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Transcript - December 1, 2006
BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW.
It's nice to know that Americans, in all their diversity, agree on something: that media in this country could use some serious improvement. Pick your peeve, it'll be reflected in any number of recent public opinion surveys: trust in the news media continues to crumble. The media have an axe to grind. The media are profane. Media—from television, radio, newspapers to books and the internet—are increasingly dominated by a few big companies.
There has to be a way forward because nothing less than the health of our democracy
depends on it and we're about to talk with two guys who have some ideas on both the problems and some solutions. One is Martin Kaplan the director of the Norman Lear center at the University of Southern California's Annenberg school. The other is that center's prime benefactor: Archie Bunker's father, the legendary television producer Norman Lear.
All in the Family still gets cited as the most important to show ever. Lear's had loads of other important hit shows—the list is on our website if you want to reminisce. These days Lear stands behind the liberal advocacy group he created—people for the American way. He's also been a major backer of the careful academic study of the intersection between media and democracy.
BRANCACCIO: Well, hello, gents.
KAPLAN: Hi David.
LEAR: Good evening.
BRANCACCIO: Norman, given the state of the media, why don't you just wash your hands of the whole thing. I mean, you're a man of means. Go off and learn oil painting, or retreat on a yacht somewhere. Why—why stay engaged with the media.
LEAR: Aren't we on a yacht? What am I doing here?
My life has been spent in media. It's something I understand—a good deal better than I understand other things.
I think this could be the—this is the best of television today, The Golden Age, as it were. Because you can find anything you want.
if you are looking for quality of any kind, it's there. There's a science channel, and a Discovery Channel and an Arts and Entertainment Channel. And Geography, and it's all there. And some great drama, and some classic comedy. But, you have to hunt. You have to wish to find it. And—and then hunt to do that.
So, on that level, and because we're living now, this is the time. So, this is the Golden Age.
KAPLAN: You wouldn't say that if you were dead.
LEAR: I—quite correct, I wouldn't say it if I were dead. I find there are a number of things I would not say if I were dead.
BRANCACCIO: So, why study it, I mean, if it's kind of a Golden Age, why study—
LEAR: I'm not studying it! I'm working it!
BRANCACCIO: Well, you are working it, but you're also enabling—the study of it.
LEAR: Well, we—we—there's a new mission statement that Mister Kaplan came up with very recently.
KAPLAN: If I had memorized it, I'd be a better person. It's perfect material as a cut away.
LEAR: Ad-lib it. Just as you—
KAPLAN: The mission of the Lear Center is to study the impact of entertainment on society. But when I say that, I want to ask you to think of entertainment differently. Don't think of it just as leisure activities, as what Wall Street would define the entertainment sector. Think of it as the way that everyone in society is looking for an audience. Think of how every realm, from news to politics, to religion, to architecture, retailing, all of them depend on becoming part of show business, in order to perform their missions.
BRANCACCIO: But—how is that relevant to our democracy, to the health of our society?
KAPLAN: Because democracy should not just be governed by the values of show business. There are some issue to understand them, you might have to risk just a teensy bit of boredom. Sometimes, things are so complicated that they can't be said in 15 seconds, but might, God forbid, take a minute and a half. The way in which our need to be constantly entertained, constantly stimulated has potentially a corrosive effect on our ability, as a society, to focus on anything.
LEAR: But when you say, "our need," there—that would assume the audience's need. And—and I think the audience has been brought to that place by advertising, by the consumer-oriented—culture, by corporate American—so forth, that—that—it—finds that can owe their attention best by moving fast and juggling fast, you know.
They—if they—'cause if they sat back and had the opportunity to think about it, they might not like it.
KAPLAN: It's true.
BRANCACCIO: Well, that's part of the paradox. 'Cause you say it's a Golden Age, for instance, for television, but a challenge is—people don't always choose the best stuff. opposite us tonight, you—you can turn the channel, and right now, the goofy America home video show has got—a tree falls on a man in a hammock, a child get a toilet seat stuck around his head. I mean, this is not—
KAPLAN: I'm missing that? Sheesh! Can you tivo that?
LEAR: A child gets his head —
BRANCACCIO: But surely, this is not ennobling. I mean, you have to—
KAPLAN: Well, and the more give them, the more they'll watch
Even Saint Augustine—wrote in The Confessions that it was amazing how the most moral of all his friends was the most blood-thirsty when faced with the spectacle of the gladiators. We're still that way, and if you dangle something shiny in front of us, we've got to pay attention to it. That's what's in the power of the people who run the media, enormous responsibility.
BRANCACCIO: Well, that's the key, enormous responsibility on the part of people who run the media. You have to raise consciousness. You have to, what—tell them that there should be a higher purpose?
LEAR: Well, that—that—it comes to the—the—the—the whole question of responsibility. And—you know, it could be—at the very beginning of television—the people who owned television stations and the great figures, the Paleys and the Goldensons and the Sarnoffs were broadcasters. They considered themselves broadcasters.
Broadcasters suggested to them—some sense of responsibility. And so, the seven o'clock news, it was seven o'clock then, the nightly news—was a loss leader. They didn't have to make money.
LEAR: All of that's vanished, in the pursuit of the ratings, which translates to the quarterly profits.
LEAR: If the name of the game is a quarterly profit statement, this quarter larger than the last, it will be at the expense of all other values.
KAPLAN: And at the same time, the media are alleged to be fulfilling a public interest obligation. They get free licenses to broadcast on the public airwaves—
BRANCACCIO: From the government.
KAPLAN: From the government, which acts as the trustees of the people, who own the airwaves. And they promise to fulfill a public interest obligation when they get those licenses. And so, when you ask them, "What is it they do?" They talk about their 10k walks for breast cancer. Well, that's very nice, but it would also be nice to cover elections.
BRANCACCIO: I want to ask you this, Marty, in that regard. We've just come out of an election. if it's as bad as people say, how do you count for the results? I mean, everyone says it was a referendum, that election, on corruption in politics and also on a strategy in Iraq that has gone awry. People who voted that way, the public got it from the media. So, something's working...
KAPLAN: Well, I think to some degree, it's despite the media, rather than because of it. And it's because of the new media, rather than the dinosaur media. Many of the candidates who ultimately prevailed were not known nationally or locally through the so-called "mainstream media." It was things like the internet and blogs—
LEAR: The blogosphere.
KAPLAN: And—and—activists, who made these candidates plausible, who did a lot of fundraising for them, and who created a kind of national grassroots network that they couldn't have dreamt of if they had to go through a top-down machinery. SO, that's one of the great joys of the new media, is it allows a kind of democratization of the grassroots, which really has atrophied in recent years.
LEAR: I—I that—that's true, and it's also were a lot of dry grass out there waiting for the spark. And I think—off the blogosphere—came that spark.
BRANCACCIO: SO, You're encouraged by—the—proliferation of voices on the internet, and people have web logs and so forth—
KAPLAN: Do you want me to depress you?
BRANCACCIO: Well, I—just—you know, engage—the word on the street, in recent public opinion polls is that we've got a problem.
KAPLAN: Let's start with this. The—Radio and Television News Directors' Association, which is the collecting of all the people around the country who create local news, did a poll. And they asked Americans, "What source do you turn to for your information."
BRANCACCIO: The answer was?
KAPLAN: 65 percent said, "Local television news." Dramatically beating out broadcast news, cable news—papers, internet. 65 percent said, "local TV news." Now, I would be the first to say that there are heroes and heroines out there in local TV news who are doing a phenomenal job against all odds. On the other hand, if a cat is up a tree, or if someone is slaughtered at the Boy Scout den, that will be wall-to-wall, every day, every night, and will always—drive out the kind of—informative programming that people are desperate to get.
BRANCACCIO: The place where most Americans are getting their political news—
KAPLAN: Right, the get the least amount of—news—not the least, but it's—it's quite down there. And, when you look at what they do get, it is dramatically skewed toward who's ahead, who's behind, how much money have the raised and what strategies. If you're looking for an issue-story that will actually explain where the candidates are on something, you'd have to work for the FBI to find it.
BRANCACCIO: Do you think this has a connection to democracy, Norman? You think that it's not just—local newscasts, by and large, stink? That—you think it's a much bigger issue?
LEAR: There's so much to be said on the subject. Yes, I think leadership—is there to lead. Leadership isn't leading when leadership—turns around and asks the questions. You know, of—of the—of the sheep they're supposed to be leading. And I don't mean sheep in a pejorative sense at all. I mean, I'm here to be led. I want a President who's gonna treat me like he's my dad. You know, and help me understand—in—in—in—in—in context, what is going on in our country and what is going on in the world, and lead me.
BRANCACCIO: So if we don't fix the state of—of the media, so that citizens don't get the information they need. You're saying we're not going to get the leaders that we deserve.
LEAR: I think that's correct.
BRANCACCIO: But Norman, you spent you career in the commercial side of all this. You know about ratings pressure. You know about the—project—
LEAR: And I've spoken to it all of my life.
BRANCACCIO: Indeed you have but how did you pull it off? Because you always had the bean counters, probably—nipping at your heels and saying, "We have shareholder value to think of."
LEAR: Well, look—it began when—when—at the same time the wanted to put All in the Family on the air. I had an opportunity to write—produce, and direct three films for United Artists. I had done a film, they liked it, and—it's called Cold Turkey. And—they offered me a three picture deal.
SO, when CBS wanted to put All in the Family on the air, I was able—I didn't think it took any courage at all—(NOISE) to say "my way or no way." I mean, somebody has to—somebody's belly has to be the slide rule, it's gonna be mine, it's my show.
BRANCACCIO: But every news director of every local station can't set himself up or her up with—three picture deal and go in and say, "This—we're gonna cover the news the way it should be."
LEAR: Of course they can.
BRANCACCIO: Can they?
KAPLAN: Well, what they can do is apply the same storytelling show business skills that they apply to everything else to real news. They are brilliant at capturing our attention. They do reenactments, they do shadow play that have grave narrators. They do chyrons. It's really exciting to watch.
It draws you in, it works. We have lizard brains, and they do it because it actually works.
BRANCACCIO:Norman, you're on the record as being quite concerned about the direction of the media in this country. In terms of increasingly fewer companies dominating whole stretches of the media. Why is that a problem?
LEAR: If all of the news and information. And entertainment. Passes to all of us through three or four funnels. That's all there are. And every bit of news and information you get comes to you from those three or four funnels. Something is wrong.
LEAR: Who can say—that all of the news is—that—that comes to us. And the information that comes to us can be distilled by three—companies only?
This experiment in democracy as it used to be called—depends on an informed citizenry. It—there—there's nothing at the core of all of our domestic problems more important than that.
BRANCACCIO: But you have to roll a social conscience into this whole paradigm, when you're talking about journalism. And Norman, you did that on the entertainment side, didn't you?
LEAR: Our—our first commandment was to make people laugh. And—and—and not the tee-hee and ha-ha variety, but to bring them to their knees. And—didn't take long to learn, if we didn't learn it going in, that the more you had an audience caring, we had 240 people sitting there, every time taped. The more they cared, the more they were on the edge of their seat and the—the—the—the louder we—would—would be that belly laugh.
BRANCACCIO: But you could've left it at that. You could've said, "We made 'em laugh." But you wanted to go further. I mean, all you shows have—some thought put into it about, "How can we make the world slightly a better place, or how can we—"
LEAR: Well, somebody—somebody once said—you know, if you—you want to send a message, to use Western Union. So, it was a naughty thing to be sending a message. I truly never thought about—or any of us, thought about sending messages. We were parents, we were citizens—we're caring individuals. And—if drama is your subject and you—you—you just lean in that direction, you find the things to—and then, comes to a fact, that if they're caring, they're gonna laugh harder. So, it all worked together, and it wasn't, "Oh, what can we do now about this?"
BRANCACCIO: Well, like, when you had your character, Archie Bunker, say some retrograde thing, then you'd have—the son-in-law meathead answer him. And you had to be sure that the answer was factually correct and made sense, I would assume. That would require some—some attention to that kind of detail.
LEAR: Well, we paid that kind of attention. But then, because—because Archie was such a fool, intended to be a fool, although, there—there was nobody who ever was on Archie's side, that we ever convinced him that—you know, he was a fool. Because the—the—the mail I would get from people who cared about Archie, who cared about Archie in that way, was—"Well, you make such a fool of him at the end of every show." They got it.
You know, people got it. But, we came along with Maude, because we felt it would be only right to have a liberal on the tube who—knew as much about what she was talking about as he did. The fool that he was.
BRANCACCIO: But you also, in a sense, made a bit of a fool of Maude.
LEAR: That was intentional. I mean, a big-hearted—I think of myself . I said this recently—I got an enormous reaction as a bleeding heart conservative.
BRANCACCIO: You?
LEAR: Con—yes, conservative, because—you will not mess with my First Amendment or my Constitution, my Bill of Rights. I feel "mine" very strongly. And—and do I—is my heart bleeding for anybody I can help? Or that—child that—George Bush will not leave behind, but—I, as a bleeding heart, understand I will have to give up something. You know, maybe a good deal, to see that no child is left behind. My heart bleeds in that way.
KAPLAN: the thing about Norman's shows was that they started from the premise that the shows are, yes, entertaining, but they also had an impact on people's lives. And so, the people who make those shows, should be—good stewards of that impact. And so, if—there's a rape, if there's breast cancer, how people deal with it is not just what happens in some show, and that's the end of it.
This goes into the breakfast table conversations of families. It affects how people think about their own lives. I mean, when on Happy Days Fonzie got a library card, kids all across the country went out and got library cards.
BRANCACCIO: Modeling good behavior.
KAPLAN: Exactly. And—you know—I—a lot of show producers say, "I don't want to be in the business, every advocate in the world is gonna come to me and say, 'You know, pimp for my cause.'" On the other hand, anybody who makes creative entertainment should be aware of the amazing power they have in their hands.
They are, literally, playing with fire. And—and that has an impact on—not just kids, who are especially vulnerable, but on everybody, even sophisticated people. If it didn't, then advertising wouldn't work. We are all susceptible to those kinds of messages.
BRANCACCIO: Is there a way to institutionalize this more, Norman? This idea of getting the producers of these kind of entertainment programs. Or even news. To think about the larger purpose in communication.
LEAR: You know, I think that's—I don't know where that conversation can get started if not at the top at the biggest bully pulpit. we're back to leadership, you know. The—the whole question of leadership. Either we provide the leadership. We can—it—the—the media can appeal to the baser instincts of people. And certainly we have them. All of us have them.
Or—or—or to the aspect of us that sees some transcendence. That can reach for something better. Leadership suggests that we would at least spend some of that time.
And some of that drive. And some of that money. And some of that effort toward giving them something that would help them. Lift them.
BRANCACCIO: Well, Norman Lear, Martin Kaplan, thank you very much.
LEAR: Thank you.
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