News as Entertainment

I think journalism today is at an exciting time, but a very, very dangerous time, and there are three kind of challenges to the way we see ourselves and to what it is we do in our profession, which is really a craft since you become a reporter by saying you're a reporter. There are no licenses, no accountability even.

The first of these is being in a time of terrific technological change where news cycles are disappearing and even news magazines go on the net to report so that they can have an around-the-clock connection to the people they feel they serve. I don't think there's much you can do about technology. It just happens.

The second is that due to inheritance laws, federal inheritance laws and a lot of other things, the ownership of the press itself is changing. So that Ted Koppel becomes an employee or cast member, as they say, of Disney; and if it's not Disney it's General Electric or Westinghouse. And there's not much we can do about that. Bill Gates maybe could do something about that, but I doubt all of us together, and by that I mean all journalists together, could do anything about it.

The final line, which I hope we'll be talking about today, the final challenge, is the line between fiction and non-fiction and how is that line set, how is it breached, particularly by the entertainment business.

As the President said, "Perhaps an editor might divide his paper into four chapters: truth, probabilities, possibilities, and lies." The President who said that was not William Jefferson Clinton, it was Thomas Jefferson who said that.

I think we have to find that line and stand on it, stand guard. The truth may or may not make us free, but at least it will keep us working.

In 1978, ABC started a program called 20/20, and it's kind of a standard news magazine program. They were trying to see what they could do in the 60 Minutes business. The first show was an absolute disaster. The hosts, if anybody remembers, were the editor, former editor of Esquire Magazine and the art critic of Time Magazine who both turned out to be absolute disasters on camera.

They had made plans to fold the show, but they went to a vice president of ABC News named Aug Weston and said can you do anything with this? Weston then went to the research department at ABC and said, this was a prime time show, I would like you to do a great deal of research for me on what people want in prime time. They said we don't have to do any studies, we know what people want in prime time. Weston said what? They gave him a one-word answer -- entertainment.

Weston then went back and decided that they would continue exactly what they were doing, which was trying to do person-oriented stories of the tragedy and triumph of the human condition. What they did change, however, was the only humans they were interested in were rock stars and movie stars. So they did what they had been doing, but now the people suffering, as it were, on the air, were part of the "rock star of the week" as they called it.

That probably was inevitable. Television is an entertainment medium and it's always been shaky and unsure about how to present news; and newspapers are the news medium, and we have always, or they have always been extremely clunky about entertaining. A newspaper is not the first entertainment people would turn to.

Last year Louis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, wrote the introduction for a new MIT edition of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media". This is part of what he said in that introduction.

"The world that McLuhan describes has taken shape during my lifetime and within the span of my own experience. I can remember that as recently as 1960 it was possible to make distinctions between the several forums of what were then known as the lively arts. The audiences recognize the difference between journalism, literature, politics, and the movies. But then the lines between fact and fiction blurred because as irrelevant as they were difficult to distinguish the lines. The lively arts fused into the amalgam of forms known as 'the media'. News was entertainment, and entertainment was news." Which is where the title came from.

McLuhan, interestingly, if you read or re-read him, looks quite good today. One of the things that he predicted in 1968 was that sports would replace politics in television, and indeed I would argue that has happened. The events that draw Americans into the communal tent of the country once were political conventions. Now it's the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Olympics.

I'm a political writer by profession, I guess by trade. We made a pathetic attempt to meet that by turning politics into a horse race. But the truth was, apparently horses are more interesting than politicians, and we couldn't compete with real sports and real entertainment.

That, if you listen to the critics of what is called the new media -- John Katz, one of them who started out as a newspaper reporter and then editor and now has moved on to Rolling Stone, Wired, and his own kind of Internet news service -- described us as... To begin with, he described us as "the old farts", but he then defined what he thought new news was. This is a quote from him.

"Dazzling, adolescent, irresponsible, fearless, frightening, and powerful. A heady concoction, party Hollywood film and TV movie; part pop music and pop art; mixed with popular culture and celebrity magazines, tabloid telecasts, and cable and home video." As far as I can tell when I watch television, he's just about right. Television news. He's just about right on that.

Tom's mentioning of where journalism fits in essentially represents the fact that we are becoming a smaller and smaller part of bigger and bigger things, particularly in communications and in entertainment. We are a tiny little business, and I just want to throw a few statistics at you, of the people we now interface with, or whatever the word for all that is.

Intel has 41,000 employees and has annual revenues of more than $16 billion a year. Bell Atlantic has 62,000 employees and $13 billion. The New York Times companies and the Washington Post company combined have 19,000 employees and combined revenues of less than $4 billion. And if you understand capitalism, you can get a pretty good idea how that will end.

There was a story in the Los Angeles Times, a series actually, three weeks ago which reported that entertainment had displaced the aerospace business in southern California, and two of the numbers they used were that in Los Angeles County alone -- not all of California, not New York, Nashville, Austin. In Los Angeles County, this one county alone, 312,000 men and women worked in the entertainment industry, and the average earnings of those people is $62,000 a year.

In the entire country, depending on how you count it, there are 60,000 to 100,000 people in journalism, depending on how broadly you define it. Their average pay is $31,000 a year. The starting pay is $21,000 a year. That $31,000 average I used to kid, was less than toll takers on the New Jersey turnpike. I called the Turnpike Authority before I wrote out these notes and I was wrong. The starting salary for a toll taker on the New Jersey Turnpike is $27,500 a year. The top pay is $52,000 a year. All of this before overtime. They are hourly employees.

In an effort to combine the new and the old, Aug Weston was one of the old pros who came in to play a part in that. Jim Bellows, who had been the editor of the New York Herald Tribune and later the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, was hired as a consultant to Entertainment At Night, which did not do well early on in the game. What Jim taught them was if you make it look like news, people will think it's news, even if it is only publicity. So expanding on stories of celebrities, now you had interviews with celebrities that looked like news. Disney even went so far as to put a program like that on the air which only dealt with their own movies and didn't have a hell of a lot of bad things to say about them.

With that knowledge, the new generation packaged news as a mix of entertainment and old journalism elements. It's blood, fire, sports, sex, feel good about yourself, and bad about your government.

There was a response to that in New York a couple of weeks ago with the new Disney cast member, Ted Koppel, speaking at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Journalists get shot and jailed and a lot of other things, held hostage around the world. And awards were given to these people. What Ted said that night was, "We celebrate tonight the men and women whose dedication to the collection and distribution of facts threatens their very existence. When they antagonize those with money, political power, and guns, they risk their lives. We, on the other hand, tremble at nothing quite so much as the thoughts of boring our audiences. The preferred weapons of the rich and powerful here in America are the pollster and the public relations council, but they are no threat to the physical safety of journalists. Our enemies are more insidious than they are. Our enemies are declining advertising revenues, the rising costs of newsprint, lower ratings diversification, the vertical integration of communications empires, breezier chattier styles are insinuating themselves onto the front pages of our more distinguished newspapers. They are the fading lines between television news and entertainment. It is not death or torture or imprisonment that threatens us as American journalists, it is the trivialization of our industry," which I would say is well apace.

We will also be challenged by the use of... Entertainment has become extraordinarily skilled at things like putting people in film when they didn't appear in the original -- Forrest Gump meeting with John Kennedy or with Lyndon Johnson. The American Newspaper Publishers Association last year put together commercials with famous people reading newspapers. One of them filmed in the Rocky Mountains by a New York advertising man named Jerry Delafamina featured General Norman Schwarzkopf. He was sitting in front of this beautiful vista of mountains reading a paper. Then at the end of that presentation he dropped the paper and you saw it was Schwarzkopf.

Jerry Delafamina thought that it looked too phony. The Rockies were just too beautiful. To divert attention and make it look real, they put a bird flying across. But the bird didn't come from an egg, the bird came from a computer. So that if you watch that commercial and you see the bird going by, there is no bird. In the next generation the bird will be there, and Schwarzkopf will come out of a computer, I suspect.

So seeing may have been believing, but I'm not sure you should judge that any more. Better we stick to believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see. The problem is, which half? As these lines blur.

So the Oliver Stoning of America proceeds apace. If you have children in college or you speak at colleges a good deal, you learn almost surreptitiously because colleges don't like to deal with this, there's a great deal of drinking and a great deal of violence and particularly sexual violence on campuses. If you talk to students about that or your own children, they get very defensive about that. Their basic line is, "Well you guys," our parents' generation, "had your fun, and now you're trying to take ours away." If you pursue the subject as to what they think college was like when their parents went there, you find out their principal source for that is the movie, "Animal House." Would that it were true!

So we now move into this challenging technological environment and with our new owners... Harry Evans, the British newspaper editor who has pretty much worked for everybody there is to work for with some distinction, when he came to America said this after hanging around a little bit. "The challenge of the American newspaper is not to stay in business, it's to stay in journalism." I agree that that is the challenge.

Finally, I assume some of you have seen "Gross Indecency" the Oscar Wilde play running now at the Mark Taper. In that play, a well-written play since most of the words are his, in that play he attacks the press three times. The first time is, "In the old days men had the rack, now they have the press." With that, the audience stood and cheered. A review was quoted from the Pall Mell Gazette of his book, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" saying "It ought to be chucked into the fire." Those were the words of the Gazette. And Wilde's response to that was, "To say that such a book as mine ought to be chucked into the fire is silly. That's what one does with newspapers." They stood and applauded again for that.

That did not greatly bother me. I think we still have many resources. I think that we work much better as outsiders than we do as insiders. Being liked is not part of the job description of a journalist. After all, our job at its most sensational -- I favor sensationalism -- is being the first one to yell that "The Emperor has no clothes." We must still have a bit of caché left with the public, because they haven't had the guts yet to rename them "The Westinghouse Evening News", "The GE Nightly News", or "Disneyworld News". Not yet. Not yet. Stay tuned, and we'll be back after these message from some of the most talented and caring, we like what we do, journalists in the country. Thank you.

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