john shattuck: good evening. i’m john shattuck, the ceo …...kennedy library forums “what’s...

KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS

“WHAT’S HAPPENED TO THE NEWS MEDIA?”

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2005

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JOHN SHATTUCK: Good evening. I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the

Kennedy Library Foundation, and on behalf of myself and Deborah Leff, the

Director of the Library who’s here with us in the front row, I want to

welcome you all to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

I’m here to set the stage for this evening’s very fascinating forum, “What’s

Happening to the News Media?”

First, I’d like to offer our thanks to the institutions that make these forums

possible. I want to especially acknowledge the Bank of America, the lead

sponsor of the Kennedy Library Forums series. We’re also very grateful to

our other forum sponsors: Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, and the

Corcoran Jennison Companies, as well as our media sponsors, the Boston

Globe, Boston.com, and WBUR-FM, which broadcasts all of our forums,

certainly including this one, on Sunday evenings.

I think the best way to introduce this evening’s forum is to turn the clock

back for a moment, and look at the news media 40 years ago through the

eyes of a very special observer: not surprisingly, since you’re in his library,

President Kennedy. In some ways, things haven’t changed much. But in

other, perhaps fundamental, ways, what the President describes in a White

House press conference on December 17, 1962, is hardly recognizable

today. Let’s go right to the transcript:




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Question: “Mr. President, perhaps you would comment for us on the press in

general, as you see it from the Presidency.”

The President: “Well, I’m reading more and enjoying it less. [laughter] But I

would say that it is an invaluable arm of our democracy--a check, really, on

what is going on in the administration--and through the press, more things

come to my attention that cause me concern or give me information.”

Now, at this point, President Kennedy comments on the value of a press,

free press, in penetrating something that we all know well these days, and

that is secrecy. He says, then, quote:

“So I would think, then, that Mr. Khrushchev, operating in a totalitarian

system which is able to move in secret, has the disadvantage of not having

the abrasive quality of the press applied to him daily. Even though we never

like it, even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we

disapprove, “There isn’t any doubt, President Kennedy said, “that we could

not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.”

But then, the President looks at the other side of the coin and points to the

responsibility of the press in a democratic society: to report accurately, as he

sees it, and without bias, and here’s what he says, also in this press

conference on December 17. He says,




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“On the other hand, the press has the responsibility not to distort things for

political purposes, not to just select some news in order to prove a political

point. It seems to me their obligation is to be as tough as they can on the

administration, but do it in a way that is directed toward getting as close to

the truth as they can, and not merely because of some political motivation.”

Well, as we often find here at the Kennedy Library, a good starting point for

our Forums are the words of President Kennedy. And I must say, in this

particular case, a starting point about the media today, and how the media

looks at, and how the media looks from, the world of political power,

whether it’s the perspective of the White House, or the Washington power

brokers, or the world beyond the Beltway in Washington. I think the words

of President Kennedy are a very good starting place.

So what has happened to the news media today? From broadcasters like

Walter Cronkite, who was here on this stage just ten days ago, to bloggers

like Garrett Graff, who’s here with us tonight, there certainly have been a lot

of changes. And our distinguished panel is here to explore these with us, and

you will hear from them very shortly.

Let me introduce each of them to you in turn. John Seigenthaler, on my

immediate left here, is a legendary figure in American journalism. A

longtime editor and, later, publisher of The Tennessean, Nashville’s morning

newspaper, he received many awards. He was later the Founding Editorial

Director of USA Today and the President of the American Society of




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Newspaper Editors. In 1991, he founded the First Amendment Center with

the mission of promoting, quote, “a national dialogue and debate about press

freedoms and responsibilities.”

Later, he founded the Freedom Forum, a non-partisan foundation dedicated

to free press, free speech, and free spirit. In the 1960s, John left journalism

briefly to serve as Administrative Assistant to Attorney General Robert F.

Kennedy, and he was the Attorney General’s Chief Negotiator during the

Freedom Rides with the Governor of Alabama--certainly, a challenging task.

And at one point during that period, he was attacked by a mob of Klansmen

while he was attempting to aid Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama.

Certainly, a profile in courage, and here at the Kennedy Library, we’re very

honored to have John Seigenthaler as the Chair of our Profile in Courage

Award Committee.

Ellen Hume, sitting next to John, is the Founding Director of the Center on

Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, just down

on the other end of Columbia Point. An experienced journalist, teacher, and

television commentator, she was the White House Wall Street Journal

correspondent, a regular panelist on the television program “Washington

Week in Review,” and Executive Director of the Shorenstein Center on

Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard. She has also directed PBS’s

Democracy Project, which has developed special television programs to

encourage citizen participation in public affairs. And her 1995 report,

“Tabloids, Talk Radio, and the Future of News” won the Lowell Mellet




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Award for Improving Journalism through Critical Evaluation. And, last but

not least, in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I am honored to

appear on the stage and off the stage as her husband. [laughter]

Garrett Graff is the Founding Editor of Fishbowl DC--

www.fishbowldc.com--a blog that covers media and journalism in

Washington. He’s also Editor-at-Large of Washingtonian Magazine and was

formerly Vice President of Communications at Echo Ditto Inc., a DC-based

Internet strategy firm. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Garrett served

as Deputy National Press Secretary to Howard Dean, and was Dean’s first

webmaster when he was serving as Governor of Vermont, and when Garrett

was in high school.

Garrett got his start in the media as a news writer and Executive Editor at the

Harvard Crimson, and he held internships at ABC News and the Atlantic

Monthly. Earlier this year, he made a special splash in Washington when he

became the first ever blogger to be admitted to cover a White House press

briefing.

Our moderator tonight, seated all the way on the far right from your point of

view, is Callie Crossley, a seasoned broadcast professional who’s done

extensive commentary and media criticism, as well as produced and directed

television and film. Callie is a regular panelist on WGBH’s “Meet the

Press,” and a frequent commentator on CNN and National Public Radio. A

former Neiman Fellow at Harvard, she spent 13 years as a network




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television producer for ABC News’s “20/20,” and she’s received numerous

awards, including an Emmy, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and an award

from America Women in Television.

So please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library John

Seigenthaler, Ellen Hume, Garrett Graff, and Callie Crossley. [applause]

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Good evening. I’m glad to see everybody here, and

I think we’re in for a vigorous discussion. I know all of these people up here,

even slightly--even Garrett, slightly--so this is really going to be a

conversation for a time, and then there will be an opportunity for you to ask

questions. So as we’re going along, be thinking about what kind of question

you’d like to ask, not what kind of comment you’d like to make. [laughter]

And because this is such a distinguished panel--and as we go along in the

conversation, I’ll have an opportunity to let you know some of the other

work that they’re doing, which also impacts this discussion--I thought I’d

like to begin, because I think people have in their minds what certain entities

are, what certain concepts are, but we don’t really share them, so as we

begin the discussion, then we’re often not on the same page.

So let’s start very simply, and have each of you, if you would, tell me what

is news to you; and, because the question “What’s happened to the news?”

seems to suggest something bad has happened, what do you think the central

bad thing is? Anyone?




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[laughter]

ELLEN HUME: John, go ahead.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: No, I’m after you. I’m a Southern boy.

[laughter] Ladies before gentlemen.

ELLEN HUME: Well, the good news is that you have a lot of choice today.

The bad news is, a lot of it isn’t true. What is news? To me, it’s more like,

“Who is the journalist?” And we have a lot of them in this room, including

Garrett’s father. The journalist, to me, is someone whose first job is to verify

facts. Simple. And the loyalty of the journalist is to the public, not to some

special interest group or some bias. And one of the problems today is that

the pressures and the incentives, due to technology and economics and other

factors, are on journalists to stray a bit from those two core principles.

Not everyone is straying, by the way. But there’s a lot of disappointment, I

think, among people that they find the news has become entertainment, that

Neil Postman’s great phrase, “we are amusing ourselves to death,” is

happening. And I think part of that is because we’re in the attention

economy, and people can just click away, so more and more news people are

in a panic about keeping your attention, and the results aren’t pretty.




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So I think the hardest part today is figuring out what is the business model

that supports the kind of news that’s based on verified facts, and not faith-

based facts. Thank you.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Okay. John?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Well, I embrace everything that Ellen says. But

I would also say that, in this time, as in all time, news is very much what the

journalist makes it. If you just take any community in which you live, news

breaks every day, and journalists make decisions. They set priorities, and

what appears in the newspaper or on television or online pretty much

depends upon the judgment of the journalist. Journalists who are trained

well, and who endorse the core principles and live by the core principles that

Ellen just outlined, provide news that’s valuable.

But I would have to say, in this time, as in all times, it depends upon what

you read and what you watch as to the quality of news. My own view of it is

that we have more news outlets, and more news opportunities, and greater

news challenges, today--the winter of my years--than at any other time in my

lifetime, and I daresay, at any other time in the lifetime of the Republic. And

all of that really puts the burden not on the journalist so much as the person

who reads, or listens, or watches the news: the burden to make discerning

judgments about who is credible and who is not.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Garrett?




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GARRETT GRAFF: I think that the way I sort of come at this question is

to talk more about news consumption. When you ask the question, “What

was news for most of the last 50 years?”, it’s a very simple answer: it’s your

morning newspaper, your afternoon newspaper, and your 6:30 PM evening

news. And now, we see news happening on a minute-by-minute basis, not

just online, but also on all sorts of cable channels, and all sorts of satellite

channels from around the world. And through all of that, you have much

more access to information than anyone has ever had in the history of the

human experience.

But in the same vein, it’s less that other people are making the judgments

about what is news, and more that consumers have to go out and get

educated about where their news is coming from, and figure out what news

sources they’re going to believe and what news sources they’re going to go

to for information. And so, for the elites and the intellectuals, you have more

access to better information than you have ever had at any point in history.

But where I think we’re going to run into a lot of trouble from now on is that

if you’re not willing to put in the time to learn where your news is coming

from, and to figure out what’s trustworthy, you also will have greater access

to less information than anyone has ever had before.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: So now, each of you have seemed to indicate that

it’s the consumer who really stands in the gap, if you will, of trying to figure




PAGE 10

out what to do here. And John, you’ve indicated that there is judgment that a

good journalist would make about what kinds of information ought to be out

there for the public trust. But if it’s on us, and we don’t know to do what

you’ve just said, if we don’t know to seek other sources, now what?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Now what? You know, it’s a marvelous buffet.

You look at a news television broadcast, or you read a morning newspaper,

or one of the tabloids. I can direct you to an outlet that will give you

anything you want, not necessarily anything you need, but anything you

want. I can tell you where to hear what you want to hear, but you all know

that, because you go there regularly. I can tell you where to read what you

want to read, but again, if you have options, you’ve tested the market and

you know where you want to go.

Those who are in journalism, every day, approach their communities, their

states, our nation, the world. And again, they apply their own experience and

their own good judgment, their best judgment based on their experience, to

give you their list of priorities as to what is important in your life, in the life

of your community, your state, your nation, and the world in which we live.

And I can remember, when I was a reporter, when I was an editor, when I

was a publisher, the complaints I had every day, every week, every month,

every year are not very different from the complaints I hear, and some of

those I make, when I talk to the editor of my newspaper, or when I talk to

my son about his telecast--he’s the NBC weekend anchor--when I talk to

him about his telecast.




PAGE 11

CALLIE CROSSLEY: What are you complaining about?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: I complain about anything that I think is

superficial. I see and read news stories with holes in them. I see information

that I think is not well-researched. I see stories that are filled with,

sometimes, typographical errors, even grammatical errors. Now, because I

was in it for more than 40 years, I understand the dynamic of putting a report

together. I mean, there are four or five or six hours in a day when the

selection process is crucial.

And just think of a newspaper, for a moment: if you pick up a book, a 400-

page book, and you will find inside that book the number of words,

approximately, that you would find in a Sunday newspaper. The book took a

year, two, three, to write, edit, publish, circulate. That same number of

words must be selected from thousands and thousands and thousands of

more sentences, and digested in a period of five hours, and presented in a

reasonable form.

So the margin of error in every newspaper, and every news broadcast, is

tremendous. It’s great. And there are errors there, and there are things that I

see that I think lack professional quality. But it’s in the nature of what we

do, and it’s also in the nature of what we do to rely on discerning readers to

read. And we don’t get enough criticism, to tell you the truth.




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CALLIE CROSSLEY: Well, let me just ask this, though. Was there a time,

and correct me if I’m wrong, any of you, that there was, at least, trust from

the consumers of news? That those errors that you made were not biased,

deliberate, somehow meant to be harmful? Now, we seem to be in a space

and time where, if that is happening, those errors, people are likely to say, “I

don’t believe it anyway. They just made it up. Nobody researches this stuff.

It’s just all made up out of whole cloth.”

So, what I’m talking about is, is there a shift in the trust level? There have

been polls taken to say that Americans don’t trust what they read or what

they see on television.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Sure. I think there’s a big change in the trust

level. I think we’ve had a number of self-inflicted wounds in journalism, and

the bleeding is still not staunched. You can’t look at Jayson Blair at the New

York Times, or Jack Kelley at USA Today, or 35 others in newspapers large

and small who have been found to plagiarize and fabricate, and not suggest

that the self-inflicted wounds are not hurting. They are hurting.

I think we’re going through a phase. I think the pendulum is swinging. I do

think that the interest of professional journalists to correct the errors is now

more intense than it’s ever been, and it’s overdue.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: What about you two on the trust question?




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ELLEN HUME: Well, I think that journalism is in dire straits. Michael

Crichton, the famous novelist, years ago said it was “a dinosaur.” He knows-

-he wrote Jurassic Park--he knows what a dinosaur looks like. And I think

that, whenever I speak in public, the audience gives me hell. They say, “You

guys didn’t warn us about certain things. You weren’t reporting well about

certain things. Journalists are not performing the function we expect of

them.”

And then I get two major critiques: if it’s a conservative audience, it’s,

“You’re carrying liberal bias. You’re all liberals.” And if it’s a liberal

audience, it’s, “You’re corporate water carriers. You’re all corporate.” The

sad fact is, in the middle of those two culture war battalions that have been

beating us up for years and years, are a really honorable group of people still

struggling day in and day out to find out the information. And what I tell my

students, who are very deeply cynical… I don’t know if any of you are here

tonight. If you are, raise your hand; you’ll get extra credit. [laughter]

But I tell them, “Don’t give up on the news, because that’s where we are

today.” I mean, bloggers are emerging for a reason, because traditionally,

what we call MSM--mainstream media, or legacy media--weren’t fulfilling

what young people and some others felt was needed, which was an

authenticity, a lack of formality. You know, in TV news, the person looks

very formal, with hair all perfect, except when the wind is blowing it in the

hurricane coverage [laughter].




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But anyway, to get to the point of trust. There’s been a breakdown of trust in

many, many institutions. It’s a loss of the voices of authority across our

culture. It’s true in virtually everywhere. New voices are emerging.

Unfortunately, they’re not held accountable. I think the greatest tragedy right

now is that there is good journalism going on, and it’s harder and harder to

do it every day. You think it’s easier because you can get more of the

authentic documents online, but it’s actually harder, because the business

model is saying, “Quick, quick, get entertainment and get the younger

audience, because they’re more malleable.”

But when I look at how these people are trying to cover this administration,

and the people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa are trying to bring the news

about these urgent crises and problems, and then we get the President of the

United States saying, “Oh, well, you know the media.” We’ve got to stand

up and fight for that middle group that’s really struggling to do it right.

[applause] Thank you.

GARRETT GRAFF: I partially agree with John that a lot of the lack of

trust in media today has to due with self-inflicted wounds. But I think a lot

of it also has to do with a very carefully, decade-long, crafted campaign by

groups on both the right and the left, to very cynically undermine trust in

media when they saw the media being unfriendly to the causes and the

candidates that they backed.




PAGE 15

I mean, you have groups now--Accuracy in Media on the right, and groups

like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the left--that daily send out press

releases and daily use the web to undermine the credibility of news

organizations. And what the web has served to do is to unite media criticism

in a way that it was never previously able to do. And so you’ve gone from

having lots of people sitting around their barbershops complaining about

corporate media, to having lots of people blogging, complaining about

corporate media.

So things come up, like the self-inflicted wounds, and they stay there. And

everything that the New York Times does wrong, people go back and say,

“Well, it’s Jayson Blair’s newspaper.” Or, “It’s Judy Miller’s newspaper.

What can you expect from them?” So you end up with, over the course of

the last 30 years, this very steady drop-off in trust which has contributed to

all sorts of other problems--primarily, a lot to do with undermining the

business models and getting people to tune out, which leads to cutbacks,

which leads to more shallow reporting at a very base level.

ELLEN HUME: I would love to add one more thing. Rick Kaplan, who’s

the President of MSNBC and has been around TV a long time, really put his

finger on it when he talks about “talk show culture.” And that’s filled a lot of

the 24/7 news that’s out there. It’s not really news, after all. He said, “The

problem with talks shows is too many of them start out with a lie, and then

everyone sits around discussing it as if it were true.”




PAGE 16

Why do we have so many talk shows out there, on radio and on TV? Well,

the reason is, if you have a 24/7 news hole, and you’ve got cutback after

cutback in the reporting staff because you have to make numbers for Wall

Street that your corporate partner wants you to make--that you didn’t use to

have to make in the ‘60s or the ‘70s--you’re going to fill it with chat. And I

just wanted to give you a statistic from the Pew “State of the Media Report

2004,” which is a bible of where the media stand today. The Pew Charitable

Trust does this.

It turns out, if you watch network news--which still gets about 24 million

viewers a night, that’s a lot--But when you watch network news, generally,

84% of its content of the newscast is about carefully written and edited

packages, produced by correspondents and vetted in advanced. That doesn’t

mean it’s perfect, but there’s been some care and some journalism work

that’s gone into it. Only 11% of cable news--and I’m talking about both Fox

and CNN, and of course MSNBC--only 11% of cable news is like that,

according to their study. About 79, 80% of it is in-studio interviews, banter,

and live stand-ups where reporters talk off the top of their heads.

So we’re getting a trade-off. What we get in 24/7 immediacy from TV, when

we click on those cable channels, is that we get the latest update. The trouble

is, it’s about something, generally, that is meaningless, and people haven’t

spent a lot of time verifying it or figuring out the context. And I think that’s

one of the reasons why people are so unhappy with the news, including

journalists themselves.




PAGE 17

GARRETT GRAFF: I think one of the complicated issues wrapped up in

that is, over time, we’re going to see that journalism is eating its seed corn.

The places where journalism is better than the web, and is better than Jon

Stewart’s “Daily Show,” and is better than cable news, is in its ability to

bring in-depth, investigative reporting, over weeks, and months, or even

years following a story, where the reporter knows more than anyone

involved in the story.

But those are also the most expensive types of reports to gather and bring to

light. And so, those are often the first places the newspapers and networks

are going to cut back, and have been cutting back, which means you’re

seeing less of that reporting in a lot of instances now, and more of the

cheaper type of news, which are the in-studio, off-the-cuff banter.

ELLEN HUME: And have you noticed that as we worry about bird flu all

of a sudden now that the hurricane season seems to be waning a bit, the

same maps are out there? Only now, instead of the weather pattern, it’s the

bird migration pattern. And I’m wondering what kind of coats the

newscasters are going to wear for the bird epidemic. [laughter]

CALLIE CROSSLEY: I think it’s important, as we continue this

discussion, because we’ve talked about what’s happening 24/7 on cable, not

everything you see on cable, or not everything you read on the newspaper,

necessarily, is news as we defined it at the beginning. So we’re talking about




PAGE 18

the big umbrella of media, and under the big umbrella of media is

journalism. And the kind of vetted journalism that we’re discussing here,

where there is sourcing, where people have some ethics about how they get

the information, that’s what is at stake when we ask the question, “What’s

happened to the news?” We’re really talking about news-slash-journalism.

So I’m not asking you, “What happened to Dr. Phil?”, because he’s media,

too, or “What happened to Oprah?”, or what happened to a number of those

shows that may be on cable discussing topical issues, but they’re really not

news shows. So we’re back again to asking people to be discerning

consumers. So, I just wanted to put that little speech in so we’re all on the

same page once again. What has happened, then, John Seigenthaler, when

you say there’s a buffet out here, and there’s plenty for everyone to choose,

and there’s lots available to the modern consumer? If everything is fast food,

nobody’s getting fed, really.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: I didn’t suggest that it’s fast food. There is

some fast food there, but there’s some depth, as well. Next spring, editors

from all over the country will go to Columbia University in New York to

judge Pulitzer Prizes. And I will submit to you-- you will find hundreds and

hundreds and hundreds of entries--some of investigative reporting, some of

interpretive reporting, some of opinion, some of art. And you will find

quality journalism that competes with anything of 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years

ago. Working journalists, edited by competent, experienced professionals,




PAGE 19

will have produced a body of work that any journalist in any era would be

proud of.

And while the self-inflicted wounds hurt credibility out there, there still is a

commitment on the part of most young journalists I talk to. And Ellen, you

teach those who want to go into it. Having said that, let me just talk about

what I think the downside problem is. The culture in the newsroom has

changed, I think. And part of it is a corporate culture, and that culture says,

“Do more with less. Cover all your community and beyond with less

resources than you’ve ever had before.”

When I was in journalism--I haven’t been in a newsroom in 15 years, so I’m

probably not the best contemporary expert you can find--when I was in a

newsroom, there were down years. There were times when the economy was

flat, and there were times when the economy was down, and, indeed, we did

more with less because we had to. Ellen talked about the corporate culture

now that says every quarter has to produce a better bottom line than the last

quarter, so that the increase can be reflected on the big board on Wall Street.

And so, every quarter, you’re called upon to do more with less. And it’s not

surprising that, in that environment, while there is still quality journalism

being practiced, there are significant errors, that there is an inability of some

journalists to produce at the level they produced in the past. I spoke to a

federal judge the other day. He said, “There has not been a reporter in my

courtroom in seven months.” That says something about what the readers of




PAGE 20

the newspaper in that community, the television viewers in that community,

find out about what’s going on in the court.

I submit it’s also dangerous because public officials--whether federal judges,

state judges, mayors, governors, presidents--need to be monitored by an

independent, searching eye of the press that looks for flaws in all the

institutions in society. And when you think about trying to do more with

less, and the effect of it, I submit to you that it’s not just a bad thing that’s

happening to the news media. It also is a bad thing when institutions of

government, and in the private and charitable sector, are not adequately

reported on.

We know one thing over the last decade. It is that there is no institution in

this society that does not need to be monitored. Not the corporate society--

think of the scandals there; not the charitable society--think of the scandals

there; not education; not even the Church, as you in this community know.

And not surprisingly, we’ve had scandals in journalism as well. As I said,

Callie, I hope the pendulum is swinging. And I wish that I could say with

confidence that it is. But as long as the culture says, “Produce more with

less,” many journalists are faced with an impossible job.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Let me just throw out a couple of things for this

audience, because I assume the people here in this audience are very

interested in having the kind of serious news, the kind of reported news, that

we’re talking about up here. But we have a Boston Globe now that’s




PAGE 21

eliminated its national desk. This is a major newspaper. They’re eliminating

the national desk. There is no coverage coming out of Boston, by Boston

Globe reporters, about national issues.

At the network news operations, there used to be 15 news bureaus. They’re

now reduced to five foreign news bureaus. That’s a statistic from Judy

Woodruff, who’s working on a paper about this. So this is what we’re faced

with. The cutbacks, they’ve happened. So, Garrett, what do we do? You say

we’re going to be eating our young, so to speak. So I don’t understand where

we go here. We can talk about the problems, but you’ve got to be able to tell

people here who are looking for some information, well, what happens.

GARRETT GRAFF: There are two things, I think, that we are seeing right

now. A lot of people are starting to use the web for a variety of ways that are

loosely being called “citizen journalism,” which we’re beginning to see with

instances like the London bombings, the South Asia Tsunami, and Hurricane

Katrina this fall, which people are going out and reporting themselves. And

they’re taking their own pictures, and writing their own accounts, and

providing the eyewitness reports that they feel the news media aren’t

generating themselves.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: But that’s not what we’re talking about, the serious

stuff that’s going away.




PAGE 22

GARRETT GRAFF: But I think that is moving in to part of that void.

Citizens are saying, increasingly, that “The news media isn’t giving me the

information that I need. I’m going to go out there and do it myself.”

I’m in Washington, and we’re seeing it in a couple of sites called

Backfence.com, which is hyper-local journalism. These are the suburban

communities around Washington who say the Washington Post, which is our

dominant newspaper in the region, “isn’t covering my high school sports

games. It’s not covering the City Council meetings in our suburban towns.

And it’s not telling me what the restaurants are that I should go and eat at,

four blocks from my house. It’s telling me what the fancy restaurants are

downtown in Washington.” And so these are people who are going out and

doing their own reporting, and posting it on these hyper-local journalism

sites.

But that’s not a sustainable model for information gathering. And as more

and more people get their news from online news sources, the Washington

Post, again, has seen its circulation drop very steadily for a number of years

now, in a hugely alarming trend for the region, because that’s primarily how

the Washington Post makes money. However, on the flip side, its web site is

doing fantastic. More people are reading the Washington Post now than have

ever read the Washington Post before. It’s just that, for instance, in my

apartment building in Washington, I’m the only person in my building of

eight units who gets the Washington Post delivered. It’s a hard copy of the

Post.




PAGE 23

Now I know, from talking to my neighbors, that everyone reads the Post

every day. They just read it online, where it’s free and they don’t pay

anything for it. So people are learning that they can get all of the news they

want online for free, but again, that’s not really a sustainable business model

for the news media. And this is the question that the media at all levels is

struggling with right now.

ELLEN HUME: A lot of the young people I work with get their news off

Yahoo! and Google, which is convenient because they will create little news

digest bytes, and there are lots of aggregating forces out there, portals that

will give you the headlines that you want. You can even pre-set your

computer to have it delivered via e-mail, so that you know if something’s

broken in the Libby case.

But the problem with that, as you’ve just said, Garrett, and as John has said

too, is that those wonderful businesses rely on someone at some point to go

out and get the original reporting done. And it’s that business model for the

investigative reporter, for the person who’s literally going to leave your

house and go out on the street, and to knock on some doors, and interview

some real people, and do some real research in courthouses and police

blotters, and so forth, the model for paying that person is the model that I’m

really worried about.




PAGE 24

So what is a consumer to do in this environment? I think that you need to

buy your newspaper subscriptions. I hate to say it, but don’t get it for free.

And when you see really good reporting, whether it’s on TV or on the

Internet or anywhere, sit and stand up for it. At the same time, as I would

agree with John, a lot of journalists are really losing their way and not living

up to the standards that we all honor. I have to say, I think the entertainment

business, in a bizarre way, is sort of picking up the old standards of news.

Did anybody watch “West Wing” last night? [laughter]

They had a fake, but really fabulous, presidential debate, in which the

candidates really were nervous and really sounded as if they were the real

thing. And they actually said things--I don’t know if you felt this way--that

we were dying to hear from our own candidates. So, “West Wing” is

presenting what looked like a real presidential debate, George Clooney is

presenting a movie about Edward R. Murrow to get us back to the old

accountability that great journalism did. And of course, Jon Stewart, day in

and day out on “The Daily Show,” which is what my students really like to

watch, presents us with his take on the news.

But none of them is talking about a world in which there isn’t that

investigator, that reporter going out. And what are we going to do when we

lose that person?

GARRETT GRAFF: The “West Wing” episode last night, though, is an

interesting case in how the news media is really undermining itself, to a




PAGE 25

certain extent. Because the NBC News logo was in the bottom corner of the

screen from the debate last night.

ELLEN HUME: Wow.

GARRETT GRAFF: Now, it was modeled like a real presidential debate.

Forrest Sawyer was the actual moderator, and Chris Matthews has appeared

on the show, interviewing some of the candidates. I missed the episode, but

people who saw it said he was far better on “West Wing” than he has ever

been on his own show. [laughter]

ELLEN HUME: How could you tell?

GARRETT GRAFF: But here, we have a case where people are tuning in

to what is supposed to be entertainment, but they’re saying its endorsed by

what they think is NBC News. So, are we seeing entertainment there? Are

we seeing journalism? And what’s the line?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: I guess my concern is not so much with “West

Wing,” but with the penchant for the news to move toward entertainment in

such a dramatic way. And I clearly excise the performance of my son in this.

[laughter] But I do think that, as I watch local television more and more, if it

bleeds, it leads. And more and more, the anchors on too many stations, as I

travel around the country, find that there has to be something laughable in




PAGE 26

the news, or something that is superficially trite in order to entertain an

audience about very serious business.

ELLEN HUME: John, you’d be really unhappy in the Czech Republic,

because their TV-NOVA which is the dominant local—well, actually

national TV station, owned by Americans pretty much— it’s so bloody, the

news, that they put a towel under it, under the TV set, the Czechs do. And

the weather lady is stark naked. Because it’s against the law to take your

clothes off on Czech TV, but not to put clothes on. So you start with

nothing, and then she puts on a little scarf if it’s going to be cold.

So this is not a uniquely American problem. It’s really a global issue.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: But, we’ve had a tradition here, Ellen, to really

have serious news. And for a lot of people who’ve had the tradition of

watching serious news to see this turn toward entertainment, is hugely

disconcerting. I have a quote here from Todd Gitlin that I think is very

interesting.

He says, “The assumption in a lot of the debate about the nature of the news

media is that the news media’s essential business is in conveying news.

Actually, that assumption reflects very shallow understanding of what the

news media and our society are about. The news media are actually an

emotion machine. The business of the news media is to draw attention

period.”




PAGE 27

ELLEN HUME: Well, that’s true of the commercialized parts, but not of

the part that we’ve been trying to find some sucker for today. And I actually

want to rise in defense of some of the trends going on. Am I allowed to do

that, Callie?

CALLIE CROSSLEY: If you want to.

ELLEN HUME: Especially in the presence of a very good blogger; Garrett

is a real journalist. And he’s not really the kind of journalism that I’ve been

complaining about, which is the journalism of assertion, rather than the

journalism of verification.

I think what’s refreshing about the new technology in all of this is that we

now have access to the original documents much of the time. We have

access. The average citizen is now the journalist as you pointed out. There’s

a downside to that, but there’s also a big upside to that. We’re seeing police

beatings that we didn’t have access to. We’re understanding human nature.

And it’s out there in the public discourse in a way that was cloaked and

protected when journalism was a priesthood of white males. Only certain

subjects would be talked about.

And I know we’ve gone too far with a lot of that. But, I’m grateful that

journalism is opening up. And I think it was important that it be held more

accountable than it used to be.




PAGE 28

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Well, let me just say this though. Yes, you may

have access to the video of the beating, because that would be something

that people would run to the internet to look at. But where are people

running to the internet to find out the details of the Medicare Prescription

Bill? And that information is less and less on the local channels, where it

used to be, on the national channels where it used to be, and in the national

newspapers. So now here we are with no information as a society.

ELLEN HUME: Well, that’s why I’m a teacher instead of a journalist. I

think we have an audience problem as well. I mean, the supply is huge, but

the audience is leaving. And it’s really important for people to discern the

difference between real journalism and stuff that’s sort of amusing and fun,

but isn’t really what you need to know to make your decisions in a

democracy.

And I tell my students: figure out where they got it from and then you’ll

know if it’s real or not. Figure out what their sources were. And if you can’t

then don’t necessarily trust it.

So I mean it’s really going back to the basics that have always been the core

of journalism. Who, what, why, when, where? If you don’t know that, then

treat it with a grain of salt.




PAGE 29

ELLEN HUME: Garrett, the rap for your generation is that you’re the

people that took serious journalism away, because you guys don’t read it,

you don’t support it, there’s no tradition of watching it. I know people tell

me young people read it on the internet. But I maintain that young people go

to the internet, but they’re not necessarily reading news.

And believe it or not, there was a guy who set up a blog to explain the jokes

behind Jon Stewart because so many of the young people who watch the

show didn’t get it. Because there is either nowhere for them to get it, or they

feel there isn’t. But there’s no tradition for them looking for that

information. How do you respond to that?

GARRETT GRAFF: I think it’s a perfectly valid criticism, in large part,

except that it’s an audience problem. It’s that the news media isn’t speaking

to people the way that they want to be spoken to. Now, the question is, how

do people want to be spoken to?

And they’re getting a lot of this quasi-news, information, entertainment. And

a lot of it is sort of almost an oral tradition via e-mail forwards over the

course of the day, as stories evolve and you pick up little nuggets here and

there.

What’s very interesting online is you can go to a site like Yahoo or Google,

and find out what other people are reading. And if you look at the top 10

most e-mail stories, the most talked about stories on any given day, it bears




PAGE 30

almost no resemblance to the top 10 stories on the evening news, or the

stories on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times or

The Boston Globe.

And in large part it shouldn’t. I mean, it’s sort of the cocktail trio of

entertainment news, show biz, celebrity news. It’s opinions, op-eds,

whatever Maureen Dowd is harping on today. Or whatever far corner of the

earth Thomas Friedman is reporting from. Or it’s news of the bizarre. You

know, the woman with her cats living in the attic growing the world’s largest

pumpkin.

So that’s what people are interested in. But, that’s not what they’re getting

off the front page of the Washington Post. But, this is where we go back to

where we started--which was John talking about that’s the job of the

discerning journalist--to tell us the things that we need to know anyway.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: And I would have to say, Callie, I think there

are in many cities, I think in most cities, there are working journalists who

every day do a good job of prioritizing news for their communities. And

they try to provide in that buffet information about world affairs and national

affairs, state affairs, local affairs. And they try to provide a change of pace

features, human interest stories, so that there is something not only ...

(inaudible), but there is a great deal that is important and something that

entertains as well.




PAGE 31

My problem with what I read and see is not that there is not a tradition being

followed. It is that the culture that produces that tradition is changing. And I

fear that enduring values of journalism suffer as that culture takes its toll.

And my sense of the lessening of public support for newspaper and

television news credibility is the direct result of that changing culture that

we’ve talked about. And it seems to me that it inevitably falls back to the

whole concept of now you must do more with less, you must do more with

less.

It’s a great struggle in everyone of those news rooms to do more with less.

But there are times when it simply is impossible.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: But, how can we make that connection to the

public? For example, the Judy Miller scandal. If I explain that a million

times, the people just said to me, “I kind of feel stupid, but I don’t

understand why journalists are all upset about this. Can you explain it to

me?”

So I explain it and explain it and explain it. And I realize in the explanation

there is no connection to lots of folks who really want to be informed, but

they don’t understand what the issues are, nor do they see why this should be

a big deal in their lives. If this culture has changed, if we’re doing more than

less, why should that matter to them? They don’t understand that.




PAGE 32

ELLEN HUME: I think what happened with Judy Miller was actually very

old fashioned. And it didn’t have anything to do with the new technology, or

with the business model for journalism being in trouble. It had to do with the

old thing of getting too close to your sources.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Absolutely.

ELLEN HUME: And that happens to a lot of good journalists if they’re not

vigilant, if their editors don’t oversee that, if they’re not challenged. And in

Washington, it’s a particular disease. And I would just like to remind

everybody that the Chicago rule--Chicago being the home of front page and

all that kind of juicy, not necessarily straight up journalism--the Chicago

rule is a good one to remember. And Judy should have heard about this and

done this. And that is you protect your source only as long as what you have

from your source is better than what you have on your source. [laughter]

CALLIE CROSSLEY: I hear you, but my point is that there seems to be a

disconnect; that’s what I’m trying to get to. Not the issue of what Judy

Miller was doing or not doing. But, the question was the disconnect from

people understanding that this was a journalism issue.

Q: Okay, to seriously answer that, the whole problem underlying the source

decision that she made is she wasn’t feeling that her first job was to be loyal

to the public. Her first job was to be loyal to her source of power, and to her

powerful source. And so the public, I think, has sensed—and I think Garrett




PAGE 33

has talked about this a bit, and John too, that there’s been a departure by a

lot of journalists from that first thing I talked about in the beginning, which

is a verification of facts, and be loyal to the public. Our job is to tell you

guys everything we can figure out. Not to have secret sources who tell us

cool tidbits that we keep secret, or that we protect, unless they’re whistle

blowing and it’s important that they are protected.

And the public doesn’t feel we’re on their side anymore. When I saw the

James Bond movie that had the Rupert Murdoch figure in it, I don’t

remember the title of that particular James Bond movie, but I saw that the

news mogul was now the new Dr. No, was the new evil figure. And even the

magic school bus had a fake TV journalist as the villain in one of their

episodes, in a child’s show. When I saw the popular culture turning

journalists from the heroes of Watergate to the bad guys who are inauthentic,

who are fake, that comes from a public sense that we’re not doing a job

we’re supposed to. We’re forgetting to whom we are loyal, what the point of

the exercise is. And I think the way you tell the Judy Miller story is to say

she forgot the point of the exercise. And if the public doesn’t understand it, I

don’t blame them, because we treat it all as an inside sport.

GARRETT GRAFF: But, Callie, I would add here that what we’re seeing

in the collapse of trust in the news media, I think, is also an across-the-board

generational collapse of trust in American institutions. You’re seeing the

same thing with government. You’re seeing the same thing with churches.

You’re seeing the same thing with business.




PAGE 34

And the problem is that it’s not until you get a moment like Hurricane

Katrina where everyone’s like wait, where was government? Of course,

government should be doing that. And you need some major moment of

catalyst like that to bring people back and make them understand what the

point of the institution is. And we sort of need a moment like that in

journalism. We need a good Watergate again, if only to demonstrate the

importance—And Judy Miller could have been that if she had held true to

her first loyalty, to her editors and to the public.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: What about Katrina coverage? Did that do anything

to make people come back?

GARRETT GRAFF: I think that was very instrumental. You saw it

particularly with someone like Anderson Cooper on CNN, who won major

points for his very emotional, very heartfelt attack on Senator Landrieu,

where she was sort of handing out the normal politician points. And he’s

like, look, I’m down here. These people are in a lot of trouble.

ELLEN HUME: But, there was also a great moment on Fox, Hannity and

Colmes, one of the conservative talk show frames for the news on Fox.

Actually, I don’t know if any of you saw this, but Shepherd Smith and

Geraldo Riviera—I hate to even mention his name in the same word as

journalism, because I’ve never considered him a journalist—But Shepherd

Smith and Geraldo Riviera were there on the scene. And there is this sound




PAGE 35

byte available on the internet—actually the video is available on the internet,

which is one of the great things about the internet. And Hannity, a

conservative, and an outspoken conservative says, “Well, you know, isn’t

the government about to show up and take care of everybody?” And

Shepherd Smith, who’s normally hewing to the conservative, pro-

administration line, says, “I don’t see them coming.”

And he’s getting really angry at what he’s seeing. And Geraldo Riviera

practically melts down. He says, “Look at this baby. Look at this baby.” And

what happened at that moment was the poses and the artificiality of the Fox

News cast was broken, and this became a very celebrated moment because,

in fact, it was a time of real news breaking out. And people who weren’t

really normally being journalists suddenly found they had to say the truth.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Let me just deal with New Orleans from a

different perspective for a moment. You can tell from my accent where I

come from. And for me the story of race is one that continues after all this

time to haunt us.

I think of my youth, son of the segregated south, I think back on that time

and wonder where we were. And let me just talk about the media more than

individual people. Where was the media when the environment in which

local newspapers and radio and television stations operated in the center of

an outrageous denial of rights and even human dignity to a substantial

portion of the population?




PAGE 36

Ellison writes in The Invisible Man, “They didn’t see me.” And I’ll tell you,

the media didn’t. And the most meaningful moment during the aftermath of

that hurricane was when that roof came off. It’s not original. It’s like a scab

picked off a sore. And suddenly we realized that class and race was still a

story the media had ignored until a hurricane forced them to look at it. And,

you know, if there is an indictment of the media to be made, failure to

recognize that in that city and still in many major cities in this country,

media is as blind to that story as it was for too many years to the problems of

priestly pedophilia.

And it only reminds me again that the effort to do more with less means that

those sorts of stories, until the scab is picked off the sore, are going to go

untold.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Garret, do you want to say something?

GARRETT GRAFF: I was going to add, sort of building off what Ellen

was saying, that what people saw in the Katrina coverage on Fox and on

CNN, and even on the networks and in the newspapers was a sense of

outrage from the media. And that was, I think, refreshing to many viewers

and readers, because we hadn’t seen that in the media in a long time. And in

that sense what we had seen was sort of a gradual slip from a skeptical

media into a cynical media.




PAGE 37

And one that sort of was reporting the news, but without the authenticity and

without the sense of outrage that you really need in good journalism. And I

think that that’s what the appeal of a lot of what blogging and online stuff is,

is it’s an authentic voice, and it’s an outraged voice in a lot of cases. I mean,

as John was saying, good journalism has a sense of outrage because it’s

about comforting the inflicted.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: And inflicting the comfortable.

GARRETT GRAFF: Inflicting the comfortable. [laughter] So I think if we

saw more of that sense of outrage on a daily basis in journalism, it would be

good for—And I mean, outrage in reporters. Not just on Hannity and

Colmes and the talk show guys. But, I mean, actual reporters standing up to

public officials and saying, “How can you let this happen?”

ELLEN HUME: I actually think the Katrina experience for this country,

and for the media, has been very, very important. I have to agree with

everybody. I really loved what you said, John, about the importance of

covering race and class. And I look at all the incentives out there, not to talk

about that, because you’ll be called “liberal”, you’ll be called “negative.”

You’ll be told you’re the old politics, and you’re not entertaining.

I think it’s our responsibility to be unpopular as journalists. If we have to be

popular, we will never ask the tough questions of the people in power. And

we will not weather the storms that come when we actually uncover the




PAGE 38

Watergates and the Selmas and everything else that journalists have done in

this country that was good.

So I just want to say—I know we’re about to turn to questions. But, I want

to say that I’m not hopeless about this. I’m educating young people whether

they like it or not. That they must follow the news. It is stupid not to. They

need a door to power, and you have to have information to go through that

door. Otherwise, you’re consigned to the window just looking at it. And I

really trust that. And I think it’s terribly important that all of us make

choices about what we trust and what we don’t. And that journalists be

encouraged to get back to the basics and stay there.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: This is the time for you all to line up to ask

questions. I would be remiss, sitting up here as a television journalist, if I

didn’t follow something that you said earlier, John. There is definitely some

good television journalism being practiced as well.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: I know it so well.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Yeah, I’m sitting on the Dupont Columbia jury,

and I have seen some really fine, fine work amazingly at local stations

across the country, small local stations even. But, some of the stuff on the

network news is fabulous. But even me, I haven’t seen a lot of it. There’s

less of it for sure, I can tell you that.




PAGE 39

Garrett, I wonder as people are lining up if there is something that you think

is very hopeful about folks in your generation coming to appreciate the kind

of vetted journalism that we talked about here.

GARRETT GRAFF: Well, what I guess I would answer is that my

generation is learning to get news from a greater diversity of sources than

were previously accessible. And that you have more people—you have the

great newspapers of the country: the Washington Posts, the New York Times,

the Boston Globes, the LA Times, that are now accessible to a much greater

number of people. Sitting in Washington I read The LA Times and The

Boston Globe a couple of times a week, which is just something that you

would have never been able to do prior to the internet.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Okay, we’re going to try to get everybody’s

question in. So questions please, non-statements. I’ll cut you off if you start

to comment.

Q: I have two questions. First, as a young person, do you have any

suggestions about where I should be looking for good news? And the second

question is, what do you think of the “TimesSelect” style model for getting

more to do more with, because they’re starting to charge for things like

Maureen Dowd now?

GARRETT GRAFF: I think “TimesSelect” is a good attempt. I think that

Ellen—I more agree with Ellen, though—Gene Weingarten, who is the




PAGE 40

humor columnist at the Washington Post, was talking about The Post’s

circulation slide last week. And what he said was that he thinks that it’s a

failure of imagination on the part of marketers in the media industry. That

for a generation that thinks nothing of paying four dollars for a cup of coffee

every morning, that 35 cents or 50 cents to get a hardcopy of a newspaper

that brings you a 400 page—or maybe on a week day a 200 page book,

about everything that’s going on in the world, that if you can’t find that 35

cents or the 50 cents on a day-to-day basis, then the people in media who do

the marketing are doing something wrong.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Where are good places for her to find news?

GARRETT GRAFF: I think they are the best newspapers in the country. I

think that’s the simplest answer. I would read The Washington Post, The

New York Times, and if you’re from here The Boston Globe every day.

ELLEN HUME: And also you need to see the perspectives of the

conservative press, I think. The Wall Street Journal is very good in the news

pages I can say as an alumna. But, also I think The Economist, The National

Journal, and Congressional Quarterly if you’re interested in what’s going

on in Congress. And on PBS, I really like the Frontline documentary series.

They win a lot of those Duponts and they’re just superb. John, where do you

go to for news?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Well, I go to…




PAGE 41

CALLIE CROSSLEY: It’s got to be NBC.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: I go to NBC on Saturday and Sunday. I surf all

the 24-hour news channels. Religiously, every time I’m in front of a set I’m

watching MSNBC, CNBC, Fox. I watch C-SPAN with great interest. I

would say with regard to marketing, I think Fox, I think Roger Ailes is a

genius niche marketer. He knows exactly where his audience is, and he goes

straight for it with what that audience wants.

Now I can get my fill of it pretty quick, but it is what it is. But I read every

day. I read—and there’s an awful lot of duplication so it doesn’t take that

long—I read The Times and get it delivered at home. I don’t get The Post. I

read it on line. And I get The Wall Street Journal. And I get USA Today as

well as my local paper, The Tennessean. USA Today sells more newspapers

every day than any other paper in the nation. Its new editor, Ken Paulson, is

a brilliant editor. And I think its success is that it’s constantly improved

since we created it in 1982.

What I’ve just said is I’m a news junky, and I go a long way every day to

find out what I can about what’s going in the world that interests me. Again,

I think I’m also a very discriminating reader.

GARRETT GRAFF: One other thing here, Callie, which is something we

haven’t talked about at all today. One of the greatest benefits of the web is




PAGE 42

the ability to get international news, and to read The Guardian, to read the

BBC, to even read al-Jazeera if you want. To learn how events are being

portrayed overseas and how other people see things is a huge benefit that

we’ve never had before.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Let me hasten to add to that C-SPAN 1 and 2.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: What I would say is there’s a couple of places

where they just pull it altogether for you. First, a stand-alone publication

each week, clips from a lot of major newspapers: The Week, and op eds from

international journalists: mediachannel.org, clips from a lot of international

newspapers. And Slate, every day, clips from all of the major daily

newspapers so you can quickly see how it all comes together.

I am going to control the panelists. They will not all get to answer

everybody’s question. So next to you.

Q: If The New York Times is so great, why didn’t they do more

investigating on weapons of mass destruction when the UN Committee that

went out there said there weren’t any? And why didn’t they get it out to us

before the election?

ELLEN HUME: I’d love to take a crack at that one. The reporter on that is

the person we’ve been talking about—Judith Miller. That’s why we’ve been




PAGE 43

critical of her. She got too close to her sources in the administration. She

didn’t do her job of verifying what they were saying. There’s another factor.

After 9/11 a lot of journalists were in disarray as were many Americans

about what is the culture, what is my job, what’s going on here? There was a

super-patriotism at work, and journalists succumbed to some extent to that.

There’s a huge powerful incentive in Washington not to cross the Bush

administration. They punish you if you don’t write things that they like.

The New York Times was off the Cheney plane for a long time, I believe it

was The New York Times, because Cheney didn’t like what they were

writing. The incentives in place to do accountability journalism in

Washington are very weak right now. They were when this was going on.

I’m not saying it was a good period. I think it was a real low point in the

quality of journalism. But I know there were some journalists trying to do it,

and Walter Pincus at The Washington Post, for example, wrote stories that

they buried in the paper.

They’ve apologized for that. They’ve acknowledged--The New York Times

and The Post and others--have acknowledged that this was a terrible time.

The intelligence agencies, by the way, were all saying the same thing. So it

wasn’t as if you had a lot of other information floating around telling

journalists day-in and day-out, “Watch out, look at this.” Sources were

generally saying the same thing to journalists.




PAGE 44

So they should have looked farther, they should have done better. It’s a

shameful period. Certainly the opposite of the Watergate period. That’s my

take on it. I don’t know if you guys agree.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Next question.

Q: Hi. You guys have spoken about there has been a shift in trust in the

past. I want to know, do you think that the shift is going to continue to get

greater? And do you think that it will change so that we could be able to

trust the media more?

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Which one of you?

GARRETT GRAFF: I think that there’s some amount of this that’s

cyclical. I think that we’re at a point now where trust is very low in

journalism. I hope that it will bounce back. I hope that we will see a brighter

day ahead.

And I will add briefly, while I have the microphone and responding to the

last question, I think that there’s a huge amount of accountability that

belongs to the editors of The New York Times for allowing Judy Miller to be

Ms. Run-a-muck, as she called herself.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: And if they were here, they would say that

they’ve said in the pages of that newspaper that they did fail.




PAGE 45

Q: There are two similar international news in the last two weeks. One is

the disturbance in France, and the other is in Ethiopia where both people

have been killed. We’re hearing a lot about France and not about Ethiopia.

So who makes the decision which one needs to be distributed more?

CALLIE CROSSLEY: John, former editor. Who makes the news decision

that France is more important than Ethiopia to cover…

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Experienced journalists. And they do it based

on their own system of values, and their perception of what the audience the

paper serves or the news organization serves, a perception of what that

audience’s interests are. It’s all a matter of priorities.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Foreign news here in America, is it fair that there’s

never a perception or a high enough perception that…

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: And I understand how people feel about it. I

am never in Paris or in Rome, or ... (inaudible) when I read the local

newspaper and find enough there about my country or my city.

Q: I’m just wondering whether the bottom line, in terms of the bean

counters and the people who are really running newspapers economically

haven’t put forward very much a disposable type of news media now, where

everything in our society has become disposable. You were talking about the




PAGE 46

small percentage of news that’s broadcast as news, as opposed to little

segments of entertainment. What are your feelings about it? Have we

created, or are we digesting a disposable media and news information

source?

ELLEN HUME: Well, news is supposed to be disposable, because it’s

supposed to be new all the time. So I appreciate your point. But my problem

is not that it moves on, but that we obsess about the wrong things. The

public has become private, and the private has become public. And there’s

too little coverage of what choices we have as citizens about what’s looming

on any front. And too much about the latest celebrity gossip. And that is

because we’re in an audience driven business now. It’s no longer the

priesthood that says, as John was saying, “This is what’s important. And,

therefore, we’re going to give it to you whether you like it or not,” because

there’s no longer a captive audience.

And I just really—My heart goes out to the previous questioner too from

Ethiopia, or if you’re not from Ethiopia, who cares about Ethiopia. I actually

did a journalism training in Ethiopia, which is another whole story. But, the

Ethiopian journalists there are being beaten and jailed. And they can’t tell

their own story. And that’s why it’s all the more important for foreign

journalists to cover them.

But, what one Ethiopian journalist said to the group of Ethiopians was,

“Well, why aren’t we covering our famine?” And the group of journalists




PAGE 47

said, “We don’t have the bus fare to leave Addis.” And then the first guy

said, “Then why don’t we just run the pictures.” And I think to some extent

we should at least run the pictures.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: And that means “we” should show them the

pictures, the American journalists should show them the pictures.

Q: Do you think blogging in the future will help young people pay more

attention to the news of the world and the nation?

GARRETT GRAFF: I do. I think that what we are seeing with the

generation that’s sort of coming of age right now is that they are growing up

as not just news consumers, but also news producers. The latest Pew Internet

and American Life Study which is related to the media study that Ellen

mentioned earlier, shows that 50% of all teenagers—not just teenagers who

use the internet—but all teenagers are internet content creators. That they

either write for the web, or post pictures on line or comment on blogs, or

other places.

And I think that that’s a very healthy trend. Because you’re creating an

environment where people feel not just that they can consume news, but also

participate in and join in and create the news as they go along.

Q: Why is it that most news that happens in America isn’t covered, but in

other countries they cover our news, but we don’t cover theirs?




PAGE 48

ELLEN HUME: Well, America is sort of the great mother ship of

democracy, and the most powerful nation in the world. So a lot of nations

really care about what happens in our country. We, on the other hand, have

had the luxury, at least until 9/11 many people have had the luxury of

thinking that what happens within our borders is all that they need to worry

about. I think that that’s why other countries cover America better perhaps

than sometimes we do ourselves.

But I have to also say that a lot of the journalism around the world is pretty

bad. I am not going to stand here and say that the journalism in America is

inferior to the journalism in Egypt or in Addis, or anywhere else. It is really

hard to do good journalism. And one of the ironies of the blogger culture is

that everyone becomes a journalist, sort of, and the standards are very

mushy. I don’t know if that answers your question. Is that the question you

had?

Q: Somewhat. My question was, why don’t we cover our own news, like

the story on Bill Bennett? I have only seen that report in a Japanese

newspaper.

ELLEN HUME: What story was that?

Q: The Bill Bennett…




PAGE 49

CALLIE CROSSLEY: The suggestion that all black babies should be

aborted, and that we’d have a reduction in crime.

Q: And I only saw a quote in the Boston Metro.

ELLEN HUME: I don’t know why that wasn’t quoted elsewhere.

Normally that kind of thing is. Normally that kind of thing goes far. That’s

how Trent Lott lost his leadership role, because he said something…

CALLIE CROSSLEY: If I hear your question underneath it would be why

wasn’t it more widespread.

Q: Yes.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: That’s very interesting. This is a story where the

White House even said that was an inappropriate comment. And yet the man

has never apologized. Now, whether you take his apology to be sincere or

not, it’s very interesting.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: ... (inaudible) It does seem to me that that story

was given significant play.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Really?




PAGE 50

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: I think if you went back and reviewed that

story when it broke, it was a high profile story most places I looked. And he

stumbled around on television for two or three days trying to explain

himself, and then muzzled himself. But, you know, it’s… well…

Q: Hello, my name is ... (inaudible) Owens. I’m trying to figure out how to

find out information—I’m ... (inaudible) would be like, “Oh Rosa Parks

died? I thought she died like five years ago.” How can I find out recent

information, or the information that is right now?

ELLEN HUME: I guess I don’t understand—Keep current?

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Yes.

ELLEN HUME: Callie, why don’t you answer that.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: Well, I think some of the suggestions that we made

earlier about where you go to look every day to see what’s going on—I

mean, we’re not talking about spending hours and hours. As you can tell,

most of us up here probably spend way more time than you ever would

trying to figure out what’s going on. I watch five newscasts in the morning

to begin with, just because I need to know what everybody is saying.

But, if you were to just hit one site, I think Slate does an excellent job of sort

of pulling from all of the major newspapers what the headlines are. And




PAGE 51

somebody like Rosa Parks, anything that would happen with her, would of

course be covered very heavily and you would know about it. I mean, I think

there are also other niche organizations that you can go to to get some

information. And it depends where you’re coming from.

There is Black America Web—There are a lot of sites on the web, and you

can pull them up for yourself. Just do a little news list for yourself so that

you already have it on your computer, and then you can just go in and see

what’s going on very quickly. So that’s what I would do. I would try to go to

a few places that pull it altogether from all over the internet, and all over the

United States. Because I think it gets intimidating if you’re not a regular user

of news, you’re like well, where do I start? I don’t want to sit here five hours

and read The Washington Post. I think that’s a good beginning.

Q: The subject today, of course, is what’s happening to the news media?

And you spent a great deal of time speaking about trust. My question is, to

what extent should you, in answering these questions, and the news media

itself deal, not just with trust, but with truth? Because truth is what is going

to engender the trust that you’re looking for.

ELLEN HUME: I’d like to answer that. I teach to this. Truth is in the eye

of the beholder; I hate to say it. One person’s truth is not always the other

person’s truth. And that’s a matter of perspective; it’s a matter of what you

already know. So truth is too big an abstract a word to really get our hands

around as journalists. I’d say that every good journalist is trying, of course,




PAGE 52

to tell you the truth, as best as that person knows it. But, if that person has

never set foot in a black neighborhood, how are they going to tell the truth

about what the life is like?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Investigative journalism.

ELLEN HUME: That person has never had an abortion, how are they

going to understand what that issue is about? So truth is always going to be

relative. And I find that the only way we can get back to engendering—

deserving the trust that you would like to offer to journalists, is what I

suggested in the beginning. Which is you go out and you verify facts. You

are honorably trying to tell an honest true job as well as you can. And if you

fail, you’re transparent and you do a better job next time, and you

acknowledge your mistake, as The New York Times has been trying to do

about Judith Miller.

But, living in truth, which Vaslav Havel and other heroes of democracy have

tried to do is a challenge for any human being. And journalists really

struggle with it. The good ones sometimes succeed. But it’s a huge job for

any of us to try to even begin to do that.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Can I just add—That’s a powerful statement,

Ellen, and it’s so true. For the journalists truth is the illusive goal. And every

day is a struggle to find the truth. And think of a political campaign, and

think of a journalist talking one day, the same day, to John Kerry and to




PAGE 53

George Bush about the truth? You know, that’s what the journalist faces

every day, getting all sides on every side that’s willing to shed some light on

a dark corner. And sometimes there is a little light, sometimes blazing lights,

and sometimes the light itself is blinding.

And so I think professional journalists understand that the truth is out there

somewhere. And I’m going to do the very best job to let my readers or

viewers know tomorrow what that truth is. Everything I can find out about it.

But I hope they have sense enough to know that the press is a human

instrument, produced by human beings, subject to human error of judgment

and fact. And all of that—I’m really back where I began, I guess, by saying,

those who view it and read it, have to make ultimate judgments about where

credibility really lies.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: And the reason that we spend so much time about

trust is because if you don’t believe that we have the public interest in mind,

then you can’t believe that anything that is produced by us is truth. So you

can’t even begin that conversation unless you have trust that we are

committed to do the job that we say that we’re dong. So that’s why trust is

so important a part of this conversation.

Q: I just wanted to know, does the media portray too much about the

government? Because I remember when the war with Iraq started, I thought

that they gave out too much information about what the government was




PAGE 54

doing to outside countries. And they don’t contain it more within the

country.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: So now you’re complaining about too much truth.

ELLEN HUME: This is secrecy; this is the secrecy issue. I served on a

Commission, a Moynihan Commission on protecting and reducing

government secrecy. And I’d say that it’s a very decent and honorable thing

for a person to care that her country is protected, and what needs to be

protected is protected.

I’d say that the record shows that there is a huge amount of unnecessary

secrecy, that the classification system in Washington has exponentially

grown since 9/11. Whether it should or not is a matter of your interpretation

and opinion. But very few secrets are given out by journalists that are

endangering the country. That just is something that you might be worried

about, but that almost never happens.

CALLIE CROSSLEY: And the role of the journalist is to keep

questioning. I want to thank very much the eminent John Seigenthaler, Ellen

Hume, Garrett Graff and all of you for joining us. Good night.

[Applause]

john shattuck: good evening. i’m john shattuck, the ceo …...kennedy library forums “what’s...

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