The Media Project 1174, 2013 December 1

Support for the Media Project comes from the College of St. Rose, Albany, New York,
offering a master of arts and communications to advance careers in media, PR, and journalism,
fuller part-time options, 518-4545143. From Northeast Public Radio,
this is the Media Project, a weekly discussion about issues confronting the media.
I'll tell you quite reliably off the record about some charming people I have known.
Before I meet politicians and grafters by the score, killers play and fancy,
it's really quite a bar, oh, and these peppermint meets up to interesting people.
They wallow in corruption, crime and gore tingling, Ling City desk,
full press, full press, extra extra read all about it, it's a mess meets the test,
only peppermint meets up to interesting people. It's wonderful, the reparsent of press.
Well, before the show started, we were doing some TV commentary here at Canon and Kojak,
and we'll get to Lou Grant shortly. Dr. Alan Sharchhark is here, the CEO of Northeast Public
Radio, professor, political scientist, etc, etc. How'd you do? How'd you do yourself?
And Ira Fuss fell, long time publisher, the Kingston Daily Freeman in New York's Hudson Valley.
How do you suppose listeners think when they hear us talking about Canon and the Kojak and
probably saying where the heck were they? Or two, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Rex Smith,
editor of the Times Union, the only good thing is if the demographic of the public radio audience is.
And that, and that, Rex Smith is a problem because what happens is that let's say you decide,
you're going to do something youthful. Well, the existing audience that you have might not like it.
Yeah. So, for example, NPR clearly, I mean, I could only suggest why they're doing it as a kid,
or a young person reading the... A young woman who's now the voice.
Yeah, it's the underwriting announcements. I don't like her. I mean, I don't like what it sounds
like I think it's silliness. But you'd like that older guy with the nasal voice. This is NPR.
Yeah, that's the one I like.
That's the same thing in print. We just did a redesign and one of the features of the redesign as
page two has sort of a bunch of short hitter kind of things and... Like you always say today.
You always say today. And you're trying to be more modern. You're trying to attract some of the younger
readers, but the older readers are calling and saying, what a waste of space. You know, a decade ago,
many, many of the gullent papers at the time they had about a hundred across the country,
created weekly youth sections in one market after another. Interesting.
Thinking that they could draw young readers this one day week and then they would
bake them into newspaper readers didn't work because the young people were not attracted to the
format. They didn't like the newsprint. They didn't like what a newspaper represented. And it
wasn't true to the texture of the product. And they had already jumped over the whole...
The whole shark. It was a term you're trying to say.
And TV, it's called jumping the shark. Jumping the shark. And now they would...
You know, the cell phones and the computers and the Twitter's and all the rest of that stuff.
Now you leapfrog with the word you're looking for. There you go.
Jumpfrog. Yeah, fight jump.
Right. Also shows you how old.
So now, so now Rix, but you have fluffed a good fight. And every time we,
we, we, we, I don't want to say allow you to because it's your show, but every time,
you're practically every time you're on, you talk about training young people how to read
newspapers. This news paper education. No, training. No, no. News literacy is about giving
young people the tools to understand what journalism is. Not necessarily to read news
papers. It's giving people the capacity to understand the difference between the journalism
of verification, which yes, we do practice in the legacy media. And there's been that and propaganda
public relations advertising, raw data. So they know when they're reading what neighborhood they're
in, basically, am I in the journalism neighborhood or am I in the political propaganda?
I, I, I get it. And if you read the post, you're always in it. All of them.
A P L S T. But I did want to ask you one thing. How's it going? Oh,
that are just in general, you know, no, no, no, no, that hurts when I do this.
That how is that going? Well, actually,
I need to read tremendous progress among the young people in country understand the issues of
journalism. Oh, oh, the in general, you're speaking out of news literacy movement,
but in that no, I know I'm talking about those. Yeah, well, the problem is the millennial
generation is not increasing its news consumption. Over the last eight years, there has been not a
noticeable increase of time spent with news among millennials, even as they have aged a bit.
No, no, remind me. What is millennial? They're like today's teenagers in 20s.
They're millennials because they're sort of coming of age around the turn of the century. Yeah,
the youngest ones now are those born just before the turn of the century.
Then above them is a generation X than boomers, and then boomers above the boomers are the
silent generation. So what was I? 41. I'm afraid you're silent. Not here.
You're right at the end of the silent generation. Maybe that explains why he booms a bit.
So the whole business about verification, which your journalist practiced Lara Logan didn't practice?
Well, there was a nice I really true. I think we were going up the rail. Yeah, well,
CPS news has ordered an unspecified leave of absence for Lara Logan and her producer and the wake
of the 60-minute story having to do with Ben Gazi that basically relied upon a supposed British
security contractor who said he was a night witness and in fact was nowhere near the American
American facility on the night of the attack. It's really true, but it's a great tragedy because
she's terrific, but mistakes were made. Yes, but you know, it sort of pulls the curtain back from
behind where 60 minutes operates. It surprises me that even though the commentators on 60 minutes
are mostly veterans. Certainly they were in the origins of Mike Wallace and you know, that group.
They're all excellent journalists, but we would have thought at least I would have that many,
many people are involved in getting a story on the air and it seems from this case from what we
can determine that Lara Logan, the on-air person and the chief producer are the ones who were
being blamed for this, which suggests that they really drove the bus. There were not many people
behind the scenes on this. Well, can I give you an alternative theory, which was somebody had
eat the pipe, you know, so you look around, is it the head guy who had to remove himself,
or is it the executive producer of the program who had to do themselves? So what happens is
when the super-sinking and the rats are deserting the ship? Well, I don't know. The question is,
you know, who gets the blame? So why would you blame the executive producer? Why wouldn't you blame
the people who created the story? The question in my mind is how much work a correspondent does when
they front the term is, when they front a story? And that's always been an interesting issue for
60 minutes and for network television news. So let me ask you a question Rex, suppose something
really bad happens at your newspaper? Well, you can't just make a suppose. I mean, you have to have
something specific. I would presume that 60 minutes of respect to news organization would have
looked into, okay, who did what and when? Why wasn't something red flagged in the editing process
and in the production? So it probably was, you know, pretty specifically directed at this particular
producer whose name is McClellan, Max McClellan, and Logan apparently actually did work on the
story. She didn't just sit there and read the script. See what I'm sitting up here, and if anything
bad happens at the radio station, you know, somebody's going to point a finger at me. Well, yeah,
but I haven't noticed you. Well, Jeff Fager, who's the CEO of a happy Jeff Fager, who's the chairman
of CBS News is also the guy who succeeded Don Uitt. Is he not? And is he still involved with 60
minutes from what we know of the Don Uitt era? Because we saw all these behind the scene stories
was that you at screened all of the stories before they aired. He gave the third degree to the
correspondent's famously Mike Wallace would have knocked down drag amounts. And they do roughly
three stories a week. You mean to tell me that the the head guy didn't see this particular story
before it aired on the 60 minute? I mean, you know, I think your question to Rex is not a bad question,
but I think that I would argue if there was a major story in the time, Jr., and the odds are good
that Rex would have seen it before it was published. And if it was turned to be fatally flawed,
Rex might have to take some heat from it because he okayed it. I don't know if that can happen at
a newspaper on a daily basis with all of the content we have 60 minutes. There's three stories a week.
And it seemed to me that somebody above the correspondent and the line producer should have looked
at that story. And particularly a story like Benghazi and it's a red face. But they didn't get,
but your point is that nobody got punished above those two. That's right. Who else fell at CBS News
and the wake of the 60 minutes two at the time it was called report on George W. Bush evading
service. You know, that was really turned out to be wrong. It turned out to be wrong. Well,
the Dan Raleigh says not. Well, he says the story was true, but what the story was true,
but the document they relied upon was not. That is the fundamental, the underlying piece of the story,
which is that George W. Bush managed to avoid being called into Vietnam War because of his political
connections. He asserts that that it remains true, but they went on the air with a big to do over a
document that purported to make that point and the document was a fraud. Interesting. And so who
other than Dan Rather, I mean, that ultimately led to Dan Rather's departure from CBS. I don't
remember who else actually got heat for that, but we tend to attribute it to the correspondence to
the face on the TV screen, even though we know that in network television news, the producers and
Zyra suggests maybe the executive producer really should have a role there. Makes sense.
Hmm. If we had a story at our newspaper that our editor had vetted and approved to be a
colossal disaster of a story, I can't imagine that we would only have sought action against the
writer of the story or even the initial copy. Meanwhile, so CBS is taking heat for a story. They
air that they shouldn't have. AP is getting a bit of attack for not writing a story that some
people are suggesting they didn't write in attempting to not tick off the White House.
That is the story about the Iran negotiations. John Kerry carrying on talks secretly. Turns
out long before a deal was concluded, a tentative deal to try to pull back some of the Iranian
nuclear program and the AP supposedly, and Howard Kurtz whom we've quoted in this program a lot,
Howard Kurtz used to write media for the Washington Post and he was on CNN. Now he's on Fox News.
And he says, you always suspect him. He says, perhaps the wire service didn't want to
tick off the administration by going with that story. And what the AP says is a tip is not a story.
And this is often the case. People will experience us of sitting on a story, but in fact,
we just haven't confirmed it to our satisfaction, which is why the blogs have become so dangerous.
Because bloggers say anything and generally get away with it. And it's also why I think AP is
generally, although the conservative wing has been critical of AP. AP is a little bit more
conservative. They're going to wait longer before they before they run a story because their
story has such impact and it appears in so many places. They're not going to be cowboys.
One is on a story. We tell our staff when they're blocking. We have an initiative to try to step up
our breaking news reporting for the web. We want people to understand that if they want breaking
news, they go to Times Union.com. They can look at the new mobile site because mobile is now so
much bigger than it was just a year ago because everybody's getting these smartphones. We've really
tried to make the point, Alan, to what you were saying about bloggers saying anything. We want
you to file quickly. We want you to be right on top of breaking news, but you can't say more than you
know. If you'll look at experiences like the Boston Marathon, when you go forward with tips or rumors,
you can get in trouble. You can do real disservice to the public. We want you to be on top of breaking
news and actually commercial radio, which has always had these newscasts at the top and the
bottom of the hour, is good training for that because these guys have to rewrite their stories and
try to make it sound fresh when they don't necessarily have anything new, but they don't dare go
on the air with something that they don't know. For us, we've always had the great lecture of waiting
until evening to write the story, get as much as you can and then write. Now we're facing
constant deadlines and it's a new muscle for us to exercise in the newspaper business.
A couple of things. Number one, I think it's much harder to be a reporter now than it used to be,
simply because of all the things you've just raised. Secondly, I wonder how often people get caught
for something that may not be journalistically appropriate. So for example, this very morning,
as we sit here and do this show, I had done a commentary that was played later that basically said,
it's too bad about the Thanksgiving day parade and the fact that if the wind is more than 23
miles an hour, whatever it was, it can use the balloons. Kids will be disappointed in the rest of it.
And I said, and that seems to me to be the right move because the handlers have lots of trouble
holding on and they can get hurt and the balloons can bust into a building and then I turned on NPR.
And NPR, I said the reason that they don't love the balloons over 23 miles an hour is because
they can't inflate them when the wind is on and that didn't sound right to me because I remember
when there was all kinds of problems. Well, I wonder if anybody has called them and said, what do you mean by that?
Now that is wrong because they always inflate the balloons the night before. So the decision is made
whether or not they're going to fly the balloons the next morning. Hey, here's an interesting thing.
On the front page of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, now there's a great name. It's because
you know, newspapers have merged over the time and so three newspapers have become one or two,
something like that. Anyway, they did something factual, but they're getting a lot of grief for it
and there's an interesting kind of mercy. So there are 32 people arrested in a federal investigation
of the city's crack trade and they put the mug shots in the front page of all 32 of those people.
All the sex pacts are men, all of them are black. And so now there's a protest about the Chattanooga
Times Free Press for what is in fact viewed by some people as being a racist attack. That is,
putting forth the notion that all criminals are black is one of the messages that is presented
by this by running 32 mug shots of all black men on the front page. What do you think about that?
The only question I would have about it is how often do they run the mug shots of other people
who are arrested or large-scale arrests? I think that there's nothing wrong with running pictures
of mug shots of this type, regardless of what the color of the suspects is. So, you know,
when you hear Chattanooga, you immediately think, well, there must be some sort of a racist
motivation. I don't know that that's the case. I hope it's not the case, but running pictures of
people who are arrested makes sense to me. I wish our newspaper did more of it.
There's a sociological approach to this too, Rex, if you don't mind my getting a little
academic here. And that is that our prisons are disproportionately filled with people. And I say
disproportionately, I mean, you know, not that far from slavery, although there'll be people moaning
when I say that. We have made an oppressed class in this country. There's a certain amount of
criminality that happens out of desperation. And therefore, you know, the guy smoking pot on the
16th floor of his park avenue apartment building is not likely to get arrested nearly as much as the
guy who's smoking under a lamppost is somewhere. So, if you take a look at the larger picture,
it is not surprising that there are black mug shots on the front of the paper, but if you take a
look at the societal issues, you should have more concerns. Yeah, I'm going to take the other
side of it and say that I think that the newspaper needs to think about the message that it conveys,
even if it is factual that all 32 of the suspects were African-American, the message that it conveys
by doing that is that all African-American men are to be feared. I think it just, you have to
think about the impact on society. I think that's somewhat what you're saying, Alan, when you do
this kind of thing, that even though the facts are as depicted by the newspaper, depicting it
visually that way is not a good thing for the community. So, I'd like to respond to that and
perhaps take a different side of risk. We've duped this out a lot. The minute you decide that you
don't want to visualize things the way that they appear to be, you're editorializing. So,
in other words, if you don't run those pictures because of what you just said, and I admire what
you said, you may change the course of history, which the newspapers are, and therefore you do that,
and for example, nobody ever says what I just said about the sociological implications of why
people of color are oppressed in this country, just because you were trying in your liberal,
and I say that respectfully to avoid typecasting. It is true that we make judgments that ultimately
change the perception of things, and we do that all the time. Is this newsworthy? Is this
more newsworthy? But this is one of those situations where it seems to me that there's more damage
done by the bald recitation of facts visually than there is by the sort of more conservative
approach that I would think of that I'm taking. But Rex, hold on, I say you'll never know.
Favorite book is Time and Again. It's a wonderful book about a guy who goes back in history,
and the whole thing revolves around the fact that at one point he just rubs up against somebody
and delays them, and that's the end of the book. So, when you do what you're saying is a good thing,
and it sounds like a good thing, you may be screwing things up for the rest of the history.
Back in 2002, the Philadelphia Daily News did a front page that was entirely filled with 18
police mugshots of fugitive wanted for murder by the Philadelphia police. All 18 were African-American,
Hispanic, or Asian, and the son of Philadelphia's mayor at the time, a man named Sharif Street,
said that that front page damages the quality of life for the average male my age,
he said, because it portrays us as the enemy of society. So, well, the guy who's now the editor
of the Philadelphia Daily News Michael Days, who was then the managing editor, said sometimes
we're a guilty of tunnel vision. The visual impact of all those black minicuse of crimes,
well, you can imagine the message that sends said Michael Days. And the visual impact he would
argue, and I guess you would argue, is greater than reading the names in the paper, even if the names
of the paper might suggest what race they are. I think so. Yeah, I think that visual, because the
photographs tell a story so powerfully that I think it does, but you know, I think it's a really
tough issue. I can see the point of view that we risk something too, as Alan is saying, by
making these judgments. It's not of the mayor. Well, on the other hand, just by putting the pictures in,
you're also making a different kind of decision. Yeah, but the side of the mayor seems to me
is right. I mean, this country is right with racial prejudice. And if somebody walks down a street
and you see a big black man or a big white man coming, we know from studies and other things
that who goes out into the middle of the street, you know, as a result of that. And I think that
the mayor's son, then mayor's son had a point. Wait a minute. If he's right, then I'm right,
and you were disagreeing with me for my point of view. Well, I always try to do really well.
That's my job. That's my job here. He switched on the one hand, on the one hand, on the other hand.
Speaking of the power of photographs, photograph, I say, there is a protest at the White House,
a protest of what's going up the White House by major news organizations, many major news
organizations have written 37 news organizations, including groups that I'm a member of the American
Society of News Headers, various journalism organizations, protesting the fact that the White House
increasingly is excluding photographers from events that they used to cover. How come?
Instead, they're letting a White House staff photographer take a picture, and then they're releasing
that picture so that there are fewer photographers, fewer sort of unplanned moments. This way, the White
House controls the visual image that comes out of an event. If my mom would say they're all doing
that now, I mean, governors have been known to do it. Governors right around here have been known
to do it. So, so, so do you think so the whole idea is to gain an advantage and you're right to
bring it up and so is the press to bring it up to just sort of put a stop to it. So, the White House
says it's just logistics that you can't get photographers access to all kinds of things and
maybe get a picture of the president smoking. Yeah, well, you can't get that. He says he
hasn't known six years. He says he's afraid of Michelle and so he says he hasn't had a smoke.
But this is just, you know, it's such a disappointment there. You know, as we go as we go along in
this administration, many of us who who had high hopes for this president and and he's filled
filled some of those high hopes. But certain issues such as this, which is an open and free and
unfettered press. And if you recall that press conference many months ago where he used or his
spokesman used the word unfettered press dozens of times, I mean, this is something that has
historically been part of our country that independent press comes in and captures history as the
independent photographers see it, not as the president sees it. And this is just a it's
disappointing. And I think the public should realize that this is not just a press issue. This is
there. Right. It's not to say the president shouldn't have private moments. Surely there there
should be plenty of times when there shouldn't be any photographers around. It is to say that when
there are public things coming on, the example that was cited is when the president went for a swim
Panama City, Florida in 2010 to demonstrate that the water had been cleaned up after the BP oil
spill. They didn't allow press photographers there, but they issued a White House photograph
showing him swimming. They made this a public event. This is the president saying, oh, the water's
clean. We've taken care of it. How about the kiss between Tipper and Owl and the famous kiss?
Well, that was that was at the convention. What about, but I was going to say,
no, no, but the question is, was that planned? Oh, but he went around the world. You recall Hillary
and Bill dancing in the beach. Yeah. And when their marriage had been in trouble, do you think that
was a stage, but at least it was taken by professional independent photographers?
You're lurking in the shrubbery, I believe, 100 yards away. And you never know who may have been
alerted to the book. No, no, no, no, no. Just think. Yeah, look at all that we just went through
the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and look at all the films of the Kennedys at home
or him coming off of the plane and being greeted by the family. They were taken by independent
people capturing history. It's just a piece of you guys always make such good arguments for whatever
you want. That's why we're here. We don't take two sides. That's right. All right. Well, if you
want to join the conversation media at wamc.org is how you're right to us. Alan Sharthock,
I'm a Fussfeld rexmith and you can talk back. We were fine. We're fine with that. We were not sensitive.
Thanks for joining us on media projects.
I'm not the best.
Now you remember Mrs. Sadie Smuggering. She wanted money to buy a new fur coat.
To get insurance, she employed Stolder Green. She up and cut her husband's only throat.
She chopped him into fragments. She stuffed him in a trunc. She shipped it all back
yonder to her uncle in Kodong. Now newspegerman meets such interesting people.
It must have startled poor old Sadie's aunt. Tingling a ling city-dest,
whole press, whole press, extra-extra-experied all about it. It's a mess meets the test.
On this Pegerman meets such interesting people. They know the lowdown now it can be told.
I'll tell you, Christ, reliably off the record about some charming people I have known.
Before I meet politicians and grafters by the store, killers play and fancy.
It's really quite a bar of old. These Pegerman meets such interesting people.
They want to know the lowdown.