Dear FRONTLINE,

Great documentary! However I think there is too much finger pointing at the media and news outlets. Don't worry, I don't work at one. One thing the film is leaving out is the dumbing down of the American public. If the American people in general demanded good, objective, quality news, someone would deliver it.

People watch "The Daily Show" not because the news is just as good, they watch because it is not news, it's a comedy show. We live in a culture now that feels it must be entertained at all times. Few take the time to inform themselves and it's considered OK by most to be incredibly ignorant. This is the root of the problem. The news is just pandering to this. Of course they share a big chunk of the blame but the problem lies with an incredibly uninformed public caring more about Anna Nicole Smith than a bombing in Najaf.

JD Sitter
San Marcos, TX

Dear FRONTLINE,

Thank you for a wonderful exposé of the current trends in journalism and the news business. Although the information age and the attendant technology has forever altered the landscape for this enterprise, it is the insatiable greed of Wall Street that has created the long-term damage to journalism, just as it has damaged every other aspect of American life. If we cannot get that bull under control, it is going to irreversibly damage the the country---uncontrolled greed destroying sustainable greed---if it has not done so already.

Keep the pressure on.

Jeffrey Gold
Salt Lake City, Utah

Dear FRONTLINE,

Where are the women? As a previous poster noted, out of more than 50 interviews, only a handful were of women, and only two (Dana Priest and Judith Miller) were actual journalists (one with no control over broad news decisions, the other with little remaining credibility). Maybe this is part of the newspaper problem. Can an industry being run almost completely by people of the same demographic (middle aged and older white men) have a broad appeal? I think the results speak for themselves.

Los Angeles, CA

FRONTLINE's editors respond:

We asked Raney Aronson-Rath, the producer, director and writer of the first two programs in this four-part series, to address this question. Here is her response: "When we embarked upon the challenge of producing these films, we made an editorial decision to interview, as much as possible, the players and architects of this history -- those who could tell us first-person accounts of the stories we were presenting, rather than rely heavily on experts and other journalists. What this meant was that we had little choice about whom we talked to. The main players for the series' first hour on the Valerie Plame affair and the history of reporter's privilege were, for the most part, men. Other than Judith Miller, the lawyers who fought her case and the executive editor at The New York Times and the other players - from James Goodale to Brad Reynolds, who argued against the reporters before the Supreme Court - all happened to be men. The same was true when we covered the First Amendment confrontations between the administration and The New York Times and The Washington Post. The executive editors of both papers were men and the reporters who broke the national security stories were men, with the exception of Dana Priest. As a female producer I found it unsettling, to say the least, that so many of the interviews we did were with men and that so many of the positions of power in the media industry we covered were held by men. But it was the reality that we faced. I did try to include other voices, such as Lucy Daglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, to help with the situation. But it couldn't make up for the fact most of the central figures in this media world we were in, were men."

Dear FRONTLINE,

As real journalism goes, so goes real democratic society.

Matthew Hevezi
Murrieta, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

Last night's piece was incredibly, sadly informative, and proved something I think most socially aware Americans have known for years: That an agressively investigative press with a mission to inform the public no longer exists in this country. I belong to what your reporter would call the "Daily Show" demographic, mainly because the information you get from Jon Stewart and co. is closer to quality real news than what the networks are giving people.

Instead of blaming bloggers and citizen journalists for making them increasingly obsolete however, the major news corps. should look closer to home. The decline is nobody's fault but the newspapers themselves and the greed of their owners. When you have news agencies beholden to stockholders, the "news" we recieve will of course be managed. And with an ill-informed population being fed celebrity gossip as if it's news of world importance, is it any wonder that the current administration can get away with the abuses it has?

Torraine Walker
Atlanta, GA

Dear FRONTLINE,

No discussion of citizen journalism can be considered complete without mention of the incredible volunteer work of countless activist journalists worldwide who have contributed to the Independent Media network since 1999.

Contributors to these websites have documented thousands of protests and other progressive activities across the globe this decade. These all-volunteer websites pre-date blogs, Youtube, and the plethora of hype around citizen journalism and Web2.0. In fact, in may ways IMCs were the model for the more recent comers. The IMCs have empowered citizens to create their own media for some time and have done it all without any corporate or government backing whatsoever.

There are over a hundred groups in this network. If you want to see the first-hand activist take on protests anywhere in the world, go to http://www.indymedia.org/ and look in the bottom of the left-hand column for the full list of websites. If you want to see activist photos from the anti-Bush demos in Brazil yesterday or today, go to the CMI Brasil IMC website. You want to see pics during the upcoming anti-G8 protests in June 2007, visit the Germany website this summer. You want to see the first posts of Josh Wolf and others from the anti-G8 demo in San Francisco in 2005, check out the SF Bay Area Indymedia website.

oakland, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

Having had a short-lived "career" (if I could even call it that) in journalism in the Netherlands, I now heavily depend on the internet for the provision of news from home, either through the press agencies or through regular email. Also, in American mainstream newsmedia I missed the indepth coverage of international and even domestic US issues I was accustomed to reading about. I literally suffered from news being presented through the prism of entertainment values and ended up received no hard news at all, were it not for access to the internet.

Interestingly, the third part of the documentary ended up with the issue as I have discovered almost everything in US society ends up with: money matters. I see this as the deeper charge and greatest challenge to the newsmedia, not only in this country, but all over the world, brought to us through this outstanding documentary series. The question this raises for me is this: Are we as a culture and a civilisation going to allow consumerism to strike even within the single most unique feature of humanity, what separates us from the animal kingdom, namely our intellectual heritage, development and future? If we do so, we will really give ourselves over to consumerism in its most literal meaning: "devourment."

I believe with Cornel West that in order to continue the democratic experiment and maintain integrity in our human endeavors, we need to pay closer attention to democracy matters than money matters.

Peace.

Maarten Altena
New Brunswick, New Jersey

Dear FRONTLINE,

Your program hit the nail on the head. I'm 30 years old and receive all of my news from the internet, even the New York Times. As a matter of fact I watched this program via the internet.

zach Summerlin
Flagstaff, Arizona

Dear FRONTLINE,

I thought it was amusing when Mr. Bergman asked John Carroll about the 20% profit margins and then, rather than asking Mr. Carroll (or one of the financial people interviewed) why such a large profit margin gives such a small return on assets, he gives one of those studied expressions of impressed surprise that would be more in place on the host of "To Catch a Predator" than on "FrontLine".

It takes only a rudimentary knowledge of finance to knowthat profit margin is nearly useless when comparing profitability across industries. Industries with low asset turn over ratiosneed much higher profit margins than industries with high assetturn over ratios.

This is no trivial complaint. Later in the story, Eli Broad is shown saying that his group would be happy with a 5-9% "return". In order to understand what he meant, it is critically importantto know if that is a 5-9% profit margin ratio, or if he meanta 5-9% return on equity or (return on assets, or return on investment.) He is not asked to clarify this, leaving the viewer none the wiser.

I think journalists would have more credibility if they spentmore time reading "Accounting for Dummies" than practicingtheatrical facial expressions.

San Diego, Ca

Dear FRONTLINE,

CENTRIST - That's how I would describe the analysis. Where was the progressive side? Why wasn't FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), Amy Goodman or Noam Chomsky/Ed Herman whose book, _Manufacturing Consent_, offers a comprehensive analysis part of the documentary? There were views expressed critical of the corporate media, but only from the conservative perspective.

There was no discussion of the fact that the NY Times sat on the domestic spying program of Bush's until the election was past. Bush owes the NY times a big favor. Yet, from this documentary, one is left thinking, some how, the NY Times has been adversarial only. How about Christine Amanpour's admission that the mainstream media practiced self-censorship in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq? It's not a matter of shifting structures- TV to Web dissemination that is responsible for a majority of Americans thinking Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attack on the World Trade Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

It's a lack of will and corporate mind-set of obedience and ideological blinders that should be a major focus of Frontline.

John Elfrank
New York, NY

Dear FRONTLINE,

I think Frontline is one of--if not the best--documentary news program on television today. I look forward to every new episode, for I know that it will be thoroughly researched, even-handed, and skillfully executed. As an instructor at the University of California, Riverside, I try to instill in my own students the need to research and investigate social phenomena, and Frontline is a prime model for investigative journalism that is in the best interest of the public trust not Wall Street.

Although there are numerous additional reasons to support PBS, Frontline is reason in and of itself. It is absolutely essential that the Frontline team continue to provide meaningful and insightful information to a public thirsty for it. Blogs, Yahoo, Google, or even prime time news programs cannot do what you do. Great work!

Lash Vance
Moreno Valley, California

Dear FRONTLINE,

We have seen the journalism of TV erode to the level of the tabloid to keep interest of the viewing public. I fear this with print media. We need to be aware that a larger number of journals keep a less controlled environment for political manipulators which are able to affect the owners and editors of them. The Internet allows a larger and more diverse opinion pool but of course we must be, as always, evaluating the sources (a skill that is still not taught effectively in the education system today).

News is not truth, as it is always a translation of the events and circumstances. It is time that the journalists create their own business model that allows us to get a professional evaluation of the "News". With the Internet, we could pay for this rather than pay advertisers for the cost of pulp and corporate infrastructure. I would be willing to spend the newspaper cost on this type of service instead.

I will miss the physical paper in hand. It feels so much more tangible and documented when the ink is still fresh.

Ernest Brown
Toledo, OR

Dear FRONTLINE,

What's to say it's not just the swing of the pendulum? Digital's in its honeymoon right now. We're all agog over its immediacy, its potential, its ease and cheapness. But eventually we'll learn that if we want responsible reporting--and we do--we have to feed trained journalists. We'll figure out a way to port more trained reporters over to digital. We'll live well with print-digital hybrids. And we'll make digital media self-supporting enough that it can pay journalists a living wage. In fact, it's already happening.

We're just going through the same troubles any profession faces when an easier, cheaper, more effective technology surfaces. Witness: auto assembly workers v. robots, Pony Express riders v. the transcontinental railroad, monk scribes v. the printing press.

Speaking of hybrids, the Columbia Journalism Review has a great story about this issue, um, on its Web site: The Race <http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Kuttner.asp>.

A snippet:

"By now I was feeling very last century. And then Ezra, perhaps taking pity, handed me a trump. You have one thing right, he volunteered. The best material on the Internet consistently comes from Web sites run by print organizations.

"So journalism reigns after all. But can this supremacy continue? Here we encounter a paradox on top of an irony. The paradox is that new forms of media, while challenging the very survival of newspapers, are quickly becoming their savior--both as a journalistic and a business proposition."

Thank you, PBS and Frontline, for this amazingly deep, broad, and important series. It ought to be required viewing in every j-school and HS civics class.

Sally Wright Day
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Dear FRONTLINE,

Thank you for the wonderful program, "News War." As a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times, I have witnessed the changes of the paper since 2000. The good quality articles and editiorials have evaporated. Your program exposed the Wall Street philosophy contributing to this demise.

I believe the Wall Street philosophy about newpapers is incorrect. I believe, the Internet as a distribution mechanism is naturally better suited for the coverage of local news. An expose or in-depth news story is particulary suited to a physical newspaper.

Additionally, when reading a physical paper, a reader will discover stories that he/she may not necessarily be seeking out. A physical paper will not let the reader alone dictate the experience whereas the online experience is dominated by the reader. The Internet is a much less collaborative experience between the Editors, Writers and Readers in a community. I cannnot fathom the effect of lossing in-depth International and National news in any given community newspaper.

With the war in Iraq, Americans are facing a perilous position in the World right now because we made decisions with International consequences based on false evidence. How can anyone believe that less reporting of International news right now is a good thing?

Nira Casey
North Hollywood, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,

Thanks for the great series! Some thoughts on part III:

+ Google, Yahoo, most bloggers, etc. are news pirates. Like music pirates, they are taking content created by others and reselling it for their own profits. If you doubt this, think of what content they would have if all the newspaper reporters lost their jobs. Theft is now apparently a great business strategy.

+ The billionaire ownership strategy has great risks. The prospective billionaire owner of the LAT seemed to be saying that he might dictate his views on public education coverage. Testing? Privatization? Kids could suffer horribly. What would a billionaire developer think of coverage of urban sprawl, a key challenge to our nation's livability, health and environment? Would he tolerate negative coverage of his big business buddies? I think of all the locally owned papers in the South that ignored civil rights for so long. The nonprofit model, however, sounds intriguing as long as it doesn?ft breed complacency and bloat.

+ The series missed a big coming trend: journalism outsourcing to the third world. It sounds like a joke, but imagine a call-center-like journalism center in India. I?'ve read some stories about this already. Since entertainment, business and much of sports is global they could cover the fluffy crap as well as anybody in the U.S., perhaps better and certainly a lot cheaper. Hell, they could even cover Congress, city council meetings and White House press conferences via webcasts. If Wall Street didn't eat the money first, the savings could help pay for U.S. journalists to do the real investigative, analysis and heavy lifting stories. For foreign news, truly foreign correspondents could do the reporting directly in the local language. The dirty secret about Iraq coverage is that most of the hard work is done by Iraqis, who are paid comparatively little and who have died and been injured in far higher numbers.

+ The hyper-local idea made some sense until they got to the little league games. Does Wall Street really want to pay the army of journalists it would take to cover every little league game? Do they even know how many thousands of kid sport games, each lasting hours, there are in even in a small city? The same goes with covering all the other "hyper-local?" events. Clueless.

+ The idea of making print reporters into radio, TV, print reporters is intriguing, but may also be clueless. The basic assumption is that there''s no extra skill involved in radio and TV reporting and that all three can be done simultaneously (without cameramen, engineers or producers) by the same reporter in the same amount of time.

+ I don't think the demand or consumption of news is declining with the internet. If anything, the ease, limitless capacity and time flexibility of the internet has increased consumption/demand. There's a huge fire hose of information, the journalist's job may be filtering it to find and serve up the most important slurps. The question is who will pay her to do the filtering.

+ Katie Couric's $13 million a year salary would pay for about 250 hungry, crack investigative reporters. If the network let them lose, it would really wake America up to a good morning.

Western, Oregon

Dear FRONTLINE,

Great series. I would only quibble with one of your points about the influence of blogs. While the blogs may have breathed some life into the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond story, it was my uncredited reporting for the New York Times that really made him step down. The news companies were not ignoring the story, just working on it for the weekend. If you go back and look at the story under David Halbfinger's byline from Dec. 15, 2002, under the headline, "In Lott's Life, Long Shadows of Segregation," you will see I was the only reporter to find the racist letters Lott wrote to constituents back in the early 1970s and report on them. No blogger did this. I would argue that was what scared Lott into stepping down as Majority Leader. He could not deny his racist past in the face of this bit of investigative reporting. Sorry bloggers.

Glynn Wilson
Birmingham, AL