Wisconsin Public Television University Place  James Baughman with Panel "The Changing Nature of Television News"  April 27, 2011 UP593    cc >> On behalf of the UW Madison Department of Political Science, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the UW Foundation, and the Wisconsin Alumni Association, we're delighted to welcome you here tonight to today's media panel. We're honored to be joined tonight by these very accomplished UW alumni and are so happy that you're here for what's going to be a really once in a lifetime highly engaging panel. A special welcome goes to all of you who are here for the Board of Visitors summit and visiting for that, for other special visitors, alumni who are back for alumni weekend, those of you who are professional journalists also in our midst, and a special warm welcome to students who are joining us tonight. My name is Sarah Schutt, and I direct the Lifelong Learning programs at the Wisconsin Alumni Association. We particularly appreciate being asked to be part of this event because it fits so well with our efforts to engage alumni in the life of the university in meaningful ways and to highlight the wonderful resources we have here. This event wouldn't be possible without the help of many people, and I particularly want to thank John Coleman from political science, Dhavan Shah from the School of Journalism, and Jennifer Karlson and Steve Wald both from the University Foundation for inviting us into this event and providing such good assistance. This is a very special evening in many respects, not the least of which is this group of people next to me here who are generously making themselves available, but this event also kicks off WAA's alumni weekend celebration. A full list of events can be found in these programs which were out on the registration table. If you missed your, you can grab one on the way out. We have more. 

And I want to call your attention particularly to the Friday fish fry which still is widely available, and it's supposed to finally be warm and sunny on Friday and what better way to celebrate the Wisconsin spring by a fish fry with hundreds of other Badgers. So we hope you can come down for that and take a look at some of the other events. You can also find information or our website, UWalumni.com. Tonight's also special because we're going to be presenting an award that celebrates both the traditions of alumni weekend and in this case this year's winner celebrates excellence in journalism. So it is my pleasure now to introduce Paula Bonner who is the president and CEO of the Wisconsin Alumni Association to make the award presentation. [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you very much, Sarah. And good evening one and all. What an exciting time to come together with these incredible alumni. Welcome back to each and every one of you. I always say that the greatest expression of the Wisconsin Idea are our graduates who go out among the world and make a great deal of difference in the quality of our lives in politics, history, economics, and every possible field one can imagine. 

So welcome back. It is a weekend where we celebrate the achievements and accomplishments of both our alumni and, in fact, I've just noticed in the corner of my eye one of the individuals receiving tomorrow night's Distinguished Alumni Award is Carol Toussaint, and Carol is right up over here. Another fellow journalism grad. [APPLAUSE] I just came over from the Fluno Center where we honored the 12 Distinguished Teaching Award recipients for this year, and we have alumni around the state right now in Antigo and Sheboygan and Racine and Kenosha that are celebrating founders days and honoring the Badgers of the year in their locale, graduates who are making the difference in those communities. It is the start, also, of the 150th anniversary for the Wisconsin Alumni Associate. 1861, June, 75 days after the start of the Civil War, which was April 12th, 1861, the first 13 graduates of this place came together and threw a dollar in a bucket and created a mission and an association because they were concerned about the state's continuing support of the grand University of Wisconsin. [LAUGHTER] My God, things just don't change. [LAUGHTER] In a lot of ways right now I feel 150 years old. So it is a wonderful time to celebrate. So it's an appropriate time to take a moment to present an award, the 2011 recipient of the Ken and Linda Ciriacks Alumni Outreach Award. 

And that is going to be presented to Professor Stephen Ward, director for the Center of Journalism Ethics and the first James E Burgess professor of journalism ethics in the School of Journalism. I'd like to ask Steve to come up and join me here. [APPLAUSE] The Ciriacks Award, which includes a $2,500 cash award as well as this plaque recognition, recognizes our UW faculty members who go above and beyond the requirements of their jobs to support the Wisconsin Idea and the Alumni Association by delivering a variety of enrichment or outreach programs to primarily an alumni audience. The award is named for one of our great alumni volunteers, Ken and Linda Ciriacks, who is on our board, and we are proud that Stephen is able to receive this tonight in recognition of his service to this community. He was a natural choice for this award. He and I have already had lots of fun on the road and various cities around the country, and being fun to be on the road with is one of the main criteria for this award. [LAUGHTER] But it is enthusiastic, he is innovative and engaging faculty and alumni in our programs. So he's done that right from the start. As soon as he's arrived, he's facilitated panels on ethics in major metropolitan areas including New York, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, numbers of founders day events and shares his love and passion for ethics in journalism in this university. He also joined Chancellor Martin and I last fall in New York City for the inaugural Meeting of the Mind series, which was very incredible. 

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses such as international communications, professional responsibility in mass media, and ethics on the digital frontier. And he previously was director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Please join in me congratulating this incredible professor and great outreach individual for our alumni and university, Stephen Ward. [APPLAUSE] The check. [LAUGHTER] >> Thank you. I won't be long, I know you want to get to the discussion with these great panelists. I just want to say that I came here just a little more than two years ago from Canada, and I can't believe I'm getting this honor already. And it is, knowing the distinguished people before me who received this award, I am absolutely honored and was fairly thunderstruck when they told me I was about to receive this award. I am also proud and happy to receive it because I fervently believe that outreach right now in terms of both the university in general but journalism and the future of journalism depends on us speaking to the public, telling them why journalism education matters, why responsible and informed journalism matters to our democracy and democracies around the world, and why all of this can still be possible and must be possible in a world of interactive global media. And that's why I think outreach is not simply something we do on the side, it's an essential part of what was the School of Journalism and Mass Communication should do and what our university should do. 

So I'm very proud to be here to accept that. I would say that, finally, I accept this on behalf of my wife Glenda Thomson who cannot be here tonight. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] >> Congratulations, Stephen. And it so happens that our distinguished moderator for tonight was the very first recipient of the Ciriacks Award for Outreach. So it's my pleasure to introduce good friend and professor James L Baughman. [APPLAUSE] >> Is that it? Mine was bigger. [LAUGHTER] Okay, I'll stop there. I'm the moderator of the panel because I'm the only male on the panel who's wearing a tie. [LAUGHTER] I am just one of two historians of television on the panel. 

One of the things I try to do in my undergraduate history of mass communication class is to try to contest what might be considered the romantic view of the good old days, people who remember TV news as it was perhaps too fondly. They forget how stenographic the network newscast could be regarding government and foreign policy. Audiences, and we may want to argue about this, were never as high as people remember them to be. Entertainment programming always drew larger audiences than the network newscasts. Edward R Murrow's most popular program was not the honored See It Now, but his celebrity interview show Person to Person. So I hope we can keep some perspective, and if not, I'll enforce it. [LAUGHTER] It's now my pleasure to introduce our panel, and I want to begin by thanking each of them for making the trek. First, Jeff Greenfield, class of '64, a senior political correspondent with CBS News. Jeff is a veteran political media and culture reporter and has been a senior political correspondent with CBS since May of 2007. He has contributed to the CBS Evening News, The Early Show, CBS News Sunday Morning, and other CBS news broadcasts as well as CBSnews.com. 

Jeff was a senior analyst for some nine years of CNN, serving as its lead analyst on its coverage of primaries, conventions, presidential debates, and election nights. Though Greenfield's reporting has taken him to locales around the world, he is principally known for his coverage of domestic politics and media. He has served as a floor reporter anchor booth analyst for every national convention since 1988. He has twice been named to TV Guide's All Star Team as best political commentator and actually was on an American League All Star Team earlier in his, no, that's not here. [LAUGHTER] I just misread that. Before joining CNN, Jeff was a political media analyst for ABC News, appearing primarily on Nightline. Previously a media commentator for CBS News, he also appeared on Bill Buckley's Firing Line show. He has won three Emmy Awards, two for his reporting from South Africa and one for his profile of Ross Perot. He is author or coauthor of 11 books. His first novel, The People's Choice, was a national best seller and named by the New York Times book review as one of the notable books of the year. 

David Tabacoff, class of '71, is a senior executive producer at Fox News, holds a BA in political science from the UW Madison. David is a senior executive producer for the O'Reilly Factor with Bill O'Reilly at Fox News Channel. Prior to his time at Fox, he worked for many years at ABC News in a variety of positions, including executive producer of 20/20 Downtown, senior broadcast producer of 20/20, and senior producer of Nightline. He has an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin Madison, a master's degree in political science from Rutgers university where he was a fellow at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. And a law degree from Fordham Law School. Jill Geisler, '72, is a senior fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. She has a BA in journalism from UW Madison. She is the head of Poynter's leadership and management programs guiding managers from the novice to the veteran toward success in Poynter-based seminars, offsite workshops, and within organizations. She brings humor and humanity to her well-informed teaching and coaching. Jill joining Poynter's small and special faculty in 1998 after a 26-year career in broadcast journalism and several walls full of national and local journalism honors. 

She brought experience in reporting, producing, anchoring, and unique expertise in management. Jill became the country's first female news director of a major market network affiliate at the age of 27. She built an award winning news room culture at WITI in Milwaukee. Jill holds a bachelor degree in journalism from the UW and a master's degree in leadership and liberal studies from Duquesne University. She's also received the UW Journalism School's Distinguished Service to Journalism Award and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences inducted her into its prestigious Silver Circle. Peter Greenberg, class of '72, has a BA in communication arts. No one is perfect. [LAUGHTER] >> I have things to say about that. [LAUGHTER] >> He is a travel editor for the NBC Today show. >> No, that's not correct. 

>> That's what I have. >> Let me tell you. [LAUGHTER] I'm the travel editor for CBS News. >> Huh. [LAUGHTER] >> And when I was here the Journalism School wouldn't talk to me. [LAUGHTER] >> Well, you know it just reminds me that the founder of the Journalism School, always said, accuracy, always. [LAUGHTER] >> Keep going, we'll fact check you. >> Yeah, fact check. Peter Greenberg is well-known and respected wherever he works. >> Oh, no, that's not true. 

[LAUGHTER] >> I thought you had Diet Pepsi in the green room. Peter Greenberg is a well-known and respected frontline travel news journalist. Peter is travel editor for CBS News, that's correct, and appears on The Early Show, Evening News, and across many CBS broadcast platforms. An Emmy Award winning investigative reporter and producer, Peter was named one of the most influential people in travel by Travel Weekly, along with Al Gore. [LAUGHTER] Bill Marriott and Richard Branson. Peter is also host of the nationally syndicated Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio Show, broadcast each week from different remote locations around the world. He has been a featured guest on Oprah Winfrey Show, The View, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Dr. Phil, and Larry King Live. Peter was honored with a News and Documentary Emmy Award as part of Dateline NBC's team for outstanding coverage of a breaking news story. Finally, Chris Bury has an MA from us in 1977. He's ABC, now let's see if this is right, ABC News, so far I'm right, ABC News national correspondent, Nightline correspondent and substitute anchor. 

Chris is ABC's national correspondent based in Chicago. In this role he reports around the country for all ABC news broadcasts and platforms including World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer, Nightline and Good Morning America. Before this assignment, Mr. Bury was a long-time correspondent for Nightline, joining the late night news program in January 1993 where he also served as former anchor Ted Koppel's principal substitute. He also anchored Up Close from 2002 to 2003 and joined ABC News in 1982 as a general assignment correspondent based in Chicago. Chris has covered many international and national stories throughout his career. He has long covered politics. He reported from the 2004 democratic and republican conventions as well as those in 2000. The impeachment and Senate trial of Bill Clinton, the 1996 and 1992 presidential elections, the Clinton White House in Whitewater. Prior to joining ABC, Chris was a reporter with stations in Houston, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. He has won five national Emmy Awards for his work at Nightline. 

He's contributed to Nightline broadcasts that earned two Peabody Awards in 2003. He is the recipient of the Edward R Murrow Award for the Radio and Television News Directors Association for continuing coverage of the Whitewater story. He is also been recognized with an Alfred I duPont Columbia Journalism School Award for outstanding television reporting. He received the Distinguished Service Award from the Journalism School at the University of Wisconsin and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Southern Illinois where he earned his BA. Folks, I think we're finally ready to start. [LAUGHTER] >> Time to go. >> Actually the program's concluded. [LAUGHTER] >> That was fun. >> Wow, that's a lot of stuff. Any case, we've got, the format is going to be pretty straightforward. 

I'm going to ask a couple of, I think, fairly straightforward questions and I hope we can get some conversation going and then we will open it up to you all. TV news is something that people have very strong opinions about, and we are living right now, not only in Wisconsin but in America, at a time when I think our politics are very divided. So I hope the conversation tonight can be pleasant enough and respectful enough and get started. So let me, again, ask a question, this has been canned or planted, so you've had a chance to think about this: is television news better now than, say, 40 years ago? In what ways has it improved? In what ways, if any, might it be inferior to the old standard of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley? That's a toss up. If anyone wants to start, she or he may. >> All right I'll start. First of all, before I start, when you read the bios, you neglected to say where our careers started. And they actually, I can speak for Jeff on this one, they actually started right here. Jeff and I both worked at the Daily Cardinal. I just got to get that out there. 

[APPLAUSE] The answer to your question, at least for me, is television may not be better right now in terms of news, it's faster. And I know Jill has some stuff to say about that. When I say faster, technology allows the dissemination of information so much quicker but the vetting is what I have a problem with. And we live in a world of citizen journalists because everybody has a cell phone camera, everybody is Twittering and Facebooking, and I won't take credit for this line but Morley Safer said, "I trust citizen journalists as much as I trust citizen surgeons." [LAUGHTER] Well, the question is not a question of whether you have the technology or whether you know how to use it, the question is who's vetting it? And that's an issue that I continue to have. >> I was just going to say that I think, by the way I did have a jacket and tie but I decided to take them off. [LAUGHTER] Because who knows, it might get hot in here. I think the real issue is I think it's more diverse now. And I think the truth is that news, as you said, we remember from the '50s and '60s is very monolithic. And if you look at the news platforms around, in terms of national news, there's a lot of different voices, a lot of different levels, a lot of different entrepreneurship. So I think it's actually improved in some ways. 

I think it's going to be a question of vetting and making sure that people are doing their job right and having some kind of professional training, but I don't think the old way was necessarily the best way. >> I would say that it's more democratic with a small D because anybody with a cell phone now is a journalist, is a reporter, and we're getting amazing pictures, we're getting amazing content. If you see what's going on in the Middle East in the last few months, we would never have been able to get much of that information. Even last week in Syria there was a Madison journalism graduate there, Anthony Shadid, with the New York Times. But none of the other networks had anybody there. We were able to get amazing stuff out of Syria on YouTube, which would have been unthinkable with the old four-person broadcast news team. The big down side is, very frankly, money. We don't have the resources. All of our networks have closed bureaus around the world. We don't have the staff. 

We don't have the resources to put in to long-term. We don't have people on the ground who have been the Jerusalem correspondent for 20 years. We don't have people in Paris and Rome who speak the language. And that's the biggest negative that I've seen in the course of my career. >> And that, to me, is a function of, one of the functions of the most fundamental change which is the monopoly is broken. When we talk about diversity, which has a lot of good parts, it used to be, 40 years ago or so, that the three broadcast networks in their evening news hour shared 90% of the audience. Today the number is in the low 30s. You may be right that the audience we exaggerate, but the number is pretty dramatic. In 1980, the three network newscasts shared 50 million viewers. Last year they shared fewer than 25 million viewers. 

So they have lost half of their viewership when the population of the United States has grown by 75 million. And that's a function fundamentally of technology, of abundance. Cable, satellite, satellite is going to go down in history as one of the most important developments because it broke the network monopoly of pictures. Until the satellite if you wanted to see a picture from a far away place you had to wait until the network news was on and that's gone. And now with the web and YouTube it's gone to smithereens, and because the networks no longer are so dominant, they cannot afford the kind of luxury that Chris talked about. To me, that's the most fundamental change. >> But it has accelerated beyond the satellite. As a veteran broadcast journalist, I'm glad to see the WISC crew here because instead of the Cardinal I got my start there carrying around a Bell & Howell film camera and reporting a segment called What's New at the U. [LAUGHTER] It was fabulous, trust me. For silent film. 

[LAUGHTER] Moving from that to Skype, obviously, but let me tell you how I got the primary information on what was happening under the Capitol dome in March. I was really wanted to get it by logging on to WISC's website or the website, or the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in my hometown where I live, and I could get it but it was late. Because I was able to pretty easily figure out which hash tags were the ones to follow, and some of the journalists were, in fact, placing those hash tags. Having done that, I could find out who, in fact, was live Tweeting from Judge Sumi's hearings in the county courthouse here in the county building, and I found out that someone from the ACLU and a county supervisor was live Tweeting. So I would compare their Tweets, and using my critical thinking skills as a journalist, figure out whether this was trust worthy information. I could then log on to Ustream where people inside the Capitol with their own cell phones or I'm not sure what they're originating technology was but it was likely cell phones, were posting live video from inside the Capitol of what the protests looked like. I was ahead of the news curve in some ways. I was curating for myself. So much so that on the day when people were rushing the Capitol because the judge had just said that they had to have access and people inside the Capitol didn't quite know what was going on because some people got the word through social media and started running toward the Capitol and people inside the Capitol said are we under assault, I was texting to a journalist I care deeply about who was covering this under the dome saying this is what's happening in the courthouse. I'm a citizen doing this. 

Okay? This is how the technology has democratized, but I'm a citizen with critical thinking training as a journalist. I knew what sources to sort out. And that is the gap that journalism of verification, not the journalism necessarily of assertion, and I'm quoting Kovach and Rosenstiel here, that we need to be really focused on. Because that's the journalism that's expensive. >> Okay, all right. Let me back up a little bit. I want you all to be, I know you were all very young when you entered the profession, but I wondered if you could reflect on the changes you personally have noticed from the time you entered the field. >> Well, when I was started, Paul Soglin was mayor. [LAUGHTER] >> Nice one. That was good. 

>> Very good. >> Obviously, I started in film, too. I covered the Wisconsin legislature as a grad student part-time for a Milwaukee station. Lucey was the governor, I believe, then. Ford was president. And we had little CP 16s or film cameras. And they had to go back to Milwaukee. >> Not so little either. >> No, not so little. And you had to be very careful because if you shot more than a hundred feet, you'd get yelled at by the assignment editor. 

>> So money was always an issue. >> It had to be developed. Then we went to video. Then we went to satellite and now we're doing Tweets. [LAUGHTER] But I was fortunate enough, along with David and Peter and Jeff, to be in the network business at the time of great growth. I was hired by Roone Arledge who hired me at a time when ABC was growing. He wanted to compete with CBS and NBC. So he spent like crazy. He opened bureaus in Paris and Frankfurt and Johannesburg and Jerusalem, and the Paris bureau had a view of the Eiffel Tower. It had its own chef. 

[LAUGHTER] Because Roone liked to go to Paris. >> There you go. >> And we had these correspondents all over the place. And the last few years I've seen enormous retrenchment. >> I should amend my curriculum vitae to say that in another week I will be a former news correspondent at CBS. This was a mutual decision. CBS said we don't want you to work here anymore, and I said okay. [LAUGHTER] So I just wanted to get that clarified. What Chris is talking about, not just, I was lucky to be in Paris for ABC, and Pierre Salinger, the bureau chief, had a chef. Roast chicken, pates, red wine, cheeses, every day. 

That is a change. A more substantive change is that at Nightline in the '80s when I got there, if you needed to go, quite literally, hire a private jet to cover the story, you hired a private jet to cover the story. That's how I covered Colin Powell's non-presidential announcement in Detroit. That's all gone. But I think the other thing about the most fundamental change, technology is obviously totally different, is that people used to talk at these kinds of gatherings about the press as the gate keeper. The press was going to be decide what was news and what wasn't. So that, for instance, the kind of gossip that you could get if you bought Confidential magazine, one of the hottest selling magazines in the '50s, never made it above the water line because no respectable paper would touch it. There are no gates now. If the New York Times doesn't want to cover something, it doesn't matter. And that's true about politics, not just because you have all kinds of alternative voices, whether it's Fox or whether it's the Wall Street Journal editorial page or whether it's, in terms of culture, Gawker are TMZ and Defamer. 

It's just that the press, if it has this concept of itself as the voice from above telling people what is news, that's gone. And that's both good and not so good. >> Well, you know, part of it is the scramble for the audience. When I left 20/20, I remember complaining if we had a 20 share, meaning 20% of the audience watching TV at that night was watching 20/20. How can we survive at that share? It was like a big disaster. And now 20/20 gets a five share. And of course to get that five share they have to work a lot harder and it's a lot, frankly, more tabloid-oriented in a desperate attempt to get that audience. And that just keeps going down and down. Now some places have sort of stabilized. I think Nightline has stabilized, but it's a different show than the show that we worked on, for instance. 

>> I think the change that I sensed is a move of a frame from stories about us to stories about me. In other words, what does it mean to me versus what does it mean to society. And I think that became almost as a sense of the way local television stations operated affected the networks. And there was a time, specifically at NBC, where people pointed out, gee, they've retrenched, they've backed away from looking at the world around us. And it was then not so surprising to people who were sensitive to that that the world was stunned when 9/11 happened. And we weren't looking outside of our own borders to know what our relationship was internationally. And you tied to that the sense that today curiosity is important until it runs into complexity. And then complexity in covering issues. >> Not to interrupt, but just to remember what the two biggest stories that summer where before 9/11. They were Chandra Levy... 

>> Chandra Levy. >> And the shark attacks. >> Right. >> Those stories dominated. >> The shark attack was scary. [LAUGHTER] >> But interestingly to your point, we are more focused globally right now and we are even focused more on the State Capitol. I did a piece for the American Journalism Review in the late '90s that analyzed all of the loss of capital bureaus, both for television and newspaper, but principally for television around the country. It just wasn't happening anymore. >> But that's the key. Broadcast news came into its own in the 1930s when CBS, lacking any entertainment to compete with the then dominate ABC, Paley said, Bill Paley said, well, I can do news and hired the famous Ed Murrow and the Murrow boys. 

And they covered the capitals of Europe in the late 1930s as the war clouds were gathering. And that's when Americans first got a taste of real news. Now, when you think about what Chris just said, it just underlines it. We now, ever since 9/11, but now especially, you look around the world and it is in turmoil. And there are some really great people covering that stuff. I think Richard Engel of NBC News is just first rate. But when you think about the idea of closing bureaus and shrinking because of the cost at the time when that story is so big. >> At 8:00 this morning the lead story on ABC's morning news was Lindsay Lohan. >> Well I'd like to talk about that. >> How many of you got up this morning hungry for that news? [LAUGHTER] >> Actually about six weeks ago I tried to... 

[LAUGHTER] Actually... [LAUGHTER] >> Go ahead. >> About six weeks ago I tried to legally change my name to Charlie Sheen because that would get me on the air. [LAUGHTER] The real problem, and Chris was talking about it and so was Jeff about the bureau system, the technology allows us to live in the global village but now there's a dearth of local knowledge at the network news level because we're depending on other people to get there first. We've now become, because of the closure of the bureaus, I got started here as a stringer. Anybody know what a stringer is? Okay, my salary at Newsweek was $20 a month, and my job was to stay here until a 747 hit Lake Mendota and then call the Chicago bureau. [LAUGHTER] That's what you did. But there are now no bureaus to speak of in terms of a comparative number anymore. And so what we're now practicing is, for lack of a better term, parachute journalism, where literally something happens and we're not there first. We're there third, fourth, and fifth because we can't scramble the jets the way we used to, literally, and even when we get there, we're scrambling because we don't have anybody on the ground a lot of the time who works for the network directly to tell us what's going on. 

Jeff talking about Richard Engel. How did Richard Engel get started? Tell them that story. >> He was a volunteer. He went there on his own nickel with no job because he wanted to go and with the combination of enormous skill and courage and a little luck wound up as the chief foreign correspondent of NBC. And it's important to underline that because there is a role, sometimes citizen journalists become, contrary to Morley, real journalists. Samantha power got started by going on her own into the Balkans and writing for whoever would pay her a few bucks to cover that story. >> Robin Wright from the Los Angeles Times. >> But before we get all wrapped up in nostalgia, there is sort of a new move afoot at the networks. At ABC, for example, we are hiring these kids, armies of one, they're armed basically with a laptop and a cheap camera and we have them in places like Mumbai and Delhi and Nairobi and they're young and they're eager and they have some language skill. They make nothing but they are getting into the system. 

They're starting out maybe online. They're filing for the ABCnews.com and occasionally, if there's a big story, they're going to get on the air. And one of them, Nick Schifrin, has now kind of become a regular. He covers Kabul. He lives in Afghanistan. He's lived in Islamabad. So there is a sort of new generation of people who are going to be bringing us these stories in a digital way. So all hope is not lost. >> I agree. >> But you talk about the fact there's no money anymore for anything, they're closing bureaus, and I wonder in this audience how many people are following the marriage that's going to take place and the amount of money the networks and cable has poured into this. 

>> There's a marriage? [LAUGHTER] >> You could have 25 different bureaus. And so obviously there's a choice made by these companies that there's money in this, there's ratings in this, and that's where the money is going. >> But I have to tell you a quick story about that because it goes to the point about you do want to be aware of the pastoral. You do want to beware the notion that the tomatoes were better back then. [LAUGHTER] There's a great line from Atlantic City where a young hoodlum is in Atlantic City for the first time and he's talking to Burt Lancaster, and he says, I've never seen the ocean, it's great. And Burt Lancaster says, you should have seen it in the old days. [LAUGHTER] But the point I'm making is that in 1953, I think, when Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth, NBC and CBS embarked on a fanatic race to see who could get the pictures first. Now, no satellite, no tape, so one of them at least configured a plane, turned it into a film processing and editing lab and thought they were going to get there first except the other network was smart enough to drop off the plane in Halifax where they could get the pictures. And the point is, I hope not too lengthy, that 50 or 60 years ago, this story of royalty, I've never understood it, we fought a revolution to get rid of these... [LAUGHTER] It was as big a deal to the audience then as the 700 people covering Kate Middleton's pedicure. 

>> I hate to plug my last book, Amazon.com, but actually ABC scooped because they took a CBC feed from Buffalo and CBC scooped so ABC, which any of us could have bought in 1953 with what we spent at a coffee house, but they had the wherewithal to make a deal with CBC and they were getting a feed through their Buffalo affiliate and were actually beating the other two networks. The problem was ABC, the Today Show at that time, as a ratings device, had a chimpanzee as a cohost of the Today show. Fred J Muggs. >> J Fred Muggs. >> Yeah, who Jeff remembers fondly. But the Canadians who were picking up the NBC feed on the border didn't think having a chimp participate in the coverage of the coronation was respectful to the crown. So there were many complaints. [LAUGHTER] >> Can I just ask a question honestly. How many people are going to watch the wedding on Friday? Come on. Don't be ashamed. 

How many people bought a commemorative plate? [LAUGHTER] >> I thought it was a gift. >> It was a gift. I came back from London, he asked me to bring him one, I brought him one back. [LAUGHTER] >> If I may, I'd like to address something that Chris talked about and that is the skill set of a younger generation of journalists. I think it's very important for us to distinguished between a cultural shift in terms of the expectations of a skill set of a journalist and the actual reduction of the staff sizes, which is truly important. I bemoan, I grieve the idea that there were bookkeepers who went around and looked at muscle and thought it was fat. And that's the degree to which we've cut. David and I both have competed tonight in memorizing the Project for Excellence in Journalism: State of the News Media report. He brought crib notes; I have it committed to memory. [LAUGHTER] >> I brought my copy. 

>> But if you check on page 36, I just made that up, you'll see that it notes that the staff sizes of the networks are half, less than half of what they were in the 1980s. But the skill sets of the journalists that we're seeing, we do a summer program at the Poynter Institute for recent college graduates that is essentially sort of a finishing school. They're amazing. They're absolutely amazing. They are not angry as the journalists that I face in news organizations because I work with a lot of new rooms on changing culture. And they're not angry. They're just smart. They're not looking at what they didn't have to do before. And interestingly in some of the best news organizations, the idea of reporting across platforms isn't seen as just a burden. And smart leaders are figuring out how to be strategic. 

Yes, you train everyone in how to shoot your own video. It doesn't mean you do it on every story. It doesn't mean you do it when it isn't safe or when it's going to take away from the time that you really need to dig for sources. But carry a camera? Why the heck not. Why the heck not be the person who's going to be in the right place at the right time with the picture. And those are the kinds of things that news organizations need to be doing a better job of. The expectation, I have to tell you, working with print journalists, I remember sitting with an editor who said, gosh, my life is really rough because I put in lots of extra hours because I've got people who are good writers are not reporters and good reporters who aren't writers. And I kind of step back and said, hmm. That doesn't last all that long in a broadcast news room. We've always had to hire people who could do both. 

We didn't have the infrastructure of copy editors that could catch so many of those mistakes. And so that expectation was higher. Well, the expectation is going to be higher in a lot of ways. Whether or not we are doing that for the people who don't have the benefit of a journalism education, and that's what I go back to. I don't disdain citizen journalists. I want to build alliances with citizen journalists so that what we're doing with what's this new fifth estate is to be talking about the kinds of values of verification and critical thinking that help inform a democracy. >> When it comes to aviation maintenance, let me give you the symbolism here. All these airlines now are outsourcing their maintenance. So I don't have a problem with outsourcing, I have a problem with oversight. It's the same issue. 

We have the intersection right now of technology and budget. As the technology is growing, the budgets are shrinking. We have one-man bands at ABC; we have one-man bands at CBS. It's now a requirement to keep your job, not to get your job, it's a requirement to keep your job at the networks now is to be a one-man band. And we still need somebody there to provide what Jim was talking about before and that's perspective. And that's what I worry about. >> Any other thoughts? Well, now we get to the issue of cable new channels. >> I got to go. [LAUGHTER] >> Now he's going to take his shirt off. [LAUGHTER] >> Okay. 

That's not very fair or balanced. Let's be nice. For some 16 years, CNN had the cable news franchise, the concept or idea of a cable news channel pretty much to itself, and then in 1996 the Fox News Channel entered the fray, soon followed by MSNBC. Certainly many of us are asking, are certain cable news channels or hosts contributing to or merely reflecting the growing ideological divide among Americans? Who would like to start? >> Who better to ask than Bill O'Reilly's producer. >> I would just basically say-- >> I'm going to surprise you, but you start. >> Well, I would say I think it's more of a reflection than actually a cause of this. I think going back to the old days, you look at the ideological split in this country over many, many years there's always been debates and disputes and a lot of it gets very nasty. Look at the birther thing, the biggest proponent of it is Trump, not any media company. And the fact of the matter is that's how it happens. And I don't think, whether it's from MSNBC or Fox, that they're sort of creating something that isn't there. 

It's there. We're reporting on it. We have a lot of time to fill so we get a lot of coverage on it. But to think that it would all go away if the cable companies disappeared is just not true. >> I quarrel with the premise of your question. >> Okay. >> And I quarrel with the premise of your question, too. >> Not you, I'm quarreling with him. >> I am merely asking a question. >> Strangely enough this is actually good for you guys so back off. 

[LAUGHTER] If you think back, there was no cable television during the McCarthy era, the late senator from Wisconsin. There was no cable news when southern politicians played the race card to murderous extent. There was no cable news when Richard Nixon was basically accusing the Secretary of State of treason. And I think what has happened is because this stuff now has a platform, a more visible platform, the more colorful exponents of ideologically or culturally strange things like the soon to be former host on your 5:00 o'clock hour. It's more visible. When I was editor of the Cardinal I used to get pamphlets from whackos but they were run off on mimeo machines. [LAUGHTER] Literally. >> Now they've got their own shows. [LAUGHTER] >> There were radio broadcasters though. >> They would certainly be writing the comments pages which used to be the kind of people who would scrawl in crayons on the outside of envelopes. 

That's where they are because there's no gate keeper and there's no gate. So I think that notion, that incitement factor, except for the most extreme things that a guy like Glenn Beck has occasionally said. And Jon Stewart I think has kind of defined Glenn Beck for my satisfaction. And the other thing, and let me just say this about Fox, two quick things. One, what the genius of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, but Ailes mostly, the creator, is he found what was called a market in efficiency. He found an audience that was not served. An audience that believed that the news they were getting, conventionally, was, in fact, biased. Now look at the contrast. Three broadcast networks divide now 23 million people. The most watched show on Fox, which is Bill O'Reilly, right? Is what? Four million if you're lucky. 

So understand what we're talking about. And on MSNBC on a really good night Rachel may get a million and change. >> Maybe, yeah. >> I said maybe. I'm on your side here, Dave. >> I think you are. I appreciate that. Thank you. >> You're being very defensive and you don't have to be. We can talk about Fox & Friends, that's a whole other subject. 

[LAUGHTER] >> Things were going so well, Jeff. [LAUGHTER] >> But the last thing I'd say about this, because we're here in Madison, it's important to make distinctions. Shep Smith and Bret Baier do basically, they do news. Maybe the All-Star panel tilts a little to the right but not dramatically. Fox & Friends is something completely different. [LAUGHTER] Sean Hannity hosts rallies in the middle of the midterms for candidates. So you have to make a distinction between if you're talking about a cable network, which part are you talking about? Just one other thing. Some months ago, maybe it was a year ago at this point, MSNBC featured a panel on media bias, and the host was Keith Olbermann. [LAUGHTER] Last Friday, Fox did a special on media bias, and the host was Sean Hannity. [LAUGHTER] This is the different world we live in, and part of the problem, I think, is that when people talk about Fox, particularly, because it's the most successful, they conflate. 

They don't make distinctions between, Shep Smith is, to me, a terrific news guy. Sean Hannity is a pamphleteer. He's an advocate. He's not a journalist. He's a columnist, if you want to make that distinction. >> But those distinctions, I think we have ourselves to blame in many respects because, well a few years ago I was asked to go to Denmark to the Danish Broadcasting Channel where they were talking about anchor creditability. And they wanted to get a sense of can you have personality and creditability. And it's a very straightforward news product in Denmark but they had a competitor that was getting to be a little bit more personable. And so I tried to sort of pull the best examples I could have of the cross-section of American journalism. And one of the things that I found really interesting was I took a freeze frame of an election, I think it was during conventions, and it was MSNBC and it was Chris Matthews who was the host. 

Now what rules does he play by? What is his code of ethics? I'm not, let's hold that question. Next to him was Andrea Mitchell. Okay, well we'd probably say straightforward, plays by the journalism rules, does have this little conflict of interest potentially in the marriage. [LAUGHTER] Next to them was the editor of Newsweek. Okay, he's the editor. And then next to that person was a former Congressman. And they were all commenting on what they heard that night at the convention. Each one of them playing by a different set of rules. One to persuade, one to analyze, one to observe, but we don't share, we don't show the little laundry tag on the back that says this is how you handle this one. This is what you're expected to believe. 

>> Well, I think, and I do appreciate Jeff's comment on this, but the one point I would make is that Fox does make an effort to separate the news operation, the news coverage operation in shows like Bret Baier's and Shep Smith from the opinion shows. And I'd like to think that people can tell the difference between an opinion show and a news coverage show. But I do appreciate that point. I don't think it's an attempt to confuse people. I think when you watch Shep Smith I challenge anybody to find that either right or left or anything else. He's trying to cover the news in a very fair way. There's a lot of that going on, and I think a lot of people who criticize Fox don't watch the entirety of the programming. >> At the same time, I think it's clear, for better or for worse, that MSNBC and Fox are presenting two different narratives, political narratives, to which people watch if they happen to agree. Every survey shows that republicans like Fox, and democrats are going to like MSNBC. So this is a relatively new thing, at least in this century, where you have two opposing narratives. 

Now, it's not all that different, a lot of us have covered presidential campaigns and as the late David Broder used to say, the way to cover a campaign is to lean against it. So if I'm covering Bill Clinton, I'm going to be pushing, I'm going to devil's advocate, I'm going to always be sort of the adversary there to what the campaign's spin is. And that was our function. Now we have these two very distinct narratives, a left and a right, CNN is somewhere in the middle, and it's up to the viewers to have the sophistication to understand that. >> Well, the thing is, you just mentioned CNN, they're struggling now because people are having difficulty defining them under those terms. >> Well, yeah, they're struggling. They made have a billion dollars last year which is one of the reasons why I think they're not going to change. It's a publicly held company. I worked there for nine years. I have a great deal of affection for the place. 

I had always hoped that it would become the default, great news network and defined not by ideology but by really smart, edgy, lean against whoever's in power. But let me just reaffirm something Chris said. A couple years ago I was at a social function with a senator of the liberal persuasion. Not Russ Feingold, just to be clear. [LAUGHTER] And this senator was saying to me that at the end of the work day, what this senator did was to go home and turn on MSNBC. And I said, why? After 10 or 12 hours in the US Senate, with the committee meetings, why would you do that? To which the senator replied, it's like sinking into a nice warm bath. [LAUGHTER] This person desperately, not desperately, wanted to know that the fights being waged those 12 hours were being affirmed. And I had also never had the experience I had with the Fox News audience, as opposed to what you believe you are doing and are doing, in some case, but what some of your audience is hearing is you are the only source of truth because you are sticking it to the liberals. To be at a convention for CNN in 2004 at the republican convention and be surrounded by several dozen delegates as we were signing off, chanting watch Fox News, watch Fox News. This is a relationship between a producer of information and consumers that is different. 

Now I don't know if at the democratic convention, Fox was surrounded by delegates chanting watch MSNBC. It doesn't parse; it's too long. But I don't know if you got that. >> But there were chants here at the Capitol that Fox News lies. >> Okay. >> And the reason, as best as I can reckon from my observations of what people were claiming is that there was a selective perception, a selective editing, and I have to rewind the tape a lot of years to when Peter and I were covering demonstrations, he was actually taking part in them. [LAUGHTER] >> By the way, let the record reflect that this building used to get attacked all the time when it was the First Wisconsin Bank and Rennebohm's! [LAUGHTER] >> But my experience in covering demonstrations on this campus involved the serious ingestion of tear gas, none of which was necessary during the protests that were going on at the Capitol. There's a great Wisconsin State Journal story about the cooperation between the State Capitol chief of police, Tubbs, and the protest marshals who had trained people. They even had songs that they would trigger. If things got too tense, they sang God Bless America, and that would calm people down, to prevent violence. 

And the thought of the police is that it was to protect the right of demonstrators to peacefully protest while they protected the institution itself. >> Having covered those protests for ABC, I think we can stipulate that the Fox reporter here was in hostile territory. I think that's why he was the only one. >> Absolutely. >> And in fairness, he's a hard news guy who was trying to cover a story. And I think the other issue goes back to the same point. A lot of people have a perception of Fox that they don't watch the scope of it. Bill O'Reilly and his coverage here had talked about his own positive experience of being in a union. He wasn't sitting there slamming unions. >> And Shep Smith was applauded by the union folks for actually saying this is about union busting, it isn't about budgeting. 

He actually stated it on his program. >> So there's a lot of different opinions on Fox and also a lot of very straight coverage. But you're right, people want to perceive it, the people who don't like Fox, there's no evidence that going to convince them otherwise and they just go after the Fox people, which is unfortunate. >> But the question that our distinguished moderator, talking like a senator, raised is, is it contributing or reflecting the ideological divide? And I really come down pretty strongly on the grounds that it is, as I say, I can point to specific examples where things have been said on one or the other networks have fanned the flames. But as a general rule, no. Because you know what? As Samuel Goldwyn once said about a movie, if people don't want to watch it, nothing can stop them. [LAUGHTER] And I really do, look, Roger Ailes spent much of his life, much of his career, as a republican operative making ads and strategy. And Rupert Murdoch is a harden conservative. And to say Fox doesn't lean right in general is like saying NPR doesn't lean left. I'm sorry, that's reality. 

Both cases are reality. But it doesn't mean that they are feeding something nearly as much as it is serving an audience that felt for years unserved. And particularly given the explosion of abundance, the smashing of the monopoly, the availability of all the channels, the idea that, let's just assume that Ailes and Murdoch were out to make not just a lot of money, which they did, but to service an ideology. So what? That's what it's about. And the reason why the left doesn't have those many audiences is because they're frying other fish, to plug the Badger alumni. >> Friday night. [LAUGHTER] There's a flyer out there. >> Jeff, I'm not sure if NPR and Fox isn't a false equivalence. I spent two days last week at NPR. >> Does NPR, as a general rule, lean left in its coverage? I believe the answer is yes. 

>> Well, let me tell you what I think is a significant difference. And, again, I will say this as someone who spent two days debriefing executives last week at NPR because I'm going to be doing teaching there on leadership and diversity. And in preparation for that, I was asking people about their own self-perceptions. I've read employee surveys and there is a concern that there is a perception and potentially a reality. But the difference is that NPR wants to build processes within, a vetting process to make certain that if, in fact, people who come to work for NPR came out of a liberal arts education and want to take a world view that is liberal, the process of editing will mitigate that. NPR doesn't want to be a liberal outlet and would argue against that. >> See, I think you've proven my point. The fact that they need somebody to come in and tell them how not to be liberal may tell you something. [LAUGHTER] >> No, they weren't asking me to tell them that. They were asking me to do some other things. 

But I don't know that that's the same conversation that would be going on at Fox. >> Well, David, do you have a reeducation program there? [LAUGHTER] >> They've been working on me for a while. The truth is I think there are a lot of different views internally in Fox as well. Again, I just, obviously Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have a certain vision. They've set forth an operation that has many conflicting views. Do you think Shepard Smith and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Greta and Bill are all the same? Absolutely not. And you put on top of that a news organization that is devoted to trying to do news fairly. We had Greg Palkot in Egypt getting his head beat in by people. There wasn't any ideology he was trying to sell. He was trying to cover the news. 

So this notion that there's some kind of group think at Fox, I just don't think that's fair. And if you're going to talk about group think, talk about the days of the three networks when they sat down and read the Washington Post, read the New York Times, had a conference call and said what are we covering today? What was that? >> That's the point. That's why I think Fox has succeeded because for a lot of people the idea that the New York Times or Washington Post set the agenda was not, in some ethereal way, neutral. I remember before I became doing whatever it is I almost used to do... [LAUGHTER] I covered the media. And I thought that not so much in the political world but certainly in the cultural world in matters about abortion, there's a brilliant media critic for the Los Angeles Times, I think his name is, was it David Shaw? >> David Shaw, yes. >> Did a piece where basically in the mainstream, what we now call the mainstream media, abortion had one side and that was the pro-choice side. People didn't set out to be biased because that is where they came from, it's what they believed, but the idea of, his basic argument and this was no right-wing ideologue, is that the pro-life side of this argument simply wasn't getting covered fairly. Not out of malice but out of just kind of what people came to the story believing. And I think it's really hard, I'm not a big fan of Marshall McLuhan's theories but when he talks about fish don't know that they're swimming in water, they don't have big brains, although they do go to school. 

[LAUGHTER] >> Ba-dum-dum. >> Sorry. But the idea is that in the world of kind of what we call the mainstream media, I think there are certain assumptions so built in, so universally, almost universally accepted, that it doesn't even strike people. One quick other example. When the Reagan administration was trying to, it had to do with parental permission to take sex education or maybe it was about birth control, whether parents had to be notified if adolescents were getting birth control, and the universal notion among my contemporaries was this is like an anti-sex puritanical thing. And I'm saying wait, when my daughter is given an aspirin at school if she has a headache, they've got to call a parent. So you're going to fit a kid with a diaphragm or give them birth control pills and you're not going to call the parent? This is somehow some right-wing anti-sex league thing? There is a kind of thinking, I think, among, maybe it's changed. I've gone on too long, I'm sorry. >> Jeff, you're talking about the New York Times setting the agenda, when I was working here in Madison I was very lucky. I got hired as a correspondent for Newsweek when I was a junior and moved out to the west coast which meant I was west of the Hudson River. 

[LAUGHTER] And what that meant was that for magazines like Newsweek and Time and to a certain extent, of course, US News and World Report, they hardly would do a story unless they read it first in the New York Times. And I can make this admission now, I'm not proud of it, but every time I would suggest a story and they didn't pick it up I finally realized why. And so twice I was so passionate about a story that I wanted to do I personally leaked it to the New York Times. [LAUGHTER] So I could then cover it. Those days, to a certain extent, are still around at the network news level in a more traditional sense because it's still the bible, they still read it every morning and you can see as they start to go down the list on their budget every day about what's going to be on that night you can almost follow it. That is now being eroded by what we've been talking about because there's a lot faster news traveling. That's the speed which you're talking about. >> Chris, is that what happens at Nightline? Seriously, I don't remember. >> I think it happens less frequently than it did. For a while it seemed as if the entire news budget of all three networks was determined by one zip code on the upper west side of Manhattan. 

And they basically made the decisions for all of us. I think it's become much more democratic. >> But now instead of the New York Times there are other common areas. So it's trending topics on Twitter. >> Daily Beast is big now. >> And you're seeing people look at the heat maps of their own digital properties and discussing whether or not the popularity of something online demands that it needs to become a fully developed story in print or on air. And some of those are about as dangerous as the overnight ratings can be when all you're doing is looking at is the subject gathering a crowd, should we do it, that can be a really good reason or a really bad reason. >> The word viral. When something goes viral, all of the sudden everybody has to cover the story. >> All right. 

>> Thank you. >> Caught you. >> All right, what is the future of television news, assuming it has one? [LAUGHTER] >> Can I start on that one? >> Absolutely. >> I think it's mobile and I brought along my prop. So yesterday I had to do a phone interview with the acting CEO of NPR, and she was appearing on C-SPAN2 on a panel yesterday on the future of public broadcasting. And using my iPad I was able to watch it in my office where I didn't have cable wired at home. Now, that's because it's a Time Warner thing and you have to be a subscriber and it's only in your house. But the idea that I'm going to able to do this here and on my phone, it's going to be, I think, a massive change. I think that's going to be incredibly important, and monetizing it so that we can continue to pay the journalists is going to be incredibly important as well. >> If you define the network news the most traditional way, the evening newscasts of one of the three networks, all you have to do is look at the ads. 

[LAUGHTER] And you know the future. I mean, if I'm the typical viewer, I've got a migraine headache, I got sinuses. >> And you want to have sex. >> And my false teeth are falling out. [LAUGHTER] I got acid reflux. >> Maybe incontinence. >> I can't pee; I can't stop peeing. [LAUGHTER] >> And you want to have sex. >> And you want to have sex. >> I have gas and I have restless leg syndrome, whatever the hell that is. 

[LAUGHTER] And if my erection lasts four hours I got to call the doctor. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] >> Aren't you glad you came for this? >> I'm calling everybody, actually, is what I'm doing. But the point is that audience, it's not only that the audience is old, it's that for two generations the younger viewers, for all kinds of reasons, even before the technological revolution, have dropped out. Now, that's still an audience to be served, 23 million people is not chopped liver, and some advertisers realize that people over 55 actually do buy things. They happen to have more disposable income than other groups. But it seems to me, this is like the slowest death. I remember doing panels 25 years ago as the network news died, it's like Franco, it just keeps hanging on. [LAUGHTER] But at some point and it may happen as soon as Scott Pelley succeeds Katie, one of these network newscasts, and CBS a likeliest because it's been in third place for 15 or 20 years, is going to redefine that night, that half hour. It serves no purpose anymore because the monopoly, as I said a while ago, is broken. You don't have to wait till 6:30 or 5:30 central time to see these pictures. 

They've got to figure out something else to do. And the second question is, it's too complicated to get into now, but news used to be delivered in a package that you had to accept. If you wanted to know something about subject A, you had to take the 30-minute newscast that would take A, B, C, D, E. Just like in the newspaper. Maybe you only read it for the horoscopes but you had to take the whole thing. Not anymore. Not anymore. If you want sports, if they have had ESPN when I was a kid, I would have flunked out of school. [LAUGHTER] And that's part of the problem. How do you serve an audience who doesn't need you in that sense? >> And by the way, I want to say that cable has the same challenge. 

If you look at a cable audience it is also on the older side. And so the real question is, what happens with college kids? Are they watching either cable or network and how do you get them in. You can have the iPad but they're not necessarily watching anything that CNN or MSNBC or Fox is putting out. >> The good thing, though, I think is that there is always this built in demand for stories. And at the end of the day we're storytellers. And the trick is, basically, in a capitalist system, how do we monetize that? How do we make money out of that? And as Jill suggested, right now the answer is mobile. There's an app for that. There's an app for ABC and there's an app for CBS. I was just reading something from the executive producer for the Today show who said that his website gets more viewers than ABC, CBS combined. So we're going to tell those stories out there whatever the technology is, and as long as companies like Disney and Time Warner and now Comcast Universal, as long as there's a market for that, they're going to figure out a way to monetize it. 

So I don't think the future, even though the evening news is going to be a dinosaur for another 20 years, I don't think it's the end of us. >> Although, let me just say, what Jeff was talking about and that is two words that are very scary to me, and it's not because of my age, it's because of the way it's been approached by the advertising community and by the network decision makers and those two words are younger demo. And there's an obsessive pursuit of a younger demo for the network news audience that doesn't really materialize. And what Jeff was saying is absolutely true. They left the building before the technology even caught up. And so the real question is, Jeff's absolutely right, we have to redefine what that half hour is even if it is a half hour, number one. Number two, if you take a look at the actual demos, the younger demo is sitting at home with a Budweiser hoping for a Heineken to show up and it doesn't show up. They're not paying the money. They're not buying the goods and services to the extent that the 40-plus group is, and yet the average age of a media buyer at an ad agency is 24 years old who think that the sunsets and rises with that. And there's this disconnect there because look what happened, it's not a network news problem but it was a network problem, when NBC decided to go for the younger demo by putting Conan O'Brien on at 11:30. 

That was an $800 million mistake. They're still trying to make good on that. And as Chris knows all too well, where did the Jay Leno demo go? It didn't go to Letterman and it didn't go to Conan, it went to Nightline. >> And why? >> And won. Nightline, if you look at certain of the metrics right now, is still the number one late night show. >> My question was why? Why did Nightline get the younger demo when everything we're talking about says... >> They went after it. It was strictly programming. The executive producer is a smart Fleet Street Cambridge-educated Brit who didn't really have an affinity for all of the baggage that all of us old network types have, and he went after the younger audience in a very successful way. >> By doing what? >> By doing more popular culture. 

By doing more... >> It's tabloid. >> It's not tabloid. There's still doing the big story of the day but they're doing the second and third story which might have been what you did at 20/20 10 or 15 years ago. >> Nightline didn't become Dateline. It didn't become a murder mystery exclusively. It still has a mix that includes news of the day, especially important news of the day, and it still isn't afraid to take on complex issues. >> Well, the other day I did a story for Nightline. I sort of get into the default of doing the serious stuff and I was doing something about natural gas and fracking and so on, but the big story, the one that the audience cared about that night, was this battle between Barbie and Bratz. [LAUGHTER] That's the story that really moved the needle. 

>> I missed that one. >> And we were all excited about it the next day because it brought in, guess who? It brought in younger women who didn't care about fracking in Arkansas but they were damn interested in Barbie and Bratz. >> It's a good business story. New York Times did the story. >> There you go. >> You rest your case. [LAUGHTER] >> Was one in eastern Libya and the other in western? Other reactions? Other comments? Well, at this point I think what we'd like to do is take that great risk and invite you to ask questions. I believe we have, do we have some mobile? Yes. >> Is there an app out there? [LAUGHTER] Do you think we can get a common consensus as the definition of a question, though? [LAUGHTER] Like not a 10-minute speech followed by "so." [LAUGHTER] >> Very good. >> Actually, at Poynter we use the definition of a genuine question is one to which you don't really know the answer. 

>> Okay, so like the OJ trial.  >> In what ways is market journalism destructive of democracy that depends upon an informed citizenry? >> Hmm, I don't-- I'll take that first. There are many different markets out there. And always have been from the days in the 1830s when a New York editor named James Bennet started covering murders instead of just respectable news and scandalized the journalism profession. The Economist shows every week that there is a market for really serious journalism presented in as uninteresting a way, physically, as is humanly possible. [LAUGHTER] They charge a lot of money and they make a lot of money. And I think, in fact, the challenge, and I think it's like one of the central questions out there, two of them. One, are people going to be willing to pay for serious journalism they've been getting for free? The New York Times payroll will help us answer that question. The second question is, are people in the business, different versions of what Chris' producer did, smart enough and courageous enough to figure out how to create some markets that will sustain great journalism. Not every news cast, not every publication has to be what we would think of us great journalism. 

There's room for lots. The question is whether they can figure out a way to get a big enough audience paying for serious journalism. And I think the jury's out. I think some of what we've heard today ought to give us some hope. >> But as to the question, what is its effect on democracy, is it a corrosive effect, I think is what you're asking. And my answer is it's kind of up to the citizen. There's more out there. If someone is interested in the trivia or the deep substance of politics, it's out there in a way that it's never been out there before. You can go to the congressional record. You can go to The Economist, you can go to foreign policy, you can go to foreign affairs, you can go to original source documents. 

If you want to be really, really well-informed, there's never been a better time if you want to take that on. And the other thing I would say is that even as the cable networks were coming to power and so on, you look at the last presidential election, 2008, you had the best turnout since '68, you had the best turnout among young people since McGovern in '72. So the idea that somehow democracy is dying, I don't think there's any evidence to support that. >> But if you're talking just affinity groups, I remember when cable television first started. Everybody figured, wow, you'll have a popular science channel and you'll have a home and garden channel and all these magazines said great, well then every magazine will have a channel. That didn't happen because by the time the magazines, they weren't moving fast enough to begin with to figure that out, the channels just developed on their own. >> But they did develop, just not from the magazines. >> Exactly, exactly. >> There's a golf channel. There's a tennis channel. 

There's a house and garden channel. There's a history channel; they don't do any history but there's a history channel. [LAUGHTER] >> Oh, no, there's a lot of history with Ice Road Truckers, haven't you noticed? [LAUGHTER] >> So they did develop that way, it just wasn't with the brands. >> But you mention that, just as an aside, all those channels that started as specific affinity channels, they're all going off-brand now. National Geographic is doing prison gangs and history channel is doing Ice Road Truckers. It's bizarre. >> C-SPAN is doing Real Housewives. [LAUGHTER] >> I almost bought that. >> I made that up. >> Okay, who? Please. 

>> For weeks when protests, tens of thousands of protesters, were up at the Capitol in freezing temperatures, in snow up to their ankles, and in a peaceful protest, Fox News reported that the demonstrations had turned violent and showed video of demonstrators in an altercation with police in a sunny climate with palm trees. >> I just want to say one thing. That happened not to be true and that was a Fox, that was a factor piece of video that was run over a series of discussions regarding trouble in a number of areas. It was probably labeled, and I just think that is just a cheap shot. That's my opinion. >> David, I saw it and it was, we warned people about file video. That when you pull file video you have to be very careful. >> Every shot of Wisconsin was labeled as Wisconsin. That was not labeled as Wisconsin. That was used in a couple of occasions discussing the whole issue of unions and state workers. 

>> I don't think you intentionally pulled that to intentionally mislead, but the fact that video from California was run concurrent with a conversation about allegations of violence in Wisconsin. >> The conversation was not strictly about Wisconsin. >> I saw it. >> As they say, I'll have to go back to the videotape. >> Go back to the YouTube tape. >> It was just bad editing. I don't think it was intentional, but it was one of the convoluted editing things. >> Come on, David, throw them a frickin' bone. >> Convoluted editing thing. [LAUGHTER] >> Okay, next question please. 

>> In this era of budget cutting, I don't think the media is giving us the full range of options. For example, I don't think they're mentioning raising taxes on the rich or even acknowledging that raising taxes on rich can be done without raising taxes on the middle-class. Also, they're not acknowledging that we can withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq now and not over a period of years. They don't mention the conditions on the ground in the United States, meaning that we have to redirect that money to the needs of our citizens. Can you raise those ideas on the networks without being censored or risking your job? >> Well, we do every day. We do. We cover this back and forth called politics. And the cables do it 24/7. We do it when it's probably big enough to cross the --. But there's no shortage of reading and viewing this argument that's been going on here in Wisconsin and every where else. 

>> It's one of the changes that I think is for the better. Because I was trying to think back in the glory days, quotes. You can go back to the Murrow days and see a cadre of journalists warning the country about what was coming. And then you have to skip several decades. Certainly the run up to the war in Vietnam, the networks were not covered with glory in the days leading up to it. We were in it when Morley Safer and others began raising some questions. And I think Iraq was a terrible example of press malfeasance in buying into the weapons of mass destruction story. But I think the debate over Afghanistan has been very different. I think you've heard a whole lot of reports about skepticism and including places like on the front page of the Times. So on that one I think things have gotten a little bit better. 

I worked with Gene on the Daily Cardinal a few years ago. >> I think a lot of the challenge that we face is that talk is cheaper than reporting. And because we see so much conversation on the air, especially in cable news, there isn't a moment to fact-check. You can be, I can put any one of my distinguished great journalists here seated beside an interviewee who begins to cite his or her own version of facts, and you don't have the ability in a live conversation format to fact-check that person. Something should be a little more obvious. I saw Meredith Vieira interview Donald Trump while he said, I've got people on the ground in Hawaii and you can't imagine what they're finding. And she didn't ask the follow-up question... >> Coconuts. >> Who are they and what have they found? [LAUGHTER] But accept it at face value and let it wash over. Who are they and what have they found? Show us your math. 

>> She was preparing for her next piece on Charlie Sheen. [LAUGHTER] >> There you go. And I don't think, I know that ABC experimented on this week with actually having PolitiFact do after the fact fact-checks, this is when Jake Tapper was handling it a couple months back. It's after the fact. But one of the things I think we all have to recognize is that when we are hearing people debate on the air, we may or may not be hearing facts, facts in context or out, and then it falls to us to use the resources at our disposal to do a little more of our own homework. >> But I must say that I think I can think of a couple interviewers, Shep Smith being one of them, Anderson Cooper at times being another, who push  back directly. This is a dilemma of journalism that literally goes back to the Joe McCarthy days when the etiquette of journalism was you covered the person stenographically. McCarthy charges 200 subversives in state department, state department denies. As though that were the way you covered it. Whereas, Obama is a Muslim extremist born in Kenya. 

No he's not. I think you saw in recent weeks a serious push back on the part of journalists about that. Across the board, I might say, of people basically saying no, you're making this up. Now, in the case of... >> Did you hear someone say, you're making this up? Those words? >> Anderson Cooper and Shep Smith both said almost in so many words, where are you getting this from? There is a birth certificate. This isn't true. And that's the trick about the difference, I think, but Chris' wonderful phrase, you have to bring that to the table. Am I wrong about this? On your network, on your show have you guys not been? >> No, we have been and I think I found it extraordinary that the president had to come out this morning and release the long version of his birth certificate, and he basically scolded us. He basically said, you're covering side shows and carnival barkers. [APPLAUSE] And I think it was a fair shot. 

But we'll see. >> A couple of weeks ago, O'Reilly, we had a Talking Points where he went line by line on some of these claims and knocked them all down. Shep Smith on Friday said Fox News confirms the guy was born in the U.S. People have said that. I don't think anybody is holding back. But you're right, it was a very strange thing today driving in from Milwaukee to hear that the president released this. And then listened to talk radio and people still having questions. [LAUGHTER] >> Look, part of the bad stuff about abundance, that's what was the saying a while ago, is the stuff that used to never get seen except by some of us opening mail in newspaper offices and television stations, you all now get to see this. The raw, unfiltered, lunacy among some people. And one of the things I do fault the cable nets for, because talk is indeed cheap, is there is a willingness to put someone on, was 9/11 an inside job, you decide. No, you shouldn't decide that. 

The journalist should decide I'm not putting that on. That's one of the things that's one of the most brilliant promotional slogans in the history of the world, we report, you decide. But some things, by the mere fact of exposing it, it's not a free speech issue. >> And that's the editing process that is often not transparent. And we also have to be more transparent about saying, as an editor, we have now made a decision that we've titrated our coverage, we have covered the accusations, we'll be doing less on this unless there is something new. >> And I felt that way about the birthers and the truthers. If somebody wants to argue that 9/11 was an inside job so that the Bush Administration could invade Iraq, I don't want them on the, I don't have a job, much less a show, but they don't belong in any thing that purports to be a serious news organization, left, right or middle. And I'm not sure that the industry or the profession, whatever we are, has been that good because it's just much easier to book somebody than it is to send a camera crew somewhere. Cheaper too. >> Next question. 

>> Is this on? By way of disclosure, I am on the board of Wisconsin Public Television. And national surveys have shown that the public trusts public media. Jeff, including NPR and public television. And we're facing such budget cuts that I just wonder, I feel that public media is very important, especially because I think that's the one station that is fair and balanced. And I just want to know what you think is the future of public broadcasting in today's political climate? >> Well, I just watched the two hour C-SPAN program yesterday so I can tell you that's it's a lot of community partnerships. I think we're all aware that NPR's listenership went up as a result of deregulation in this country that no longer required local radio stations to present local news. And so the default became national public radio, and I do think that it's proof, at least to the New York Times pay wall, that there are people who are willing to pay for what they believe is quality journalism. Whether it's contributing to their local public broadcasting affiliate. But that's getting to be a tougher and tougher sell because it is competing against programs that are the warm bath. That give people the political viewpoint that they would like to see expressed. 

>> NPR has a huge radio audience, correct? Here's my problem. I think much of what NPR does is terrific. So politics, I happen to be a huge fan of Car Talk. [LAUGHTER] And I live in Manhattan so it makes no sense at all. [LAUGHTER] What I've never quite bought is why the public, in terms of tax revenues, should be paying for it. The size of NPR audience is such, and I don't know the numbers, maybe you do, if every listener contributed something like a dollar. >> But they don't. >> But that's the point. And that's the question about market forces and democracy. Look, yeah, I like Car Talk a lot and there's plenty of other stuff that I like. 

The question, and particularly in this day and age of a $14 trillion debt and a trillion dollar deficit is if the listeners who devote, who love NPR and public television and they take it into their homes, it gives them something nobody else does, right, literacy. They're not going to kick in a buck a year. I think that's what the problem is. Because if NPR could get free of the government --, you wouldn't have this issue of demagogic congressmen, every time some artist is shown on public television, going crazy. To me, it is a dilemma. >> But, Jeff, it also gets down into content. I'll give you a production point of view on this. I'm producing a couple of shows right now for PBS and I have to tell you that it depends on which administration is in power that will determine the openness of the executives at PBS to want to do certain programs because they're worried about their funding. And it gets a little scary. >> Can you imagine an NPR that didn't have to worry about that? Where the public part of NPR wasn't government money, it was just money from... 

>> Only about 7% is government money, the rest is foundation money and individual donors. And I think if you really want to take it to its extreme, there aren't enough foundations in the world to support all the journalism that needs underwriting now, whether it's public broadcasting or whether it's some of the new entrepreneurial startups that are going on. And so it does go back to what is the value of information in a society. Should people assume that it's valueless because, sadly, my sense is that in print and in broadcast the digital world developed almost outside of their radar. It was a bunch of oh, I don't know who are those guys over there that are goofing around with some online stuff. Yeah, let's shovel some stuff over on to that. And the ethos of the web developed apart from the business mentality of the people whose companies produce news. And so people who, when they finally started paying attention said you can't charge for this. People have an assumption that it should be free. If you start to charge for it you will lose audience, and what we need now more than anything is just to aggregate eyeballs. 

And at some point that was supposed to turn into dollars. And because good business minds at some point said this isn't really working all that well, we're giving this away for free and it costs to produce. >> So maybe the next strategic move of an outfit like NPR instead of those fundraising drives which are annoying. [LAUGHTER] "We don't do commercials so send us money." [LAUGHTER] What would happen if they went dark for 48 hours and said we need your support, you're not giving it to us. We need the average of a buck a year, and some of you can probably kick in a buck a month or a buck a week. So you want to know what the world is like without NPR, this is what it's like. Maybe NPR has to think more like an aggressive person looking to get its audience to understand. And I don't know if that's legal. But it seems to me as opposed to those endless hectoring, we have four minutes or we're going to kill ourselves. [LAUGHTER] It's a new world out there and people are going to have to, the idea that people are going to have to learn that they have to pay for this stuff and it's true after decades of clicking it on for free. 

In another generation, in the Victorian times when I went to school, mothers used to tell their daughters when warning them about men, they won't buy the cow if the milk is free. Which is one of the more repellent images. [LAUGHTER] But in terms of things like journalism, that's what's happened. >> Make NPR an app. >> It is an app. But they don't charge. [LAUGHTER] CNN's app charges and it gets you live streaming breaking news video. You have to have a service that you can't get somewhere else. Does Fox have an app? >> Yes, it's free. >> And do you have live streaming video. 

>> Yeah, there's video. >> On breaking news. Because they made a lot of money on theirs and there are things, I think, that people will pay for. Sometimes we're afraid. We're not afraid to beg but we may be afraid to sell. >> All right, question, sir. >> There's been scarcely a mention of a source that many young people are relying upon for their news which is Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and in particular I'm interested in your feedback on the accountability that they demand. When Stewart runs those videos of politicians who have been spinning ideas and they are confronted with their own words when they are in contradiction of what they said, why can't conventional journalists and conventional new sources do the same thing? >> Does the name Tim Russert ring a bell? That's what Tim got famous for. That's what he did for years on Meet the Press. He would bring a politician on and say let me show you what you said six months ago. 

Now let me show you what you said a month ago. Taking nothing away from Stewart, who is a spectacular satirist, the best journalist did that. In my days at Nightline, Koppel is a pretty fair interviewer not using this technique but using, not visually, but doing that. The best interviewers know how to do this. Look, not only do I think Stewart and Colbert are terrific but Colbert helped me sell a lot of books by doing his show a few weeks ago. [LAUGHTER] So I'm particularly grateful. >> I love Colbert, I love Stewart, I love Bill Maher. They don't send people out to cover news. Someone's got to pay for Richard Engel to go to Beirut. Someone's got to pay for Anthony Shadid to be in Syria this week for the New York Times. 

Somebody's got to pay for that. These programs that you mentioned are delightful to watch and my kids absolutely love them, but let's not confuse them in journalism. Journalism is going out and getting the stories that this like to make fun of. And that's where I think this distinction is sometimes lost is that people think Stewart is doing a great job. What he's doing is comedy. You talk to Bill Maher. He's doing comedy, he's not doing journalism. >> And it's not the only place that young people are going for news. By the time they've tuned in they've scanned Reddit. They've looked at all of the own sources that they've set for themselves, and so they're not discovering for the first time what's on there. 

It's kind of been developed is that's where young people go for news. No, that's where young people and others go to see a comedian's take on the news of the day, some of which you will find complete agreement with, some of which you won't. And it's not wholly unlike Mark Russell. >> God help us. >> Pardon? >> It's way better than Mark Russell. [LAUGHTER] >> But what I'm saying is in the tradition of Will Rogers, whom I think we all started out with, of finding political humor, some of which is biting. >> But interestingly enough, there's been a shift in booking policies and the people who actually make themselves available to go on shows like Jon Stewart. The king of Jordan was not interviewed by 60 Minutes. The king of Jordan was not interviewed by Nightline. The king of Jordan was interviewed by Jon Stewart. 

Because he felt that he'd have a better platform there and a more receptive audience. >> And by the way, I did, in looking at the research because I'm doing a lecture tomorrow at the J School about this, it is not at all clear to me that young people are watching news in other forms. That was my belief and it has been rudely shattered by at least, the research that I've looked at suggests that what young folks are doing on the web is not news or anything that we would consider news. It's social networking. It's ESPN. It's entertainment. It's perhaps matters erotic. [LAUGHTER] >> You think? >> Just a hunch. But I think it's not at all clear. What seems to be clear is that for the last couple generations younger audiences have been drifting away from anything we once considered news. 

And my theory, which I will explain in a great and amazingly hypnotic way tomorrow, is they are avoiding the news because they can. Earlier generations couldn't. >> But they're getting it through Facebook and Twitter. >> What are they getting? >> They are getting the recommendations of their friends. And their news feeds oftentimes contain news that has been selected for them because they have shared interests. And I think as traditional journalists we're kind of skeptical of that because somebody else is their editor. But I think that there is more that we're not seeing. What we are finding at Poynter, most of our traffic to our website about journalism, we aggregate news about journalism, the traffic isn't coming from news room checking it out, it's coming from people who are recommending it to each other on Facebook and particularly on Twitter. And when you recognize that that becomes the new tap on the shoulder, hey do you know what's going on, it's a news story. Now, obviously, research is going to have to dictate how well-informed people are as a result of having your friends recommend things to you, but I don't think we should start out with the idea that that's all bad. 

>> I didn't start out that way, that's what the research that I saw was telling me. I had the other opinion. But, look, what's his name? Clay Shirky, the guy that everybody quotes about the new media at NYU. He basically says this is like, we're in like 1550 and everybody is looking at this Gutenberg press saying what's this? What's going to happen? And we don't know yet. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that out of all this will emerge spectacularly new great forms of journalism, and I'm also prepared to believe that we're going to be walking around thinking that Lindsay Lohan is too heavy to be covered on the network news. [LAUGHTER] >> We talk about Twitter, we talk about Facebook, we just had a recent example in Egypt where they call it the Twitter and the Facebook revolution. It got everybody out in the street. It was a huge tap on the shoulder, we all agree about that, but now comes the real challenge. Have we seen elections yet? Have we seen a democratic infrastructure set up there yet? No. And one of the reasons is because now the same people who were Twittering and were Facebooking are confronted with the challenge of oh, my God, maybe we actually have to have a conversation. 

We may actually have to talk to a human being and not text them. And they are not culturally inclined to do it. They don't know how. And that's the real challenge right now. You got them in the streets, you deposed the government, now where's the conversation? >> You see the research when they surveyed Egyptians. I think the mark of Twitter and Facebook isn't really there. >> Exactly. That became, I mean it was cute to call it the Twitter revolution, but a small percentage of the people actually had access to it. What we saw here, and again I'll use, there's a guy at NPR named Andy Carvin who's on the digital side, and he made a conscious decision that he was going to become the curator of information coming out of the Middle East. And Andy Carvin was able to determine who were the legitimate sources. 

Who were on the frontlines. And he aggregates and re-tweets what's going out and became sort of that pipeline. A method of coverage that we hadn't really thought about before. And that's, again, what clay Shirky is saying. Disintermediation, the idea what we are inventing news as it happens around us is particularly uncomfortable for those who are used to having a very clear pipeline of reporter, editor, viewer. >> How much, when you do your stuff for Nightline, how much is this new world part of your thinking, either in the sense of all right we're going to structure story in a way that we're going... >> Well, it's funny. One of the things that the producers now at Nightline, no matter the subject, and I'm sure you do this too, they do YouTube searches. Whatever it is, they sort of do this search on YouTube to see what comes up. We're talking about the natural gas story and there's this great video of people opening their faucets and lighting a cigarette and the thing is blowing up because of the natural gas. 

>> Tonight on Nightline. [LAUGHTER] >> We use that stuff. We use Twitter. Twitter, I think, is, I just got on it a few months ago myself. >> Me too. >> It's kind of annoying. >> It's just really not working for me. [LAUGHTER] >> But it's a great promotional. >> It's a police scanner. Think of it as a police scanner and you'll be okay. 

>> You can drive people, you can say watch my story on fracking tonight at Nightline and it will draw people. >> I can see it as a promotion. I'm following only a few hundred people and I look at the stuff and they're very smart people and I keep thinking to myself, you know, I don't have that much longer on this earth. [LAUGHTER] >> That's all the more reason tomorrow at 4:30 to hear Jeff give his lecture across the street in 2195 Vilas. The James Hoyt multimedia room, and it's free and open to the public. We have another question. Go ahead, sir. >> At first, and I'm sure I speak on behalf of all attendees here tonight and hundreds of thousands of alumni around the country and the world, thank you for coming back to Wisconsin and for your really candid and fascinating discussion tonight. You make us proud to be badgers. [APPLAUSE] For those of us who still have ink in our veins and read daily newspapers and for anybody who's been in public life or a supportive democracy, we have real concerns for the future of the fourth estate. 

We see good journalism as an ally to good government. And superficial, sloppy journalism as maybe an evil component to bad government. Peter, since we were classmates together and we'd always genuflect to you or refer to you as the editor of the Cardinal, which I think you were, why don't you lead off with the panel this question: what's the future of the print medium? >> I do not own a Kindle. I like to hold something in my hand and read it. I'm very old school that way these days, so I've been told. I think that there is a future for it. I think we're living in a world of massive consolidation right now to the point where, look, when I was here, when Jeff was here, there was the Daily Cardinal and then there was almost not the Daily Cardinal and other newspapers came in. And it's been a struggle, look at the Milwaukee Journal, look at the Capital Times. And just going online, you know why I don't have a Kindle? Because it doesn't have a print button. If it had a print button, I'd get it. 

I want to print that. It's my sense of history, it's my sense of perspective. How we started this conversation tonight, the word perspective. And my problem is with my own research staff I have a rule and this is where I get scared about the future. My rule with them is if I ask them a research question and they come back with a three-word answer and the three-word answer is the web said, I fire them because they haven't picked up the phone, they haven't had a conversation, they haven't done the homework to find out who they're talking to, at least two separate corroborating sources, all the stuff we were trained to do. I learned how to do that on a newspaper and then later on at a magazine. So I wonder, and it goes right back to what Jill was saying about vetting and about verification. So my concern is not with the medium itself, it's with the process that takes away from that medium. If that makes any sense. >> I'm old school, too. 

I get papers delivered to my door. I like that. But I have to concede something here. That this may be a generational matter. It may be a matter of preference. I suspect that several hundred years ago some guy may have been saying I miss that parchment. [LAUGHTER] When I unroll those scrolls out, that's what I need. >> Papyrus. >> And the second part about this... >> I have parchment delivered to my door. 

[LAUGHTER] >> The second part about this is when you look at a news story online and you realize what can be enhanced by that, that can't possibly happen in print. The hypertext. People used to complain that the papers compress the politicians speeches. And television the sound bite, the shrinking sound bite. >> See Obama's birth certificate here. >> Yeah. Or you want to hear the complete press conference? That's where it is. You want to see that great dunk that Kobe Bryant, I read the Times today, New York Times because I was home, and they had this kind of half finished story because of the west coast game and then if I read the Times online, they'd play that turn around game changing play. That's not a bad thing. And I have a feeling some of this, so you have to distinguish between the future of print, which I do think is highly problematic, it's a terribly inefficient, if you think about it, dirty, distribution system. 

Trucks burning fossilized fuel, trees being chopped down, garbage as opposed today the kind of information that something like the New York Times can deliver. And that's where the question of can somebody, the Times, Rupert Murdoch, whoever, figure out a way to get people to pay. >> But part of that issue is who's willing to try? In the case of Murdoch, whether people here love him or hate him, he's put a lot of money into the Wall Street Journal. It's a good newspaper. He's trying to figure out a way to make it pay for itself. He's developed this app, The Daily, which is an attempt to do what you're saying which is aggregate news but have video and have good stories. You need somebody with a vision who's willing to put his money where his mouth is. >> And the Times is trying. >> Yes and the Times is trying. >> And the other thing is, yes it's hard to know the end of the revolution when the blood is still in the streets, but I think we are becoming us and they are becoming them. 

The newspapers are becoming television; television is becoming newspapers. Virtually every one of my stories now I write a print version that goes on ABCnews.com. I have someone in their production thing who does the hyperlinks to cite previous videos or previous stories. The newspapers, we see newspaper reporters now carrying small cameras and they are uploading. There's this synergy. What's happening to newspapers? They're becoming television stations. What's happening to television? We're becoming newspapers. And so these distinctions are just melting away. And we're really entering this kind of new media era, not an era of newspaper, magazine, television. >> I had a meeting in March with the editors of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

I live in Milwaukee. It's my hometown paper. I see the tough decisions that Marty Kaiser, the editor, and George Stanley, another UW alum, the managing editor, have had to make with the resources they have, and they've put their resources toward investigative journalism, toward watchdog. And you've seen, if you follow local media, you've seen the laudatory results. They don't like operating with a smaller staff, but when I was talking with them one of the deputy managing editors said, I realized at some point that I'm now working at a digital publication that also prints a newspaper. And this was on the heals of massive increases in their online readership because of the Green Bay Packers because of severe winter weather and because of the legislature situation, because of the budget. And they said we've had all this increase in traffic but we still haven't seen the dollars. And so this idea of being a success and seeing the success happened here, because your print dollars and digital dimes, is that challenge. And, unfortunately, we all came up in journalism, we don't do math. [LAUGHTER] And so we're the worst people to be asking what the future is if it involves dollars and cents. 

>> Can you imagine, by the way I did a widely unread book about 30 years ago. [LAUGHTER] About the 1980 campaign. It was a very heavy analysis of the media. And I was just thinking how much richer would that book be digitally. Where I say, in this appearance on Meet the Press Ronald Reagan appeared to have been confused about his tax policy. Play it. This commercial that Jimmy Carter wrote tried to argue that Reagan, play it. That does not strike me... >> Never finish the damn book though. [LAUGHTER] >> Let me propose, time is of the essence. 

We have about seven minutes left and we have time for one more question. Where is that one more question? >> Paul, did you have a question? >> Very distinguished question. >> Mr. Mayor. >> Research. Let's go back to Jon Stewart and what Peter was saying about vetting. Which is maybe Jon Stewart doesn't produce the news and he relies on other people's film, but he's paying somebody to do the research to go over it. Someone is being paid or was paid back in your Daily Cardinal days, on newspapers to check two sources. We have a governor here in Wisconsin who made statements about tax policy, about salaries, about health insurance, and the numbers went out over the country for six weeks before anyone really challenged them. What's going on behind the doors in terms of commitments to research and checking the facts? >> Okay, could I ask how you feel about term limits? [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I think, look, I think this is a fairly basic thing and I don't know the extent, I am not sure that the assertion that no one was checking these arguments are right because I am pretty sure I have seen in some mainstream publications and programs conflicting arguments about the relative pay and benefits of public employees versus private employees versus unionized states versus not. 

I do think, really Mr. Mayor, that sometimes people's perception, I used to get this when I was on TV at ABC all the time when I was a media critic, how come you never-- fill in the blank. And invariably, or I shouldn't say invariably, more often than not it turns out somebody did do that only that viewer wasn't watching because you only have so much time. I'll just make this as a more general point. I used to be a media critic. That's how I first got into this business. I never, in all the years I was doing media criticism, heard somebody say, you know, I like Reagan but you guys got to be more tough on him, or I'm not fan of Reagan but you guys are unfair to him. People's perception of the media tracks so closely with their political view of an issue as to be virtually indistinguishable. Now whether or not the press laid down on the job with Governor Walker, I don't know. You guys were covering that story. >> Well, we were to the extent that it mattered enough to a national audience and it wasn't every day. 

But I think that we did publish those figures about union employees, what they made, all the comparisons were made. I will grant you, Mr. Mayor, that the research departments have been cut back. They have suffered. I know at Nightline, when Jeff and I were at Nightline together we had six people who did nothing but check every line of our scripts. >> And they had titles called fact checkers. >> They were researchers. >> And now there's a dependence. >> And they were vetting. And I got to say those six people are long gone. And where do we fact check? We fact check on Google. 

>> And you're looking for neutral third parties who exist, nonprofits or whatever, to do that analysis. And one of the challenging things is that there are a lot of policy organization that is aren't, in fact, neutral but have titles that appear so. And part of the obligation as journalists is not to say here's a report from the Journalists for Better Journalism and not find out that all of the members happen to have a particular point of view and a particular funding source that encourages that point of view. >> Absolutely. I cannot underscore that enough. Because you can get respectable numbers, I mean the New York Post, their op-ed pieces about public policy are drawn, I won't say exclusively, but overwhelmingly, from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Perfectly respectable organizations. One is libertarian; one is kind of conservative-libertarian. If you start with an economist in the Cato Institute versus an economist from... >> Brookings. 

>> Well, Brookings or the Center for New American Politics, you're going to get totally conflicting views starting with the same numbers. And I tell you something, as a philosophy major, you want to talk about not doing math... [LAUGHTER] You say wait a minute, you're telling me that the rich are escaping their fair share of taxes, you're telling that rich people pay 47% of the taxes, and I'm sitting here thinking what am I supposed to do with this? And in the case where those wonderful researchers that were at Nightline when we were there that are no longer there, you're putting an awful lot of burden and Google won't do it for you. I don't think. >> I'm afraid on that note, that taxing note, we will have to... [LAUGHTER] Speaking of taxes and the mayor here, people in my neighborhood should remember tomorrow is a recycle day. [LAUGHTER] >> Now I know I'm back in Madison. >> Remember not to put recycles in the can can. I just want to thank the panel on behalf of everyone here. [APPLAUSE]