Lack of confidence in U.S. media, part X

I'm talking in class today about First Amendment freedoms and protections for the press - and how chimerical they can be. The trouble is the rapidly declining levels of public confidence in the U.S. mainstream media - something I've talked about previously in this blog (see, e.g., this entry, "The public who care less and less about press freedom", from April 13). I noted research by the Pew Research Center's Trends 2005 report, the National Opinion Research Center, and USA Today. (See here for a U.S. News take on the Pew report, by Jay Tolsen; and Nicholas Kristoff covered the issue for the New York Times - see my blog entry for a review on that piece.

Anyway, it's worth summing up some serious statistics and points:

• 1. 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.
  Pew Research Center's "Trends 2005" report (available online).
  
• 2.Between 1973 and 2002, confidence in the press has fallen sharply, from 85% to under 60% - and the press is now almost at the bottom amongst public institutions (only beaten by the legal system).
  National Opinion Research Center survey, 2004
  
• 3. A 2004 survey of 112,000 American high school students showed:
  - 32% of them believe that there is too much freedom of the press
  - Only 10% believe that there is not enough.
  - 36% would prefer that the media be subject to government control
  USA Today survey
  

Some comments and insights:

• "The public sees the [mass] media as self-centered and self-promoting."
  Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
  
• "I think commercial factors are the overriding factor shaping the collapse of professional journalism.”
  Robert McChesney, professor of communication, University of Illinois
  
• "Media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules by Washington."
  Ted Turner, CNN founder
  
• "As people move online, the notion of news consumers is giving way to something called 'prosumers,' in which citizens simultaneously function as consumers, editors, and producers of a new kind of news in which journalistic accounts are but one element."
  Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, writing in The State of the News Media 2004
  (Above comments all from U.S. News)
  
• Nobody among the public seems to care much about Matt Cooper and Judith Miller. (And, as CNN reported last week "The full federal appeals court in Washington Tuesday rejected a request from two journalists facing possible jail sentences who had asked the court to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel. . . . Cooper and Miller could face up to 18 months in jail for failing to reveal their confidential sources to a federal grand jury.")

It all seems quite discouraging, doesn't it?

Government & private VNRs

I've been thinking about (and talking about) VNRs, or Video News Releases, and I meant to tackle this in more depth in my blog. I haven't had time, but I thought I'd at least get up some links relating to the practice and its dodgy relationship with Public Relations. The most recent NPR piece is from Mike Pesca on "Day to Day." Here is a longer piece on the practice by David Folkenflik for NPR's "All Things Considered." (And here is the Wikipedia entry on news releases and VNRs.)

BBC and NPR and podcasting's Brave New World

In class I've been talking a bit about the podcasting revolution underway in our media. In the States, National Public Radio has been making strides in making at least some of its content available on podcast (my current favorite is the WNYC weekly show On the Media - but I'm really waiting for WAMU's Diane Rehm Show to be put up).

Meanwhile the BBC is also jumping on the podcast bandwagon early. The Beeb has announced that it is making 20 radio shows available for its listeners to download as podcasts into digital media players. The ones on the list that U.S. audiences are likely to be particularly interested in include:

• Today (Radio 4, daily) - 8.10am interview
  
• In Business (Radio 4, weekly)
  
• From Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4, weekly/twice weekly)
  
• Mark Kermode film review slot (Radio Five Live, weekly)
  
• Go Digital (World Service, weekly)
  
• Documentary archive (World Service, twice weekly)

In announcing the move on its web site, the BBC quotes Simon Nelson, controller of BBC Radio and Music Interactive, who claims: "The BBC was the first British broadcaster to podcast when we made In Our Time available last year". The same article notes that the UK's Virgin Radio - also quite popular among Americans listening on the web - "has also started to make talk-based highlights of its breakfast show available as podcasts" (although they avoid podcasting music, as the right issues haven't been sorted out yet).

All well and good. Unfortunately the podcasts don't seem to be up yet - or at least I haven't found them when I checked on the Today and In Business program websites (on Radio 4). But I did notice that BBC/NPR's co-production "The World" definitely is available on podcast here. So that'll be something else to listen to in the car.

TV owners get around FCC ownership caps

Today's Broadcasting & Cable provides a very useful extended piece on broadcast TV station ownership in the U.S. In "How They Rank and Why, compiled by George Winslow, B&C, the top 25 Station Groups "are ranked according to the percentage of the 109.6 million U.S. TV homes they reach, as measured by Nielsen Media Research." The piece details each of the top 25 owner groups, the number of station each owns, and the total reach of each group. And - this is an especially interesting bit - the "reach" is calculated two ways: using the FCC method and then a more accurate method that reveals each group's reach to be considerably higher than the "official" FCC figure. Winslow explains:

The FCC method discounts by half the reach of UHF stations, those channel 14 and above. The ranking also shows reach without the discount (coverage total). If a group owns other stations in a market, those stations' coverage is not counted in the group's total. This year, BIA Financial Network, which collects the list of stations and computes coverage, excluded stations run under joint marketing and programming agreements. It also omitted stations operated under time-brokerage deals. As always, low-power stations, satellite stations, translators and stations that have only cable distribution were excluded.

You add these factors in, and the result is a big jump in reach for the big groups. Thus, for example, number 1 group Viacom's 35 stations have a reach of 38.90% according to the FCC's calculations - just under the Congress-mandated maximum of 39% - but a "true" reach of 43.35%. Number 2 Fox (owned by News Corp.) is even worse: Its 35 stations have an FCC-calculated reach of 38.27% but a "true" reach of almost 45% - which just happens to be the original cap set by Michael Powell's FCC in 2003, just before a mass popular revolt and Congressional action forced the agency to retreat. Funny, that . . .

Here, by the way, is the complete Top 25 list of station groups as listed by Broadcasting & Cable:

1 Viacom VIA
2 Fox TV Stations NWS
3 NBC Universal GE
4 Paxson PAX
5 Tribune TRB
6 ABC DIS
7 Univision UVN
8 Gannett GCI
9 Trinity Broadcasting Private
10 Hearst-Argyle HTV
11 E.W. Scripps SSP
12 Belo Corp. BL
13 Sinclair SBGI
14 Cox Private
15 Clear Channel CCU
16 Pappas Telecasting Private
17 Raycom Private
18 Meredith MDP
19 Post-Newsweek WPO
20 Media General MEG-A
21 Entravision EVC
22 Emmis EMMS
23 LIN TV TVL
24 Young YBTVA
25 Gray Television GTN

The public who care less and less about press freedom

If advertiser support is one crucial (if deeply flawed) leg that supports the U.S.media system, then public support for journalists' First Amendment protections is another. And if public support erodes - as it is doing - then the First Amendment loses much of its meaning. This is another issue that has elicited much navel-gazing on the part of the media (well, at any rate that part of the media that still cares about journalism over mindless entertainment).

The latest warning salvo comes from the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof. He notes the travails of Matt Cooper, Judith Miller, and Jim Taricani, a less-well-know NBC television journalist, who was finally "freed last weekend after four months of house arrest for refusing to reveal his sources." Miller and Cooper, the victims of a government witchhunt for refusing to name sources in the Valerie Plame leak investigation (see here for a Slate backgrounder) "have been ordered to jail for up to 18 months for protecting their sources, although they remain free until their appeals run out."

As Kristof points out, "the climate for freedom of the press in the U.S. feels more ominous than it has for decades." Now it would be great if there was some outpouring of public support for an embattled press - something like the groundswell of public outrage that greeted the FCC's 2003-2004 attempts to roll back media cross-ownership rules. But that hasn't happened. In fact, much of the public thinks the press a.) has too much freedom, and b.) abuses that freedom. Kristof notes the stunning result of the Pew Research Center's "Trends 2005" report, which shows "that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago." He also notes research by the National Opinion Research Center that has "measured public confidence in 13 institutions, including the press. All of the other institutions have generally retained a good measure of public respect, but confidence in the press has fallen sharply since 1990." For good measure I also noted in a March 1 post a USA Today survey of 112,000 American high school students, which showed "that 32% of them believe that there is too much freedom of the press, versus 10% only who believe that there is not enough. Even worse, "no less than 36% would prefer that the media be subject to government authorization beforehand." And the results of that poll seemed in line with many oher recent studies of adult attitutudes.

Of course, the press itself has to take much of blame for its dwindling credibility. But at the same time, that doesn't help. No matter how messed up our major media institutions are, and how poorly they serve the citizens, it's still much more dangerous when people give up on the media and accede to the principle of greater press restriction. And as for the First Amendment and the protection of the courts? Kristof correctly identifies just how flimsy these protections really are. He notes that while "Judges don't exactly decide cases based on public sentiment, . . . their decisions do reflect the values of their society. And in our society, public support for the news media has all but evaporated." And he reminds us: "The safety net for American journalism throughout history has been not so much the First Amendment - rather, it's been public approval of the role of the free press. Public approval is our life-support system, and it is now at risk."

The only hope, as I see it, is for the big press/news media organizations to get off their arrogant high horses and recognize that they can't expect to forever wield the First Amendment as a "shield" - purely on their own terms - against allcomers, while pushing for ever-higher profits. They need to reconnect with the broad public and reconvince that skeptical public of their relevance. And they need to do that in such a way as to relegate the desperate search for profits to second place.

The way things are these days, I just don't know if they can succeed.

What future for mass media?

The Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, and the LA Times have all been looking at the future of network news, which is pulling in fewer and fewer viewers. The Benton Foundation's Communications-related Headlines service notes:

The Big Three broadcast TV networks have been losing audiences to 24-hour cable news, Internet sites, and other sources of instant headlines. All that competition, say many media analysts, will eventually force networks to experiment with the content, style, and format of the evening news. Minus the ads, the average newscast is just 19 minutes, according to Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes the network news at The Tyndall Report. That lends itself to summarizing the day's events rather than providing the added value of in-depth reporting. So newscasts may face the same change that newspapers have made - emphasizing news analysis over news reporting

.
The CSM notes just one "novel step to stay relevant."

Last Monday, ABC News announced that it will make its coverage available on a variety of media platforms. In addition to ABC News Now, a 24-hour news digital channel, it will provide broadband news and video on demand for cellphones and computers. "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings" is one of the products that will be accessible at any time. These steps should allow ABC to compete with cable news.

Industry pundits and commentators are being forced to consider the possibility that network news - perhaps like the networks themselves - might no longer be feasible in any form. Sunday's New York Times magazine weighs into the issue with a major piece by Jon Gertner dealing with new attempts by Arbitron - using "Portable People Meters" - to try to measure viewers' TV watching habits more accurately. Gertner quotes one Nielsen boss who says: "Television and media will change more in the next 3 or 5 years than it's changed in the past 50." Scary stuff. The Columbia Journalism Review's current edition also deals with a complementary issue: Nielsen's attempts to retain its TV audience measurement system's credibility as advertisers get more nervous.

The underlying question, of course, is whether all these billions in advertising dollars spent in the mass media system really is effective at all. All these articles fit well conceptually with my previous blog on Media chaos ahead?. There's a general feeling abroad that the mass media are approaching a tipping point, where the whole advertising-funded model that has supported the U.S. media in the modern era might be getting closer to complete collapse - and when the collapse happens it will be rapid and it will be stunning. Now this idea is hardly news - I've been hearing "The End of Advertising"-type stories for at least a decade. But as media channel diversity and content delivery explode, we could be closer to that prophecy than many in the industry would care - or dare - to admit.

Media chaos ahead?

I heard an excellent piece on NPR's "All Things Considered" yesterday - dealing with the potentially catastrophic future for the media system in America. Bob Garfield, the co-host of NPR's weekly On the Media, presents a piece titled "An Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media." In it he notes that "Network television audiences are down as cable, the Internet and a host of other new technologies emerge; and marketers are shifting their dollars accordingly." The thesis: "The media world faces an interim of chaos before a new order is determined." Listen to it and be afraid, be very afraid!

David Brooks ain't so bad!

I've found a new reason to like David Brooks. Brooks is a senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, as well as a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek, and a regular on NPR and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer (where I often watch him doing his Friday roundup with Mark Shields). Although Brooks is definitely conservative, I've always admired his relative open-mindedness, and his ability to concede at least half the point whenever it's clear that the standard "conservative position" is flawed. (Compare this with conservatives such as Kate O'Beirne or Charles Krauthammer, who always seem to be in lock-step and "on message" with the Republican line of the day, no matter how ludicrous it might seem.) At the same time, he manages to retain his gravitas and avoid the sophomoric wishy-washiness that haunts, say, Tucker Carlson.

Brooks is also now a regular columnist for the New York Times, and I typically find his writing interesting and thought-provoking, even when I don't agree with it. But in Saturday's Times I found a Brooks column that I could heartily and unreservedly endorse. In fact I was jumping up and down with joy! (On the inside!) I happily found myself reading his piece, "The Art of Intelligence" - which, I realized, was not only a scathing critique of the U.S. intelligence services, but also a compelling "real-world" argument for something I am committed to: qualitative research methods!

The news hook is last week's release of a damning presidential commission report that the CIA got its Iraq intelligence "dead wrong" and today still knows "'disturbingly little' about the capabilities and intentions of other potential adversaries such as Iran and North Korea."

Brooks places this chronic underperformance within a decades-long historical context of success followed by chronic failure:

The years between 1950 and 1965 were the golden age of American nonfiction. Writers like Jane Jacobs, Louis Hartz, Daniel Bell and David Riesman produced sweeping books on American society and global affairs. They relied on their knowledge of history, literature, philosophy and theology to recognize social patterns and grasp emerging trends.

But even as their books hit the stores, their method was being undermined. A different group rejected this generalist/humanist approach and sought to turn social analysis into a science. For example, the father of the U.S. intelligence community, Sherman Kent, argued that social science and intelligence analysis needed a systematic method, "much like the method of the physical sciences." Social research - in urban planning, sociology and intelligence analysis - began to mimic the hard sciences.

This is a spin on the oft-head refrain that the CIA has long eschewed "humint," or human intelligence (spies on the ground) with machine intelligence (computers, satellites, etc.) But Brooks takes things much further. He blames the CIA's problems squarely on its infatuation with the scientific method to the exclusion of consideration of deeper, historical, hermeneutic analyses that the agency (and the prominent scholars who used to work with it) used to do so well. The trouble, says Brooks, is that this approach is where the money is. "The scientific method used by the C.I.A., and its technical jargon, can seem to have more authority (used to justify bigger budgets)." This has also led to serious overspecialization in what needs to be a more generalist field. Thus "academic analyses of society and world affairs are now often quantitative, jargon-laden and hyperspecialized. Historical works have gigantic titles and minuscule subjects - think 'Power and Passion: Walloon Shovel Making, 1723-1724.' It's all part of the same problem.

So we get decades of calamitous intelligence failures. This week the presidential panel on intelligence pointed to the same failings found by other reports. It said intelligence analysts "displayed a lack of imagination." They created artificial specialties - separating regional, technical and terrorism analyses. They built layers of hard analysis on fuzzy and impressionistic information.

The present commission, unfortunately, seems to be going down the same wrong path that has led so many commissions astray as "it tries to reorganize the bureaucratic flow charts to produce better results."

But the problem is not bureaucratic. It's epistemological. [My italics.] Individuals are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people around us. When you try to analyze human affairs using a process that is systematic, codified and bureaucratic, as the C.I.A. does, you anesthetize all of these tools. You don't produce reason - you produce what Irving Kristol called the elephantiasis of reason.

Brooks concludes:

I'll believe the intelligence community has really changed when I see analysts being sent to training academies where they study Thucydides, Tolstoy and Churchill to get a broad understanding of the full range of human behavior. I'll believe the system has been reformed when policy makers are presented with competing reports, signed by individual thinkers, and are no longer presented with anonymous, bureaucratically homogenized, bulleted points that pretend to be the product of scientific consensus. I'll believe it's been reformed when there's a big sign in front of C.I.A. headquarters that reads: Individuals think better than groups.

As a manifesto for serious reconsideration of humanist, generalist area studies - and what anthropoligist Clifford Geertz called "thick description" - I can't think of a better argument for qualitative (i.e., naturalist, idiographic, emic) research than this Brooks piece. And it's all the more powerful because it reminds us that academic debates of this type need not be considered arcane, boring, and peripheral; rather, they can and do have enormous real-world consequences.

You go, David Brooks!

"The Office," U.S.-style, fights back!

OK, I just might have to admit I'm wrong about NBC's Brit transplant, "The Office". I wrote the other day that it might well follow other Brit comedy clones and bomb Stateside. But early indications are that the show in fact did quite well with its pilot episode, securing 11.3 million viewers, according to the Nielsen ratings. Overall, it ranked third in the ratings for the Thursday night it ran, behind only Fox's "American Idol" (itself a Brit reality TV transplant) and NBC's "ER" (which now, incidentally, includes Asian-British actress Parminder Nagra as one of its stars). Not bad. Perhaps this show can buck the trend, survive the Anglophile critics' barbs, and become a genuine success. We'll see.