But I'm not going to argue with people that want to watch that because there are a lot of choices. Did I have a chance to have it on my station? Yes. Do I want to have it, no? But do I like the numbers he's getting? Sure. Everyone makes choices."
Terry Anzur: "Val's station seems to feel there's a need for an alternative. Why?"
Val Zavala, Vice President of News and Public Affairs at KCET TV which offers alternative news format and content to Southern California, says there will always be choices and news outlets must make choice based on how they define themselves:
"I think probably every single person on this family would agree there is a need for an alternative in the sense that... We're talking about giving people a choice.
"Last night, I think when most people... A couple of nights ago when Pamela and Tommy Lee's divorce was all the rage, we were doing a story about Iraqis who had fought on our side against Hussein and were now imprisoned by the INS here."
"And believe me, I was in commercial news, so I'm not going to get up on the holier than thou road and say that I haven't covered some of the less than noble kinds of stories. I've been out in front of people's homes when their three year old has been shot accidentally by the six year old, and I've had to stick around to get the body, and the parents have been angry at me. And if I had a rent to pay I'd probably do that job again.
"So it's not a matter of moral superiority or ability, but it is a matter of choice. I think, however, what's happening in the marketplace is that ... just like you either buy the tabloids at the supermarket shelf or you subscribe to US News and World Report ... Broadcasts are becoming stratified, in a sense.
"I think the problem comes, if you don't know what you are. Are you for this group or this group or this group? So you get all mixed up. ... You can start saying we can get a number here and we can get a number here, but remember the overall trend is down..."
Terry Anzur: "Steve, do you find that your station is providing a real alternative, or are you just doing the same thing everybody else is doing in a different language?"
Steve Malave, is the Executive Producer of KMEX TV's Notesius 34. It is the flagship station of Univision Television Group:
"No, we're not. ... Besides trying to find the local Latino hook for any story, we go beyond that, trying to find an angle that relates to our viewers. But you won't find the Tommy Lee and Pamela Lee story on our station. The issues that we deal with on a regular consistent basis -- immigration, education. Our broadcasts are catered to our audience specifically, their needs.
"The number one issue in this area with Latinos is immigration. Not only that but then education, as far as with the Prop 209 and 187 before that. ... Our broadcast time is precious. We don't have time for the Tommy Lee story. We don't have time for Madonna had a baby. We're not going to send a live truck out there. Our viewers really don't care about it."
Terry Anzur: "Howard Rosenberg, I know it's natural for everybody to promote their own product and how wonderful it is, but we've got to be doing something wrong."
Howard Rosenberg has been the TV critic for the Los Angeles Times for 20 years:
"I guess it's up to me to be the dissident here. I think local news in Los Angeles is narrow, it's superficial, it's too thin. I think it's not serving the public. I think it's getting worse. I don't think it's going to get better. I think it's getting worse for a lot of reasons.
"I'd be interested to know number one, Val, why you would do that job anyway, if you needed the money? That, to me, speaks to the lack of ethics in this business; and number two, I'd like to ask Steve, he ticked off a lot of topics, would you be willing to assign somebody those topics as a beat, exclusively to cover those stories..."
Steve Cohen: "Sure, if I had the bodies. I have six reporters."
Howard Rosenberg: "So what good is it to send in generalists to cover intricate stories?"
Steve Cohen: "You're being too narrow in your thinking."
Howard Rosenberg: "I'm being too narrow?"
Steve Cohen: "Yeah, you are. You can send somebody in to do an education story and they can be read in on the story and come up with a good piece. We have..."
Howard Rosenberg: "Do you think parachuting somebody into a story is as effective as having somebody cover that as a beat?"
Steve Cohen: "No."
Howard Rosenberg: "Whether it's local government, whether it's the environment, whether it's race relations..."
Steve Cohen: "No, I don't."
Howard Rosenberg: "Why doesn't a station in Los Angeles have a bureau in Sacramento, the state capital? The state capital."
Steve Malave: "I'd like to interrupt. [Univision] does. In fact I most recently came from the newly purchased Univision station in Sacramento. When I was there I opened up the Sacramento Bureau for Univision."
Howard Rosenberg: "Why no one else?"
Steve Cohen: "You can get material out of Sacramento. You put material on, you decide to do a story, you do it."
Howard Rosenberg: "You can get material out of Tibet, too, but it's not the same thing."
Steve Cohen: "That's true."
Terry Anzur: "It's gotten so bad that not only do most stations not have reporters in Sacramento, they don't have regular beat reporters at city hall. Bill Boyarsky, how is the city less well served because of that?"
Bill Boyarsky, has been with the Los Angeles Times since 1970 and recently became city editor:
"I would like to say something in defense of celebrity journalism. ... The celebrity culture is part of the Los Angeles story, and I don't mean mindless kind of coverage, and I don't mean gang banging celebrities while they're on their way to taking their kids to pre-school just after they emerged from a heart operation. (Laughter)
"But certainly the Robert Downey story which we put on page one this morning was not only a celebrity story, but it was a story of celebrity justice. The Spielberg story, which we're following is, in the view of a lot of people, the view of celebrity justice. I think through celebrities you can tell a story. So if you read our paper this morning you'd see, on page one you'd see Robert Downey, drug offender, escorted with a sheriff's patrol to wherever he was going that day, and on page B1 you'd see the story of an incredibly impoverished immigrant family where the father was accused of killing a five year old child, one of many children in that whole story, kind of opened the world a little bit into a whole segment of Los Angeles that nobody ever notices.
"So we use Downey because everyone's going to read a story about Downey because he's a celebrity, but if you read that story, you also see there's really unfair justice here in Los Angeles County."
Terry Anzur: "Judy Muller, is it any different when you cover LA for a network?"
Judy Muller, Los Angeles Correspondent for ABC News:
"Covering Los Angeles from a network point of view is obviously different. We're competing to get on the air with people from around the world every day, so it's got to be a big story, or it's got to be a little story. It's got to be celebrity oriented that matters, we would like to think. ...
"But I am, from a network point of view, sometimes depressed on how hard it is to get follow-up stories. For instance, we had riots here what, seven years ago that tore this city apart... You'd be hard pressed to sell any kind of story that takes a look at what's happening now in those areas. Are those conditions still ripe for discontent? Of course they are. But nobody wants to hear about it until it happens.
"Immigration. Now that the courts have ruled that immigrant mothers can't get prenatal care for future citizens of the United States, I've talked to a number of doctors and nurses who have told me they're going to defy that order and refuse to bar those people from their clinic doors. I think that's a story. I don't know why local news isn't doing it.
"It's always hard to be a national network correspondent and criticize local news, but I would probably come into Howard's camp on this. ...
"I've lived here seven years, and I have yet to learn much about my city council except if the leaf blower dispute comes up, or I know Nave Holden was accused of groping some woman, and I know that Hernandez was accused of drugs -- sort of like we cover the White House, actually." (Laughter)
Carole Black: "I need to say one thing about city council, just so everyone understands. I would have thought, because I live in LA, that that's what people want to hear, too. But what we hear, and I think other television... This is the great part that newspapers can do in different areas. We're broadcasters. We cover 4,000 square miles and so many different city councils are involved, and when we do a story, which we do more of than anything else, on LA city council, our phones are flooded with what about us? We don't care about LA. I'm in Orange County, I'm in Riverside, I'm in Ventura, and you never serve us."
Judy Muller: "I realize that."
Carole Black: "So after awhile, we have a harder time... We do cover the stories, but we don't cover enough local politics, you're right."
Bill Boyarsky: "It's a matter of will and a matter of talent and a matter of style. You can cover anything there is. You can cover something that everybody thinks is boring, and if you're skillful, you can make it interesting. ...
"I cover boring stuff all the time. ... When I was a columnist or when I was a reporter, I was bored with a lot of the stuff that I covered, and when other people wrote about it so I knew it was boring, but I knew it was important. You have an obligation to get important things on the air. You have a real obligation of making boring interesting... If you can't make boring interesting, it's because you don't have the skill, you don't have the talent."
Steve Cohen: "... Things have changed. Bill's right, and Rosenberg's right... What's changed is that the structural, the macro dynamic of television news is totally different today than it was in 1980. Why? CNN was still the chicken noodle network in 1980. Most of us wouldn't go work for them. There were no news magazines in prime time. There were no news magazines period. Documentaries were on the way out. You could collect talent in one place that was so stunning by today's measures, you couldn't believe it. ...
"The other thing that we had which was on the macro level so critical was that the guys that were running the business didn't see these television stations as just another fungible commodity. They believed in service. They believed in the FCC mission. They understood that we existed with a purpose which was not only to be profitable and to get ratings, but to serve. And that's the environment that's changed..."
Jess Marlow, former KNBC anchor: "At one time we did have beat reporters. ... David Horowitz who was assigned to do education. We had a city hall reporter. But one of the things we didn't have was the God awful competition we now have. People didn't have remote controls. People really weren't dictating what we covered. We dictated what was covered, and we did it with what we thought were very strong journalistic principles. And I think they were much stronger than they are today -- and I've always blamed the market researchers. I'm now, after listening to this morning's session, willing to blame the market. (Laughter) When Jerry Springer beats Nightline, beats almost everything else..."
Terry Anzur: "But why should we be blaming the viewers and blaming the market researchers..."
Jess Marlow: "Because they're the ones who determine what they watch."
Terry Anzur: "Why can't we just do the right thing?"
Jess Marlow: "I don't know how long we'd survive."
Judy Muller: "Why can't a station take a reporter, a good reporter, gutsy, good writer, somebody who can put things in an interesting way that would get people's attention, assign them to city hall. Let them split their time between city hall and Sacramento. I cannot believe that local stations do not have Sacramento bureaus here. I am astonished."
Jess Marlow: "Carole and I have talked about it."
Judy Muller: "The only thing I see on local news that feels like a communal experience is high speed chase, which I admit I love and will stop and watch."
Audience Question: "One of the things that consistently bothers me when I watch local news is the amount of time spent on the weather and sports. All I want to know is, is it going to rain, is it going to shine, what do I need to wear to go out in the weather? ... All the statistics I study say that arts are higher attended than sports, so I wonder why isn't there any arts on local news?"
Steve Malave: "I'd like you to turn into "Noticias Trenta Quatro Seis"... 6:00 o'clock and 11:00 o'clock. (Laughter) We don't have a weather talent, we don't have a weather man... [We get] right down to it. Current temps, forecast for tomorrow, and if you're traveling here's what you face if you're going to San Jose or if you're gong to Tegucigalpa."
Val Zavala: "And if you speak English, watch Life and Times. We do weather in a 15 second bumper, and every Thursday we have Edward Golbin on for his regular arts and culture..."
Carole Black: "I've been shocked myself... It's the number one reason why people tune into news. They want to know that, they want to know the five day forecast... I'm surprised myself."
Connie Rice: "I saw that almost every local station had enough money to fly people to camp out at the White House for three weeks, but they don't have enough resources to go to Sacramento.
"I'll tell you, there was a period in time when it was absolutely crucial damage control up in Sacramento, there was a huge battle over how these block grants were going to be shaped to salvage what was left of our welfare system in California. So it's the new welfare, the welfare to work system. There was a crucial battle between the Democratic controlled committee and what [Governor] Wilson was trying to propose. There wasn't a single report, and I'd have to admit I didn't see every news, I didn't do the 20 hours that you did, but there wasn't a single report. But there was for three nights running a story about a snake that ate a chihuahua. My mind, I just decided at that point I'd better go back to my cases."
Howard Rosenberg: "Channel 28 has a guy... You may not like his style, but what he does is terrific, and that's Uell Hauser. He merely walks into neighborhoods and talks to people. Consequently, you see people that you never see on television anywhere else in LA. I think it's just incredibly interesting. If it were done in the right way on a commercial station..."
Audience Question: "I wanted to sort of go with something that Connie and Judy have brought up in terms of the political responsibility of covering politics which all sounds so boring.
"The political decisions that the decision-makers are making in Sacramento and in city hall affect the lives of all of your viewers, and if you can bring alive the fact that these decisions on immigration, healthcare, and education are impacting their everyday lives, that would be the biggest service you could ever do, but also the most interesting thing that they probably would learn to want to watch. That is the thing that I think is most disturbing and most depressing about local news in LA, is not knowing what's going on... Meaning what's going on to us as a community, and not just what's going on to somebody's pet or some dog that bit a kid's face."
Carole Black: "Can I say something about... I'm sorry, I hate to say this, and I didn't want to be here defending news necessarily. I thought I was going to be defending against car chases. But I'm sorry, on education and healthcare, then you're not watching our station, because one of the ways we've grown, and I see it on the research and I see it on the viewer comments, is we do cover education. We do cover healthcare. And we do because those are two things that viewers are more interested in... Even if they don't have kids, they care about education. We happen to have a reporter that reports on education. She does general assignments, but she reports on education. And whether it gets a bump or not, we report on education, but it has to come from the point of view of how it affects the viewer, because they care very much.
"If she's not standing up there in Sacramento, it doesn't mean that we don't have the story. It is an electronic age. We have to be fairly realistic about this. There's no story we can't get."
Val Zavala: "You said that you were covering education, so truly, I didn't see your newscast last night but I'd be interested. So did you cover the biggest single bond issue that's ever been passed in California was passed yesterday in the State Senate, and it goes on to the Assembly, was that in your newscast?"
Carole Black: "You know what? I can't tell you right now. I can't because I was at something last night, so I couldn't swear. But you make a good point..."
Connie Rice: "There are a number of stations that have covered education just in this year because the politicians decided that it was the issue. But look at how it's covered. ... Remember class size was the quick fix of the day. Everybody reported it. The papers reported on this, and everybody reported on it... But, what extent of the huge problems does it solve? I saw none of that."
Carole Black: "Marion Wright Edelman is connected with our station, with the Children's Defense Fund. We have selected to work through this and work through stories about young people and the difficulties that they're having and the things they don't get from schools, and the family support that isn't there, and the money they don't get because they're on welfare, and we've selected to do it through individuals. I think everyone can select to do it in their own manner. But getting a story told through an individual has been very effective for us personally..."
Connie Rice: "It tells the voter nothing about whether Diane Feinstein's initiative is the fix. What would it take to fix our schools? What could be a more important issue? Nothing."
Steve Cohen: "You're assuming that political leaders have answers, and I don't think..."
Connie Rice: "No, no, no. I'm not assuming political leaders have answers. I'm assuming that there's information out there that can put a context on what the proposals are and that can educate the voters."
Steve Cohen: "We definitely agree on that. I think our challenge is to take the time to attack those issues and to tell them in a way that is intellectually honest to people at home. And just doing it from the perspective of the knuckleheads in Sacramento, city council, and the board of supervisors in this town doesn't get you there because those folks don't tell you much, they don't have much to offer, and what they do have to offer is mostly process that never comes out in the results."
Howard Rosenberg: "You're a veteran journalist. You know the value of sources and hanging out with sources and getting to know sources and understanding the beat, not just parachuting in and doing a story. You know that."
Steve Cohen: "But you have to pick your spots. That's all I'm saying. I'll give you an example from my own show. Simple example.
"Everybody else is saying on the Lewinsky story, what happened to the President. I said who are Kenny Starr's pit bull dogs? We found one. His name is Michael Emmett. He happens to be a guy that came out of LA. So we went after the story. Just two guys on my staff. I said let's find everything out we can about Emmett. So we did. We did the record search, and we found, lo and behold, that he's considered a callous prosecutor, that he tried to set up a woman in a major case against sheriff's deputies, that he dated opposing counsel while he was in the midst of a major case jeopardizing millions of dollars that the county put into the case. We broke the story. You can do that. You just have to take your shots.
"Now we did that story, we got, thank God for Jonathan Alter, he saw it and he wrote about it in this week's Newsweek. We puff our chests out about that. And it's not just us. Everybody in this town has stories like that. On OJ alone, Channel 4 broke more of the OJ story than Dominick Dunne would ever break on the story, and it wasn't because they were specialists, it was just because they took the time to say if we focus our journalistic resources on this we can come up with a great story. We did on Emmett, they did on OJ. Across the board in LA journalism -- not at every station. I'll agree not at every, but at some stations you will find the kind of journalism, albeit narrow, in my view, but it's there on television. But it's just that you don't see it every day, you don't get it. The result is that because of the macro change of the way people view us, as Jess was saying, you can't get the impact that you used to have 20 years ago.
"Twenty years ago if I did the Emmett story we would have been the biggest thing on the planet in terms of breaking that story. Today it's lost, and you have to struggle to get a Jonathan Alter yourself, or Bill or someone else to pick the story up and give it something more..."
Audience Question: "I want to address the issue of celebrity in the news. I'm from a small town in Maine and we don't have that. I understand that celebrities are a local issue because they live here, but I'm wondering if we took those 15 minutes of local news casts that are about the celebrities, about Christian Slater in a posh jail cell and used that more towards education or more community oriented issues, if that might solve some of the problems, or if the celebrity issues are necessary to have on local news, if that is really what's making your ratings."
Judy Muller: "I think you point out one thing that's important, and probably is too much not only on us but on national news too. But it is the entertainment capital of the world, and if we were in Detroit and there were car stories, I can guarantee that we wouldn't say we have too many car stories..."
Voice: "So we're not saying don't do the interesting human interest stories. Yeah, titillation and sensation, there's a place for it. But when it's cropping up on half of the information and then you've got how much of the other in weather and so forth, you've got to ask what impact is that having..."
Carole Black: "Maybe I'm more concerned about your point that, what I'm noticing here is that everyone remembers the celebrity story on something, and no one remembers all the news stories that we do that I think are quite good..."
Audience Question: "...I know the problem you have, I know the competition, I know the ratings and everything else. I'm sitting here wondering, are we just saying that we can do nothing about it, where half of the time is spent on things that are sensational to get the ratings? Are we doomed to have that, or does anybody from the local networks, have something to tell us that will be encouraging?"
Steve Cohen: "You know what the answer might be? Actually, this is one of the few times where I think the answer to television might be more television. But coming on the horizon is something that's familiar in the industry -- digital television. Believe it or not, by 2003, every single channel in Los Angeles, every single station that currently sends out one program one signal, will be able to send out four to six simultaneously. ... Now that could be terrible because you get more schluck. On the other hand, it might solve a lot of problems.
"One of the issues we've been talking about is how do you cover Orange County? How do you cover Ventura? Inland Empire? They're different universes. If we have digital television, we can have all the news that has an Orange County section on one channel, one section. You can get much more specific, much more niche..."
Tom Rosenstiel: "Steve, you mentioned that the ownership is different and their expectations are different. How does that play out for you day to day?"
Steve Cohen: "I work for a small company, Criscraft. It's only a multi-million dollar company, not multi-billion dollar company. But when you have vertically integrated ownership, let's take a group like Sinclair that now owns 55 television stations, many of them that have news operations. The care and feeding of passing down any kind of credo to the people that work within those shops is zero, in my view.
"The building of a wall between sales and general management and news is also not as thick. As a traditionalist, I think that wall needs to be very thick and very high. And I think that the sense of television stations just being, as I said, just another commodity to be traded and resold, eats away at our ability to be credible journalists and to solve some of the problems that the panel wants to have solved."
Terry Anzur : "I'd like to bring up one more area before we wrap up. This has been a very lively discussion with a lot of points of view expressed. How can viewers make their feelings known in a meaningful way if they don't happen to be one of the 500 or less Nielson families in Southern California?"
Connie Rice: "Not the solution to everything but a very important thing is a thing called news councils. If any of you saw the 60 Minutes report on the news council that existed, is it in Minnesota? It is a group of citizens. It's like a court, but it is not a court. It's not officially a court. But it acts as a forum for companies, for individuals to come before... It would be like composed of... Some of us might be on it and citizens might be on it, and it's a grievance procedure without anybody going to jail. But it gives terrible PR to those news organizations that don't do a good job. The case... 60 Minutes covered the story of a news council, I think it was in Minnesota, Minneapolis, wherever... And the local station there was a CBS affiliate, did a very kind of sensational, no perspective look at the number of repairs that were shoddily done in Northwest maintenance for the airlines. And the news council found that in fact, despite what the television station said, that they did use graphics that were hyperbolic and so forth, and it really took the news station to task. In the end, they were terribly embarrassed by the story, as they should have been. And that's something that could exist in every single major market in the country and doesn't. And could exist here."
Val Zavala: "Following up on what [Connie] just said, dovetailing with that, goes... After listening to this morning and to this afternoon I've learned more about the business side of this industry. I think one of the major solutions is going to have to be aggressive media literacy. If Americans don't learn how to decipher and decode and understand what is and what isn't, and our children don't understand to distinguish, we are in trouble. Our constitutional democracy won't last. So I think media literacy is crucial, and I think it's the only thing that's going to impact this industry."
Judy Muller: "...It's really important to send people out to understand there's a difference between well, a source told us today that... And two highly placed sources in the State Department who told us directly without equivocation... That there's differences in the way things are reported. That the source is important. That sort of thing. And I think you're absolutely right, it's the kids we've got to start with."
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