You
may not recognize his name, but chances are you’ve seen Robert J. Thompson on
television and read his comments in newspapers. One day last week I saw him
discuss the Presidential debate on CNN and, a few hours later, read his
insights on Howard Stern in the New York
Times.
Thompson
is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at
Syracuse University and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture
at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. You might say he’s in the
right place at the right time.
From
cable television to satellite radio to the Internet, the media’s scope and
influence have grown exponentially. And Thompson, who has written or edited
five books, including Television’s Second
Golden Age; Prime Time, Prime Movers;
and Television Studies, is the go-to
guy for opinions on the media and popular culture.
In
a recent conversation with Thompson, we discussed the rise of cable news shows,
the latest FCC obscenity crack-down, and the conglomerates that control the
airwaves. We began by asking him if there is such as thing as the “liberal
media.”
Thompson: It depends on
who you ask. Fox News has gone to number one in the cable news sweepstakes by
claiming just that, putting themselves up as David against the liberal-media
Goliath. I think we have to put all of this in perspective when we think about
who owns these things — Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch himself — huge
corporations that you hardly think of as the vanguard of revolution.
The
big mainstream networks — the media elite, as the conspiracy people call them
— really have one basic goal that they’re going after and it’s not a
conspiracy of ideology, it’s a conspiracy of the marketplace. They’re trying to
maximize audiences by not offending any enormous constituency of people. For
the most part I think the networks are going right down this very centrist
approach to news.
City: Have conservatives, through repetition of the “liberal
media” mantra, effectively shifted the playing field to the right? For
instance, in response to the success of Fox News, MSNBC hired a conservative,
Joe Scarborough, to host a show.
Thompson: Right, but
they also tried to go on the other side by hiring Phil Donahue; it just didn’t
work very well. They had a good idea but they hired the wrong guy to do it. No
one has been able to do this yet, but if you look at the closeness of the 2000
election and you look at how close this one appears to be, there’s certainly a
market for the equivalent of the Fox News Channel in the other direction. It’s
the same thing we’ve seen in talk radio, where there have been hugely
successful people on the right. That may be beginning to change with Talk
America [a liberal network featuring Al Franken and others].
For
the most part it hasn’t been as successful. Part of that has to do with the
nature of the two sides as they manifest themselves now. One of the main things
conservatives talk about is a return to basic, common sense family values —
forget all this relativist thinking; there’s right and wrong and we know what
it is — a return to pre-1960s notions. That kind of thing plays very well on
radio shows and Bill O’Reilly because it sets up very clear, dramatic
conflicts.
Phil
Donahue was much more about “well that’s true, but we also have to look at
this.” It was all about the nuances and the complexity of an argument. Those
people are seen as wishy-washy and flip-flopping. O’Reilly was a lot more fun
to watch than Donahue.
City: Fox News may promote that message, but Fox’s entertainment
arm is one of the raunchiest.
Thompson: That’s the
delicious irony. On one side Fox is part of the family values thing, on the
other side they were the ones who brought us Temptation Island and Who
Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?.
City: There have been great changes in news since the advent of
cable. Bill O’Reilly seems like a good illustration of someone who wouldn’t
have been acceptable on the air 20 years ago. For instance, he’s obsessed with
Al Franken calling him a liar.He
seems like a basket case, yet he’s the most popular figure in cable news.
Thompson: You’re right,
it would not have been acceptable before cable. O’Reilly could probably have
gotten the 4 million people he gets on cable now in 1978, but before cable
nobody could stay on the air with an audience that small.
City: But those cable shows have a tremendous impact. The Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth spent about $400,000 for their first ad against John
Kerry, but they got tens of millions of dollars in free broadcasting on cable
news. They got their issues, however false they were, on the table.
Thompson: That’s
absolutely right. Many people have figured out how to use the news cycle as an
adjunct to their budget. Two movies, The
Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit
9/11, could have completely pulled their advertising budgets and it
wouldn’t have mattered because they were being promoted for free by the news
cycle. Even though it’s a small audience watching these cable channels, they
are influential.
City: Recently, when Dan Rather was fooled by some counterfeit
memos about George W. Bush’s questionable military service, that story, which
was substantially true, was immediately forgotten. The story became Rathergate.
Why can’t the media keep its eye on the ball?
Thompson: That was an
absolute and complete breakdown of everything that should happen in a serious
journalistic environment. Part of it was CBS saw a scoop. They were blinded to
all of the due diligence they should have done. If you look at Rather’s
background, there was the idea that he could break a big story and show he’s
still the heir to [Walter] Cronkite and [Edward R.] Murrow and CBS is still a
force to be reckoned with.
Was
there also an element that he liked about that story, that he could position
the president in an uncomfortable place? I’ve got to think there was some of
that there, given his history with the Bush family. Reporters are going to have
feelings. I think the way you shield yourself from that is to make sure
whatever you report is right.
City: On the other hand, when a nasty story about John Kerry’s
fingernails by Fox correspondent Carl Cameron and an item giving credence to a
satirical organization called “Communists for Kerry” were posted on the Fox
website, no one seemed too upset.Â
Thompson: This has
absolutely astounded me. I knew it wouldn’t get the coverage Rather got, but
the silence has been deafening. I’d like to know where the “liberal media” was
when this story came out, because the networks and newspapers should have been
all over it. The Rather story was a bigger story. But what Carl Cameron did was
make up bogus information. While I’m sure he didn’t mean for it to go on the
website, he shouldn’t have been writing it in the newsroom and he certainly
shouldn’t have put it some place where there was a possibility it would get up
as legitimate news. The “Communists for Kerry” thing got barely a peep. It
could be the fact that networks are so paranoid about claims of being on the
left that they’re afraid to make anything of it.
City: That’s possible. Locally, our PBS station has refused to
carry “Democracy Now!,” a show hosted by a liberal, Amy Goodman. But they did
recently pick up a show hosted by conservative, Tucker Carlson.
Thompson: The
organizations that feel most vulnerable to the attack are being very careful
that they don’t do things that get them painted by that brush, and that’s not a
good criterion on which to make decisions.
City: Even the New York Times’ Public Editor, Daniel Okrent,declared
recently that the Times seemed to
favor a left-tilting view. My reaction was, whatever happened to aiming for the
truth wherever it lies?
Thompson: There are
going to be times in history where to tell the truth you are going to have to
tell a lot of stories on one political side or the other. For example, if you
counted the number of headlines saying bad things about Republicans during the
Watergate era, I suppose you would come to the conclusion that the media was a
vast Democratic conspiracy to get the President and that would not be the
proper conclusion. Similar kinds of things may be going on now when a war was
entered into with a number of problems that are now confessed to and that stuff
has to get reported. If, in fact, you can create an environment where you make
the other side afraid of being accused of bias and their hands get tied, that’s
a bad thing.
City: We live in an age of corporate media domination, companies
like Clear Channel Communications and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. And
before they backed off due to a tremendous public outcry, it seemed obvious
that Michael Powell and the FCC were happy to give unlimited control of the
public airwaves to whoever had the most money.
Thompson: Until the
Super Bowl, the tradition over at the FCC was to let the marketplace have free
reign. Then a very interesting thing happened. And it got so confusing, you
needed a scorecard to figure out which side you should take. The tendency had
been toward deregulation. However, the people who want less government, the one
place they don’t want to give free reign to is the media, because that’s the
place they consider to be opposite their ideology — too much sex and bad
language. So after the Super Bowl regulation was OK, not about ownership, but
content.
City: You’re talking about Janet Jackson’s breast; lately it’s
been about Howard Stern’s mouth.
Thompson: The hue and
cry over the Super Bowl was juvenile — the idea that people cuddled up with
their families and read “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” and turned on the
Super Bowl… It’s a sport with people bashing into each other, the commercials
are highly suggestive, and there are people gambling and drinking in living
rooms all over America.
When
it comes to Howard Stern, we do have indecency rules, whether or not one agrees
with them. When they decided to go after the most vulnerable places, morning
radio, what they found was, if we’ve got indecency rules — even though
indecency is difficult to define — most rational people would say that some
of what Howard Stern does is indecent. He probably belongs where he’s going,
satellite radio.
When
we got to the point where the networks were cutting scenes from NYPD Blue and ER and putting down directives that seemed to roll back language
requirements to pre-All In The Family,
that was disturbing. The good old marketplace came in and put a stop to that.
There hasn’t been a lot of change. Desperate
Housewives was the number one show in America last week; almost 22 million
people watched it and forgot everything that happened after the Super Bowl.
City: With satellite radio and cable television, is the media
becoming so fragmented, with more and more choices, that people are just
preaching to the choir and fewer of us are allowing a different point of view
to creep into our consciousness?
Thompson: I think
that’s the biggest cultural story of the new century. We used to have a
situation where everybody fed from the same cultural trough. This started with
network radio in the late-1920s, it continued in a bigger way when TV came on
to the scene in the late-1940s. Because everybody, for a couple of hours a
week, no matter what your race or economic status was, fed from the same place,
it forced you to occasionally encounter things that you didn’t agree with and forced
you to occasionally change your mind.
You
now have an opportunity to go to a place which reports the news in ways that
you find comforting and tells you what you already believe. That’s a
potentially dangerous thing. Some of the important stories that made the golden
age of broadcast journalism what it was in the 1960s and early-1970s —
Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement — it was important that everybody was
hearing that stuff and I think a lot of people came around because they heard
stuff that they might not have been comfortable with.
City: What’s your take on the idea that many young people get
their news from “The Daily Show”?
Thompson: A lot of them
do and given what we’ve seen in the last few months, you could do a lot worse
than The Daily Show. If they get
their news only from late-night comedy, that’s a bad thing, but as a
supplementary source, it’s good. The
Daily Show occasionally does things that CNN and CBS ought to be doing, in
finding clips and putting them together. If journalism is the fourth estate
that keeps the powers of government in check, good political comedy is the
fifth estate, keeping journalistic power in check.
City: Come to think of it, which is more ridiculous, Jon
Stewart’s satirical take on the news or people in the spin room after the first
debate saying, “George Bush did a great job” when he was clearly creamed?
Thompson: My favorite Daily Show moment was when Ted Koppel
was going to read the names of those who died in Iraq. One of their
correspondents rants about how partisan, biased, and unfair this was. Jon
interrupts and says, “But Steve, it’s just the names and the pictures; these
are facts.” He says, “That’s just it, Jon, the facts are biased!”
That
was one of the most trenchant statements I’ve heard in a long time, and it gets
back to what you said before; sometimes the truth appears to be biased because
it goes against one party or the other.
City: It also might be tricky to tell young people there are more
trustworthy news sources when pundits like Paul Begala and James Carville sign
on as advisors to the Kerry Campaign while maintaining their roles on CNN’s
“Crossfire.”
Thompson: The bottom
line is we can’t expect this problem to be solved on the other side of the
camera. We need an educated populace. One thing I give Fox credit for is
stirring up a debate about media credibility. They have raised the
consciousness of a lot of people who used to watch Walter Cronkite every night
and when he said, “That’s the way it is,” they believed it. In some cases it’s
had a negative effect, but Fox has made the average viewer a little more savvy
about that kind of thing.
I’ve
been saying for 25 years that we ought to put media literacy into our schools.
We teach people how to read, write, and do math, basic skills they need to do
battle with the world. After several centuries that curriculum may need some
additions. How to gather and interpret journalism is a really important skill
we ought to start teaching kids very early.
City: So they don’t they take what they see at face value…
Thompson: Right. Every
kid ought to know who owns the Fox News Channel, who owns ABC, who Dan Rather’s
boss is. Everybody ought to know who the basic players are and how the
corporate structure works. They ought to know what you just said about Begala.
City: Speaking of education, you mentioned the tendency of
liberals to make nuanced statements. We get complicated explanations from Kerry
about why he voted one way before voting another way, which actually make sense
if you take the trouble to listen. But conservatives stick with simplistic
mantras like: “Flip-flop.” Are we so dumbed-down that simplistic statements
carry the day?
Thompson: That’s part
of it. In the last several years conservatives have been better at rhetoric.
They’ve been able to get a message out and hammer it home. Democrats haven’t
figured out how to do it. We’re in a part of our history where it’s easier for
conservatives to do. The 1960s and 1970s were about diversity and that kind of
thing and now there’s a backlash, a return to “family values.” Abstinence,
period. No swearing in broadcasting, period. That stuff is really easy to
package in clearly repeatable statements that appeal to a lot of people. It’s
much harder on the other side to create an easily repeatable statement when
you’re going through “If this, then that” and the rest of it.
City: On the day of Sept. 11, 2001 the media showed people
jumping from the towers. For a few weeks afterwards, it was common to see
footage of the second plane crashing into the tower. These images seem to have
been largely banished by mutual agreement. Should they have been?
Thompson: When it first
happened it was so outside our realm of experience and I think some people
thought it was sick and perverse that it was played over and over. But I think
one needed to see it over and over to get it into one’s psyche. I also believe
it was OK to show the people jumping from the buildings because you showed the
buildings going down with a colossal loss of life in the abstract. They’re
buildings; you don’t see the people.
But
then we somehow wanted to clean up the event by not showing the real human
beings in the building having to react. I hope little kids didn’t see it — it
was horrible — but it was certainly part of the story. We see it in the
anniversary commemorations and certainly I don’t think we should erase these
images from collective memory. I think the collective decision not to show them
on political commercials is probably an issue of taste.
City: But we’ve also cleaned up the images we see of war.
Thompson: Carnage is
one of the things that war manufactures, no matter how good of a war it is. And
if wars are being fought on our behalf as citizens, journalists are responsible
to show us what that means. To try to clean up a war by not showing the one
thing that is most distinct about it, which is that it kills people, I’ve never
fallen on that side.
If
I were a news editor, I’d include that, but what happens if I get a beheading
tape? Would I include that? I think I wouldn’t. Essentially these are
industrial videos being sent to us by people who want them to be shown. And
just like I’m not going to show an industrial video that GM sends me on my news
broadcast, I’m not going to show the other one either.
City: I recently watched the short documentary in which Amy
Goodman shows what CNN International broadcast in terms of war casualties, as
opposed to the sanitized version shown on CNN here. The world is getting a far
different view of us than we are getting of ourselves. It makes for a more
jingoistic society, and we can’t imagine why people hate us. It becomes a
gigantic global issue.
Thompson: And it’s only
going to become more and more important. It may be that satellite television
comes a little bit to the rescue here because more people are able to see more
of this stuff. I can get a few Canadian stations and even that little
difference is a very enlightening experience. I think it would be good if
people include in their diversified portfolio of information coverage of this
stuff from other nations, knowing full well that they have their own
ethnocentric, jingoistic point of view.
City: You’re prescribing a diversified media diet while people
are happy to just gorge on Fox candy.
Thompson: Yeah, in many
ways we’re talking ancient philosophy here. But there’s a certain optimism I’ve
felt lately. Everybody complains about the blurring of entertainment and
politics. I have no problem with that. I think a healthy republic would find
politics entertaining. We should be going to movies and watching TV shows about
politics. We ought to find our political process every bit as interesting as
cops and forensic investigations, genres that have dominated television.
I’d
love to see not one West Wing but
five of those shows like you’ve got five Law
& Orders. I like the fact that more comedies are spending time on
political stuff, the fact that a documentary about the war can be something
where people buy popcorn and bring a date. I’d like to see six documentaries
from all sides of the political spectrum. People are engaging in politics and
it’s penetrating our entertainment, penetrating our lifestyle, and that’s a
good thing. We’ve all got a lot at stake in this.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2004.
