Mark
L. Rosen Lecture
University
of Vermont Political Science Department
March
22nd, 2012
Golden
ages, whether they be of ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy or
Broadway Musicals, occur as a result of a combination of unique
circumstances. They end when those special conditions are
fundamentally changed.
Before
I address the demise of network television news- and the news media
generally - as someone who was part of the golden age of network
television news, I’d like to begin with some thoughts on that era.
On
January 30th, 1968, the beginning of the Chinese New Year
known as Tet, 70,000 communist troops launched a surprise offensive
throughout South Vietnam. The attackers surged into more than a
hundred cities and towns, and, for the first time, Saigon and the
U.S. Embassy complex in the heart of the city came under rocket fire.
A
few weeks later, the U.S. military claimed that because of the heavy
losses the Viet Cong had suffered, Tet was a defeat for the
communists. That may have been literally true, but Tet was
nevertheless both a political and a propaganda victory for the
communists, and a key turning point in the war in Vietnam. This was
because the intensity and scope of the Tet Offensive shocked most
Americans, who had been led to believe that given American
superiority in firepower and technology, victory in Vietnam was
inevitable if not imminent. This sense of shock was greatly amplified
by the key electronic medium of the day- network television news.
At
a time when news anchormen rarely left their studios, CBS News’
Walter Cronkite hurried to Vietnam to prepare a special report on the
Tet Offensive and its implications for America’s deep involvement
in the war. As a veteran World War II war correspondent with the
contacts and clout that only an anchorman can have, Cronkite was
certainly qualified to do such a report. And, as numerous polls of
the day regularly rated him, he was “the most trusted man in
America.”
At
the conclusion of his special broadcast on Tet in late February,
Cronkite did something he had almost never done before- and certainly
not on the subject of Vietnam. After much agonizing he decided to put
his credibility on the line and offer a personal opinion. This is
what he said.
“To
say we are closer to victory today, is to believe in the face of the
evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest
that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable
pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only
realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion. …..It is increasingly
clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then, will be
to negotiate not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to
their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
By
today’s standards, where opinions rather than facts drive most of
what we see on television news, this may sound downright wishy-washy.
But in 1968, with Cronkite saying it, this was a big deal.
In
fact, at the White House that night, President Lyndon Johnson watched
that special report with some of his staff, including his then
assistant White House News Secretary Bill Moyers. According to
Moyers, “The president flipped off the set and said, ‘If I’ve
lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’” Five weeks later
Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election.
Now
I am not suggesting that Cronkite changed the course of the Vietnam
War. In fact, it would take another seven years before Saigon fell to
the North Vietnamese and the American presence finally ended. Nor was
Cronkite completely responsible for the president’s decision not to
run again. Senator Eugene McCarthy was already contesting Johnson’s
re-nomination in the Democratic primaries and a challenge from Bobby
Kennedy seemed possible. But Johnson was
prescient when he noted Cronkite’s link with Middle America, and by
the end of 1968 most of Middle America shared Cronkite’s view of
the war.
The
golden years for network television news ran roughly from the mid
fifties to the mid eighties. In those days CBS, NBC and ABC were
indeed the windows on the world for the great majority of the
American people. Each night more than fifty million Americans would
gather in front of their TV sets at the dinner hour to watch the
evening news. (Fewer than 20 million do so today and most of these on
are Social Security) The newscasts evolved into a combination
national town meeting, teach-in and therapy session where people
could learn about and ponder the momentous events of their world,
their nation and their neighborhoods. And these were momentous times.
The Cold War was at its height and in the aftermath of the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962, nuclear war was widely believed to be a very
real possibility. By 1965 the Vietnam War was raging; by 1968 violent
anti-war protests were everywhere.
Also
in the 1960s a president, his brother and the country’s most
prominent black leader were assassinated - the latter two in the same
year of 1968. Below the seething surface, America itself was in the
throes of at least four on-going and interlocking social revolutions
over race, feminism, sexual freedoms and new technologies.
At
such a moment, the newly found power of television could have become
an instrument for division and extremism as a free but irresponsible
press has sometimes been. But it did not. Perhaps more by accident
than design, the news broadcasts of that era were voices of
moderation amid chaos. They reflected middle class values and
essentially centrist politics, mainly because those who produced them
were middle class and moderate- sometimes a bit to the left-sometimes
a little to the right, but never far from the center.
The
assassination of President John Kennedy was a watershed for
television news. Whatever warts have since been discovered on the
Kennedy persona, at the time of his death he was a much beloved
president. Television’s three-day non-stop coverage of the
aftermath of the event, even including the live coverage of the
murder of Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas police
station, still went a very long way in calming a deeply shaken, and,
at the margin, almost paranoid population. It was crucially important
at this time of highest anxiety for the networks to conduct
themselves responsibly. After all, just the year before, the United
States and the Soviet Union had come to the brink of nuclear war over
Russian missiles in Cuba. Oswald had both Russian and Cuban
connections. Were the Soviets behind the assassination? Should we
launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against them if they were? Such
powerful questions were running rampant throughout the country. In
the early days after the assassination the TV networks firmly said
”No” and “No” to both questions – the Russians weren’t
behind the assassination and therefore pre-emptive strikes were off
the table. The country began to breathe easier.
One
can almost hear the breathless tones and purple prose, especially of
the all news cable channels, if God forbid, something like a
presidential assassination should befall us today. But in November
1963, the networks behaved with great seriousness and dignity and in
so doing achieved new levels of respect in the eyes of most
Americans.
There
were many people involved in the news programs but three men became
their personifications: Walter Cronkite at CBS, David Brinkley of NBC
and later ABC and Howard K Smith who left CBS to anchor at ABC. When
you watched them on television you were getting an authentic person,
not the creation of focus groups, Q-ratings, makeup artists and
publicity departments. These were genuine bona fide journalists who
came across on television very much the way they came across in
person.
While
the personality of each man was certainly different, it’s notable
how similar they were in terms of background and journalistic
philosophy. All were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. All were from
middle class families, though their early lives were far from
idyllic. Their mothers were strong and dominant women who seem not to
have liked their husbands much. Brinkley says he was an unwanted
child. Smith’s father was a ne’er do well from an antebellum
aristocratic family gone broke. And Cronkite’s father was an
alcoholic. Remarkably too, all were Southerners.
This
Southern background turned out to be very important to how they
approached probably the most important story of their times- the
Civil Rights movement. As young men, none of the three had been an
activist for racial equality. Cronkite confessed he lacked the
courage to take issue with his Texas high school friends when they
made racist remarks. But all had seen enough racism in the South to
know that it was morally wrong to perpetuate a system that enforced
unequal treatment and protection under the law. This proposition
would eventually be accepted by the nation as a whole, thanks in
large measure to the extensive news coverage of the Civil Rights
movement by network television news. And when the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of ‘65 were passed, it could be said
of the networks, this was their finest hour too.
In
its golden age, network television news had its period of greatest
influence, mainly because it rejected extremes and had as its
symbols, men of unquestioned journalistic excellence and integrity.
In so doing, it contributed to peace and stability in both foreign
and domestic affairs. The daily arguments in the news rooms were not
about what story would be the most broadly interesting, amusing or
titillating, but what was the most intrinsically important; what was
it that viewers needed to know to make them better citizens. As the
then sage of CBS News Eric Severeid put it, “My job is not to tell
people what to think. It’s to suggest what they should think
about.”
The
image of network news has greatly diminished since one of its own was
considered the most trusted man in America. In most polling these
days the news media generally rank among the least respected or
trusted institutions. I might note that while they are now down to
near single digits, they still usually come out ahead of the United
States Congress in those polls.
So
what happened?
As
I said at the outset, golden ages end when the unique circumstances
that created them are fundamentally changed. In the case of the news
media, huge changes came about as the result of new technologies, and
these in turn completely changed the business models of these
companies. This has been true for print as well as the broadcast
media.
I
am sure that many of you here know much more than I do about the new
information technologies. So forgive me if at times I seem to be
stating the obvious. And humor me by allowing me to mention a few of
the significant technological changes which occurred in the thirty
year span I was a correspondent for ABC News.
My
first foreign assignment was to Paris, in the beginning of 1966.
Originally I was supposed to go to Saigon, but after the vice
president of the news division was killed in a commercial air
disaster, a number of personnel changes were made and I ended up in
Paris as the roving correspondent - which meant that I would go where
the news was, and other than Vietnam, in those days that usually
meant somewhere in the Middle East.
But
even in Paris, communications then were still World War Two vintage.
Most of my interchanges with the head office in New York were by
telegram, which given time differences it could often take twelve
hours for an exchange. There were trans -Atlantic phone lines via
radio but certainly no direct dial. Phone calls had to be booked with
the French phone company, they weren’t
reliable, could take hours to get
through and they were very expensive - maybe a hundred dollars for a
normal business call.
After
I had been overseas for a year or so,
the foreign bureaus started getting Telex machines, which were a big
upgrade. Meantime several geo-synchronous satellites went up in this
period. This meant we could use the French state television
facilities to send pre-packaged stories to New York via satellite.
These were complicated to arrange - and could cost up to five
thousand dollars a pop- so we did this very rarely.
Of
course, when I was first working in the Middle East, communications
were even more primitive. We used only telegrams, there were almost
no long distance phones and certainly no satellites. Radio news
reports were transmitted via short wave circuits, booked days in
advance. During the 1967 six day Middle East War, when I got to the
Suez Canal with the Israeli forces who had spent the week fighting
their way across the Sinai desert and pushing the Egyptians back
across the canal, I was on a very big story. This was on a Friday.
That night, my black and white film had to be driven back through the
desert to Tel Aviv where the next day it was put on a scheduled
flight to Rome. In Rome it was transshipped to a Pan Am or TWA plane
to the States. When it arrived in New York the film had to be
processed and edited. My report finally made the air - Sunday night.
By that time there was a cease fire and my big scoop was basically a
feature.
Twenty
five years later during the first Gulf War, I would do live reports
from the roof of my hotel showing Scud missile attacks in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. In the intervening years cameras had gone from black
and white film to color film, to color tape. They became smaller and
smaller so they could be comfortably hand held.
Satellites made direct dial phones possible and cheaper, and there were enough satellites in operation that the cost of using them had been reduced dramatically. And by the time of the October 1973 Middle East War, I got my reports on every night using satellite facilities located in suburban Tel Aviv.
Satellites made direct dial phones possible and cheaper, and there were enough satellites in operation that the cost of using them had been reduced dramatically. And by the time of the October 1973 Middle East War, I got my reports on every night using satellite facilities located in suburban Tel Aviv.
Just
as the telegraph had revolutionized print
reporting during the Civil War, the important new technologies of my
era significantly changed the nature of 20th century war
reporting. Satellites ended the two or three day time lag between an
overseas event and it being shown on American television. Computers
and digitalization ultimately made it possible for two people to
carry enough equipment by hand, to transmit live sound and pictures
from virtually anywhere in the world. As I would conclude after doing
a study at Harvard’s Kennedy School after I retired, live
television coverage of the next war was inevitable – but a
decidedly mixed blessing. Yet that genie of live coverage of war is
now out of the bottle and we simply have to deal with that reality.
These
new technologies gave us the capacity to make the news more
immediate, more vital and more competitive. Meantime, cable
television, which had been around for a number of years, found new
and better ways for wiring cities and so millions more people started
getting access to cable. And as that happened, cable began to
challenge the big 3 networks, seriously cutting into their ad
revenues. All news 24/7 cable channels would eventually weaken the
big 3’s news monopoly as well.
But
all these tech changes I have mentioned, pale in comparison to how
the newest of new information technologies have totally
revolutionized the main stream media. The Internet, combined with the
personal computer and the cell phone- and the accompanying arrival of
the social networks Face Book, Twitter, You-Tube and the personal
blog - also have begun to redefine what constitutes news- and who or
what is a reporter.
No
one would argue that citizen reporters, using cell phones amidst the
revolutions of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and now the Syrian
uprising, have been anything other than a very good thing for freedom
and democracy. But I also believe that professional, knowledgeable
and trustworthy reporters must continue to play an important role in
our news media- something which I will expand upon a bit later.
This
may be a good time to make a general statement about the new
technologies. In my view, while they can certainly change the game,
they are inherently neither good nor bad. Like all their
revolutionary predecessors- from moveable type to the telegraph- they
are essentially neutral instruments. Whether they serve society- or
subvert it- depends entirely on how these new tools are used- and to
what ends.
So,
those are the fundamental technological changes that brought about
the demise of the golden age. The other significant change I
mentioned concerned the business model. The two of course are
directly related because it was new technologies that forced many of
the business model changes.
When
I joined ABC News nearly five decades ago, network news did not
function for the purpose of making money. According to the FCC rules
of the day, networks were obligated to carry news and some public
service programs as a condition of their licenses.
Bill
Paley, who owned CBS was a businessman not a journalist, but he very
much enjoyed the prestige that CBS News brought him. He did not
expect the news department to be a major vehicle for enriching
himself or his stock holders. Neither did Leonard Goldenson who owned
ABC, nor Robert and David Sarnoff who headed up NBC.
In
my first year, 1965, the annual budget for the ABC news division was
$5 million - and it lost money. In other words revenues from
commercials run on the newscasts did not add
up to the department’s expenses. When I left 30 years later -
because there were many more news programs made possible by those new
technologies – the annual budget for news had ballooned to about
$500 million. But commercial revenues not only covered that- they
added another $200 million or more to the network’s profits. When I
first wrote about this many years ago I coined the phrase- network
news divisions went from loss leaders to cash cows. Among other
things, such profits began to attract Wall Street and by the nineties
all three networks had been bought by conglomerates with few if any
connections to the news business. Corporations like GE and Disney
were interested only in the bottom line.
The
result of this change was that the number one preoccupation for
subsequent news managements became ratings, because the amount of
money any network news division could earn was based entirely on how
many people were watching. And so began what is often
described, quite accurately, as the dumbing down of the news -
a policy based on the mistaken assumption that soft news would
attract more viewers. Show doctors were brought in. Focus groups were
employed to come up with more “interesting” items for the
broadcasts. This brought us less foreign news and more celebrity
stories- fewer investigations and more news-you-can-use. But that
didn’t help and network news continued to lose viewers and revenues
at an ever faster rate. By the late nineties, cable news and the
Internet were taking a huge bite out of both.
One
other act of desperation to staunch the financial hemorrhaging was to
make major cuts in staff and news coverage. Networks used the end of
the Cold War as an excuse to reduce and eventually close most foreign
bureaus. Those cut backs were not cosmetic. In 1984 I was transferred
to London as the network’s senior foreign correspondent. In those
days, London was ABC’s overseas headquarters. We had our own
building with our own offices and studios in central London close to
the BBC and we had about 200 full time employees. Today, ABC rents a
couple of rooms in a building near Heathrow Airport and has fewer
than a dozen staffers. But all of these
cuts merely had the effect of eliminating some of the previous real
strengths of the network news broadcasts – the reporting that made
them different and better than cable. And so the ratings slide
continued.
There
was an old saw that owning a newspaper was like having a license to
print your own money. No more. For newspapers and other print media,
the challenge of the Internet and the social networks is that they
have stolen much of the readership as more and more people turn to
the web for their news. And as readership falls, advertising rates go
down. Even worse, sites such as Angie’s and Craig’s lists and
others have siphoned off most of the classified ads which since the
early days of newspapers have been their bread and butter .The result
of this is that even major newspapers like the Washington Post have
had to make meaningful staff cuts, especially in their overseas news
coverage. And even on the domestic side, many old pros have been
given early retirement.
The
New York Times is hanging on, with the help of a $250 million loan
from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu. The Times is trying
various ways to charge for its on- line version which is perfectly
proper, but people accustomed to getting most everything on-line for
nothing, apparently are resisting. So no one yet seems to have found
the formula for making newspapers the big money makers they used to
be. Actually the aim now is just to survive- and in the case of many
papers they are failing at that too.
The
once powerful weekly news magazines, facing the same sagging
readership problems as newspapers, are only shadows of their former
selves. Time is in survival mode. US News basically folded. Newsweek
went broke and was sold by the Washington Post for one dollar. In my
day news magazine writers were among the highest paid. But it’s
obvious from the slim number of pages they now published, that
magazines are no longer able to offer the big bucks for reporters and
are largely reduced to opinion columns. There are still some good
columnists, although I suspect they may be working at discount prices
so that they continue to get published. Among other things, this
helps them compete for guest commentator appearances on the cable
news channels- who pay pretty good money.
Among
other general circulation magazines the New Yorker and People seem to
be the only ones thriving. Each apparently has a solid number of
subscribers and enough big spending advertisers. But publishing, in
all its old forms, is clearly struggling and e-books actually
published by Amazon.com, may well be the future.
I
recently noticed that the once revered Encyclopedia Britannica is no
longer going to be available in book form. 2010 was its last book
edition and in future, it too will be only available on-line. I guess
it will be going mano-a-mano with Wikipedia. The latter certainly
doesn’t have the cachet of Britannica, but as it doesn’t pay most
of its writers and it doesn’t charge its readers, Wikipedia may
just win that battle.
This
pretty much brings me to the end of the demise of the news media part
of this lecture. What remains is the question, why does all this
matter?There are people, and perhaps quite a few in this room who
would argue that it doesn’t. They would say that the new media of
the Internet, the social networks and the personal blogs represent
liberation - from the old style hierarchical journalism ultimately
controlled by large corporations - a system that has no real future
in the new I.T. age. Moreover, people can now find out things for
themselves and think for themselves and they don’t need
“professional” journalists to tell them what’s happening.
If
I were a lot younger I might feel that way myself. But while age
doesn’t necessarily equate with wisdom, it does provide
perspective. And what I see, is that in spite of all the platforms
available to provide and dispense information, there is tangible
evidence that today’s Americans are remarkably ill informed. I
think that is a direct result of the new evolving system, where
people read, listen and watch only those who share their prejudices.
They don’t want to be bothered with “diverse” opinions. And so
throughout the Internet and the blogosphere, on talk radio and cable
news, what we have are more and more people with passionate, partisan
opinions that are largely fact free. We are constantly being told by
many of these people that President Obama is a Muslim, a socialist, a
communist and a Nazi. And I would guess that if challenged very few
of these people would be able to even roughly define what any of
those words mean.
In
the olden days, we reporters would try to set the record straight
when people in the news did nothing but blow smoke. We were
discouraged from expressing our personal opinions in our reporting.
But we were expected to challenge public figures who distorted the
truth or flat-out lied. Nowadays facts and lies don’t seem to
matter. What is touted as “balanced” reporting, especially on
cable news programs, involves finding the loudest and most extreme
voices from either side of an issue and having them yell at each
other for a ten minute segment. Viewers learn nothing from such
pseudo-debates and I know that I am far from alone in thinking this.
David
Gergen is now a Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a
commentator on CNN. But David also has a law degree, served in the US
Navy in the Pacific, and was a U.S. News columnist and editor. Most
notably and for many years Gergen served in the White House as an
advisor to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. While working
for Clinton, he approached me about becoming the White House
spokesman on foreign affairs. When that didn’t work out, he
suggested I could be the spokesman for the Pentagon. Especially with
no Cold War, I didn’t think that would be interesting so I
declined. As it turned out, I really dodged a bullet. Had I taken up
the offer, when the Monica Lewinski scandal erupted, she and Linda
Tripp would have been working for me at the Pentagon. But I digress.
In
a recent interview Gergen talked of his concerns about aspects of
today’s journalism. He is not against young journalists. And
neither am I. But in his words, “You want younger writers who are
really, really bright. But I think covering or understanding the
world today does require you to spend enough time doing that.”
Gergen continued, “[New York Times columnist] Tom Friedman
spent a great deal of time in the Middle East. He
got two Pulitzers early on in his life, as a working journalist, on
the ground. I thought ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings, who was a
serious figure, knew the streets of Beirut better than anybody I
knew, and if anything was happening in the Middle East, I’d turn on
Peter Jennings because I knew that he’s paid his dues, he’s been
there, he’s worked there, he knows it.”
And
so it comes down to this. The reason the demise of the news media
matters - is that when we do not have a
reasonably informed electorate, the very nature
of democracy is threatened. Citizens need to have a basic
understanding of the issues the country faces and what political
parties or candidates have done in the past or propose to do in
future. But the evidence is building that even with all the new
technologies we do not have better informed voters. Actually the
opposite may be true.
In ancient Greece where democracy was born, the two political or social classes that vied for power in Athens and most other Greek city states, were the oligarchs and the democrats. The oligarchs tried to establish a state in which only owners of substantial amounts of property could vote and hold public office. The democrats insisted that all male citizens have the same rights. For a century or more the democrats usually prevailed. But the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, were not big fans of democracy. As Plato saw it, the rich had mostly their own special interests in mind. But rule by the many, was not the answer either. According to Plato, ordinary people were too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. It was the demos, after all, the majority of ordinary people, who time and again had voted to support the disastrous campaigns of the Peloponnesian War - the 27 year struggle between Athens and Sparta that effectively ended Greece’s golden age. In his best known work, The Republic, Plato opted for neither oligarchy nor democracy - but sought to define and create the ideal community or society- one possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. This came to be known as Utopia and we’re still searching for that one.
Two thousand odd years later during the Age of Enlightenment, European philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were leading advocates of a new “social contract” between rulers and their people that would replace the “absolute” power of the monarchy. Locke’s social contract included the new concept that political rule or government, should be based on the “the consent of the governed.”
Thomas Jefferson had carefully studied John Locke, and integrated this idea of consent of the governed directly into the American Declaration of Independence -while adding the powerful notion that “all men were created equal.” His many biographers inevitably stress this principal founding father’s abiding faith in the American people. As he once said, “Whenever people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
But he also said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free …. it expects what never was and never will be.” Jefferson’s concern about ignorance and his belief that the people must be informed, drove him to become the great proponent that he was for public education. His other preoccupation, freedom of the press, was directly related to this. Jeffersonian scholars believe that he saw the press as an essential element in providing citizens the objective information they needed to make sound political judgments. Those two ideas are tied together in most journalists’ favorite Jefferson quotation.
"The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right. And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."
One thing I might remind you about that Jefferson quote. He said this before he became president. After a stormy presidency and subsequent years during which he was often pilloried by the press, Jefferson may well have come to a different conclusion. Still, there is no doubt that Jefferson firmly believed that Americans must be nurtured to become informed citizens. But more than two centuries later, there is also no doubt that one of this country’s most respected political minds is greatly worried that today’s Americans are not just uninformed but woefully ignorant.
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. I was covering the State Department at the time. I had the impression then, that he was uncomfortable with me because I knew Henry Kissinger quite well from having traveled with him a great deal during the Nixon/Ford period –and that I was at that point, flying around with Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. In those days Brzezinski was no big fan of Kissinger or Vance, so perhaps that’s why he never became a news source for me. But I respected him then as I do now as one of America’s best strategic thinkers.
Brzezinski’s new book is called Strategic Vision- America and the Crisis of Global Power. In setting up his thesis concerning America’s strategic decline, he lists what he calls, “six critical dimensions (that) stand out as America’s major and increasingly threatening liabilities.” One of those he identifies as, quote “a public that is highly ignorant about the world. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States public has an alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current events and even pivotal moments in world history.”
Brzezinski supports this assertion by citing surveys that even as US troops were being killed in the Middle Eastern region, 63% of young American adults could not find Iraq on a map and 88% couldn’t find Afghanistan. He mentions polls that show more than half of college seniors didn’t know that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansionism, and that thirty percent of all American adults could not name two countries that America fought in World War Two. He blames this on a deficient public education system- and on the news media- which except for a few major newspapers he holds in low regard.
Brzezinski then continues in this latest book to argue forcefully why this matters. In his words, “The cumulative effect of such wide spread ignorance makes the public more susceptible to demagogically stimulated fear - especially when aroused by a terrorist attack. That in turn, increases the probability of self destructive foreign policy initiatives.” He goes on, “In general, public ignorance creates an American political environment more hospitable to extremist simplifications.”
In an interview about his book on CBS, Brzezinski made it clear that what he has in mind are the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and his alarm over the drum beats of a new war with Iran. As he summed it up in that conversation with Charlie Rose, Brzezinski echoed the sentiments of both Plato and Jefferson. “We can’t have an intelligent foreign policy unless we have an intelligent people.”
While I totally agree, I would like to repeat that the demise of the news media I’ve been discussing, mostly has to do with their loss of respect among the American people which has greatly diminished their influence - and with the failure of their business model, which has left them with an ever-weakening financial base and thus they are less able to do the job of informing the public in ways they once did.
That
said I would like to close on a more positive note.
In
the often now denigrated “mainstream media,” there remain many
reporters willing to risk their lives so that we can be better
informed. While most days they get less air time or newspaper space,
and there are fewer of them, we are fortunate to still have excellent
reporters out there doing their best, sometimes under frightful
conditions.
Those
who go and work abroad today tend to be better educated than my
generation. A number of them have written the definitive books on
their subjects - such as Steve Coll‘s “Ghost Wars” about the
CIA in the Middle East and Lawrence Wright’s “Looming Tower” on
the history of al Qaeda. Fareed Zakaria in his books, his column in
Time and his program on CNN is one of journalism’s deepest
thinkers. David Ignatius of the Washington Post is a bone fide expert
on intelligence matters. We can turn to the vast experience of Tom
Friedman of the Times and James Fallows in the Atlantic monthly.
George Packer and Jon Lee Anderson did remarkable reporting on the
Iraq War for the New Yorker. Christiane Amanpour of CNN and ‘til
recently of ABC, for years has excelled in overseas reporting.
My
former colleague Anne Garrels, who spoke fluent Russian, did
perceptive reporting from Moscow for ABC as the Soviet Union
collapsed. Later, she won awards for her work for National Public
Radio in Baghdad during the height of the chaos of the Iraq War – a
war which cost the lives of more journalists than any war in history.
Margaret Warner of the News Hour on PBS does solid foreign reporting.
So do most of the foreign correspondents of NPR. Among network
correspondents today, NBC’s Richard Engel, who speaks Arabic,
stands out.
And
I find the stories out of Cairo by David Kirkpatrick of the New York
Times as informative and nuanced as anything done in my day.
I’ve
saved the final mentions for two reporters who recently paid the
ultimate sacrifice in the course of doing their job.
Marie
Colvin, who was from Long Island and worked for the London Sunday
Times, was right in the middle of what is now a Syrian Civil War.
Colvin was distinctive for the eye patch she wore to cover the eye
she lost when she was shot while reporting on the civil conflict in
Sri Lanka in the early nineties. This was her last message, sent not
long before she and a French photographer were apparently targeted
and killed by rockets fired by the Syrian Army.
She
wrote, “I think the reports of my survival may be exaggerated. [I
‘m] in Baba Amr.” That neighborhood of Homs was the focal point
of resistance to the Syrian regime and in retribution, its people and
their lightly armed defenders were subjected to relentless pounding
by government tanks and artillery. “Sickening,” wrote Marie. “[I]
cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened
by now. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel. Doctors could do nothing.
His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling
helpless. As well as cold! Will keep trying to get out the
information.”
Anthony
Shadid won two Pulitzer prizes for International News Reporting - one
while working for the Washington Post, the other while with the New
York Times. Shadid was born in Oklahoma. His family had its roots in
Lebanon. He was familiar with Arabic but became
fluent only by working diligently at it as an adult. This gave him a
big advantage over most Western reporters as he could easily pass as
a local. As good
as he was in explaining the politics, or describing the battles of
the Middle East, he was even better in depicting the basic humanity
of the people and their struggles. Much
of his work centered on ordinary people who had been forced to pay an
extraordinary price for living in the region – or just for
belonging to whatever religion, ethnic group or social class they
were a part of. In
his books and his reporting in two of America’s best newspapers,
Shadid was able to change the perceptions of many people in this
country who are prone to seeing Arabs as either decadent rich oil
sheiks or a bunch of ignorant rag-heads with terrorist inclinations.
Anthony
Shadid continually risked his life in Baghdad during the Iraq War. He
was shot in the arm while reporting from the West Bank. And last year
he came close to being shot as a spy when he was captured by Qaddafi
loyalists in Libya.
For
the past year, although based in Beirut, Shadid spent much time in
Egypt covering its new revolution. Periodically he’d been sneaking
into Syria from Lebanon to see and hear for himself about the ebb and
flow of the efforts of the Syrian opposition to oust the dictator
Bashar Assad. Last month, he again eluded the Syrian authorities. But
Shadid suffered from severe asthma, and near the end of what would be
his last covert trip into Syria, he died from a major asthma attack.
He was 43 years old with a wife and two children.
The
news media world is much poorer for the loss of the likes of Colvin
and Shadid. These two reporters knew they were taking great risks,
but they persisted with their very dangerous way of life. I have
often been asked, what motivates people to go to cover wars?
As
it happens Marie Colvin eloquently answered that question, as the
speaker at an event just over a year ago, to honor the many
journalists and those who help behind the scenes, who in the past
decade lost their lives while doing their jobs. This is part of what
Ms. Colvin said on that occasion at St. Brides Church in London.
“We
go to remote war zones to report what is happening. The public have a
right to know what our government and our armed forces are doing in
our name We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of
war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians. War
reporting has changed greatly in just the last few years. Now we go
to war with a satellite phone, laptop, video camera and a flak
jacket. I point my satellite phone to South Southwest in Afghanistan,
press a button, and I have filed.”
She continued, “In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same – someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people - be they government, military or the man on the street - will care when your files reach the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.”
And
so my message is this. If we truly care about what is happening in
this country and in our world, there are still people in the news
media in whom we can put our trust - and to whom we can give our
support. The best way to do this is to pay attention to what they
write and broadcast – and - to tune out the hate- spewers, the
misogynists, the racists and those who would divide us. If enough of
us do this, America will be better informed- and its democracy may
yet be saved.
I welcome your comments. To post your thoughts, click the word "comments" below.
I welcome your comments. To post your thoughts, click the word "comments" below.
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