Archived from Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Join a live chat with veteran journalist, author, and TV show host, Bill Moyers, of Bill Moyers Journal.
Archived Chat
David Salerius, Liverpool, NY:
Your view, please, on the current state of the media reform movement and prospects for a meaningful "independent" journalism ethic.
Bill Moyers:
Remember that old story? Adam and Eve are exiting the Garden of Eden and he turns to her and says, "My dear, we live in an Age of Transition." I'd say that's where the media reform movement is at the moment. A few years ago we were all about trying to stop the consolidation of media ownership that had homogenized content and turned journalism and entertainment into a for-profit commodity (check out our site at PBS.org and pull up the documentary we did a decade ago called "Free Speech for Sale" - about the consequences of the Telecommunications Act of l996. Now both the White House and the majority in Congress are opposed to further consolidation. And our commercial news media is in a tailspin. There were l2,000 newspaper lay-offs last year alone, and as we'll discuss below, we experiencing the migration of radio, television, and nearly all media to a digital platform. So the media reform movement has switched its energy from the consolidation fights of yesterday to seeking fast, affordable, neutral Internet connections for every home and business (can you believe over 40% of American homes still don't have broadband?) That's one reason the movement was united so strongly in protecting "Net Neutrality" on the Web. It's joined the battle for independent, quality journalism and, fortunately, for strengthening public media - including PBS and NPR. Check out http://freepress.net
Tim H, New York, NY:
In style and substance, how would a 1965 Lyndon Johnson have handled the myriad of problems that a 2009 Barrack Obama now faces?
Bill Moyers:
I thought of this very parallel while watching Obama's news conference last night. Like Obama, LBJ reached out to "the other side." His most quotable text from the Bible was from Isaiah: "Come, now, let us reason together." Even, I might add, the reasoning was often with a baseball bat. Just kidding. His long experience as Senate Majority Leader taught him the importance of winning votes from the minority party. Partisanship wasn' t an end to itself but to get an important measure enacted. He worked hard at that especially on all the civil rights legislation, when he knew the country would respond far more positively if it were not seen as "By Democrats Only." He would have been tougher one-on-one than Obama appears to be. For example, if someone from his own party -- say, a Democrat like Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- had crossed him the way Nelson has foiled Obama on the stimulus package, LBJ would have taken him to the wood shed, as we used to say in Texas. "You want a four-lane highway in Omaha, do you? My hind foot." Once when Senator Frank Church of Idaho brought up the argument by the famous columnist Walter Lippman, who opposed the war in Vietnam, LBJ snorted: "Frank, that's fine. You want a dam on the Snake River, you go ask Walter Lippman for it." I don't see Obama that much of an infighter.
Rich Homberg, Detroit:
Detroit is about to lose its everday newspaper delivery. Can you comment on this and the NYTimes article "News You Can Endow"?
Bill Moyers:
Detroit without a daily newspaper? Hard to believe. But you're not alone in the predicament. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is on the rocks. The Rocky Mountain News is on the block. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis has filed for bankruptcy. Most of the 3l,000 people who work for Gannett's 85 daily newspapers will be taking a week of unpaid leave. If I had the solution, Rich, I'd hand deliver it. In time I think the vacuum can be filled in part by locals versions of ProPublica.org - the online investigative reporting unit funded by some philanthropists (would there were more like them!) Or Spot.Us, which is experimenting with sponsored reporting. Or MinnPost (see above).
Lisa:
Where do you get your news among gazillions of sources? Any strategy to overcome information overload?
Bill Moyers:
Every morning I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and segments of the Washington Post -- to get a sense of how they are playing the same stories as well as their own original reporting. The Times has done superb coverage on the Great Collapse (my term for what's happening to us.) I spend a couple of hours on several Website--starting with talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM.com), going on to townhall.com to see how the conservative base is responding to the news and alternet.org and/or truthout.org for the liberal perspectives. I graze all day as time allows across a mulitude of sites --news and opinion --and check in occasionally with the AP and Reuters. I also have several newspaper among my "favs" -- Los Angeles Times, Times of London -- that I will visit over the course of a day. I still prefer magazines stacked beside my bed, however -- and right now they include Harper's, Reason, National Review, The American Prospect, In These Times, Mother Jones, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, YES, and the quarterly of the East Texas State Historical Society. I don't have a strategy for managing the information overflow except to read what I want and then ask myself, with the computer off and the magazine closed, what do I thik about what I've just read? Well, actually, I find good movies a great antidote to overanalyzing the news.
Terry Fleming, St. Louis, MO:
What is being done to foster the next generation of the type of journalists, such as yourself, that are so necessary for our continued democracy?
Bill Moyers:
Thanks for the compliment. There are a lot of fine young journalists -- better than I was at their age -- out there on the Web and in the world of free-lance. Some of brilliant writers, some are original thinkers. Check out Glenn Greenwald on salon.com, for example, at Matt Yglesia, Christopher Hayes, and so on. The problem is the farm club for traditional journalism is drying up. I went to work on my home town newspaper on my l6th birthday; newspaper jobs today are hard to come by at any age. When I first went to CBS -- as senior correspondent for the famous documentary series CBS REPORTS, able secretaries could move up to research jobs that led to positions as associate producers and then producers; none of the networks any longer produce that kind of investigative work, so the opportunities have shriveled. The Web is a great peg for hanging one's hat, and the "natural born" journalist will find a way to do so. But I don't know where the step-by-step move-by-move reporting -- overseen by a curmudgeonly editor who makes sure you get it right -- will come from.
J. Elizabeth Solnick, akron, Ohio:
What would you propose we do to fix the poor media we have been enduring for so long.... The Fourth Estate it is BROKEN.
Bill Moyers:
The term "media", Elizabeth, is too general. Not all "media" is broken. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage - they're all "media", too. And far from "broken" they're wallowing in money from some of the very tactics you describe. Serving partisan constituencies can be lucrative. It's the quality journalism we've come to associate with the best newspapers and magazines that's in jeopardy. Over the past 50 years advertising has paid for the reporting and editing. Finding a substitute for that advertising is the big challenge. I suspect some journalism stars - the Paul Krugmans and George Wills - could flourish as independent brand sites supported by Web subscribers. How to pay for the unsung shoe-leather fact-gathering document-digging on-the-scene reporters is another matter. Would the Watergate scandal have been revealed without a young Bob Woodward checking the police blotter in the District of Columbia? I doubt it. And that's to be feared.
Broadcasting - a subject raised by Joshua Brown of Arlington, Texas in another post - is a different matters. Radio audiences are fracturing again, but television audiences seem are more loyal, mainly, perhaps, because the form is one people find entertaining. But don't expect in-depth coverage locally or nationally from television. And the kind of investigative reporting that takes weeks or months - forget it on the tube. Except for Frontline, NOW, Bill Moyers Journal, and 60 Minutes, there's not much digging. It's one thing to cover the news, another to uncover it. And too few have the resources or inclination to do that kind of plumbing.
Broadcasting - a subject raised by Joshua Brown of Arlington, Texas in another post - is a different matters. Radio audiences are fracturing again, but television audiences seem are more loyal, mainly, perhaps, because the form is one people find entertaining. But don't expect in-depth coverage locally or nationally from television. And the kind of investigative reporting that takes weeks or months - forget it on the tube. Except for Frontline, NOW, Bill Moyers Journal, and 60 Minutes, there's not much digging. It's one thing to cover the news, another to uncover it. And too few have the resources or inclination to do that kind of plumbing.
Vilma Pritchard, Nesconset NY 11767:
Why can't State of Emergency be declared for FINANCIAL catastrophes like natural ones? How many homes and jobs must be lost before we declare one?
Bill Moyers:
We don't need a state of emergency to be declared if official Washington acts as if one exists, and one exists. Visibly in the lives of so many millions who have lost their homes and their jobs, invisibily in the rotted foundations of our financial system that for too long now has been exploited by the elect for their own benefit. I dont' think enough people realize just how close we are to "the point of no return." Obama was asked about that last night in his news conference, it was a real teachable moment, and he signaled his own understanding of the reality when he talked about a possible "lost decade." But then he softened his language and I thought he pulled his punch -- nervous, I'm sure, because he didn't want to cause a panic. He still needs to make a speech to the nation as if a state of emergency had been declared.
Pat Fletcher, Trenton, NJ:
Which of your past topical programs or books would you redo if you could? What exactly would you do differently?
Bill Moyers:
Most recently? It was just a few weeks ago. I had a great woman in the studio -- Sarah Chayes, the former NPR reporter who was sent to cover Afghanistan after 9/ll and stayed to start a local business near Kundahar, to help the Afghanis become self-sufficient. She knows more about the country and its people than anyone I've met in a long time. And the conversation was wonderfully illuminative when I ended it in order to run an interview that I had conducted the day before with Governor David Patterson of New York, who had just released his new "austerity" budget. I interviewed him because 48 of our states are in dire straits and I thought it would help viewers around the country to learn about how governors struggle to make hard choices between competing goods. But I cut it too short, as well. In hindsight I should have devoted the time to one of these subjects instead of trimming both of them. It wasn't our best broadcast because while it was produced, we didn't take you deep enough on either topic.
Lisa, Madison, WI:
Few of my students in a college intro to Journalism class watch PBS. How do we attract more young citizens to quality/public media?
Bill Moyers:
That's our fault in public television . We have too few broadcasts grounded in reporting -- the best is NOW with David Brancaccio and Frontline, the best documentary series since CBS Reports -- so we don't have that farm club I spoke of earlier. Our local stations have too few resources to cultivate new talent. The BBC is a great newsgathering organization because it was established with a dedicated tax that produces revenues of about six billion dollars a year -- that's why listeners and viewers get a feast of news and information not to mention some great cultural programming. Public media in this country has never had the means to grow our own journalists, and we don't now. We need to reconstitute ourselves with at least a third of our programming devoted to news and public affairs and a trust fund to provide the training that produces generation after generation of independent journalists.
David Bean, Portland, Oregon:
Wouldn't an independent media ethic include funding for it? How about having subscribers through internet service providers (ISPs) pay for content?
Bill Moyers:
You've put your finger on the crux of the matter: How to get people to pay for the information they need? Getting them to pay for the information they want - entertainment, for example - is not the big problem. But the information we need as citizens, to make democracy work and hold government accountable - that's the rub. Newspapers are dying less from too few readers than from too little advertising. There were no ads in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, for example. An executive at the Times was quoted as saying, "If people won't pay for what they love, we're out of business." New business models have to emerge, including revenue from subscribers. Joel Kramer - the former editor of the Minneapolis Star (and, I might add, once my intern when I was publisher of Newsday) -- has started a regional journalism Web site base on a not-for-profit model. He sells ads and sponsorships and raises the rest of his budget from people who care about serious news coverage. He puts the issue this way: "Serious journalism is a community asset, not a consumer good, and people (and foundations) should support it, as they support museums. Publish a newspaper worth $2 a day, the price of a cup of coffee, and $5 on Sunday. Raise the quality. Make it more i-depth, more analytical, to complement the immediacy of your free Web site, and do not make that deeper more insightful coverage available for free on the web." Joel is part of an interesting debate on these issues going right now at http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/battle-plans-for-newspapers/ Check it out.
songweasel, orlando, florida:
we tweet, fb, txt...r we 2 L8? is language as we know it going away? plz, sa it 8n't so...
Bill Moyers:
Believe it not, one of the many things on which I have no expertise is the future. I leave that to the Apocalypists. But I know of course that we humans adapt, change, create new ways of saying the same old thing -- "I love you." and new ways of transmitting it (my granddaughter texts back 'I (heart) U." The urge to communicate being as primal as the urge to procreate, I suspect we will develop new idioms and modes of speech, but at least I will be long gone before Elizabeth Barrett Browning is reduced to a robotic squeak accompanied by a short electronic pulse. On a related point: Did you see the study done in Britain, and just released this week, about the IQs of children dropping by a factor of 2 over the past 25 years? It has educators all a'twitter (no pun intended) and is, I think, a cause of concern.
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Starred (*) questions have been edited by PBS editors for brevity and/or clarity. The original, unedited question can be found to the right under Audience Questions.
Confident in the country's future?
Mr. Moyers, how confident are you in the future of our country?
Bill Moyers Will Continue the Discussion
Hi everyone,
Thank you to everyone who joined our chat today. The live session was so popular that we experienced some technical difficulties. As a result, Mr. Moyers was not able to answer the final question. He has graciously agreed to answer that question, as well as a few others, on his blog as the week goes on.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/
We apologize for any inconvenience - but we are thrilled that so many people wanted to join in on the live conversation. Thanks again for your participation!
Lauren
PBS Engage Staff
Media Access
As an African-American writer and feminist, I state my biases early. Notions of dispersed inequalities seem to surface whenever I listen to the "spin" of current mainstream reportage. As was the case in "Animal Farm," we are all equal but especially when it comes to media, some seem to be more equal than others. Whether considering "A-Rod" versus "Barry Bonds" or Obama's having run for change while countering many of the inclinations of supporters on America's "left," it appears that only the sanitized perspectives of Black media mavens, whose paterned perspectives don't stray far from the mainstream of capital oriented business perspectives, find their way into the public discourse. Indeed, though a Political Scientist who matriculated at MIT with the likes of Glenn Loury, my ideas as they embrace a broader sense of the democratic principle than that forwarded by the current guardians of the fourth estate, are never heard. As an example, there has been no serious or protracted discourse that considers banking sanctions on those institutions that have taken TARP funds with no accountability or commitment to support federal attempts at righting the fiscal ship of state. As well, Public Broadcast teams from San Diego to Dallas present numbers of ethnic staff that are far inferior to their corresponding demographics with no real access or entree to consistent and ongoing modes of expression for those on the periphery. Indeed, if anything, those "public" inclinations should be just the opposite and the Public air should echo voices that the private sphere would most assuredly not want to hear. McCluhan was correct that the medium is the message. Is the broader message to disenfranchised America that much like the sixties, where Blacks were chided for "talking Black and sleeping white," that even the fringes of alternative media reportage have their limits and all who might qualify are nonetheless not allowed to play? Where is the love? Has the centrifugal quality of modern media "thrown" truly dissenting ideas aside?
Tuesday's Chat
BM: "Did you see the study done in Britain, and just released this week, about the IQs of children dropping by a factor of 2 over the past 25 years?"
I was unaware of it, but the time period correlates with the beginning of 'Thatcherism'.
BM: "Radio audiences are fracturing again, but television audiences seem are more loyal,"
I read or saw where PBS is hurting, but NPR is experiencing and audience surge.
BM: "Newspapers are dying less from too few readers than from too little advertising." and "New business models have to emerge, including revenue from subscribers.".
Less advertising could be used by newspapers to display more independence. They could then advertise this indepedence to justify the extra cost as does public radio and TV during their pledge drives.
BM: "Except for Frontline, NOW, Bill Moyers Journal, and 60 Minutes, there's not much digging. It's one thing to cover the news, another to uncover it."
I notice that the only commercial broadcasting program you mention is 60 Minutes. Is it any coincidence that most of the newscasters on this program are in the 60 to 80 year age range. I have talked to many younger people and when I mention the news or jounalism, they reply something to the effect that it is bull. I sympathize with them. It is hard to take the new 'infotainment' model of news seriously.
However, I don't think they realize that there is news and journalism that is serious, has no ulterior purpose related to business, reenforcing nationalism, or simply imparting an uplifting moment. News and journalism on subjects that seriously effect their lives.
Infotainment has helped foster a population that is, to a large degree, discouraged and intellectually lazy. And for those who do want to get involved, well there is always Rush and Bill.
Mr. Moyer, what do you think
Mr. Moyer, what do you think about future of journalism? It seems to me that Journalist value is no longer there. For instance, we see these opion host dominating cable news and when one tries to hold them accountable, they would say, well, I'm not a journalist; I'm an opinion. There is evident to people like Sean Hannity (I think this happened when he was arguing with Robert Gibbs). He said that he's not journalist, but by the same token, he claim to be journalist whenever he is questioning Mr. Obama's. So, do you think journalism has been changed by opinion talk-shows?
Hi Bill: Was the Moyers
Hi Bill: Was the Moyers community in Southeastern Oklahoma named for your family?
Book by two British authors
At the end of your 20 Mar 09 show you mentioned a book by two British authors whose collected data over three decades indicated that the narrorer the distribution of the wealth of the country the happier the people were. Would you please tell me the name of the book and the authors?
Robert Dunlap
interview with william k black-4/3/09
Bill, great interview and great guest. His knowledge and clear outline of the culprits and actions of the king-pins that put us where we are now in this economic mess was the best I have heard to date. It would be great if Frontline would carry Mr. Black's observations into the bowels of these corporations like they used to when I first started watching them so many years ago.
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