The First Amendment; Carol Rivers

The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s produced by WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Reuben. I'm absolutely delighted to have as my guest today Carol Rivers who I consider to be one of the most profound commentators on American life especially as it pertains to American women in the country. Many of you know her as the author of the book Aphrodite had mid-century which was published by Doubleday and she is also in the preparation of a new book which is tentatively entitled A Time for daughters to be published by Putnam's. Karl Rove has also worked as a writer in residence at The Washington Star and is presently. And I think permanently we hope professor of journalism at Boston University.

Carol I have been reading some of the things that you have more recently done for Mother Jones magazine for new times for the New York Times for their press services and so on. And I thought in these articles a a theme as it were of concern for the minorities and a feeling that America is turning away from the minorities in its concerns. Is that a fair assessment. I think that's true. I think that I'm particularly concerned about the media. We're moving away from and era when the media has been concerned with poverty with minorities with social issues and we tend to be moving toward a time when the information that seems the most saleable is the information that's available to the more affluent. So you'll find that in the magazine field which concerns me since I've done a great deal of magazine writing. There is a syndrome now of I call it the bagel people syndrome.

Stories of where can you get the best bagel in town and who's the latest movie star celebrities and gossip that sort of thing is selling a lot and it's spreading like a weed throughout a lot of newspapers and magazines. So the image we get of different problems is an image of of an affluent country not much concern and we may be sitting on a kettle could boil. But it you know we may be repeating the same old mistake because I can remember when when Watts blew up the first time around there were a lot of editors in Los Angeles saying how could this happen right under our noses. Well Reed It could happen with but has there been no reporters sent to Watts because black people want news so that you know I hate to see us repeat the same vicious cycle that we will not again become interested in a lot of social issues as a news story until somebody burns something down which is a little late. Charlayne Hunter said. Practicing those words very recently she

said. If more black reporters were working in more minority reporters we could have warned them about the rioting that was going to take place in 64 65 66 and so on in various cities before it happened and perhaps stopped the worst of it all stopped it all. But there was no warning. There was no message from those who knew the community best. Well I think that what's happened now is that the ruling concern among a lot of the media is now profit and survival so you're finding that editorial meetings now may be dominated by how can we package this stuff. Who are we going to put on the cover How's our new hot gossip page going and not by such questions as what's happening in certain areas of the city where there are tremendous social problems where there isn't much money. The concerns in the editorial board room. Perhaps it's always been true but

I find it distressingly true today. One of the comments you made about the demise of New Times magazine where you had a recent article was that it couldn't compete with magazines on jogging. And you said how much can you say about jogging. Well this is what intrigued me because one of the sister publications of New Times is a new magazine called The Runner which has taken off. Now the New Times and the run are both owned by a conglomerate in CA and it was appalling to me to find out that the runner is selling like crazy. And I asked myself you know if you love running how much can you read month after month but what kind of track shoes to wear or how to breathe when you jog. Why is that magazine surviving while a magazine like New Times which really did look into a lot of social issues was born in the days of the new left and tried to talk about things like mental health and consumer and

fraud and all these kinds of issues. Can't make it. There's some real problem there. There really is. And I think that it's really to the point when I bring up the fact that you wrote an article which is all at once a direct and poignant and the kind of article that makes you. Turn off your your reading light and sit back and think for a while after you finish it it's called the nightmare of Hugh Rivers Jr. which was published by New Times in October 1978 in which you talk about America's mental health system as it affected your own family and your brother without exacerbating a very sad story. I do want to ask you about it and perhaps if you would just give us the barest bones of it and then we could get to the themes behind that you brought out.

Well the basic part of the story is that my brother went into a program for treatment of severe depression at the National Institute of Mental Health was one of the most prestigious research outfits in the country and was taken off of certain medication that had kept him free of delusions since he had had a delusional episode once before. The story that emerged was he was taken off the medications became delusional discharged from the program there and then it became a bureaucratic nightmare because in a community surrounded by hospitals and doctors there was no way he could get treatment. Note the doctor would see him because all the roads lead that lead back to a certain social worker who had decided that he wasn't really sick at all he was just play acting. And it when on and on to the point where he was totally delusional thought that. Richard Nixon was chasing him to kill and wound up wandering in a swamp in North Carolina and nearly died. And then what happened to the family was that no one wanted to

take any responsibility and the bureaucrats covered up. And finally because of bureaucratic mistakes and the nonexistence of Community Health Systems my parents wound up having to pay for private hospitalization for my my brother which cost them $20000 of their life savings which was just about all their life savings. And the thing that the experience pointed up for me was that the mental health system in this country is a joke. It doesn't exist. We've gotten a big push toward deinstitutionalization getting people out of mental hospitals into the community. But what exists in the community and for the most part it's pitifully inadequate. There are no halfway houses. The clinics that exist are overstaffed under budget. So you have people essentially literally wandering around the streets with no help. You know at one point in the article you said this terrible thing happened to my my brother and it destroyed a good part of your

own family. Your father had two heart attacks before this began and this didn't do him any good and your mother died shortly thereafter of cancer. And one of the rubs was that you couldn't get him back into the hospital of the National Institute of Mental Health because one woman kept insisting it was the family's fault or they weren't showing the right attitude and all of the doctors that you you mention in the article most of them keep saying things like oh you really put me on the spot. Now I'm placed in the middle and so on and so forth. Later on you say Suppose we hadn't been middle class white so concerned with taking our last pennies and dollars and destroying mother and father and all the rest of it was we have been black without a family support system without any money at all or a Chicano or Puerto Rican or whatnot. We wouldn't have had any chance. Oh I think that's true. The fact that my brother is now on the correct medication he's stable. It has a very good chance of

leading a full and normal life is only due to the fact that he had a family that would literally spend his last penny to get him treatment if my brother had been poor or black. He would right now be in the back wards of some mental hospital spending his life probably either there or shuttling between hospitalization periods of being wandering aimlessly on the street and being back again. There's no question in my mind now that you've written this I think exceptional piece. The nightmare of Hugh River Jr. which I don't think you have heard the last of because I think it's good enough to alert the profession and I think they will signify some approval somehow. But the the magazine that you did it for folded. You say in one amusing article that you did that I read that four or five of the journals that you have worked for folded shortly after you worked for them. I feel like the Titanic. Well. I think you you are taking too much blame it was after all the iceberg not the

Titanic. The problem is that the journals of serious comment are drying up at the same time that the how to do it. Books and magazines are popping up all over. Now combine that with the fact I read somewhere recently that there are only 700 minority people excluding women in the American newspaper business the daily newspaper business. Of those 50 work for the Honolulu Advertiser. Of those 10 percent work for The Washington Post. The majority of American daily newspapers in small towns have no. Minority people are tall. Most of the minority people who work for American newspapers work for thirty five percent of the biggest newspapers. This this is a very dangerous picture that the figures paint.

It is and what I think happened is that the issues that minority people have to deal with that poor people have to deal with are often very divorced from the issues that upper middle class management deals with. If you are a managing editor and you live on Long Island and you take the train into work every day you probably never seen a rat crawl in a window and bite a child abuse. You have no pressing concern about the X million rats there are in the city so that you tend to look at a day's news or you say I hear. Oh Pak hears this is happening. Here is a brand new opening of a big new picture. These are the things that seem to you the sexy stories the interesting stories. There is nobody to stand at your elbow and say 100 kids were bitten by rats last year. These recurrent issues of social problems that that don't change that need to be followed up that aren't always sexy stories all they can be written in an interesting way. You've

got to have somebody with that nagging little voice who's going to be a pain in the tail. Who's always going to say you got to run that story you've got to run that story. Presumably it's going to be in large measure people from minorities ranging from Native Americans Hispanics across the board blacks who are going to make an insistence now there's a game being played to for example in television more minority people than ever of being hired. It's been a true rather dramatic increase since 1971 especially since 1975. And we find that in reports to the FCC the stations are saying that a lot of these people are holding high jobs or jobs that might be interpreted as significant job not only editorial jobs but significant. They have put about 75 percent of all the people on the staff to some of these stations in that high category. So it's a game. It is it's a numbers game and also you'll find Take a look at some of the people you're hiring if you

hire an Ivy League middle class black and put it one as an anchorman. He's probably not going to do what you want he's probably never been poor. He may not relate all that well to the black community so just having a black face or a Chicano name doesn't necessarily mean you're getting the kind of input that you want. If you are a manager of any kind of media I think you have to seek out the kinds of people that are facing a lot of the social problems you've got to go to the people in neighborhoods you've got to go to your kind of community and say OK what's bugging you. What is that. What are your problems what are the things we should be doing that we're not doing. And certainly one of the ways to do that is to have to hire people. But you can also do it by reaching out to to those kind of people that aren't reached and asking for their input and that's not done very much but you have to train them.

I saw another figure. Another is to figure that five years ago or six years ago the amount of money being spent by American newspapers to train people from the minorities like the Berkeley some a program that is being directed by Bob Maynard was six years ago something like two hundred twenty five thousand dollars nationally in total and that something like 14 months ago it had sunk to one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. A lot of money is drying up and also minority candidates get put in it really in a no win situations. A good example of that is what happened at one of the networks a few years ago where young particularly black people were hired sent out to bureaus across the country as reporters. With much less experience then the Usually than the white males who had the jobs. So first while they're competing against people who had much more

experience and they did not get what one executive called producer acceptance back in New York in other words the young minority reporters without as much experience without the sort of networks back and forth weren't getting their stories on the air. And there were good reasons they weren't getting the stories on the air sometimes their stories weren't as good because they hadn't had the training sometimes they just didn't simply have the right connections for a whole variety of reasons. The program was canceled because it didn't work well. Whose fault was that was the fault of the young reporters who were sort of put out in the firing line not given enough time too often to develop the kind of pace they needed and then told they failed. Well that's a no win situation you see that happening a lot with minority candidates. You said in a recent piece that was released by something called One woman's voice which is in Princeton New Jersey is it a new service of one kind or another.

Yes it's a nationally syndicated column. And I'll just quote a little bit I am I entitled to have Ok so no no not at all. OK. So for free. I see a pessimism setting in and not merely the expected desire for a respite from the turbulent 60s or pick up bits and pieces of information and I sense a pattern. I think the intellectual foundation is being laid for a philosophical concept of limits. I'm not talking simply about the idea of realizing we can't do everything overnight that's only commonsense. I mean a hardening sense of the world is the way it is because of forces we can control. And it is a folly to try. I wonder if the 80s will be a graveyard for the hope of social change. When my children come of age at the end of the decade will they inherit a conventional wisdom of things as they were the 70s have been called the time of the Imperial me. Will the 80s and try and the imperial status quo as well talk more about that.

Well I'm. You do have to say and quote end quote. I am disturbed by the movement has been called neoconservative ism I guess in which people who might be expected to be liberals are coming out and saying such things as we must cut the budget we can't do everything. And it's not that some of these these observations aren't realistic but they're there is a great deal of social injustice in this country that we have not dealt with. We people are saying well the war on poverty was a failure because we spent all this money and things didn't change. Well the point is that we what we did was with a War on Poverty was it was a great hoopla when this war on poverty was announced. And at the beginning there were a lot of money thrown into programs and then just as many of these programs were beginning to take effect. They were underfunded and gradually bled to death. So that was the idea that we spent tons of money and yet

nothing changes not true the war on poverty in many areas was very successful particularly in the south it trained an entire generation of black leadership. But many of the failures of the programs the war on poverty came because we wanted you know a quick win. You're talking about programs social programs that may have taken years to be effective and if they didn't work in three years they were junk. We tried something else so we haven't really tried to address the question of social ills with all our effort and I think it's it's an illusion to say we have. Let's take a case for example of the South Bronx that's been condemned as a failure those That's the way those poor people destroying neighborhoods used to be good middle class neighborhoods where you mix European immigrants in there and their children lived that sort of thing. And yet it's not the failure of the immigrants. It's not the failure of the poor. Sometimes as the conditions imposed on them we always say Pull yourself up by your

own bootstraps. But that's an impossibility in a technological world for most people. They're trying desperately to keep going on such a story as the South Bronx have the media been at fault they're not pointing out the really basic problem. And it's spending so much time just describing the destruction of the buildings. I think so. I remember when Bill Moyers did an excellent program on the South Bronx it was one of the few to take cameras into the yes street yes. And he. He has a hard time getting on prime time. His last show which was on a mental hospital took six months to get on the air because they couldn't find a spot for it in prime time. That certainly says something about you know where social issues rank. When it comes to entertainment but I think the media is at fault in in following the merry go round in not going. I find in dealing with with editors for example if you come up with a social issue story they will

say often well we did that last year and we've done that story. Well the point you've done that story the problem hasn't gone away and you may have to run the risk sometimes of offending readers or boring readers by saying to them the problem hasn't gone away. And by putting pressure on leaders selectman and senators and congressmen by nagging them a little bit in the press by following up on stories and. The media has been very reluctant to do that it's a huge mall which will always eating new red meat new sensation new story tomorrow's story. And certainly that's the nature of the beast and you can't you can't deny it but you certainly can make a much stronger effort than is being made to deal with yesterday's unresolved problems. The magazine The Economist I find sometimes has better articles on American problems.

Then Time or Newsweek again I think it's fat ism that you point out the fashion of American journalism is flip and current and it's not into the continuing story. Is it only because of disinterest or is it because the continuing stories cost money you'd have to hire a different kind of staff you'd have to give them lots of money for research you'd have to have a tremendous library you'd have to give people all kinds of airplane tickets and and give them weeks and weeks to ferret out the facts. It's not part of it. That's part of it yes it is expensive it's expensive to run a good news operation for example and it does not show up in the balance sheet. You make more money now if you are running a newspaper. The best way to make money is to put on a big gossip page to run a lot of celebrity stories a lot of rote resection is yes grocery section. Those kinds of stories and your readership will go up and one of the unfortunate thing that seems to me is that has happened is the growing consciousness of

the fact that news makes money particularly in television used to be that the television news was carried through as a public service. And while it wasn't may not have been a great product at least you didn't get what you see now in television news which is a beautiful anchorman or anchor women stories that run for 30 seconds because they want to try to cram in as much is as can be crammed in happy talk whether you know long segments of weather because for some reason people seem to want lots of weather you know television news has been almost totally taken over by show business and television news is where something like 75 percent of the American public now gets its news. I think would be a very distressing sight to Ed morrow to see that too often particularly local television had become they become circuses.

What does Ed morrow know that Howard Cosell couldn't do better. Well yeah Howard Cosell is probably several grades above what you usually see on television. But I remember when I worked at the US A. This was just after the murder period. People said it was a better agency than before and I kept saying why I think it's going down. And they said no it's because Ed morrow was our boss. And those of us who worked for him felt that we were enhanced by his his attitude. I think this is the same thing that's happening under the present director John Reinhart who has a very great concern for minority issues and in all the rest. Well is it entirely can we can we turn any of this around. Well I tend to believe that things are cyclical. And that unfortunately we probably won't in the news business which has been my business. It probably won't turn around until we have some kind of natural catastrophe a national catastrophe that will do it for us. Another

Watts another riot another session of upheaval before we we decide that once again we are going to be interested in covering national issues and not just peddling trivia and entertainment as well as the things the American public should read. Do you think it's going to have to be the shock treatment that some sort of a disaster well maybe we ought to look at Iran in the early part of 1979 or the Middle East at any time or Cambodia for the last five years or any of these servers be off for you. Bangladesh we ought not be immune to what is happening in the world and show a little more social concern and it's obvious isn't it that we ought to be doing some better stories. Well I suspect that we won't feel the shock waves in the media until it is the kind of thing that touches our lives directly when the oil is shut off and we have to wait in line for gas stations or they are burning down part of our city or

until somehow we are personally affected by the things that happen. Well to end on a on a lighter note you did a an article and I think it was January 11th 1979 on the fact that the Skylab was falling falling falling again and it was sort of a Russell Baker kind of an article What was your conclusion there. Well my conclusion was that I've decided the thing I'm going to worry about for the whole entire next year is that Skylab will fall on me and I will look at the sky and twice a week and if I do not see a shadow heading toward me I'll not worry about anything else. And what is the what is the betting in Washington now that it will fall on the Pentagon or the East Room which it which would really play havoc with NASA's appropriations if it does that. Well it it might fall on a southern bank in Georgia and end an investigation. There are people who would probably like to see that happen. Maybe a coup cynics in enemies would probably like to see it fall on Cleveland or

maybe city hall at this point. Or I make a syndicate. Well Carol rivers it's always a pleasure to have you and. May I again congratulate you not on one particular story but on a series of stories over a period of years in which you show concern for such subjects as sexual harassment of American women and the needs of publications the needs of their clients of growing up and the problems of young women and young men and certainly of the of the incarceration of people in hospitals and prisons and whatnot. It's a major contribution for this edition. Bernard Rubin thank you. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in to 1970. The program is produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. I w GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its card to.

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