Transcript
MR. STEPHEN HESS: Good morning. Welcome to another of our weekly Brookings/Harvard Forums. I'm Steve Hess and I welcome you on behalf of myself and my co-host, Marvin Kalb, the Executive Director of the Washington Office of Harvard's Shorenstein Center.
Today we have been given a treat because Andy Kohut has agreed to release his just-completed survey on how the public assesses the news coverage since September 11th. Andy, who is the Director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is clearly our premier analyst of survey research data through his organization. So, he's going to make a short presentation of his findings. It's released today. I should say the Brookings website, which has the full transcript of these programs, will also link to his survey so that you can get it that way, although for those in the audience it's in your packet.
Also in your packet, you will find another survey. This one has just been recently released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and its director is here with us too, Tom Rosenstiel. He is the author of many of my favorite books including one called Strange Bedfellows.
Then our two additional panelists, Mike McCurry, known to all of you as the press secretary to President Clinton. I am told by Tom's assistant that Tom and Mike went to high school together or kindergarten together or something together and I'm sure if you ask very nicely they'll sing their kindergarten fight song.
MR. TOM ROSENSTIEL: It wasn't kindergarten, he's older than I am, and it was way too many years ago.
MR. MIKE MCCURRY: And it was way too many years ago. (Laughter)
MR. HESS: You've forgotten your fight song. All right.
Our other panelist, Jill Abramson, who is the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, wrote another favorite book of mine, Silent Justice which I should say was co-authored by Jane Mayer who went to the same high school as I went to, only I went there about 100 years...
MS. JILL ABRAMSON: I went there, too.
MR. HESS: Did you too? Oh, my goodness.
The reason that I'm mentioning all of that is that all of you out there who think there is a Washington conspiracy are right. There's no question about that. (Laughter)
While we're talking about books let me make one correction because the other day I inadvertently tuned into C-Span and there was the session that Marvin and I hosted with presidential press secretaries, and it became clear to me as I listened that I had made a ghastly mistake in the name of his new book. No one should be allowed to do that. His new book is not One Scandalous Year, as I announced, but One Scandalous Story. So that's the announcements up to this point.
Andy would like to speak from the podium and then we'll open it for the panel.
MR. ANDREW KOHUT: I'm here to say that the public image of the press is improving. There, I said it. That's the first time in 15 years of studying public attitudes towards the press that I've ever said anything remotely close to that.
Now I'm not so foolish to think that this represents some sea change in attitudes towards the press, nor does the changing attitude toward government represent a complete reversal and distrust of government. I think what it reflects in the trust in government surveys, and certainly in this survey regarding the press, is the way people are responding to these institutions at a time where they feel great need to know, and where they view the performance as pretty good.
I will give you some ideas about why I think the public has responded to the press as it has, but first let me give you some facts pretty quickly.
The poll shows the public giving the press better grades with regard to performance and with regard to the perceived values of the news media and journalists. We had 13 general measures of public opinion about the media, and it was a statistically significant change in the direction of improvement on all 13.
As to performance, the percentage of people saying the press usually gets the facts right rose from 35 percent in the survey that we did in September prior to September 11th, to 45 percent. That's the best grade that the press has gotten for accuracy in our polling with this question since 1992. Now that's not much to crow about. Forty-six percent said the press is usually accurate, 45 percent said they're often inaccurate. But it's better than 35/57 a month earlier, but it's not as good as the 55/34 back in 1985 when I first started doing these surveys.
News organizations also continue to get good grades for the way they're covering the terrorism story and the war on terrorism, although not as high as the first weeks of September. Then, 89 percent of the people that we questioned gave the press either an excellent or good rating. That's slipped to about 77 percent in this survey. Seventy-seven percent is still a pretty high number. When we regularly ask people to rate how good they thought the coverage was of typical stories, generally about 50 to 60 percent would give the press positive marks, so 77 percent ain't too shabby.
Now, the biggest rise in positive attitudes towards the press had to do with more people seeing the press as professional, moral, patriotic and compassionate. The leading news organizations' "stand up for America" jumped from 43 percent in September to 69 percent in the current survey.
Seeing the press as an institution that protects democracy jumped from 46 percent to 60 percent.
Seeing the press as moral rather than immoral, we have a 53/23 margin prior; in early September the margin was 40/34.
I should add that much of the decline in perception of the press in terms of its values occurred during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal years. That's when the American public began to doubt not only the press' performance and the way it does its job, but began to doubt its basic values. This survey shows some considerable rebounding, at least for now, on these measures.
There were smaller changes in other measures of the media's image. Fifty-two percent said the press tries to cover up mistakes; and 47 percent think the press is politically biased in its reporting. Both of those numbers are better numbers for the press than earlier.
More broadly, just a third say the news media helps society solve its problems, most saying the media gets in the way of society solving its problems. These are clearly not positive measures, but they're better readings that we received in previous surveys both in September and in a very long trend line since
All things being equal, this poll shows for the first time in a long time a better opinion of the American news media.
As to why the good grades on a story which sparked an overall image improvement, there are a number of signs in the surveys that we've conducted between September and early November which show a clear link between the coverage and needing the content. When we asked people an open-ended question, why do you say the coverage is excellent or good, people said because it's timely, because it's comprehensive, because it's informative.
Further, the survey showed a clear link between worrying about the prospect of future terrorism and liking the coverage. People who were very worried, 58 percent gave the press excellent grades; those somewhat worried, 48 percent excellent grades; among those lease worried, only 41 percent.
Similarly as public worries about terrorism declined from mid-September to early November, the very positive ratings of the press also declined.
But I have to say that it's not only need to know alone that explains the public's positive view of the coverage. I think the lack of contention about public policy and the low partisanship in Washington undoubtedly play a supporting role in liking the way the media has covered the story.
When we asked people what they didn't like, there were a few mentions of bias, there were a few mentions of negativity, even fewer mentions of sensationalism. And these are the predominant criticisms that people give about news stories when we ask them this kind of question.
All this unusually good news notwithstanding, the poll finds strong support for government control of news for the sake of national security. By a 53/39 percent margin, the public says it's more important for the government to be able to censor stories that it believes could threaten national security than for the media to be able to report news believed to be in the national interest. These numbers are just about, and other questions related to this, are just about what we found in the Gulf War with exactly the same questions.
I think they're predicated on a number of judgments that the public made then and are making now about the government and the war effort.
First, the public thinks it's been getting a straight story. Eighty-two percent believe that Pentagon officials are disclosing as much as they can and not hiding the bad news. Eighty percent have confidence that the government is giving an accurate picture of the war. And 70 percent believe that censorship is intended to protect the safety of U.S. forces, not to cover up bad news. All of these measures, again, those that are repeats, and most of them are repeats from the surveys that we did in early 1991, are almost directly comparable to what we found ten years ago.
Finally, despite approval of censorship, there is no appetite on the part of the American public for propaganda. The public finds a solid majority favoring war coverage that is neutral rather than pro-American, and an even larger 73 percent margin favoring coverage that portrays all points of view including those of countries that are unfriendly to the United States over pro-American news reports. And by a 52/40 percent margin, the public says the press should dig hard to get news and not trust government and military officials.
Finally, there continues to be support for the press' watchdog role even in a time of national crisis. Half of the public thinks press scrutiny of the military keeps the nation prepared compared to 37 percent who think it weakens its defense. There was an even bigger margin of support for press criticism of political leaders at this time.
I think the public has a very nuanced and complex view about censorship as it does about press performance. I'd be interested in getting your reaction.
MR. MARVIN KALB: Andy, thank you very much. Listening to you I can't shake the feeling of whether the cup is half empty or half full.
MR. KOHUT: It's fuller than it's been.
MR. KALB: It's fuller than it's been for awhile. And when you take a look it usually gets the facts straight, it's now 46 percent who think they do and 45 percent who think they don't. So another way of writing the lead is that it's a wash as to whether the American people feel they're getting the straight story or not.
MR. KOHUT: As opposed to most people thinking a month ago that it was worse.
MR. KALB: Tom Rosenstiel, you're going to give us your judgment first, and then Jill and then Mike. Why don't you go first.
MR. TOM ROSENSTIEL: It seems to me that the question is, in part, what are these numbers telling us? Is there reason to believe that, while as Andy says he's not so foolish as to suggest a sea change, are there signs that there are the roots of something that may become more permanent or more structural? Not permanent, more long lasting.
The fact that the numbers are so similar to where they were in 1991 during the Gulf War might suggest that these things are going to drop again when this war, if this war, ever ends. But there are some significant differences between the press outside of war in the year 2001 versus the press during peacetime in 1991.
In the research that we've done at the Project, we've seen a long term shift away from what we would, what journalists would probably call, traditional hard news, even in hard news or mainstream news outlets, toward what traditionally journalists call soft news. I'll give you just a few numbers.
In 1977 for the twilight of the Walter Cronkite era, hard news made up roughly 70 percent of what was on the evening network newscasts, whereas celebrity and lifestyle coverage made up about 15 percent.
By 1987, the eve of the end of the Cold War, that had dropped somewhat, but only somewhat, to about 60 percent of the evening news being hard news and about 19 percent being celebrity and lifestyle.
By 1997, and in numbers that are pretty comparable to what we found this June, the numbers were quite different. Only 40 percent, less than half of what was on the evening newscast, was hard news and celebrity made up roughly a third of the newscast.
That has changed dramatically after September 11th. We are back to basically a 1977 kind of mix for news. Today an evening newscast, 80 percent, even higher than we saw in the last '70s, 80 percent of the news on the evening newscasts is hard news, and not all of it war news. And celebrity and lifestyle makes up actually just one percent of what people are seeing on the evening newscasts.
If you look at other venues, and we looked at morning news—the Today Show, Good Morning America, and the rest—you see that pre-September 11th, only seven percent of the time, of the stories on morning news programs, which are produced by the news divisions (and in fact the Today Show is the most important revenue-producing program at NBC, including entertainment and news), only seven percent of the stories in morning news were traditional hard news, whereas 75 percent were celebrity and lifestyle. Today basically a shift: sixty percent hard news, 24 percent celebrity and lifestyle.
What does this mean? How does this pertain to Andy's findings? One of the reasons that people traditionally in all kinds of research say that they are upset with the press or when they see the press sensationalizing or hyping news or doing other things that they say they dislike, they infer one of two things usually. One, that the press, that journalists are doing this to become celebrities, for self-aggrandizement. Even more common, that the press is hyping the news to make a buck. That they're sensationalized to sell more newspapers, to get more eyeballs, etc., etc.
I believe in the research that I've looked at that the root of the credibility crisis in journalism is a question of motive. People have begun to doubt the motive of journalists, the reasons that journalists do things.
If the press agenda becomes more serious, if the stories become more serious, and journalists are engaged in more serious work, I think it follows that the public begins to attribute more serious motives to them.
I have grave doubts about whether or not that news agenda that we have right now is going to remain as serious. The only suggestion I think that would indicate that that might happen is if we see a realignment in the programs. There is some tentative sense of that. Good Morning America, which is the most serious of the three morning shows at this point, is rising in ratings, and the Today Show is dropping in ratings. While Today is number one still, the gap has narrowed and the shows are competitive. Now there are multiple reasons for rating shifts in any kind or TV environment, but we are seeing a similar though less dramatic shift in the evening where again ABC, which is probably the most, somewhat the most international of the three programs even now, has briefly become number one again vis-a-vis NBC which had been number one and has dropped, and is of these three a little less serious or a little less hard news oriented of the three nightly newscasts.
Again in the classic words of the TV hack, only time will tell. This really is tentative. The one thing that I think to be very cautious about is that most of this shift in the news agenda is war-related. In other words, most of the stories that are hard news are about the war
I read a quote in the Washington Post this week in which the editor of Vanity Fair said that the American public were serial-obsessive. That they would obsess on one thing and then they would obsess on another.
I actually find in the research that we've done that he's completely wrong, but that the editor of Vanity Fair certainly is a serial obsessor. (Laughter) So are the managers of most news outlets. We are seeing that at this point, and that would suggest that they will obsess again on something else and it may well be the Vanity Fair fashion show if the war ends.
MR. KALB: Thank you very much.
My colleague up at the Shorenstein Center, Tom Patterson, in one of his latest efforts on hard news/soft news makes the point that networks probably would do better in attracting an audience if they had more hard news.
Jill Abramson, New York Times. Do you have a poll that you're going to tell us about this morning? Or would you like to comment on them?
MS. JILL ABRAMSON: I'm woefully poll-less
MR. KALB: Talk to us about Andy's poll.
MS. ABRAMSON: I spent a couple of hours looking at Andy's results yesterday. What I found most interesting about them is I think they're reflective of the nature of the story itself. That the key thing about September 11th, the ensuing war on terrorism, the military actions in Afghanistan, the heavy coverage of bio-terrorism threats and the anthrax letters is that this is a story that the public feels fundamentally impact their lives quite directly. They feel a strong connection, and as you put it Andy, a very strong need to know. They crave information because they see that information as essential to their safety, to turn forward with their lives, to their vision of the country, how strong the country is, how secure the country is, which is something that the public really cares about.
You cited the Monica Lewinsky story as being the apogee of public ill will and resentment towards journalists, and I think that there's a clear reason why that is. The public felt a fundamental disconnect from that story. That it didn't matter to their lives and they felt the press was obsessing on that story and that it was irrelevant to most of the daily lives of the American public. And their anger mounted as night after night, especially on those 24 hour cable TV channels, even though those have a relatively small audience, that there was this nightly drumbeat of obsession on that topic.
I agree with Tom, that motive, the questioning of the motive of journalists also became a new thing, but I think there was a very clear frustration that I would find in any forum that I went to. That this was a story that a large part of the public, the Lewinsky story, viewed as irrelevant. September 11th could not. You couldn't find a story that's possibly more relevant to the lives of the people of our country. So I think that's an important point.
I think the more positive feelings toward the press also hopefully reflect what I see as the coverage has continued for two months now, to reflect two really healthy trends within journalism. I don't have any data to support a link between Andy's findings and these trends, but I thought I would lay them out for you.
The first is I think it's brought about a shift from opinion to information. That also would reach an apogee during the blanket Lewinsky coverage was a shift away from information and reportage being valued, and opinion became the coin of the realm. And you had the explosion of punditry and this very pointed, very partisan, very bitterly charged nightly debate, that really did not usually turn over facts but over opinions and how the pundits felt one way or another about President Clinton's behavior.
Now I see a devalutation of opinion, even watching some of the same shows, which interestingly enough had some of the same pundits as panelists now commenting on the war, there's a lot less naked expression of opinion and more a discussion of the facts of the day, the actual events—what transpired in the war, what new facts were learned. I think for the joy of sheperding the Washington bureau of the New York Times is that the Times has always placed its value and its resources on reporting, on sending the best reporters around the world, to find out what's going on, and while obviously we have a lively Op-Ed opinion page too, that never reflected the kind of extreme, bitter partisan bickering that seemed to keep the TV shows alive during Lewinsky. So I see that as one healthy trend.
The second being that with the shift towards kind of the more entertainment/soft news culture, that we had too much of the in the '90s. All of you know there was a shrinkage, in part for cost savings, but also as an acknowledgement of the shift of foreign news resource gathering—news gathering resources abroad were slashed by almost all news outlets, except the New York Times. We remained very, very committed and we were not closing foreign bureaus. But especially the TV networks were busily shutting the doors of some bureaus where up to that point it was unthinkable not to have correspondents located abroad. I think that was a very unhealthy trend in journalism.
Economically these are not the best of times so it would be premature for me to predict that the doors would be reopened, but there are very few major news organizations who aren't spending what is necessary to cover the war in Afghanistan and I think it has brought a grudging realization to most news organizations as a mistake to put fluff above serious foreign reporting. So I hope that's another healthy trend that maybe connects Andy's results.
The results of the poll that I find worrisome is that the public is so willing to accept things like censorship. And while censorship itself hasn't presented itself as a problem in coverage of the war on terrorism so far, the Pentagon has placed extreme limits on the media, on access. There has been very little direct access to the troops. Reporters, although in the beginning they were put on one ship they haven't been allowed back except for spotty days here and there.
I wish that public support could be a resource in the media side here to get more access and have a more open way of covering the war. Because in past wars, and certainly going back to World War II, having the press right there watching deployment, watching troops return. The most famous example is that there weren't many reporters on the beach at Normandy as D-Day unfolded.
I think the press is willing to accept reasonable limits, that we're willing to hold stories. The press does not want to put America's troops into danger, but I think the Pentagon has capitalized on the public opinion in your poll where the public is willing to accept a variety of censoring on the press, and I find that a little worrisome.
MR. KALB: Thank you Jill, very much.
Mike McCurry?
MR. MIKE MCCURRY: It was often my duty to be the piñata for the White House press corps when I was there. I would normally be inclined to focus on the shortcomings that the public finds with the performance of the media, but I think this is way too important a moment for that so I'd like to be a little more proscriptive and analytical.
I think if there is to be excellence in journalism as Tom suggests, and we have seen it in the midst of the coverage of this war, the New York Times, the Washington Post, those handful of news organizations that have committed the resources to cover this war globally, if we are to see that sustained then we have to seize this very important moment. Because, as Andy's poll suggests, the public attitude towards the media is quite fragile and we could easily slip back, as Tom says, to the heydays of Condit, Lewinsky, and the kinds of stories that I think don't do the press much justice, but it takes two to tango and some of the things I want to say are directed more to how the government processes information, as well.
My suggestion is that we really need to think hard and create what I would call a new epic of public information. There are several elements which contribute to that new effort.
The first and most important in my mind is that the government must find better ways to deliver information to the public, put things in the public domain that needs to be there. One of the findings in this poll suggests that information technology such as cable television and the Internet are growing in importance, yet the way in which the government briefs the press daily is oriented to what we would collectively call the old media. One person, no matter how cute and charming, standing at a podium in the White House trying to answer all of the questions about everything the government is doing every day is a hopelessly antiquated way of delivering news. We've got to find creative, innovative ways to speed the information flows.
Second, I think the press needs to find ways to be more substantive, to provide richer content, and to be more serious, but the press has to learn how to be ambidextrous. One of the things that is in this poll is that the public is perfectly capable of following one big story, but it nevertheless needs information about other things that are important in the ongoing public debate that does exist for us here in Washington. All of those things that contribute to policymaking, that require a sophisticated understanding of complex issues and require a sustained effort to educate and build interest in the elements of those public policies. And when you serially obsess, you miss that opportunity. So I think the press has to learn how to cover more than one big story at a time
The third, and this picks up on what Marvin has often suggested about the economics of the news business itself, there must be a new business model for modern 21st Century journalism. The basis of competition in the news business previously on speed, on scoop, on getting to the story first becomes an impossible to sustain model in these days of 24x7 news gathering. We can't go any faster in getting information, and the danger of course is that mistakes get made and the press' credibility erodes as the information is wrong, or as the government provides flawed information and that is speeded in its delivery to the public.
I think in some ways going back to finding a delivery model that puts a premium on rich, deep content that is right, that is accurate, that is best, is probably a way in which we can sustain a profitable news enterprise, but it's not going to be along the lines of the way in which the news is delivered today. We need a new model.
Next, and remember this is Bill Clinton's former press secretary saying this, credibility counts most. Telling the truth counts most. I think that is true of those in government who speak on behalf of government and certainly true on behalf of those who report the news, and anything that erodes the credibility of either a news organization or a government spokesman in a time in which there is a bewildering chaos of information available is quite dangerous to the quality of our civil discourse.
The adversarial relationship, which is, I think, critical to this seeking of truth in our system of public information, where the press must be skeptical of the government and be circumspect when analyzing public information. That skepticism cannot erode into cynicism. I think part of the problem, and Tom is right that motive is what I think most concerns the public, is the sense that the sneering reporter who seems to have utter disdain for the government official, the government official who is so cynical to believe that they can stage manage the news and withhold truth, are both poison in the system of public information and we have to eradicate it from that system.
Last, a point that I would borrow from my friend and wonderful press critic Tom Rosenstiel and his co-author Bill Kovach, the role of all of this public information process has to be to make the important interesting. Those things that really do count and matter have to be, the story has to be told in a way that is vivid, maybe sometimes humorous, maybe creatively done, but done in a way in which the public is engaged and the engagement is sustained.
My corollary to the dictum that you have to make the important interesting is that it is okay to make the important entertaining. There is often a criticism of infotainment at annals like this, but anything that engages the public on those things that matter most to the public does a service to the concept of public information.
My last observation comes from something I borrowed from Terry Smith who reminded me last night that Ambrose Bierce said that "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." (Laughter)
I think that this war teaches us and reminds us of the importance of public information and civil discourse as we try to run a great country that has the awesome responsibility of world leadership we now have, and we have to seize this moment.
MR. HESS: It strikes me that the importance of this particular panel and Andy's report in the process that Marvin and I are working through week by week on the press in this crisis situation is that for the first time we very clearly bring in the public, public opinion, and how that relates.
I'd be particularly curious, Mike from the government, and certainly Jill and Tom from the press and Marvin too, for that matter. Okay, from your own experiences or knowledge or so forth, how does public opinion play through government? Obviously the Clinton people were notorious for having polls. You read other polls like Andy's closely. You had crisis situations as well. Where does the collective opinion of the public fit in your planning and your—
MR. MCCURRY: Every White House polls extensively, and this White House does, and they will read this poll to confirm their belief that the restraints they have put on the flow of public information at the Pentagon and elsewhere are warranted in the eyes of the public and thus represent policies that they can sustain over time, because the public quite clear-headed and soberly understands the importance of protecting lives when lives are at risk and understands the need sometimes to curb the aggressive desires of the press to uncover that story.
Now they will misread this poll if they don't also understand the importance of the numbers that suggest that the public wants an impartial hard-digging press corps that will hold those in power accountable.
So I think the tendency might be for those in government to misread some of these numbers and to think they're going to get by with things that unnecessarily curb the flow of public information.
MR. HESS: Journalists or former journalists, where does public opinion fit into how you do your job? Obviously you all take polls and read polls as well. Does it have any affect on what you put in the paper or on the
MS. ABRAMSON: It frankly doesn't all that much. The Times as an institution, I mean we do reader surveys from time to time but we don't do mass public opinion polls ourselves.
The Times is committed to a certain very serious global form of journalism and we kind of carry on with it whether we are operating in an environment where the public is more distrustful of the press or now would be somewhat more sanguine numbers.
I think information hungriness that the polls reflect would perhaps influence us in continuing to provide, just anecdotally, the public seems to be split about my newspaper, whether we're presenting them with too much. We've been doing since September 11th a whole separate section called "A Nation Challenged" which is filled in totality with stories relating to terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. Some people feel this is kind of too much, it's too rich a diet, and others say it's a gift and it enables them to be informed at the most sophisticated level about these topics day after day.
So I would see the continued hunger for facts and information as being ratification to keep on supplying a pretty rich menu of stories.
MR. KOHUT: Could I make a comment? I agree with your analysis and Tom's analysis as to why the public is responding to this trend for hard news and the line being drawn to information and not opinion. But I became very pessimistic this morning. I don't know how many of you do this, but ever since the attacks when I wake up in the morning I turn on the television to see if anything dramatic has happened.
I turned on CNN at 6:00 o'clock this morning. They had Christiana Amanpour reporting from Afghanistan, and I can't remember what she was saying. But on the crawler for breaking news it said tonight at 8:00 o'clock, Greta Van Susteren gets Jesse Ventura's ideas on how to track down Osama bin Laden. (Laughter) I said to myself, wow, it can get very weird, very fast.
If that's what we're getting now with a little break in the action, I guess I'm not too confident of the trends that you see, Tom, and not for the New York Times, but for many other news organizations.
MS. ABRAMSON: I think that's a really good point. In fact right before I came here I was exercising at the Y just around the corner and watching CNN and they had, poor Wesley Clark was on as kind of a chatty expert, and Paula Zahn was peppering him with his theories about whether Osama bin Laden has Saudi doubles, and if so, how many there were. He just looked like he wanted to disappear. (Laughter)
MR. KALB: Jill, before, when you were talking about the two healthy trends, and one of the trends that you found was a devaluation of opinion; I don't agree with you on that at all. I think, and picking up a very major point of Andy's study, the American people are getting, if I read this thing right, "Overall, cable is the top source of news for all Americans." Fifty-three percent regardless of age and whatever characteristics, they're getting it from cable.
All right. If they're getting it from cable and the point you were making was that not that many people actually watch it. And getting to my point here in questioning your judgment, forgive me, about the devaluation of opinion, opinion is the lifeblood of cable "news". It's the same cable operations, you were bemoaning Lewinsky a moment ago.
MS. ABRAMSON: ...I actually detect, and I can't, maybe Tom actually has data. I've watched sporadically... I think even the cable shows themselves are somewhat more information focused. It isn't just a partisan or ideological debate about the war. That debate really isn't happening. And talking about developments, and yeah, what people make of those developments, what verges on opinion. But I'm talking about that very bitter ideological clashing and brawling that was going on during Lewinsky. I don't sense as much that tone on shows like Larry King.
I think while you can make too much of this, it's perhaps a silly anecdote that a symbolic event was Geraldo's departure from his show, which had been a showcase for the sort of nightly slugfest, and for better or worse, he says he wants to be a war correspondent again, and Roger Ailes, his boss, is sending him over to Afghanistan to report.
MR. KALB: What's the motivation, do you think?
MS. ABRAMSON: Well, obviously Geraldo wants some kind of change, and I just think...
MR. KALB: And Roger Ailes?
MS. ABRAMSON: I don't want to make too much of it. They want to make money, clearly, but they now see the money and the glamour as having their celebrity reporter, Geraldo Rivera, in Afghanistan reporting, rather than moderating a slugfest pundit panel which is what he did.
MR. HESS: Tom and Andy, a point of information on this. Because the data that we've been presented with this time and for the election, Andy's material on the election too, shows that people are getting their news, they say, from cable. If this is true, this is a shift that has profound implications as Marvin has just pointed out. And yet I still don't understand it. Because we know that the networks, evening news programs, are getting collectively, the three of them, between 20 and 30 million people a night based on the Nielsen surveys, and we know that CNN, MSNBC, Fox and so forth collectively, are getting two or three million a night. How come everybody when they answer your report... I thought maybe it was in your question but it's not, because the question is very specific, what cable is all about.
MR. KOHUT: I'll short circuit this. At any point in time, cable's share may be very small, but the net audience for cable on any given day could be relatively lar
A person has lots of opportunities to watch CNN but only one opportunity to watch broadcast news.
It's the difference between ratings which measure audience at a fixed point in time versus where people say they get their news, which can reflect not only a particular point in time, but the sum total of assessment of what they do over the course of an entire day period. Have I confused you
MR. KALB: No, no. That's a very important thing. In other words the judgment here is based on someone's impression of watching CNN or whatever over a day, whereas with the network you're just dealing with that half hour of news
MR. KOHUT: The other thing is, in the surveys that we did right after September 11th, we asked people where they were getting their news, and all of the news was the same thing. What was on broadcast was the same as what was on cable and similarly for local television. Still cable won. People said cable, because in point of fact broadcast has ceded to cable national news. We saw the same thing in the election last year. The public has come to believe that if you want national news you go to cable.
MR. KALB: Is it possible that what they also want is the opinions that we have a dispute about? In other words the public impression of "news" is not just the accumulation of hard evidence but also what people think about it. Is that possible?
MR. ROSENSTIEL: Marvin, there are so many different possibilities that you cannot detect from the survey data or the ratings data. The fact is that most people are home and watching television during prime time. There is no news, there is no network news on during prime time. So you are simply going to have more people check TV news, checking cable because cable is the only news that's on from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. So right then and there, because of the structural nature of when news is delivered, more people will check in on cable. And that may not be a function of whether they prefer talk shows or network news, but they are not home and watching television.
Two other quick points. I think it's quite possible, certainly if Andy's comment a few moments ago and my anecdotal experience I've had with other people, at the moment when I turn on cable news I don't even have the sound on because a high proportion of the time, and it was true in 1991, these are talk shows, not reportage, not information. But they have a scroll and in one or two minutes I can see what headlines there are and if anything major has happened, and if it hasn't then I click it off and I'm good to go for another few hours.
MR. KALB: But a headline can be totally meaningless or misleading...
MR. ROSENSTIEL: Absolutely.
MR. KALB: ...unless you've got something before the headline.
MR. ROSENSTIEL: But it ain't a talk show.
The third point on this is that if you look inside Andy's numbers, the cable number is high but it's not growing particularly. The biggest amount of growth, 13 percentage points, is in the number of people who are going to newspapers. So in terms of growth, newspapers have been the big beneficiary of the war.
If I can, I want to make one other point to answer a question that Steve asked a long time ago in terms of polling numbers and whether that impacts what journalists put on the air or produce
Jill rightly said that in her instance, in the New York Times in particular, the answer is no. In television I think the answer is yes and the reason is because they get a poll every night in terms of Nielsen data and overnight ratings.
But the thing that's important to understand in television, and I think increasingly is true in print, that audience information is also balanced against something that is in some ways even more compelling to them, and that is the cost structure. This war is costing people a lot of money to cover. And even if their ratings are going up and audiences prefer this, if they cannot sustain covering it and growing their audience over a long period of time they will cut away to other things because they simply can't afford to provide people what they want.
Most of the changes that we have seen in network news in the last ten years have not been driven by audience numbers. Audience for network news has dropped by 50 percent in the last ten years. What it's driven by is cost cutbacks. They're not getting rid of foreign bureaus because audiences say on surveys that they don't want to watch international news. They are getting rid of foreign bureaus because they're too expensive and it's cheaper to cover lifestyle and celebrity. And in particular, celebrity is a way of hitchhiking, for journalists to advocate even trying to make important things interesting, and simply hitchhiking on the celebrity or appeal of already famous people. It's not journalism at all, it's a sort of parasitic programming.
MR. MCCURRY: I want to make a point, I think it's important, and Andy will correct me if I get this wrong. The question was what is your primary or main source of news? Now if someone had asked me that question I would have said cable, but that doesn't mean that I don't find a multitude of other sources of news.
In the poll, 44 percent say they at least sometimes get news about issues related to terrorism from talk radio shows; 35 percent get news from the Internet; 24 percent get at least some news from religious radio and television programming. I think you also found that even though it's a smaller number, some people report that they get some of their news from Jay Leno at night.
Now that's very, very important to grab a hold of that because I often quote Joe Nye, the Dean of the Kennedy School up at Harvard saying, "We live in an era with a plenitude of information but a paucity of understanding." It's the quality of the information that counts. And where do you go to get that deep, richer, substantive information that is behind the discussions on the chat shows or behind the headlines or behind some of the things that you hear instantaneously and call news? You go for understanding to places like the New York Times with its rich coverage, or places that count.
We're making all sorts of distinctions and getting worried here about the differences between print and broadcast coverage, but as these news products converge into one sort of seamless computer broadband-delivered information product that comes into the home and the distinction between print and Internet and broadcast doesn't really matter any more, the economic model of how you put that information package together is what counts most. Where do you go to get it and how do you assemble it, how do you deliver it to a public that remains very hungry for the news?
I saw the New York Times had a big full page ad yesterday, they're now going to deliver, since some of us still like to read the paper, they're going to deliver the paper facsimile right to your computer screen so you can turn the pages just like you were reading the newspaper. That's going to happen. That's where we're headed, and I think the economics will shake that out. Some people are going to be good at foreign coverage and some people aren't.
My issue is this. It's the quality and the standards that exist for those who have the information and have to get it out and those who get the information and filter it and report it to the public that we ought to be worried about.
MR. KALB: I think the New York Times will provide you with a better optometrist also (Laughter) for checking on the news.
Andy, a question for you. The business which Mike just raised about religious radio. Twenty-four percent get at least some news, I don't know what some means, but some news from religious radio and television programming. Is the religious radio component something relatively new?
MR. KOHUT: No. Religious radio is a very, very big market.
MR. KALB: No, in terms of getting news from religious radio.
MR. KOHUT: No.
MR. KALB: Okay.
MR. HESS: What about the question of the demographics? As I look at this, obviously both the evening news and newspapers, the older you are, the more likely you are to do that. Does that mean, Jill, that your audience is dying out, or that your audience hasn't yet arrived? And the same with the Internet, which is the sort of reverse trend. The younger people seem more interested in that.
Is that the wave of the future? What can we say as we carry these figures into the future?
MS. ABRAMSON: I think the Times' philosophy on this, because obviously you would never want your audience to die out, so the way to guarantee that is to only deliver the news in paper form. That's why we have a commitment... We at this point don't care how people choose to receive the New York Times, what delivery vehicle they like—be it the Internet or having the paper on their lap. We have a commitment to make it available in all these ways.
Our web site has had explosive growth in the number of users and has during this story.
MR. KOHUT: I've got two facts to back that up. One, among people under 30, cable is the number one choice but the Internet is as large as any other source of information.
Secondly, in the three surveys that we did after the attacks, we asked people what they were doing more of and 50 percent said they were reading more newspapers. They were reading the newspaper more carefully. And that was disproportionately young people. This is a great opportunity for newspapers for young people who have largely just not looked at newspapers.
MS. ABRAMSON: Do you think that's at all, back to the point I was trying to make about the relevance of the story, that even young people can see that this story can impact them and they better know what's going on?
MR. KOHUT: It's need to know. And it's clear in some of the other surveys that we've seen, that when we test levels of information the more a person knew about foreign affairs prior to the attacks, we did re-interview surveys, the less fearful they were. The more informed people were much less worried about...
There's a real difference in information level in the way people have reacted to this event and that relates to media usage and age. The younger people are better educated but less well informed.
MR. ROSENSTIEL: What's interesting to me about that, Andy, is it suggests that... We have seen sea changes in the press and the nature of the press and what it covered before. The press was in just as trivial a state in the 1920s as it was in the 1990s, and what changed that was the Depression. Suddenly people had a need for more serious information and they began to get it.
The Depression led to the war, and that led to the Cold War. The Cold War was a period of sustained seriousness in the press. When the threat was not as acute, it was sort of more abstract. Why? What happened?
I think you can infer, at least, that if you give people a diet of stuff that is fairly serious for a long period of time, that changes what they're interested in. That if you educate them about these other parts of the world and give a geography lesson, if that's sustained long enough, they're not going to just want to go back to... Gary Condit is not sort of the basis of human nature, it's just the basis of where we were at that point. So that's a reason to suggest that everyone's educational level will go up, at least in terms of certain kinds of subject matter.
MR. KOHUT: In March of '91 at the end of the Gulf War we asked people whether they were more interested in the news now than they had been prior to the Gulf War, and 49 percent said yes.
We know that that 49 percent withered away as the Gulf War withered away, and we went into this great void of low interest, particularly among young people in the '90s.
In the current survey, we re-asked the same question and we got 66 percent saying yes, I'm more interested. This is a bigger view than the Gulf War. But I think the same thing will be operative.
If this goes away, then, I think, and particularly if it goes away quickly, we're not going to have any time for that learning process, that habituation process to happen.
On the other hand, God forbid, if this becomes an enduring problem, it's going to be good for the news business.
MS. ABRAMSON: Andy, the part of the poll that reflects the public's willingness to be, the constraints placed by the government on the press in its coverage, do you extrapolate that this would then... I wanted to pick up on something that Mike said, that he suspected the government might seize on that part of the poll as a confirmation that you can shut the press out and place restraints on them and there won't be a public cost of any kind for doing that. This morning there was also news of yet another Harvard poll showing surprising public support for Bush's military tribunal proposal to try suspected terrorists in proceedings that also could be secret; Ashcroft's policy broadly, even given his slight retreat yesterday, has been to have a very high level of secrecy surrounding detainees and the investigation.
Would you suppose that there is kind of broad public support for all of that?
Glennon (sp?) was saying he was shocked at the level of... He did the poll and he was shocked by the high numbers of support for the military tribunal.
MR. KOHUT: I think there's a great deal of support for the tribunal. I think people think we're too soft on criminals generally, and terrorists should get...
MS. ABRAMSON: I'm talking about the secret part. That's the part that pertains to...
MR. KOHUT: Even the secret part. The American public has said we're willing to suspend civil liberties, we're willing to do with less information. But I think that there are some clear limits to this, particularly with regard to censorship. I think that these numbers would be very different if the public had concerns about the way the war was going. If we had asked this question at the end of Vietnam or even the middle of Vietnam, we would have gotten a very different answer. But the war is going very well, the public is with the program, and therefore it's willing to give, cut the government much more cloth than it would, than if there was a great deal of internal conflict and question about government policies. Should things change, the government won't have as much cover vis-a-vis the press from the public.
MR. KALB: I'd like to get as many people involved in our discussion here as possible. So if you have a question or a comment... Identify yourself and what organization you're with and ask your question.
Q: I'm James Gibney from Foreign Policy Magazine, and I'd like to do a two-parter. One for all the members of the panel and one specifically for Mike McCurry.
My first question is, to what extent do you think the nature of this conflict is going to affect the durability of the trends that Andy Kohut has mentioned?
The Bush Administration has made a lot of how this is a new kind of war, it's not going to be something that's over and done with in a few months or even a year.
The second part of my question for Mike McCurry is, to what extent can the government influence the durability of these trends by raising the prominence of these issues and playing more of a sort of public rallying role?
MR. MCCURRY: It gets back to my suggestion that we have to get much more creative and innovative in how you tell the story. I think it is incumbent that the government imagine and deliver a better public information product than to have a bunch of senior government officials walk out and answer questions from a normally belligerent press corps at a thing called a press briefing. That's just not a way in which the public can get the information.
Now there are good things happening all across the federal government with web sites that are really becoming more interesting to see. The CIA has got a particularly interesting one. But I think a lot more has to be done on that.
There are some policies, by the way, that impede that kind of flow of news. Some of the best reporters in the world are people who work for what used to be called the U.S. Information Agency. I don't know if it still is or not. But they are people who are deployed overseas, who know exactly what the impact of our foreign policy is. They are prohibited by law from domestically disseminating the information that they have, going back to an old... I think it was because they were protecting radio or something back at the end of World War II. So if there was a commercial reason, Marvin, I'd be happy to hear it. (Laughter)
Anyhow, those kinds of barriers that exist to the flow of information that ought to happen have to occur. Then not all derive from the bully pulpit. It's not just the President and not just reporting from the front lawn of the White House that matters. You've got to go dig deep elsewhere in government and find where the stories and the information are that count.
We obviously know, it's true now when it comes to the conduct of foreign policy in remote places in Central Asia, but it applies to a lot of other activities of government as well.
I think people woke up wanting to know a lot more about the Centers for Disease Control fairly recently. So the reporting of the broad reach and scope of government is warranted.
MR. HESS: It certainly seems to me, while you've stated, I think quite imaginatively, how government has to change its ways while we have a new type of war, it strikes me that overwhelmingly the press is covering it as the old type of war. That is, the dailiness of the press that's sort of driving this coverage. All you have to do is listen to any of these press conferences that go on and the sort of questions they ask. So I think there's a lot that the press has to do, too, to respond to this new type of war, if you will.
MR. KALB: And yet the nature of journalism, it seems to me, may not allow for a total change in the way... There are certain things that you have to ask questions about, that you have to go to observe, that you have to do. That's simply part of the game. That's why I was going to ask Mike, beyond a more imaginative use of the Internet, how can you imagine a different way of helping out the press corps? Aside from having somebody stand up there once or twice a day and answer questions?
MR. MCCURRY: I think by transacting in those things that make information compelling: vivid, anecdotal information provided...
MR. KALB: Would you be taken seriously with all your anecdotes?
MR. MCCURRY: I think... Look at how the press often reports difficult stories. They start with the human interest angle. They find an interesting person. They go to a hospital and find an injured victim. That's the kind of war coverage we're seeing here. It draws you into the human drama of the story and makes it more compelling to the reader or the viewer. There's no reason why government can't be a part of that process.
One thing that will have to change is the press will have to be in a more amicable adversarial relationship. They'll have to say some of the information that we get from government we can reprocess and use ourselves, just as we take those incredible shots of what comes out of the gun site of an F-16 as it launches and put that on the air, there are other ways in which government can package and provide that kind of visual, vivid information.
MR. ROSENSTIEL: I would just add one other thing to that, and I think it will also mean focusing less of your attention on the traditional press corps and providing more information directly to citizens, not as a way of bypassing the press to control the story, but because the press is so antiquated in its approach to delivering information and is so serially obsessed with one big story.
MR. KALB: Politically the White House has been trying to do that since 1972...
MR. MCCURRY: You know what? Politically the White House has not been doing that nearly as much as...
MR. KALB: the Washington Post.
MR. ROSENSTIEL: Well, jump over them by using traditional press technology. The prime time press conference and things like that.
What I'm talking about is delivering information to lots of sources which this Administration is not trying to do. There are few exceptions, but their approach to this war was to withdraw information that had been for a long time public off of web sites and things like that.
You said the nature of news is such. I think it's the nature of traditional news organizations that is such, and that the great innovation in terms of the way people relate to the news is going to come not out of CBS or ABC but out of some college kids who are using a new technology to go over the story with little digital cameras and do something so totally different that it couldn't have even been conceived inside a...
MR. KALB: I hope you're wrong.
Q: Will Lester with AP.
Andy, if you could tell me how much of the erosion between '85 and now occurred with the Lewinsky scandal and how much was it a steady process that was just escalated by the Lewinsky scandal? From your polling.
MR. KOHUT: In '85 the public had great doubts about the way the press did its job but still believed it and still liked it. By the early '90s, the doubts about the way the press did its job were even greater, and believability, its credibility began to suffer.
During the Lewinsky era, the public began not only to have doubts about the way the press collected the news, but also about the values of the news media. Whether they were moral, whether they were patriotic, whether they made any sense to them.
And that's sort of a three sentence summary of the Times Mirror/Pew Center trend. So for the most part it's been a slow process, but the real questioning of the media's values occurred in the Lewinsky era.
Q: Mike Getler. I'm the Ombudsman at the Washington Post.
The same subject, basically. How confident are you that people, or is there a factor in which people don't respond in a way that in your gut you feel is not accurate? Particularly during the Lewinsky kind of period.
It is widely reported that this was a terrible era for the press, and undoubtedly it did hurt. But my own sense is that that story was enormously important, that it was covered professionally for the most part, and that people read it. They read all of it. A lot more people than who said they did. And I just wonder, it did involve the President. It wasn't caused by the press. I wonder if you're confident that people responded honestly to those kinds of surveys on that point.
MR. KOHUT: When the President's impeachment trial opened up it ranked tenth in terms of cable news for audience. I think there were seven wrestling shows that did better during that period. So it isn't only a matter of what people wanted to tell the press. The public really disliked that story. And after awhile, there was no news in it because they knew how it was going to come out. The President wasn't going to lose his job. There were points when the report was, when the Starr report was released, when the mea culpa was done, boy, it seems like ancient history. There were points where there was a lot of history...
MR. MCCURRY: It is ancient history. (Laughter)
MR. KOHUT: Mike put it behind him. (Laughte
There were points where there was a lot of news interest, but I think you have to take people at their word, and I think the audience measures reflect that.
Yes, there was a strong core of people who followed that story, but it's like a lot of the small, big minority slices of the population which were large enough to move the needle on cable but not large enough to be significant percentages of the American public.
MR. ROSENSTIEL: Mike, I would also add there is a lot of media research out there over the years that suggests that if the press covers something a lot, people watch it. The press doesn't tell people what to think, but it does tell people what to think about. And so there's some of that factor that goes in.
Was Gary Condit really riveting the nation? It doesn't seem to any more, but we were talking about it a lot so people paid attention. I mean even I watched Connie Chung's interview. I don't know why, but...
But I also know that somebody from CBS, and Marvin you may have heard this, said that by the summer, before Lewinsky basically copped a plea or made her deal, by the summer of whatever year that was now, Lewinsky had become a rating loser at the networks. That if they led with Lewinsky that show that night would do worse than if they led with something else. There's contradictory evidence, in other words.
MR. KALB: What is not contradictory is at the very beginning there was a rush toward coverage on the part of excellent journalists, blotting out all other news. That I think has been demonstrated.
Q: I'm Katherine Lewis with Bloomberg News.
I'm interested in the decision by news organizations to devote resources to covering different stories, and specifically the economics of those decisions. You've talked about how it's more expensive to cover foreign news and a lot of the trend towards celebrity and lifestyle news was based on its cheaper. But at the same time you're also seeing more readers, more viewers, and that must be bringing some money in.
So I'd like to know what the panelists think about how those two trends are relating and whether there is going to be enough new revenue or new prestige even from having larger foreign news or hard news, and how that's going to play out?
MR. KALB: I've got a question for you. How are you going to cover the new Mayor of New York?
MS. LEWIS: Fortunately, it's not my beat.
MR. HESS: Can I just add one thing about that before the true experts speak?
News organizations have a tremendous amount of international news coming in, and it's news that they've already paid for. It comes from the wire services, it comes from the supplemental wire services, and so forth. I'm not talking about that. The half a dozen that support this operation, like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times and so forth and so on, all the others do
When you go out and look at how these stories, not today with the crisis but two months ago without a crisis, are being played across the country, whether it's in Louisville or Ashtabula, and you see that there's virtually no news there, and it's not a question of economics, that's the key thing, because they've already paid for that news and they're not using it.
MR. KALB: Maybe it's anticipated economics. In other words, what you think people are going to be interested in, what you think people are going to buy. It's not necessarily what has been purchased, but in anticipation.
For example, at the New York Times you very proudly and rightly spoke about the additional section that the Times has put there. That section has to cost money.
MS. ABRAMSON: It's phenomenally expensive.
MR. KALB: At what point in this long war, if the President is accurate, will the New York Times consider that it's too expensive?
MS. ABRAMSON: I worry that I'll sound Pollyannaish in saying this, but I think they'll make that decision also based on where the story is. How intense. But it will also be a cost-driven decision as well. It also becomes a question of the resources you need just in terms of energy and manpower to put that out, how long we can sustain that effort as a practical matter.
But to answer your question more directly, the Wall Street Journal has a story today about the terrible ad revenue picture, and that's true most disastrously for newspapers right now and magazines, but also for television. Because these are hard times for a lot of companies that used to spend more lavishly on ads. The contrition in ads and what's going on in the economy is hitting just as the cost of covering this story is reaching its most intense point.
I think you're right, there will be a rubber meets the road moment. There has to be if those two trends continue to accelerate.
MR. ROSENSTIEL: The only variable here would be if Wall Street decided for the next year that a 20 percent profit in newspapers and a 40 percent profit for local television stations was an unmeetable goal, and that half of that was realistic... To a significant extent the amount that these companies cut is determined by the expectations that the market sets for them and not by what they would want to do to run their companies in the most, what they would consider the best, long term...
MR. KALB: All of the publishers who tell us that, also have a responsibility. At a certain point if you're earning, you look down at your enterprise and you're earning 20 percent, you can say that I don't mind earning only 15 percent this year, and use that five percent for news coverage. There is an expectation level, a profit margin level that was set in the roaring '90s so high that when you begin to think about a new time and a new story as Andy's poll I think very well delineates, then at a certain point you can accept less profit. It wouldn't be the end of the world for a lot of these people.
Q: Gautam Adhikari I was with the Times of India, currently with the National Endowment for Democracy. My question is for Mr. Rosenstiel.
There is some pretty startling data on page 11 of your report where you say, when you mention corporate synergy and the product promotion that goes on and passes off as news.
My question is two parts. One is, is this a growing trend? Is there anything that you have which shows whether this is a growing or declining trend? I tend to think it's not declining, it's probably growing.
Secondly, is there any direct revenue relationship on this, that when somebody presents either a product or the distribution of a product or the results of a product in news as news, is there a payoff somewhere that reflects in the balance sheets of these corporations? In which case, do you feel there is a danger, as is maybe happening in radio to an extent already, that so and so part of the news is sponsored by so and so corporation until eventually everything gets sponsored?
MR. ROSENSTIEL: To the first part of your question, we don't have longitudinal data, but I think there's a lot of common sense data and things testimonial that we've had from people in both network and in local [TV] that the... For one thing, the opportunities for synergy didn't exist to the same degree that they do now ten years ago.
In terms of the second part of your question, increasingly these are revenue opportunities. To give you an example, we were doing a training at a local television station yesterday and the news director said that a local advertiser, a pesticide company, had come to the station and said we want something that makes us stand out. We're no longer really satisfied by just buying an ad. We want something else and what we'd like is for you to do positive stories about us in exchange for our buying an ad. The station said we're not, and this is a good station, we're not going to do that but we will do something else. We'll do a sort of infomercial bumper.
A bumper for people who are not hip with TV lingo is something that is in between the commercials and when the news program begins again. It's where you see the teasers for upcoming shows and teasers for upcoming stories.
So they do, Ace Hardware is a store with a heart. It's a little 30 second thing about how they're giving money to the Heart Association, something like that.
Those are paid for and they're produced by the news division as little mini-stories that are not quite news stories and they're not quite commercials, and they are more frequent in local television now than they used to be.
The Today Show has a new program with Amazon in which after they do a book segment on the Today show they do a link to Amazon where you can buy the book. Well how much shilling of the book will there be, what's the change in the relationship between the book, the interviewer and the book author if that segment is actually sponsored by a book seller?
We're told that people in local television, looking at one medium, that the question of sponsorship and advertiser influence is the most important issue in local television news, and in the survey we just completed that came out earlier this month of local television stations, over 50 percent of local TV stations say that their advertisers now try to influence their coverage. They don't always succeed, but that that is growing steadily.
So it's not just a question of synergy, it's a question of whether the news in a sense is for sale. If the issue of credibility goes to motive, this is a very dangerous road for journalists.
MR. HESS: And the data that Tom presents reminds us too of Marvin's previous comment about responsibilities. That is, of course, that NBC is owned by General Electric; that CBS is owned by Viacom; and that ABC is owned by Disney. In other words, the news operations that we're talking about are very small elements of very large operations, and when one...
MS. ABRAMSON: Not mine.
MR. HESS: Exactly. Exactly.
MR. KALB: Which in and of itself is a very large entity.
MR. HESS: Exactly. So we should at least keep that in mind.
Bringing the panel and the discussion to a conclusion, I think we ought to thank for a fascinating new report and some very vary interesting comments on it.
I would, however, go back to Marvin's first questioning of Andy and that is the question of are we too many happy faces here about it? Remember, this may be better than it was before, but when you look at the data there are almost 50 percent of Americans who think that news organizations are politically biased; there are 50 percent or so that think that stories that they read are inaccurate; and stunningly, there are more than 50 percent who say that the news media get in the way of society solving its problems. So there are real problems that we have to face there.
Let me tell you a little about next week's program and perhaps even some other programs we're doing. Marvin and I are getting to feel a little like the Sol Huroks of Washington, that is the people who put on programs.
Next week it's going to be a little different, so pay attention because it is not going to be here. We are going to move our program to the Foreign Press Center because we are going to have a panel and a discussion of foreign correspondents' perspective covering the anti-terrorism war from Washington. The Foreign Press Center is Suite 800 in the National Press Building. We're going to be Wednesday, December 5th, but it is a slightly different time to fit their needs, and that's 2:00 to 3:30. It is open to all of us, just as these sessions are, and I might just say a word or two following up, so you know what we've got in store for you.
On the following Wednesday, the 12th, we're going to have a program in which we're going to have former national security policymakers at the highest level commenting on how the press fits into their planning. That will be here at Brookings. Again, we'll come back to our 9:30 to 11:00.
The week after that on the 19th we're turning to the question of health. We had a big story with anthrax and so forth, we haven't dealt with it, and we're going to have a panel of journalists, press officers and scientists dealing with that.
We then go on Christmas break with the rest of you. On the 9th of January we come back with what will be the first quarterly report on how the press and the government are doing in this war against terrorism.
So I hope you look forward to these programs as Marvin and I do. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks to our panel again for being profound.