OPENING QUOTES

"When I watch the news I am like, shocked. I like, can't believe what I hear sometimes."

"I haven't actually watched news lately because it's gonna bring up emotions and it's definitely, it's not gonna make us move on."

"You should know what's happening. But you should form your own opinion about it."
"I want more news."

TITLE: "Get the News?"

Oliver: I'm Oliver.

Christina: And I'm Christina.

Oliver: With all that’s been happening since September 11th, it's easy to become frightened or cynical. It may want you to turn off the news. But now more than ever, we have to stay in touch with what is going on in the world, both here and abroad.

Christina: So we've taken a close look at the news to help you to be more critical. To see the difference between what's fact and what's hype and how to sift through the different sources including the Internet.

Oliver: We've talked to a lot of teens and we also had the chance to interview some top journalism experts like Bill O'Reilly, host of Fox's THE O'REILLY FACTOR, Serena Altschul reporter for MTV and now CNN, Barry Gross, head editor for the NEW YORK POST, and Peter Jennings, long time anchor of NBC NEWS TONIGHT.

30 MILES FROM NEW YORK CITY

"The scariest thing I saw was the day after it happened in the NEW YORK POST and the headline said 'It's War.' I didn't get to read it yet so I wondered if we were really at war or if it was just a non-factual headline that they just wanted it to seem like we were at war."

ORANGE COUNTY, CA

"I was here on the west coast and I have family on the east coast, so knowing what's going on in real time and seeing what's going on was a real big comfort."

"People I know are still traumatized by the photos and they keep repetitively showing them and saying you wanted to see this. Take this. Eat it. Swallow it now. You can't consume it in a proper manner because it's thrown at you."

"The pictures were what was really happening and it's a good perspective of what was going on there."

Christina: Have there been stories that news stations have chosen not to present because of 9/11 and you know people are more sensitive now and you feel the viewers can't handle certain things?

Peter Jennings: I don't think that we think that people are more sensitive or that people can't handle things. There are certain things we decided very quickly right away that we would not do any of the jumpers from the trade towers. Just, period, no. We thought that would be too hard on people and I think the most important thing we did was decide that we wouldn't show the buildings falling down time and time and time again.

Carter (IN THE MIX reporter): Ever wonder who writes this stuff? I'm here at the offices of the NEW YORK POST to talk to the chief copy editor and to find out the truth behind the headlines.

Barry Gross: The POST is a tabloid and we are kind of brassy. We entertain as well as inform.

Carter: So why do you feel it was important to make that shift in tone after 9/11?

Gross: People were hungry for everything they could possibly read on it. To have any kind of playful tone in the headlines or brassy tone in the headlines would be inappropriate. It would be disrespectful. It would just be wrong.

WHAT'S HYPE?

"The thing of overdoing upsets me because it's that fine line of upsetting people and just getting the raw facts out."

"With the slightest thing they recorded I think could just, could sometimes bring more fear into people. So something, yes, should be reported but not everything needs to be said."

Christina: Due to all these headlines and all this talk and speak of war and terrorism, do you think the news has caused unwanted uncertainty in the people and public, it's scaring them?

Bill O’Reilly: If someone is scared that we reported there is anthrax in a Washington, DC post office, it's not our fault.

Christina: Not even that there is anthrax but that a person comes on TV -- an analyst -- and says these are the ways we go about doing warfare and these are all the things that could possibly happen to you, but don't fear anything. Do you think that's worse?

O’Reilly: I think that Americans are smart enough, most of them, to know what’s real and what's hype, you know? And the hype, you watch it for a little while and then start to turn it off.

Carter: With headlines like "Red Alert" and all the anthrax scares, were you concerned about making people scared or worried?

Gross: I don't think, when it comes down to what was happening with 9/11 with anthrax, that we could be accused with whipping up a frenzy. I don't believe that anything we would say in the headline could possibly scare people more. I mean people were getting anthrax. People were dying from it. Few people at this newspaper got anthrax.

News bite: I want to encourage all law enforcement officials and frankly all Americans everywhere to be on the highest state of alert.

Girl One in park: If there is knowledge of a terrorist attack by them getting on TV and being like there is going to be a terrorist attack, people will like be more cautious.

Girl Two in park: At the same time, I think it has a reverse effect on the public because it frightens people and it works people into this artificial state of panic that can't be sustained for a very long time. It's like crying wolf. If you do it long enough, the public will become immune so when there is a real danger you don't know how to act.

NEWS SOUND BITES

Christina: How do you think young kids should feel, seeing things like that and seeing these images going over and over and over again, playing all the time.

Jennings: I think it must be very tough on somebody to watch something extraordinarily violent all by themselves and not have anyone to talk to in order to understand what it is that is going on. But I am pretty much in favor of letting kids watch most things. I think they have to understand about that. I think they have to understand about violence because they will learn about courage and about fear. They're all part of life. You just want the chance to be able to talk to folks about it.

Oliver: What do you say to a teen that is afraid of getting all these intense facts that the media is giving out?

Serena Altschul: If there are things that are disturbing to you on television, it is ok to talk about them with your friends and definitely talk about it to your parents and if there is stuff that are scary that’s ok, because it's a scary time and understand that there aren't just easy answers. There are things that are just more complicated than they seem, particularly in television.

Boy: There may be a terrorist attack tomorrow. Find out where at 11. I mean ,they are not even trying to pretend that they aren't using terrorist attacks to increase ratings.

Christina: The news has become a lot more graphic, a lot more imagery going on, a lot more of everything going on and the headlines have become more and more graphic and I wanted to know, is that to catch ratings or is that just...

Jennings: I don't really know what to say to that. We call that ca-ca. Ca-ca.

Christina: Each of the stories are the same but they're presented in different ways and the headlines are more bold than the last one and each person is saying something more striking and vivid than the last person, so is there a lot more pressure now on the networks to make things more catching for ratings or otherwise?

O'Reilly: If you're in the commercial television news industry, yes, compete. Now the networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS -- they pretty much do what they have always done. You're not seeing a lot of difference there. Cable, that's different especially when you are getting into prime time because we are not only competing with the news programs. We’re competing with FRIENDS and ER and all these other ones, so we have to be flashier. We have to be more bold. We have to take some chances. We have to engage the audience right away. Not give them free minutes to let them click. 70 percent of Americans watch TV with the remote control in their hand.

Altschul: It's one of those eyeball things. There are more people looking at the screen right now and now the real goal is how do we keep them?

Girl in park: Right after 9/11, there was this thing that was shown over and over again. And it was of this Palestinian woman dancing when she heard the news that America had been hit and they just showed this one clip over and over again of this woman just smiling and dancing in the streets and it just makes people so internally angry and that's what like, hype is. That’s what propaganda is.

Gross: Bombs R Us, I guess, is a typical tabloid NEW YORK POST headline. It's certainly not a story that is a great deal of fun, but it properly reflected what was happening.

Carter: Do you think that that might have added or influenced any kind of prejudice or stereotypes?

Gross: We have pictures of children 8 or 9 years old training to become suicide bombers. Yes, that will influence some people's thought negatively. Is it fair to the vast, vast, vast majority of Arab-Americans and Muslims who are appalled by that? Yes, it is very unfair to them. But I can't see how, if we have photos like, that we should not use them.

"I wouldn't say that the media is actually causing the stereotyping to rise. I would say they are just doing their job and if it happens to come out that way, then that's just the way it's coming out."

"The newspapers and TV and President Bush addressing things like not to attack Islamic people and Arab people -- I think that was definitely necessary because there are a lot of ignorant people."

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

"I get my news from various sources, spend a lot of time on the Internet, watch TV, radio, anything really."

Girl in park: I like getting my information from TV just because you can see it visually.
"Being a teen growing up in California, we also hear a lot of our news from the radio because we rely on our cars more often. We drive all the time, constantly."

Oliver: How do the roles of TV, newspaper, how do they differ?

Janine Jackson: TV and on radio, to some extent, they have less time to tell the story. You know, print media can give background information and can usually be a little more complete and a little more comprehensive than what you get on TV or radio. But I think the standards should be basically the same in terms of including information and including a range of debate.

OP-ED WHERE PEOPLE GIVE THEIR OPINIONS

O'Reilly: We're like the op-ed page of the newspaper. We give opinion and we debate issues. We bring people in and if you were to put one label on, it would be a news canvas. I look at a story and I try to tell people what really happened here. What it means to your life. How relevant it is. Now I have to do that in a flamboyant way. Sure, I have to get your attention. I can't just sit there like and here's what's going on, you know, I'll die.

Altschul: I get to go out and really explore a topic or investigate a subject. And put together an experience and a journey focused around some specific question. We stopped by the local music store to see how the business was affected by September 11th.

O'Reilly: TV is a medium where the camera cuts through and brings whatever you’re talking about and whoever you’re talking about into your home. It's a very intimate medium so you have to play it much differently than if you're a newspaper person.

Gross: I mean, obviously if you're a newspaper like this, the headlines are not gonna have a dramatic effect on someone. The great debate on the virtues of what goes above the fold and what goes below the fold. If it's above the fold people can see it and if it's below the fold, well, tough. You have to buy the paper to see it. The tabloid you gotta lay it up front. I mean, buy us because. But when the buyer is reading the story, the story has to back it up.

Girl in park: When it's in print, it's a lot more in-depth and it's a lot more like delineated and you can weed out for yourself what is propaganda.

"I try to see the Europeans' papers too. I try to see what they are following and how they are following what is happening."

"Just because something is written in a newspaper, that doesn't necessarily mean it is unbiased. Everything has some bias in it no matter what."

WHERE'S THE BIAS?

Jackson: Welcome to COUNTERSPIN, your weekly look behind the mainstream news. I'm Janine Jackson.


Oliver: Could you explain what FAIR is?

Jackson: FAIR stands for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and we are a media watch group. We think news media is really important. They influence how we think and how we feel about the world, so they deserve scrutiny. So we look at newspapers and magazines and TV and radio. We try to ask questions, like whose perspective is included in this story and who's left out? Are all the facts that are relevant in this issue included in the story or is there something missing? Journalists have a responsibility to represent a range of perspectives including those that are outside the powerful elite circles in society. And we encourage people to ask those questions and talk back to media when they see something that they don't like.

Girl One in park: The media was just all over us

Girl Two in park: They have sensationalized it. The covers have been, oh look at the pain, look at the suffering, and every media outlet that our story goes through distorts it a little bit more and I think by the time our opinions get to the public, to the people who are watching, to the people that really want to know how we feel, they are not really our stories anymore.

Girl One in park: I also think it is really horrible that we're the school that is getting the attention. There are schools that are closer to the World Trade Center site.

"The media kind of played a bad part with us because we are the closest school, but everybody said that Stuyvesant was the closest school and in turn made a lot of students get mad."

"I’m kind of glad that we don't get that much publicity because some kids don't really want to experience it and live through it all over again every time you watch it on the news."

Girl in park: It's like when you cut yourself or something like that, you don't like dig your finger in it to see what the inside looks like right after it happens. You let something heal.

Oliver: Would you say that there is some bias in the way they report the news?

Jackson: We don’t really think that there is anyone without bias. That is what we are trying to convey to people -- that it’s not really that anyone can be objective or completely neutral, either us or the major media. What we try to be is balanced. In other words, we try to include points of view that we disagree with and disengage then in some way and to explain where we are coming from.

"Peter Jennings, since he is a newscaster, he really gives you an unopinionated look at what is going on."

BIAS

Christina: A couple of years ago we did an interview with you and you said news does have a bias.

Jennings: You should be able to sit there and ask yourself right through that lens and what does that person on the television trying to say to me? In other words, you have to analyze everything you see and be pretty skeptical.

Christina: Do you still feel that way?

Jennings: Sure, sure I think we all have biases. Some of us are white. Some of us are black. Some of us are old. Some of us are young. Some of us live in one place. Some of us live in another. In other words, I think we are all a product of our experiences. In the selection of stories, we make you see where we are interested. We do a lot of stories on religion on WORLD NEWS TONIGHT. We've always done a lot of stories on race. Those show somebody's interested in doing something in the country. I don't think there is anything wrong with bias because we all have it. But the thing is to do the reporting in a fair way and to not let your biases out all the time.

Girl in park: It’s like when you’re doing a survey and you ask leading questions, when you’re interviewing someone and you ask leading questions because you want a certain answer.

Christina: Alright so what's a leading question?

Oliver: A leading question is a type of question is deliberately asked to get a certain type of answer. Here's a leading question. Do you think teachers really pile on the homework?

Christina: As opposed to how do you feel about your homework situation?

COMPARE AND ANALYZE

"Before I used to think like it's the news, they are reporting the truth, and they are giving me an unbiased look at things. But now I can actually look into what they are telling me and be like, this isn't substantiated. This is an opinion."

Oliver: With all the news that is in front of us, with all these different sources of news, how can we tell what's fact and what is made up?

Altschul: You need to understand the context and the layers of the context and where these people are speaking from and what sort of institutions are behind them, but in another way, maybe a simpler way, you just should maybe realize that you just should realize that you should be questioning what people say.

Girl in park: Look for the facts, not the adjectives. The thing is, you can say a sentence. You can say the exact same thing but have completely different implications and a lot of that is what the media's been doing.

Christina: How do teens distinguish between what's good information and what information is opinion? How do we sift through that?

O'Reilly: They need to read as much as they can and not rely on television so much. You’ve gotta get a basic understanding of what the issue is and you only can do that by reading. As painful as it may be, if you want to be smart and informed, you have to read.

Girl in park: I like to read similar articles in the NEW YORK TIMES and the WALL STREET JOURNAL because the JOURNAL is very Republican and the TIMES is fairly Democratic. Fairly. And it's an interesting comparison because you see a different perspective on it and what's interesting is that each one brings up facts that they each admit. So if you look at two sources of media with opposed biases, it's really very informative and you wind up with something resembling the story.

"It's important rather than to stop watching the news, because you think it's biased to watch more news and different news stations. Don't get all your news from Channel 1. You know, go to all the different channels and newspapers and sort of look around and keep your ears open to what's going on.

Jackson: The worst thing to do is to read one newspaper or to turn on television news and watch one show and imagine that you are getting all the information you need to get.

Jennings: If you see a story that confuses you or see a story that interests you, just go and look at how all different sources are reporting it. So if you see something on cable and see something on a network and they are all different and you see something different on the Internet, than you have to do a little homework.

O'Reilly: The Internet is a great tool -- you can learn whatever you want.
"The nice thing about the Internet is that you have so much available so you can find out everything you've ever wanted from all the different perspectives which is great."

Anthony Lappe: Young people see that a minute and a half report on the news is not giving them a full picture and they are turning to the Web. You can read reports from all around the world with different perspectives of different people, different countries, and you can do your own primary research of documents and government agencies.

Oliver: A primary source is any firsthand account of an event. Original documents, photographs, speeches -- these are all primary sources.

Christina: It's like hearing gossip in the hallway about someone versus hearing it directly from that person, who in this case would be the primary source.

Lappe: It's incredible and inspiring because there are so many sites where you can find very credible information that cover stories that you're not gonna get on the evening newscast.

Josh Shore: Along came the Web, along came the visual video, and has sort of made it possible to get the news yourself. Desktop editing made it possible to edit it yourself. We saw an opportunity to start creating a new news culture that spoke to a generation that we felt was being ignored by mainstream news outlets simply because no one could really find a way to keep them interested.

Lappe: One of the main dangers of the Web is so much misinformation, conspiracy theories, and bogus rumors are floating around and a lot of young people get sucked into that. There’s a lot of information out there and it is up to you to try to sort through it all and look behind the scenes, look where that information is coming from, and look at the internal biases of the sources that you are getting. At GUERRILLA NEWS NETWORK, we're just another source out there. Another part of the diet, and if young people truly don't go out there and get their news from different sources, the world is going to be a much better place in the long run and you're going to be enriched as a knowledgeable person with these issues.

GET INVOLVED

"It’s our responsibility to make our government accountable for the decisions we make here."

"The youth need a voice as much as the adults because the youth are the future and are the present so we need to know what the youth are thinking, what the stance on views are."

"What are your expectations of the children’s forum?"

"I’m expecting you know, a new show of HIV/AIDS to be addressed as a whole. So we are here as watch ducks and we watch what they will do for us."

"If the youth didn’t have a voice like they do right now today, how would you feel?"
"Like nobody, I don’t know. Like being part of nothing."

"On TV, it looks like it was just done right there and you know it looks easy but when you are actually on the grounds doing work, it makes you think more about what the media really is. You watch some 60 second clip and you don't realize that hours of tape had to go into it and hours of work."

Christina: Is there a challenge in like trying to get teens to watch the news and trying to get them to absorb what is going on?

Jennings: What do you think would catch their eye?

Christina: It's weird because we don't want somebody to dull down the news for you because you are a teen and underestimate you almost, but you want something to catch your eye, I don't know.

Jennings: I almost think that TV does underestimate the intelligence of teenagers and people in their 20s and 30s as well and sometimes we're guilty of saying duh, and we don't need to. I think really good reporting and TV is when people push themselves intellectually to a higher level.

O'Reilly: You can't get informed in America. You can't get informed anywhere. In most countries, the government tells you what you can see on television. America is one of the few that has a free press that is unfiltered by the government.
"When I was little, my Dad would come home at 8 and we would eat dinner and we would watch LARRY KING LIVE and stuff like that. It's like it was incredibly boring at the time but I learned a lot about world politics."

Girl in park: You have to trust yourself as an informed observer. You have to be able to trust your intellect. To make your own decisions to weed out what's feasible and what isn't.
"If you don't know what is going on in the world, it is like you hardly have a knowledge of life."

CLOSING

Oliver: There is no question. The media can keep us in touch with what is going on all over the world. Understanding how to interpret the news is the key to really stating what you know. But after you recognize that different mediums have different strengths and just because something is in print or on the Internet doesn't mean that it's true or unbiased.

Christina: There is bias in everything, including this program. Like who we choose to interview and what questions we decide to ask.

Oliver: Just remember that we can never have too many sources. We have to ask our own questions and think for ourselves.

Oliver: As always, we would love to hear your opinion and advice. So you can e-mail us at inthemix@pbs.org.

Christina: Or you can drop a line at IN THE MIX, 114 E. 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016.

Oliver: And you can also check out our Web site at pbs.org/inthemix.

Oliver: For more info about this show and other IN THE MIX shows. You can hear video clips and hear what other teens had to say. Plus, you’ll find other resources like transcripts, schedules, discussion guides and lots more.