Alan Dershowitz, Law Professor at Harvard, moderated the afternoon which brought together all of the morning panelists who were able to stay as well as Marty Kaplan, Associate Dean at USC's Annenberg School of Communication, Nancy Hicks Maynard, Director of the Economics of News Project and former publisher of the Oakland Tribune, and Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee. Prof. Dershowitz began by playing the role of Mark Willes to discuss how panelists would weigh non-economic and economic values in handling hypothetical situations inside their news organization.

We heard that it is difficult to draw a solid line dividing decisions based on quality journalism and those based on economics. Jim Amoss remarked that solid walls are not practical or desirable today, but their needs to be a language of understanding and respect to strike the right balance.

We also heard that it is difficult to specify what methods of trying to attract audiences and appeal to their interests are acceptable and when does it become a revenue scheme that affects content negatively. How much choice is a good thing? William Wheatly believed that "the public can differentiate among different kinds of news programs." Phil Balboni, on the other hand, remarked, "The problem is that the general public begins to believe that this focus on celebrity and soft features in the absence of hard news is what the news is all about, then they respect us less in the final analysis."

Although the executives and newsroom journalists did agree that both economic and non-economic values are necessary for a news organization to succeed, the questions of how necessary and how heavily each should be weighed remained. Max King suggested that the executives like Mark Willes may not have bad intentions but don't"understand what dire consequences can result if he pushes this too far." How far is too far.

Perhaps the most conclusive thing we can draw from the discussion is that in order to have the two sides of the operation truly connect, they first need to devise together some specific definitions of credibility, integrity and profit in a news organization.

Alan Dershowitz: "I want to role play in the beginning, and pretend that I'm Mark Willes, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, and I'm calling in my editor and my editor for today is going to be Marty Kaplan, and Marty, we're having a problem here. Circulation's down, there's these large pockets of potential readers of the LA Times. They tend to be people we don't cover very much--the Hispanic community, the African American community, other communities--and we're going to have to sit down and make some changes in the way the LA Times covers the news of Los Angeles. I would like you to spend more of your time and resources covering the Hispanic community and covering the black community because I want to have more Hispanic and black readers. Do you have a problem with that?"
Martin Kaplan: "Not only don't I have a problem with it, I think it's smart. The number one and number two television news stations in Los Angeles are Spanish language. The number one and number two AM radio stations are Spanish language. The number one and number two FM radios are Spanish language."

Alan Dershowitz: "So we don't even have to compromise. We can make a lot of money and do the right thing at the same time."

Martin Kaplan: " Not only that, we'll do better than we're doing now because those Spanish language outlets are providing better coverage of Sacramento than any of our competitors."

Alan Dershowitz: "What do you mean by better coverage?"

Martin Kaplan:"They have bureaus in Sacramento. None of the television stations have any."

Alan Dershowitz: "Are they providing more honest coverage or are they providing the coverage that the listeners and readers want to hear?"

Martin Kaplan: "If you read the [Project for Excellence in Journalism] study of hard and soft news over the last period that was presented at [the forum at USC], you will discover that with the exception of Spanish language print media, all the emphasis has moved towards soft. They have the highest proportion of hard news of any outlet, so I think it's well worth imitating."

Alan Dershowitz: "That sounds great. Now Tom [Rosenstiel], we have another problem here and that is we're also finding that our ad revenues are down. We tried Marty's approach and it really worked quite well. We had increased circulation among the Hispanic community and the black community, but we're getting a lot of complaints..."

Tom Rosenstiel: "Well, I would say that we need to make the case that we're selling to a broader part of the community and... we need to educate some of these advertisers about how our audience is appealing to them. And maybe we should help them develop their appeal to these communities in ways that they haven't thought about. And I wonder if there is new technology that we should exploit..."

Alan Dershowitz: "That sounds interesting. But...[now] we're getting a complaint... from the advertisers, that even in our attempt to appeal to these minority communities, we're turning off a lot of the minority readers because we're emphasizing the bad news. We're emphasizing crime or emphasizing corruption and they would like us to put... a more positive light on their communities... In the beginning they felt we weren't reporting enough. Now they think we're reporting too much in the sense that we're just not telling the stories they want us to tell. Can we work on that a little bit or are we crossing some line there?"

Tom Rosenstiel: "I have a problem there, Mark... I think it's our job to fairly represent the community that we're covering. We'll take a look and see if we think we're telling the full story, but I don't want to get in the business of skewing the news to please my advertisers."

Alan Dershowitz: "What if it turns out that we're writing the news in a way that really is turning off these readers and they're not going to read it at all? What is the purpose of taking Marty's suggestion of covering this community when the community is not reading our coverage because they don't like the way we're covering this community? Can you talk to each other about this and see if there's some way without crossing any lines we can both increase the circulation, the ad revenues, and not compromise the editorial integrity?"

Tom Rosenstiel: "Let me ask you a question, Marty. Do you think we're not doing a good job of covering this, or is this an ethnic community that we're dealing with, which is accustomed to a different kind of journalistic tradition in Latin and South America? Are they just not accustomed to American style journalism where we tell it without fear of favor?"

Martin Kaplan: "I would question our publisher's numbers. He has 50 people in his overnight tracking, and I would bet that's not a big enough sample. I would question the contention that they don't like the coverage that they're getting. I would question the notion that massively increased coverage is inevitably negative coverage. I think that is the consequence of, for example, the way television news covers South Central, in which case every time there is a gang incident it always leads the news because the TV news is predisposed to be violent and there's always a film crew there.

"I don't think that has to be the case in the way we cover it. I think if we gave them the local news they needed, if we were unbelievably intensely local and there wasn't a single sports team anywhere in the entire community that was not covered in our paper, I think they'd be delighted to find it, and even so, could swallow whatever they didn't like about the downside."

Alan Dershowitz: "But Gregory [Favre], if you sent reporters in to try to see who's right... and they were to report and say back to you well, you know, Marty has an interesting point, but we really do care about gang attacks. That's what most endangers our community, the prevalence of guns in the community, the prevalence of crack dealers..."

Gregory Favre: "...In the first place, their viewpoint wouldn't differ a great deal from the whole community who are concerned, obviously, about crime within the community. But second, I think the biggest complaint I would get from them would not be that. The biggest complaint, they don't see themselves in the newspaper. They don't see themselves represented in the newspaper as they live their daily lives. And certainly in your newspaper that has been evidenced through the years by not covering certain parts of the community."

Alan Dershowitz: "...Everyone wants to see themselves in the newspaper on the social pages, on the financial pages... but almost nobody wants to see themselves or their community covered on the crime pages or on the corruption pages. And isn't it inevitable that when you cover a community you have to cover both the good and the bad, and not all communities and not all groups in any given time have the same ratio of positive to negative. ...Can you report totally honestly without in any way introducing, for want of a better word, affirmative action into newspaper reporting?"

Gregory Favre: "I think you can, and I think you do it, in the first place, by having a staff that reflects that community, understands that community, speaks the language of that community... Number two, in my newspaper and in your newspaper you don't cover all crime in Los Angeles -- ...because there's crime and there's crime stories and some rise to coverage and some don't. ...You make those kind of news judgments every day. ...A 15 year-old walks into a cafeteria and starts shooting and kills one and 23 others are injured. Obviously, it doesn't take a genius to know that's a front page story...

"I think the kind of routine crime stories that you see a lot on television because it bleeds, do not get into mainstream newspapers in a large way..."
Alan Dershowitz: "Nancy [Hicks Maynard], when Marty and Gregory want to hire more people to report on one community, and we're ... not [dealing with] the LA Times now, ... does that necessarily also mean less coverage of other communities and hiring fewer people from those communities to cover the story?"

Nancy Hicks Maynard: "Maybe. But I would have started back and asked Marty to go back to Mark with his numbers, and not to assume that coverage was the issue. I would have him check the circulation department's operation first, because often in inner cities that's a bigger issue about whether communities get the coverage of the newspaper or not.

"So I'm willing to engage the conversation on hiring, but only if I can have the conversation with you, Mark, on really holding the circulation department's feet to the fire about service and selling in the community that we're trying to reach..."

Alan Dershowitz: "Everybody seems to be assuming that it is perfectly okay and it's not a problem to somehow change your coverage in order to get the numbers of readers up."

[Voice unidentified]: "In my newsroom there are huge complaints about increasing Latino coverage when we've talked about doing a separate section just for that purpose the argument comes back that "ghettoizes" those readers. So in addition to whether a new community could skew your news judgment, there's also the question of whether by consolidating that way you are sending a signal that they are not like other citizens."

Alan Dershowitz: "Is ghettoization of readership necessarily a bad thing? Is it better for all people to read the Los Angeles Times, or is it better for there to be 15 ethnic and sub-group newspapers thriving in Los Angeles, each of which has their own voice to their own community?

" ...If you were the czar and had to make a decision about what's best for a multicultural society, would it be a society in which everybody reads the same newspaper and the newspaper reports relatively equally on every group, or every group had its own little newspaper which spoke in its own voice and articulated its own concerns or a combination?"

Phil Balboni: "...But we do have in journalism the implicit belief that there are certain things that all citizens should know. That we are not simply satisfying their demands, we're not just pumping out the news you can use that our nightly focus groups say, but instead there are things people do need to know and it's our job to say what they are and to put them out, and to do it for the whole community, not for a piece of it."

Alan Dershowitz: "...In running your very excellent cable programs, do you ever make decisions that are generated by a desire to get more viewers?"

Phil Balboni: "Yes."

Alan Dershowitz: "And that's nothing wrong with that, right?"

Phil Balboni: "Not as long as it's kept in perspective."

Alan Dershowitz: "Do you ever make decisions from the point of view of news content or coverage, in order to get more advertisers?"

Phil Balboni: "Not directly, but sometimes indirectly. When you have the opportunity to do new programs. Not newscasts, but other informational programs that ... target the business-interested viewer, or people who are interested in health care [or Hispanics.] ...That happens all the time."

Alan Dershowitz: "But you seem, and I think most of you seem to be suggesting, that there's something different about making decisions based on increasing circulation, that seems to be on the more positive side of the continuum; whereas doing it for ad revenue seems to be on the negative side of the continuum. Why? What's the difference?"

Phil Balboni: "Maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but circulation and advertising, ratings and advertising are so intertwined because it's the magnitude of the circulation or the size of the television audience that allows the programming to flow more freely..."

Alan Dershowitz: "William [Wheatly], can you ever imagine a situation that you might be in where you would make a decision, a news decision, based on whether or not particular advertisers would or would not advertise on a show or on your network?"

William Wheatley: "No."

Alan Dershowitz: " ...Imagine that you're Mr. Taylor's competitor, you have a smaller newspaper and you're marginal, and the possibility is you may go under. Somebody has done a demographic study for you and discovered that the only way for you to survive is to do something which you believe would compromise your editorial integrity..."

William Wheatley: "I don't think you want to compromise your editorial integrity. First of all because it's the wrong thing to do; and secondly, even if you were to do it you inevitably undermine the trust that the public has for you and they become less interested in what you do."

Alan Dershowitz: "So you think that whenever you compromise your editorial integrity that's a bad business decision?"

William Wheatley: "In terms of business in the long run it's probably a bad decision. I suppose there might be a case where in the short term it might be a good business decision, but that doesn't mean it's the right decision...

"I'm not saying there aren't economic judgments in the sense that you have to have an economic viability in the long term, but I'm not sure that they always clash in any case. It seems to me that advertisers are generally interested in being associated with a high quality product that has integrity."

Alan Dershowitz: "Ben, ...you had a report done saying you're really going to go out of business unless you start presenting the news of particular subgroups in the community in a more positive way. Would you do it?"

Benjamin Taylor: "I would not because... I don't agree with the point of view that positive news is what makes for a successful newspaper. I think that what newspapers have to do is accurately reflect what's going on in society. It's not always positive, it's not always negative... But the newspapers that do it best are the ones that are going to succeed and thrive and grow and make a legitimate business out of what they do."

Alan Dershowitz: "So you're agreeing really with William, in a sense saying that good journalism is good business."

Benjamin Taylor: "Yes."

Alan Dershowitz: " ...[Mark Willes] says he doesn't believe in the wall. The wall stops people from talking... He would prefer to introduce a line. You can talk over lines, step over lines.

"...What's wrong with recognizing the fact that we're talking about one of the biggest, most profitable businesses in America, the media?"

Phil Balboni: " There's nothing wrong with recognizing it. The problem is that it's gone too far. When journalism... becomes primarily a product for sale in whatever way creative minds can find to package and market it, then it loses the special distinction, the special role that it plays in our society... The danger there is that at some God forbid moment in time when we who propagate news need the support of the American people, and we go and say Ôhelp us,' and they say, Why should we bother? All you do is make money and sell a product. That's all you really care about.' I can see that every day on your TV screens and in your newspapers."

Alan Dershowitz: "Let me understand exactly what it is you're saying. It's okay for NBC to have Seinfeld which made a fortune... so that it can support the news division which ought to run without concern for profit. That's okay. But when Seinfeld goes off the air, instead of substituting yet another sitcom they put on a news show in its stead like Dateline which is soft news rather than hard news, the result being more news rather than less news and more viewers watching news and fewer viewers watching sitcoms, you're unhappy."

Phil Balboni: "Again, and with apologies to Bill, I don't mean to be picking on NBC, but because the other networks do it too. Yes, I'm unhappy because much of that, most of that, is not real news. And some of it is manipulated for economic purposes. The danger is there is this blurring of the lines for the public. ... It isn't that NBC News or ABC News doesn't know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. The problem is that the general public begins to believe that this focus on celebrity and soft features in the absence of hard news is what the news is all about, then they respect us less in the final analysis. That's the problem."

William Wheatley: "I don't think the public is necessarily respecting us less because a particular program may deal in what you call soft news...

"I think the public can differentiate among different kinds of news programs, just as they can differentiate among different types of magazines or newspapers, so I don't consider that a problem, frankly. I think it's important to say also that there are substantial numbers of people in the public who don't ordinarily watch, for example, an evening news program who watch other types of news programs..."

Phil Balboni: "But they're not getting the news that is really important. If they stop watching NBC Nightly News or World News Tonight and switch their viewing to the news magazines, they're not getting news. And indeed, the amount of hard news even in those nightly newscasts has also declined. The figures were gathered, I have them right here in front of me, by one of our sponsors here today. It's a dramatic decline in hard news and I think that's a problem. It isn't sufficient to say that you just pop it into a time period and therefore because it's competing in prime time and it replaces Seinfeld or whatever, that it's okay to change it. It isn't okay."

Bill Wheatley: "I really think that's a type of thinking that really is rooted in what the media landscape was a long time ago. The media landscape has changed dramatically... I don't think that every program that's produced by a news division has to consistently reflect throughout its program hard news values."

Phil Balboni: I couldn't disagree more. I think that statement in and of itself is an example of what's wrong, and I say that with all due respect to you who I know have high standards, but..."

Alan Dershowitz: "Phil, does your news network ever do a feature story?"

Phil Balboni: "Yes, we do."

Alan Dershowitz: "How does that reflect a hard news value?"

Phil Balboni: "I don't think we're talking about a feature story. Newspapers are filled with feature stories. A feature story as opposed to a hard news story is not the distinction that we're debating here. It is when the entire enterprise swings in that direction. I think that that is indeed what you get if we're talking about news magazines now, that's what you get there."

Alan Dershowitz: "I don't understand one point, and maybe you can explain it. I turn on my television here in Boston between 6:00 and 7:00 o'clock at night. I have about 25 news options now...

"So I flip to the next channel and I come to your excellent local news approach and I may like that. I go to CBS, NBC, ABC, and I get less hard news than I used to get, but if I can switch to MSNBC I can get slightly harder news or CNN if I want brief headlines I go here. If I want to go to Fox I can get a slightly different orientation. What is wrong with the fact that today I have incredible arrays of choices including very hard news?"

Martin Kaplan: "There's nothing wrong with choice, but ... there is more that is the same than is different, [the] Lehrer [Newshour] being certainly an important exception to that."

Alan Dershowitz: "But if there's one exception, why doesn't that satisfy you? Why would you impose on people the obligation to see hard news when they'd rather see soft news and have the choice to see hard news?"

Martin Kaplan: "Because it's the responsibility of the press to make the important interesting. The choice of what is important is a value-laden elitist choice which the press has the responsibility to promulgate... You can take any story which is sensational and put it on the front page. The talent is to take a story that most people would find boring and figure out how to make it interesting enough to put on the front page."

Alan Dershowitz: "That's exactly my point. ...If you were running the Rather report, you would lead with the Indian nuclear test... How would you do it different from the way it was done by the networks?"

Martin Kaplan: "I'm not sure it was done badly by the networks. I think there was a stake in it and it was a hot story. I think the fact that the savings and loan crisis went uncovered for ten years is an example of how in the face of something complicated like economics, the press doesn't pay any attention because no one's interested..."

Tom Rosenstiel: "I think the concern that many people in journalism have, and I detect that Phil has, is that the softening of so much of the news and the shift towards infotainment, is not broadening our choices, but is actually diminishing the quality of the best of our journalism. That our most serious news outlets are becoming more like a kind of entertainment themselves in a chase for audience, and that the expanding dial has not given us a greater sort of information pluralism. It's just given us a phenomenon in which no TV show ever goes off the run, it's perpetual reruns. Or as Jim Carey put it once, journalism is disappearing into the larger world of communication..."

Alan Dershowitz: "Phil, if somebody had come to you about five years ago when you were just starting up your network and said I have a great idea for a show. It's called America's Most Wanted. What we can do is really serve a great public interest. We can put pictures of people who are wanted and in fact we can demonstrate to you, because they've done this in a couple of other countries, that we can have arrested people who would otherwise go on and commit serious crimes. And by the way, the ratings are off the wall. They are phenomenal. Do you take it for your network? Is it a news show? Is it an entertainment show? Or is it something that defies traditional categorization?"

Phil Balboni: "It's not a news show, that's for sure. It does have a public service component to it. I've never seen it, but I think that it's all right to do something for the public service, but clearly that show is not done for the public service. It's done because it can sensationalize crimes and get people involved and get a lot of people to watch."

Alan Dershowitz: "...Why do we need to have this absolute category that you seem to be pushing hard, hard news on the one hand and everything else on the other?..."

Phil Balboni: "I don't believe America's Most Wanted is produced by a news organization in the classic sense. I don't think it's done by journalists. I don't have an argument with that or it having a distribution or a marketplace. It is when news organizations begin to transform themselves more into the servants only of those who want to generate revenue and profit than they do to perform the public service which journalists are supposed to do, that's where I have a problem. And I don't think there should be any compromise about standards when it comes to that. None."

Alan Dershowitz: "...Is it possible that TV is only a temporary medium for the news and really will turn out not to be the best medium for news at all? That TV is really an entertainment medium, a public interest medium, and will news eventually come on instantaneous transmission through the Internet, through the big Times Square thing that you see now when you go into Times Square, where the news is reported instantaneously?"

Phil Balboni: "It already is... I wouldn't be surprised that what you're saying is correct. We've developed a web site that is all video and stories that are discretely there. You can take any one or none of them in the order that you want. I think more and more people will migrate to that. I don't think television as we know it will go away, nor should it, nor should newscasts that reach large audiences go away."

Voice: "I think that's absolutely true. There's a transition going on in communication. I think it's more likely that the television set will be joined with the computer some way in one all purpose information and entertainment center."

Nancy Hicks Maynard: "But when we do, it's going to change drastically the economics on which we build our businesses. The way that digital technology is changing the information business is very risky for many, certainly for publishers, because the Internet and those interactive media are more useful for the advertising piece than they are for the information business. There's a big risk that the classified advertising base which would be searchable and interactive, will move on-line before the information moves with it, leaving two very large and very expensive operations to run that do not support each other. ...This is not necessarily a period of quality development..."

Alan Dershowitz: "[Kevin], what is the business of the media going to look like and how will the way the business of the media unfolds in the next generation impact on [concerns] about the separation between news gathering and entertainment?"

Kevin Gruneich: "I think you have obviously more fragmented universes, as you do today, relative to 50 years ago... In fact I think having a reliable news source will become all the more valuable because of all the garbage that is and will be flying around the Internet."

Alan Dershowitz: "Maxwell, do you think in the year 2020 there are going to be any cities left with more than one newspaper?"

Maxwell King: "No. But I disagree a little bit with this notion that things are going to get more and more fragmented. I think the fragmentation that we're looking at now with all the different Internet sources of information and newspapers and magazines and shoppers is a temporary thing. I think what's most likely to happen is this convergence that Bill talked about of the television, the computer screen, and other channels of information, telephone, coming into the house. I think when that happens, whether you start out publishing a newspaper or putting out a web site or putting out a television broadcast, you're probably going to have to be able to offer video and audio and print and search and all these different things if you're going to have a viable product..."

Alan Dershowitz: "But 100 years ago Mr. Taylor's family had newspapers and the Salzbergers had newspapers and your family had newspapers. The more this becomes dependent on megacommunications, aren't we going to see seven corporations plus the United States government dominating the flow of information or having an effect, and having to pay tolls to Bill Gates?"

Maxwell King: "The Internet component of it, I think, seems to me to be much more likely to invite participants in. When the Salzbergers bought the New York Times... it was a far more expensive proposition to get into the newspaper business than it is today to get into some form of electronic publishing...

"What's happening right now is that the first few years of the Internet have been characterized by a sort of marvelous chaos in which anybody can go on, very few people have any authority. I think over time protocols will sort out and there will be highly credible publishers of information like newspaper companies...

"It ties into the point that you seemed to be pursuing earlier about why journalists seem so fixated on integrity or credibility. The way it ties in is not just that we think telling the truth is nice or integrity is a badge to wear, but we think there's a commercial value to credibility. There's a commercial value to having a reputation for being honest, truthful, and authoritative. That commercial value will eventually invade the world of electronic new media."


Alan Dershowitz: "But then this really does become a lovefest, doesn't it? If we all agree that credibility, honesty, integrity, has a commercial value, then only foolish people would try to in any way compromise the integrity of journalists..."

Maxwell King: "It's not a lovefest because the world is full of foolish people."

Alan Dershowitz: "...Why has this discussion, why have the efforts of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times created so much conflict? He is not one of the foolish people, right?"

Maxwell King: "He did not seem this morning to be a foolish person."

Alan Dershowitz: "And yet you think he's leading us to Armageddon."

Maxwell King: "I think he's continuing and accentuating a process that is leading us to Armageddon..."

Alan Dershowitz: "But he's not foolish."

Maxwell King: "He is not foolish."

Alan Dershowitz: "So why is he doing a foolish thing if he is in any way interfering with the integrity of journalism which is its most profitable commodity?"

Maxwell King: "I don't think in his heart of hearts he believes that he is. I mean I listened to him. He's intelligent, articulate, and appeared to be very sincere in what he said. So I think he's new to our business and I don't think... He's not steeped in journalism traditions or the news, and I don't think he understands what dire consequences can result if he pushes this too far. I don't think he's insincere or disingenuous. I just don't think he realizes what could happen, and I don't think he realizes the larger context in which his activities are being played out. I think that's why it's gotten so much attention, because it has struck a nerve. People, particularly in our business, know what's going on, whether they want to say it or not, and they see this as a very overt new threat.

"I'm not unreasonable on this point, and I said that this morning. I think journalists should understand, and I know most of them do, that their work plays out in a commercial environment in which certain things have to happen. It's a matter of proportion and perspective and we're losing it. That's what we need to be concerned with, moving the pendulum back in the other direction."

Julie Keller: "Mr. Wheatley [said] that at some point television won't be doing news, won't be a service for news. One difference between print and broadcast, of course, is that broadcast uses the airwaves that presumably belong to us all... You've been given the airways for free, the networks have, and that was predicated on the idea that you were going to be doing in part a public service with news and public affairs. How do you reconcile that with thinking there might be a point in the future when you don't do that and you're just a conduit for sitcoms?"

William Wheatley: "The point I was trying to make is that ...as the technology changes, the instrument of television, as such, may become obsolete, and that a new technology emerges which is a convergence technology involving computers. I still think there's going to be a remarkable demand in that technology for news and information, and I suspect that the network companies and other companies now invested in journalism and for that matter entertainment will embrace, and in fact already are embracing, the new technology. So I think you're going to see these companies involved for a good long time to come in gathering information and presenting it to people. It's just the delivery mechanism will be a little different."

Martin Kaplan: "You raise an interesting point in that for generations television has been considered a quasi-public utility in which the public has an interest in regulation. The last 15-20 years has seen an abandonment of that. Antitrust is essentially, except for the recent Microsoft filing, a piece of history in broadcasting. And the notion that there should be a tradeoff between the license to broadcast and a responsibility of what the public needs to hear or should hear, that's ancient history now. I would like to think that a revival of the sense of a public stake in the broadcast media is still possible."

Alan Dershowitz: "...If you had your way, Marty, would you also regulate newspapers and require them to get a license and act in the public interest?"

Martin Kaplan: "No. Because I don't think owning a printing press is the same thing as having the right to broadcast... One is a mass medium and there is a compelling case for a public interest in that mass medium."

Voice: "When this convergence takes place it's going to turn into one big entity and the question then is what's going to happen to the First Amendment? Are we successful at getting the protections of the First Amendment which I think should have extended more to television and radio than they ever did, are we going to be successful in protecting the First Amendment as we go through this technological revolution?"

Alan Dershowitz: ...What we're talking about is the theory of capitalism here... If everybody works in their own self-interest will in the end the public interest be served, or is it better to get the government involved. This is a debate which we've had for 300 years and we're playing it out now in the context of the media."

Bill Wheatley: "...Once the Cold War ended, I don't think we've risen to the challenge of defining important trends in international affairs. It's not so much events anymore, although there are certainly some significant events, but it's the important trends.

"I know we were wrestling with this not long ago at NBC in terms of the Asian economic crisis and how do we tell that story to our mass audience? How do we relate it to them? How do we make them understand that there's a stake in it? We did some pretty interesting reporting on it. But I think we've been slow to rise to the challenge of doing that. We have to be better story tellers, if you will, engaging people's interest and telling them why these things are important to them."

Benjamin Taylor: "I would just say, speaking very parochially from the Boston Globe's point of view, we actually I think are doing more with international coverage right now than probably we've ever done in the history of the newspaper...

"The other thing I would say is that ... the face of every major city is changing in terms of who lives there and the kind of recent immigrants that live in all these various cities. I think the interest level in international moves for the big city newspapers is significantly there for readers, and it's beyond just the academic parts of those cities but is truly in virtually every neighborhood..."

Question: "I'm Renee Hobbs from Babson College. All day long I've been sitting in the audience asking myself what do my students, what do ordinary readers and viewers, what does this set of issues have to do with them? ...And I guess the one way I answer that is to reflect on how I learn ...about the challenges you face in the relationship between the business side and the editorial side of the newspaper. Every month I read the Columbia Journalism Review. I learn that in fact you do in the industry face these challenges and you make decisions about editorial content based on business decisions, and sometimes you do it well and sometimes you do it less well.

"I can only recommend that from the point of view of readers and viewers, and I put myself in that category, the more that we learn about that the smarter we get. ...I'm not really afraid of how economic decisions impact the editorial choices you make as long as readers and viewers understand the context in which those decisions take place. ...Once people understand how news gets made, I don't think some of the discourse that we've had today becomes all that critical..."

Question: "I'm Marcy Merlingham, I teach a course at the Harvard Divinity School called Money, Media and Morality -- Investing in the Civic Good.

"...I do believe there is a place where business values and civic values or journalistic news values come together, and that is in the area of corporate ownership. A lot of the concern is how the values that shareholders supposedly have are the sort of reason given for certain decisions made at the board level on down.

"Some of us are looking at ways in which an ethic of ownership might be cultivated that acknowledges that fiduciary responsibility might be expanded to address certain stewardship kinds of responsibilities, where we are not just looking at return on investment in financial ways, but we are looking at return on investment in public interest ways... Have any of you thought about a way of contributing not only to this internal soul searching in the profession, but a kind of broader soul searching in terms of what does it mean to own property and how does that ownership either enhance the public interest or undermine it? The owners are not just shareholders, they're also citizens..."

Alan Dershowitz: "Let me just make one final point as we end. About 30 years ago law schools didn't teach courses on legal ethics. The Dean would get up there and harumph a little bit, and the basic rule was honesty was the best policy and if you were honest that was best for business. Then came Watergate and we started teaching legal ethics classes. We began to realize that often ethics and tactics pushed in different directions and that the hardest questions that lawyers face, honest lawyers, is when if they move in one direction it will help their client and help them earn money, but it will move away from the highest level of ethics. Now when we teach ethics what we do is we take problems, real hard problems. In every open of them the ethics push in one direction and the tactics push in the other direction and we make the students work through them in very real ways.

"I think what was missing a little bit from the discussion today, and I only mention this for purposes of the future, is we didn't have enough hard hypotheticals, and for that I apologize. Enough hard hypotheticals based on real cases where the business considerations pushed very hard in one direction and the considerations of integrity pushed very hard in the other direction, and then ask ourselves how to resolve it. It's very easy when the business considerations push in the same direction as the integrity considerations. Maybe in 90 percent of the cases that's right, but it's the ten percent of the cases or even the one percent where they push in opposite directions that really, really makes the difference.

"So for the future I recommend that a discussion like this be informed by some very, very hard judgments and very hard choices, and I think that what was an excellent, excellent discussion thanks to all of you and to your excellent contributions, could have even been a more informative discussion in the context of real tragic choices, because in life choices often are very tragic."

Tom Rosenstiel synthesized what was heard throughout the day: "In a sense, what we were here today to find out was whether or not this issue of business versus journalism is an issue of misunderstanding or real conflict. Jim Carey talked about the risk [being] that capitalism will eat its seed corn economically and politically when it comes to journalism, that we're heading into a culture of a free market without political democracy in part because citizens will be left without a diversity of information if journalism goes in a certain direction.

"Mark Willes arrived and said that media companies have two "must do" responsibilities. The first is a fiduciary one to their shareholders for a good return on investment. The second is to make people to choose [your] media. Without an act of sort of moving towards journalism voluntarily, circulation will dry up and the business will go out of business. It's interesting, I think, that he did not mention public service as a must. It was, in his mind I think, something simply that was congruent with these two financial responsibilities.

"Diane Baker said that survival has become a key and pressing issue, and that short term versus long term distinctions were often less meaningful than many journalists thought they were. When it came to whether economic values and non-economic values were in conflict, she said they simply needed to be balanced.

"Kevin Gruneich talked about non-economic values are a factor because editorial independence is viewed as very important to the success of a media company's financial performance.

"Ben Taylor agreed with many of these things and talked about, however, there being a crisis of confidence in journalism about where this balance is. Where there is a conflict, Willes said, the ultimate test comes at a time of recession, whether newspapers gut themselves or maintain their investment.

"Jim Carey at the end of this seemed to feel that something was missing, that the language of quality is very vague. He thought the question was why is there a first amendment? Is it to help companies make a profit? Or is the profit made to help fulfill the responsibilities of the first amendment?

"In the second half of the morning, Max King arrived and said that success seemed to be defined increasingly in newspaper companies and in media companies solely in economic terms, and that the measure needs to be broadened. The pendulum needs to swing back towards journalism.

"Greg Favre talked about the separation of church and state remaining an important one. Unlike what Mr. Willes seemed to be saying, we are not in complete agreement. This line needs to be respected because without it we would sort of destroy ourselves. his greatest fear, Greg said, is that we seek out readers who appeal only to advertisers. It seemed to me he was touching at that point on the notion that was embedded but not explicit today that the role of the citizen or the allegiance that the journalist has in mind is different than the allegiance that the business person has in mind. The journalist has in mind a responsibility to the entire community and to the citizen rather than the shareholder, and that somehow targeting your journalism for specific readership rather than for a whole community was part of what might be where the conflict lies between the business and the news side.

"Phil Balboni went even further and said that news as an engine of profit is ultimately corrupting, that our aspirations were being strangled.

"Increasingly there was a discussion among the journalists that public service has to be equal if not superior to these business considerations. Perhaps this discussion began to move in a direction that was not all that surprising, but I thought Jim Amoss put it rather eloquently when he said that it is okay to have the Chamber of Commerce come and talk about how you shouldn't print a particular story because it's bad for business, but it was much more alarming to him to have the advertising director come to the editor and say this. The balance and the values and the culture of the news organization are tilted in that way.

"Some of you today thought that this conversation might be too insular, that it might be somehow a kind of internal conversation that didn't mean much to citizens. I think the question is, however, very fundamental to citizens. What kind of product is it that we're producing? Is it one that's aimed at all citizens, or is it one that's aimed at a kind of common denominator of mass? To some extent, and I think one of the things that was not stated explicitly is that the issue of what kind of journalism you produce depends partly on how much you're willing to spend on it in terms of time and money. If profitability is the primary goal, it may lead you to produce a kind of journalism that's simply cheaper to produce. It's not simply a matter of how interested citizens are in it.

"In the afternoon, Professor Dershowitz, it seemed to me, tried to press many of these conveniently or dearly held notions that we journalists had when he talked about things like the comic strips or the sports sections which were put into journalism not too long ago because they were a kind of entertainment, they were a kind of way to get people in. We don't view them that way as journalists now because as we became professionalized, these were traditions that pre-existed.

"Ultimately, there is a problem of language. I think the point of conflict we came down to is what does credibility mean? What does quality mean? What does balance mean? These are probably issues that cannot be resolved with the level of discussion that we had today. I think we do need to sort of get down to the nitty gritty and say what do you mean by that? Professor Dershowitz at the end said we need some harder hypotheticals. It's interesting ultimately to me that we don't have them, because these are issues that for the most part I think we have swept under the rug. Points of conflict between [business] and editorial, we tend not to talk about in the news business. We erected these walls 100 years ago in part because we thought that avoiding conflict was better than trying to create a delicate balance. That was more practical a way of doing it.

"Perhaps what this discussion is all about is that we can no longer afford a strict system of walls that avoids conflict, but we now need to engage much more rigorously in a reflection on where the points of conflict are and what balance actually means, because the walls are gone and the balance doesn't exist."

[top]