News as Entertainment and Entertainment as News: Session 3: Can and Should the Trend Be Reversed?

Ken Auletta, who writes the New Yorker's Annals of Communication column, believes that if you want to ask news organizations to change you must start by convincing the company executives that they have other responsibilities than those to the shareholders. One way of doing that, he argues, is to shame them into recognition:

"Before you can discuss what might be done you have to look at the business proposition that you're dealing with. It's not just what the previous panel was talking about which is increased competition. It's also that the audience has changed. The people who own these journalistic institutions, by and large, are large companies. Large companies in which these journalistic institutions play a smaller and smaller role and don't contribute the same profit margins as say local TV stations do ...other parts of the business do. So increasingly those companies look to their audience being Wall Street. What is the shareholder value we're getting, which is the same question that a widget company asks.

"If you're going to request them or demand them to change, you somehow have to deal with this equation. How do you get them to change their value system which basically is, what matters is how do I maximize my profits to shareholders. That, they say, is their fiduciary responsibility. We come back and we say ... that is not your only responsibility. You have some public trust obligations, you have some responsibilities to your community, you have some responsibility to your employees. It's a multiple. But you have to first address that question of how do you, Mr. Shareholder or Mr. Owner or Mr. CEO, change your value system or at least alter it some way.

"Among the ways you might do that is to shame them. ...Just [stick] a tape recorder or a pad in someone's face and say, 'Now would you tell me why you air Jerry Springer's show?' I love doing that. I had a conversation with Frank Biondi two weeks ago who is the CEO of Universal MCA which owns that show. I said, Frank, tell me again why is it that you put that crappy show on the air that you wouldn't let your nine year old, if you had one, watch? I think we have to do more of that and remind these people that there is a disconnect between what they do in their business life and what they do with the product they produce and its impact on the community. It's going to be real hard going because of that first and fundamental issue for them."

Warren Olney: "What do you do when he says, 'Jerry Springer is the leading program in the United States at 11:00 o'clock.'"

Ken Auletta: "'Aren't you embarrassed, Frank?'"

Steve Brill, Chairman and CEO of Brill Media Ventures and the founder and editor-in-chief of Content, the upcoming magazine of journalism criticism, said he agrees with Ken Auletta and plans to use the power of embarrassment as a tool in his magazine:

"I want to pick up where Ken left off. ... Open up the annual report, for example, of the General Electric Corporation or CBS or Disney. The first sentence of that report, or maybe the second, always says, 'Our goal is to maximize value for our shareholders.'

"...Do you all have pension funds or something? If you get a report next quarter or six months from now that says that your pension fund owned X and the average for the Dow Jones or something else was twice X, you're going to say what kind of idiots do I have running my pension fund? If you write them a letter and they write back and say, well you see, when we invested for you we didn't tell you this, but we invested in a lot of companies that say their goal is to maximize value for shareholders, but we also invested in a couple of companies where the management said they were willing to try to make as much money as they could, but they also had some other things they wanted to do. One of them wanted to be very active in the arts in Florida. Another one is really hung up about the values of journalism and their owned and operated television stations make only a 32 percent profit against a 50 percent margin, and we know you understand that. Right? ... The answer is you don't understand it. And the answer is that you really shouldn't understand it, and the answer is that the fiduciary obligation of anyone who has a publicly owned company is, you're taking money from strangers who are buying your stock and you're promising them that consistent with law and all prevailing standards of law and what's appropriate, you're going to maximize value. That is your promise when you go public.

"What's different today than many decades ago is a lot of these companies that are now public were private....

"One alternative is that the government can own media, and I don't think anybody wants that. Another alternative is you can have charity news organizations. PBS and charitably owned newspapers and magazines. I think those are miserable, terrible alternatives because they never really do good news; and second, they're beholden to a whole different set of interests and a whole different kind of pressure from the people who contribute to them...

"What I'm starting to think about is the economic model as an alternative, and it starts with something that Ken said and that is the power of embarrassment. One of the goals of our magazine is to embarrass people a lot who are doing not good things, and to praise people a lot who are doing good things.

"For example, the woman who was on from KNBC said they respond to all telephone calls. That's bullshit. They don't do that. Everybody knows that. (Laughter) If you call that channel, because we've had reporters who have tried, we've had reporters already who have tried, and make a complaint about something that's on the air, they don't respond. You get a form letter...

"The fact is that the power of embarrassment, as Ken puts it, can be pretty heavy. But I think it even goes a little further than that. ...In a world where there are so many media outlets, where there's so much competition, brand names really count. To the extent that embarrassment tarnishes a brand name, it lowers the value -- economics -- the value of that entity. And to the extent that doing good things helps a brand name, it enhances the value. Actually, NBC's a good example.

"A lot of what's really terrific about NBC has rubbed off and has enabled NBC to build all kinds of ancillary products using the NBC name. That's the good news. The bad news is that I perceive that they're starting to water down the value of their core brand name in news by mixing Geraldo in with Tom Brokaw, and with their regular news operation in the name of the S word. Their idea of synergy is putting Geraldo with Brokaw and with Claire Shipman and everybody else. I think ultimately that, while it will deliver a short term hit -- it helps things short term; Long term that kind of thing might erode the brand name."

Michael Schudson, professor of communications and sociology at UCLA San Diego, thinks that both embarrassment over content and aggressive media literacy could be helpful, but we should remain modest in our expectations for change."

"In trying to change the new system as it stands, it seems we at least have to begin with modest objectives. News and entertainment have always been mixed...

"[Originally in our country] what the propertied white male who was participating in the political system was supposed to do was to judge as best he could the character of locals running for office. Make sure that they were not tyrants or potential demagogues, send them off to Congress, and let them do their business. ...Then evaluate it two years down the road. Not follow it every day in the newspaper, because the newspaper wasn't covering it anyway. Besides, what could the individual really know? ...

"Things changed after that. We became a democracy after that. It's not that there's nothing new under the sun, but if we think back to the beginning, we should have some modesty about what we can do with the news media...

"There was a newspaper story some years back about Judge Wapner, Day in Court. What people got from watching Judge Wapner. This was in interviews with people who were running small claims courts in I think LA and San Diego. One of the judges said we can tell when people come in small claims court whether they watch Judge Wapner or not. How? The people who watch television bring in a document. The people who don't watch television don't know that you're supposed to bring in some documentary evidence to support your case. They don't know... It then becomes my word against his word.

"Judge Wapner, it seemed to me, was doing very good civic education on this entertaining television program. But think about how limited an education that was. What a small step for mankind it was to bring in a document when you go into small claims court. But it takes hard work to do even that.

"...Can we change organizations? Can we change the public? Those are the two reasonable places to start. Changing organizations. What Ken and Steve have been talking about, are the ways in which the power of public embarrassment could really make a difference. I think that's a good way to go, and I think public embarrassment can make a difference. However, it's perhaps more difficult to embarrass people in the media than it is to embarrass most others. Why? Because the people in media don't have face to face clients. ... The power of embarrassment is a face to face power, and most journalists are quite remote from the people who are doing the judging -- their audiences. So there's some difficulty about that level of attack.

"On the other hand, there's difficulty in changing the people. The last panel said well, aggressive media literacy would be a good way to go. I think it could make a little difference. I think there should be aggressive media literacy efforts. At the same time, my understanding of things says that's only going to make a very little difference. If you want to improve public health or public safety we can have lots of campaigns that tell people to wash their hands before they eat. That will help a little. But it will be much more helpful to have safe city water supplies. ... Some kind of socialized or structural reforms, it seems to me, have done more for public health... and if we can conceive of what they might be, would do more for the media than person by person education."

Warren Olney: "...If, as you said, Ken Auletta, the concentration of ownership is such that you're now dealing with these enormous organizations, how are you going to get a forum big enough where you can embarrass them on a scale that's going to make an impression?"

Ken Auletta: "...The notion that you can't shame these people like they're some faceless person you never see, Citizen Kane, is poppycock. I mean, for instance, [Interscope] Records. Time Warner owned 50 percent of Interscope Records which made rap music. If you remember, Bill Bennett and Delores Tucker combined to protest that this was anti-feminine, anti-women, pro-violence, promoting cop killing, etc., etc. Time Magazine tried to defend it. They went at them very aggressively, and some people, my self included, wrote about it and actually printed some of the lyrics. In fact one of the things I learned later is we printed the lyrics of one of the songs in the New Yorker and Ford Motor Company pulled out its ads in the New Yorker for an entire year, which to the New Yorker's credit, they never told me about...

"The truth of the matter is that Interscope Records was making a fortune for Time Warner, and yet Time Warner sold Interscope Records because Gerald Levine and the other executives were shamed and embarrassed among their friends that this was going on. It is one of several examples that one can think of."

Steve Brill: "It's more than just shame and embarrassment... Suppose, we started a discussion, one of our reporters did, with the editors of all the major book reviews in the country and we said how do you decide whether to list a book as non-fiction or fiction? They said the only thing we expected them to say is, well, the way the publisher labels it. We said well, is that the standard your newspaper uses for everything else? They said hmm, that's a good question.

"Well suppose the New York Times book reviews stops automatically labeling a non-fiction book as non-fiction. Or suppose they say at the top "purported" non-fiction for these books. That will raise a question about this consumer product..."

Warren Olney: "How do you apply that then to news?"

Steve Brill: "I just did. Non-fiction books are supposed to be news. By the same token, we intend to start grading the major newspapers around the country on several different characteristics. Their accuracy, the candor with which they admit mistakes, how actively they seek out mistakes and try to correct them, an overall sense of the breadth of their coverage. But we're going to have a rating system and it's going to be totally wrong, and everybody's going to attack it. And the only thing it's going to be better then is the rating system that's now in place because there isn't one..."

Warren Olney: "What are the standards that ought to be applied to news as we know it now so that we can have something to compare it to, and presumably make it better?"

Michael Schudson: "That's a very hard question... It's not a matter of not knowing what good journalism is, although there are a variety of good journalisms. I would take today's LA Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, even my own San Diego Union Tribune, over the way they did news 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago, or 40 years ago. Without question. Although I just glanced at the content analysis that the committee has commissioned and I may have to revise that a bit. But the best of today's best journalism, it seems to me, is far superior to what we've had in the past. It's just that the ordinary fare that people get is not the newspaper, it's television. And I'm truly not sure how to make television news better."

Ken Auletta: "[These large corporations] would all worry that their brand would be tarnished, that their business would be hurt if they were accused and found guilty of polluting. Then the question is can you make the argument that some of the things they do are toxic and therefore are polluting people's minds about society? If you can, you have a compelling argument, a compelling business argument for why they might change. It involves shame, but it involves much more than that."

Warren Olney: "You can measure pollution, but how can you measure the toxic nature of news, particularly if it can be argued that the reason the news looks the way it does is this is what the focus groups tell us the audience wants?"

Ken Auletta: "...If somehow you could translate some of the survey research about the press, about the public being angry with the press and a bill of particulars about what they're angry about into that that is harming you, your business, your brand, your news brand, then you might have some affect on people.

"I think also on a very human level, if you could start asking people, if you have news directors as Steve and the others who were here today and you start asking specific questions about why you did things, and they expose themselves to this kind of a forum and other forums, you're going to change their behavior. You're going to force them to think...

"The real problem in journalism is not that people are sitting there scheming about how I can screw the public today. They're always thinking about how they can maximize profit, it's true. But the real problem is mindlessness. ... God, if my competitor's doing it, I've got to do it. And somehow you've got to force people to think and reflect a little more than they do, and it's very hard."

Steve Brill: "Now if two days ago the New York Times had done a story the day before the 75th Anniversary party of Time Magazine, which Ken and I enjoyed last night, that Time has gone from 1977 to 1997, from 26.9 percent to 5.8 percent in terms of its cover stories for policy and ideas, it would have been a little bit embarrassing. Someone would have looked at that. Maybe they'd be thinking the next time. It certainly doesn't make it a bad magazine. Actually, I think it's a terrific magazine. But raising those kinds of issues, those kinds of questions really helps."

Warren Olney: "Mike Schudson, you talked a little bit about how much easier it is to force Detroit to require seatbelts. Are you suggesting some sort of regulation? Is there any way that the public ownership of the air waves can be asserted?"

Michael Schudson: "I don't see how in American First Amendment tradition that government can be very much more aggressive than it is...

"Here's a modest proposal. Suppose a local news [cast] or a local set of journalists, journalism school deans and what not said we think that the very least local television can do is to devote at least as much horse race coverage on October of even numbered years to local politics as to local sports teams... If a local television station has some commitment to democracy, that would be an embarrassable proposition.

"I did see some data on local Los Angeles coverage of the 1996 races, and I believe, I don't have this exactly right, but I think there were four stories among the three network affiliates in the whole season on congressional races. Well, Congress is hard to cover on television, but the result was they didn't cover it all essentially. Could you embarrass people on that?"

Ken Auletta: "Maybe. I think there are some things you could do. For instance there are newspapers and journalistic institutions around the country that are trying to plug into the new media. Time Warner has the News One in New York which is 24 hour local news on cable. They're not searching for a mass audience, they don't achieve a mass audience. Arguably it adds very good coverage, much better coverage of the city...

"One of the things that some communications companies like Cox Communications is doing, the Tribune Company is doing, is they're trying in those cities where they have newspapers, to try and create multi-media newsrooms. That is to say they create a 24 hour cable news that's dedicated local; they do radio; they do broadcast television; and they do online newspaper. And it's all in the same newsroom. So ... you are sharing information, you're sharing the resources which is an idea you had before. The newspaper reporters are helping the broadcast and the cable and the radio, which gives them a coverage they wouldn't normally be able to afford. You can think about the staff of over 50 for the local staff for the LA Times, if they had something like that what that might do in this community.

"But in addition to that, it means that if a story breaks, they're putting it on their online right away. You're getting instant access. ... But let me tell you the conundrum. When you look closely, for instance, at CLTV in Chicago -- 24 hour cable news ... they do in a 24 hour period, eight live half-hour newscasts, and all the rest of the 24 hours they repeat those half hour newscasts. At 8:00 o'clock in the morning they have two reporters working, and at 11:00 o'clock in the morning, a prime time for them in terms of reporting, they have three reporters. So you tell me what kind of depth of coverage you're going to get from three reporters throughout the course of a day..."

Audience Question: "I just wonder if there is maybe an over-confidence that the market can solve all the problems created by the market. There's usually almost an immediate writing off of ... any sort of government solution along the lines of quasi-public television like BBC or French television. I know that's not popular currently in the United States, but should we write that off?"

Steve Brill: "The government as the solution, it just couldn't be worse. If you think about it, the problem you have with Jesse Helms seeing something in an art museum that he thinks is outrageous and doesn't like, and his hook into that is that that museum or the artist has gotten some kind of a government grant. I mean you would have that problem all day, every day, no matter what..."

Warren Olney: " What about advertisers that refuse to support magazines or by extension broadcasters, because they don't like the stories? What's the difference between that and Jesse Helms?"

Steve Brill: "There's a very big difference. It is eminently solvable if you have an audience. The fact is that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, do all kinds of stories that advertisers have to hate, but they have an audience. ...What I'm suggesting is, this is the least bad way to set this up, and it has all kinds of problems, but the alternatives I think are just, I think are unthinkable."

Ken Auletta: "I don't think it's practical in terms of government support, particularly since you have so many news sources now. You'd never get public support...

"But actually, one of the potentially encouraging things, as you do more narrow casting. That is to say as you do more cable and you have more choices including the digital choices that are going to be coming online, you don't need that mass audience anymore. One of the attractions for advertisers is they don't have to spend to reach everyone in the city when they only want to target a small audience. They can just target it. So you can get advertising revenues you're not getting from smaller businesses, from businesses who want to focus, and you don't need the kind of mass audience so you can risk boring people.

"But I'll tell you, we shouldn't avoid one important subject here. It's easy to blame the public, and I would, and I know there's survey research that says that. But you can't stop there. Ultimately the people in journalism have to be prepared to say, and there's no way to avoid this it seems to me, I am going to do what I think is important and good, and sometimes I'm going to have to tell you, dear public. I'll try and make it interesting, as Steve said, and I think you can. But sometimes I'm going to have to tell you eat the goddamn spinach, because this is important for you to have to be a citizen in a democracy. If you're not willing to do that, then we should get in another business. If you can't do that, we should get in another business."

Steve Brill: "I think Ken's right. What Rupert Murdoch says is the ruling of the elites who want to pick things. Elitism is also called leadership. It's also called editing. Every editor on the planet sits there and decides this is something people should read and this is something they don't need to read or it's not important for them to read. Editing in journalism involves leadership and the most successful businesses on the planet, by the way, are also those where the people running them are always thinking not simply of what customers want today based on some stupid focus group, but what do I think I can create that customers will want if I create it?...

"I sort of hate the distinction between "news and entertainment". The only distinction I've been able to figure out is the distinction of motive, which is to say if your only purpose in putting on a television program or printing something is to sell the most copies you possibly can or get the most viewers you possibly can no matter what, I guess you could say then you're in the entertainment business, and if your purpose is to do something in addition to that such as tell people something you think they should know, then maybe you're in the news business...

"I'm entertained by watching Nightline and C-Span. Does that make it entertainment? I don't know."

Audience Question: "Ken, you mentioned there might come a time where the news directors need to step their foot down and say look public, you're going to eat your spinach, and we're going to give you what you need to know. Is it going to do the public any good giving them what they need to know if they're not going to watch it? If they're just going to flip the channel to the Jerry Springers or the other..."

Ken Auletta: "That's why I said, you could operate on the assumption that the public bears a measure of responsibility, and I think they do. But it seems to me that's not the operative truth that you should operate and be moved by in journalism. The operative truth is a faith that you have that you can proximate the truth and present it to the public and the public will do with it what they will. But they will get it.

"Your job is to try and figure out how to get it to them. Now if you have this problem, which we do in this country. Increasingly fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers. If you're in the newspaper business, how do you address that?...

"You've got to be smart about it. You've got to be a story teller. You've got to figure out how to get a new medium so that you can promote... One of the reasons Cox and Tribune are doing these multi-media efforts is they figured out this is a great marketing tool to reach non-readers. If you could reach online or cable television or radio people driving their cars -- people who don't normally read the paper, and here is the Orlando Sentinel reports today, maybe they'll start picking up the Orlando Sentinel..."

Murray Fromson, Director of the USC School of Journalism: "I think your point before, and it's a cop-out to always turn and blame the publishers and the station managers. I think reporters, as you pointed out, have to really get those uncomfortable stories out there and really make them sing. There's no reason why we aren't doing a much more aggressive job of reporting what's going on in this country, and not just interviewing politicians who are self-serving in their responses to reporters, but getting to the people who are really victimized or the victims of whatever policies that reigns in the country at this time. I think that reporters have to face up to the fact that it's their job to get the story...

"Quite aside from the politics of what's going on in Washington right now, I doubt very seriously if a station manager or publisher or any executive was telling these reporters to forget about double and triple checking sources producing facts and not rumor, not secondhand and thirdhand rumor and speculation, and leaks from both sides -- the White House and Starr's committee."

Tom Rosenstiel: "The question of how do you measure or when do you measure strikes me as a subtext that's come up earlier in the afternoon and also here. Do you evaluate yourself nightly or quarterly? ...If the news company's going to say look, I can get a bigger audience tomorrow night doing OJ, and I don't give a damn what you say in content, versus the argument, if you'll give yourself three years to judge success and failure and build audience loyalty, you can go a different route.

"If their evaluation is look, you can say whatever you want, Steve, but each quarter I get a score card that's more important than the one you give."

Steve Brill: "There are degrees and there are shades of gray. I think if you can get that high score card from Nielson and be judged as doing good stuff too, that's even better...

"I'll come back to what I said before. Is this thing that you say is non-fiction, is it non-fiction? Does that mean, first of all, for starters, is it true? Second, is it influenced by something that you haven't told the audience that it's influenced by such as an advertiser, such as the fact that we're doing a story on the 5:00 o'clock news that happens to be a story about how this fabulous made for TV movie we're doing at 9:00 o'clock actually happened. The real story behind the something that you're going to see tonight. That's not news. That is promo.

"...All of us journalists promise people that at least the first thing we're going to try to do is tell you the truth. We may screw it up, but that's the first thing we're going to try to do is tell you the truth. And we also say if you've got a magazine, your direct mail letter doesn't say and we promise we're going to give you the things we really think are important as long as we think it will sell a lot on the newsstand too. It doesn't say that. Or as long as it doesn't offend any of the publisher's friends...

"A kid's magazine says we're going to tell you the truth about this as long as the Toys 'R Us people like it. There are some basics that you can do before you get to the sort of wonderful debates about how much coverage have you given to this story versus that story."

Ken Auletta: "But I think one of the things... I'm convinced that one of the answers to your question. Certainly not the only answer and maybe not even a main answer but an answer, is that journalistic institutions, print, electronic, have to begin thinking about how they manage. That is to say one of the weaknesses they suffer from is this hierarchical management structure. The great editor imposing his or her will down. And you need an editor to come in with a value system and a belief that I think this is important, I have standards... "Steve Brill is probably one of the toughest guys in the world to work for. That's why he's a good editor, because he imposes standards. But I think a lot of organizations fail because they don't listen to the smart people they hire.

"Journalists every day, you have to make a second assumption -- not just about the potential intelligence of your audience, but the intelligence of your employees. You've got to be able to listen to them and get them back. The hierarchical model of the CEO/editor who comes in and says we're going to do this, we're going to do that... That's the wrong model. The model is really come into a room, put on the blackboard what you think we should be talking about today, and we're going to devote part of that... What are the stories we should be doing? What do you think? You have to build in some more leisurely time for discussion because the rest of the day is chasing fires and you don't have time to think. So the importance of somehow building in a structure that allows you to reflect so you can do something that is not by rote."

Tom Rosenstiel: "I wonder if there is a self-perpetuating quality to the addiction to infotainment for stations? What I mean by that is, if you filled your newscast with car chases and killer bras and stinky sheets, your audience is gravitated to that and [I wonder if] you've undermined your credibility to say to them for a moment now we want you to eat your spinach, for the next three minutes. The ability to say to them trust me, this is important. It may not be as entertaining as the previous story, is something that also builds up over time. If you've basically built an audience around something else, that's precisely why they vanish when you say let's eat your spinach. Then you look at your overnights and you say Christ, we're not going to try that again."

Steve Brill: "I think that's a good point."

Tom Rosenstiel: "Maybe this is what I meant by long term. We have to understand more about the audience research that we've got to say wait a second, this isn't a snapshot of the universal public. This is a snapshot of the public that we've built up over the last five years."

Ken Auletta: "Let me go at it the other way. I had a very interesting experience... I saw David Corvo here, and at his network, NBC, and I was doing my book on television. The new owners came in, Bob Wright and Jack Welch and General Electric and they said let us hire McKinsey and Company to take a look at how we actually cover news and what it costs us to do a story and how many stories we actually assign, get on the air, and why don't we have more pool cameras so we can save some money that way and maybe use it to cover things more intelligently. There was a lot of worrying, particularly among traditionalists in the newsroom that this was a menace. You don't want this information. These guys are going to just us it to cost cut, etc. In part they did that, and some of the fears were justified.

"But the truth is, they were right to come in there and try and analyze it. One of the things they discovered is that 50 percent of the stories that were assigned never got on the air. And the average cost, if memory serves, was $26,000 each story. So you start saying hey wait a second. I am a business. Why can't I do this a little more intelligently?

"If you take that model from the big bad new owners of NBC, which I think was a pretty intelligent model they tried to do, and you apply it to some of what we're talking about, let's look at some different ways of doing things. It may be with new media. It may be with 24 hours. It may be with the way we organize within the office and get ideas generating. But you've got to challenge your basic assumptions but not challenge the fundamental one which is that we are professionals and a professional assumes that we have some body of knowledge that we can say we think this is important, we think this is not. That's not all we do. We have to entertain them. We have to give them weather, we have to give them sports, we have to give them... It's a supermarket we're offering of choices for people. That's legitimate."

Steve Brill: "Let me just say something to the research. You talked about the difference between television and newspapers. If every newspaper editor, and indeed every reporter, got a report the morning after the newspaper was published that told him or her exactly how many people read his story, how many people read to the second paragraph, the third paragraph. How many people read the junk. You'd have newspaper editors saying my God, we're never doing that Bosnia story again. That is what happens with television. That is one of the pressures. A newspaper is a blended product. But that's the research television has.

"Now I have this sort of theory rattling around in my head that there's another kind of research that could be done. All of us instinctively figure that an ad that we place in the LA Times, it's likely to be believed more than if we put an ad in, lt's say, the New York Post. Leaving aside the demographics and the number of subscribers, it feels... It's in a more believable environment.

"To come back to your point about the kinds of stories, it seems to me that we've never been able to study and measure the credibility and believability of environments on either television or in print so that by taking "the high road" ... you should create a more credible, believable environment, and the ad might actually be worth more money and that might mitigate against a lower Nielsen. Basically you'd be multiplying your Nielsen rating by what I'll call your credibility rating..."

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