The First Amendment; Diamond; Israel; Myths Of Media Power

WGBH Boston in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communications at the School of Communications at Boston University now presents the First Amendment and a Free People: an examination of civil liberties in the media. In the 1970s. And now, here is the director of the Institute for Democratic Communication, Dr. Bernard Ruben. I'm very pleased to have as my guests on this program two people who know a great deal deal about television and its impacts on the American people. Ed Diamond is a senior lecturer at- of political science at MIT, where he directs the new study group. He's also a commentator for The Post Newsweek Television Group in Washington and a contributing editor for New York magazine. Many of you know him as the author of "The Tin Kazoo" which came out I believe, Edwin, in 1975. And he is currently working on a biography of Jimmy Carter, which I won't say too much more about except that it is, uh, something of a documentary biography or a psycho biography or what have you. My

other guest is Kay Israel uh whose field is American politics and Kay is currently finishing his doctoral work at MIT with collateral coursework at Harvard University. I'm gonna start out, uh Ed, with you and, uh, I'm intrigued by an article that you have in the, uh, September October issue of Skeptic magazine this year entitled "The Myth of Media Power." And 1 of the things you say is that, uh, a great deal of the potential threat advertised through the years about television. For illustration purposes, that, hell, that the American public in political campaigns might be thrown off its collective pins by media spots for political candidates that would be absolutely distortions they wouldn't be able to see around them and they'd vote the wrong way or vote on the wrong issues. And you, in a very refreshing way say, the same instrument that can provide those distortions has created a

very sophisticated- a group of American viewers and that the news programs and other sources of information, on a daily basis, make them versed enough so that they can see the distortions in part for what they are. Is that that- is that your spirit or not? I think you've, you've said it better than I did in the book and I- and I'm grateful to you. The book came out in- in, uh, November of '75 and I- I just want to add that it's going to be brought out in paperback because the hardcover has done so well, but the significance of the date was not to work in that sneaky plug, uh, but, uh, to suggest that when I wrote it- uh, I concluded that the American audience had become sophisticated and the television had been an instrument in the- in the education, in- the- in making people skeptical or more sophisticated. I wrote before the existence of a program called Saturday Night Live. Now, Saturday Night Live is on NBC, on television. It, uh,

go- it is seen by an audience of mainly young people. And granted I'm a- uh, young people are not typical of the entire television audience or the entire voting citizenry. But Saturday Night Live essentially to me, for those who have not seen it, know nothing about it, has as its point of departure the kidding of television and television styles. You have to understand television to- before you can understand the satire of Saturday Night Live, and what happens on Saturday Night Live Live is that commercials are kidded, Jimmy Carter is kidded, Gerald Ford is kidded. And the- and all of these icons of the media that a few years back people were so convinced that, you know, they- they can sell us anything. They can sell us pepsodent, they can sell us president. Uh, programs like Saturday Night Live show how people are aware and can discount and kid and deal with the pitchman's, uh, art.

That's what I say. I'm still in the minority on that though, Kay, you may - Kay, do you want to, uh, comment on that? Ed's point is, uh, very well taken. I think that the, uh, studies that have been taken, uh, taken, uh, by the, uh, two boys at Syracuse, tend support Ed's point of view which that, uh, people can digest the information. Are we talking about So, Syra- Syracuse has - Absolutely - lots of money to study lots of people. So we are talking about McLure and Patterson. Right. Absolutely, uh, I think what they basically say is that, uh, on an informational basis in reality, uh, people are selective enough to pull out information from what they see on TV and put it to good use. Their indictment of, uh, television television, I think, ?primary? is the fact that the information that's made available sometimes isn't of a level allows the viewer to really pull out anything worthwhile. Well, since we brought those researchers to the, uh, audience's attention. They also have done a lot of work on the split voter problem and how selective perception leads people to vote

for this Democrat or that Republican without much party loyalty. Well, as- as you point as you point out, Ed, there's been going on for 30 years the breakdown of political parties. ?Evrin? Kirkpatrick is very worried ab- about it from the American Political Science Association point of view, but But they also say that- the- ?their? split voters tend to believe the very last thing they've seen in a good TV spot. Well, this is- this- I don't- I just- I find this hard to b- I think, this country is different than- I think this is 1950s thinking and between the 1950s and the 70s came the 60s, the growth of the consumer movement, the Ralph Nader-ism and all the public interest groups, uh, the Vietnam, Water Gate, CIA, FBI, which are all shorthand for saying, ah, as I sometimes say to students, you trust your mother but you make her cut the cards. I mean we still have a sense of trust in this country, which both Carter and Ford played to win their campaigns, but we're still- we're still- Uh,

We now ask questions. We don't accept blindly the faith of authority. So then- then you're suggesting that before Watergate before Vietnam and so on and so forth we had, uh, television theater and we couldn't really assess what it was; with Vietnam we had- we had cinema verite today which was very hard to take and made us all mature. Is this- ?speaking over each other? ?I'm sure? Again you're saying it- you're saying it in different- ?and prep? better terms than I did. I think, uh, when I grew up, I'm- I'm of an older generation than K.. When I grew up we believed our government told the truth. Governments didn't lie. Well of course they did. That was the- but that's called diplomacy, but generally you tended to trust the government, you tended to trust the police, you tended trust the universities, you tended to trust the various institutions of society. They had a cr-. The very fact that we now have- we have the phrase "a credibility gap" and I think it's a good thing that we no longer trust these institutions, that they are on-

they're- by the way, I- first,1 I don't think we trust institutions anymore the way we used to. Two, I think that's good to be skeptical about them because I think it- the skepticism will cause us to kick the tires of a car before we buy it. What a squeeze the- squeeze the fruit before we buy. What- what Nader and the public interest groups have been urging consumers to do. Look over the product, comparison shop. Examine the claim. Read the small type. All of the movement has to spill over to other- into other areas- I'm going to ask K. to act as a sounding board for your remarks because- ?he's of that generation' he's of the generation. How does this sound to you, K.? I- I think Ed is right on the most part but I think there is 1 question that has to be asked. I think it's the kind of question that Daniel Schorr has been asking of late which is, basically, is our perception of reality, due to the confines of the medium, sufficient to give us a true picture. And again, this is, I think, going back to the point as to what the message is being sent

out- Alright, K. is- K. is only our feet to the fire here. OK. What I'm saying is basically this, uh, the example that Shore gives is that ?of we'll say? a congressman that is rather rambunctious and, uh, well over time in terms of getting a short, brief answer to a question. It's up to the reporter then to edit it down and make it coherent. Shorr's contention would be that when the moment you edit that down you're not showing reality, you're showing a reflection of reality. A- A little glimpse of what may not exist in that time and in that part we do have distortion. Well, distortion ?eh- uh-? anything that isn't- I was shifting off from the audience, which we talked about, I- apparently we all agree that the audience is smarter, more sophisticated, or parts of the audience- We'll come back to that in a second. OK but now you're shifting to the makers of the new- the newsmaker or the man- the people who harvest the news crop every day. Now, uh, of course the difference between art and reality is selection, whether a novelist, a poet, a filmmaker, or a

Walter Cronkite makes ?this?- Cronkite, of course, has very little to do with the selection. And that's an important thing because most people have the notion that when they turn on the, uh, Evening News with Walter Cronkite, reality out there is the world and art is the program you see. And that Walter Cronkite has looked at the reality and made the- he's the artist that said we'll do A B C D and we won't do F Y G h. Well in th- and that some people call that distortion. 1. And 2, some people say this shows the bias one man's power. Well, People say that, K., 1, don't know what art is about, although they may know what they like, and 2, they don't know what journalism is about. Because the essence of art is selection and the essence of journalism is not 1 man making selection but it's done by a group. So it isn't Walter Cronkite's eyebrow- or Walter Cronkite's preferences do not shape the news.

It is a group of people, not professionals necessarily, but people with more- with more or less experience, who are saying from all the things that happen in these 24 hours, I mean let's be specific rather than use these high class WGBH words like- like art and reality, what we're talking about is, OK, it's 6 o'clock newscast we've got to do. And, uh, there've been 24 hours of happenings out there, all over the world, and we've got 22 minutes to do it in. What do we select from that reality to present. But aren't you at odds with your own, uh, supplementary thesis and something you wrote and something you wrote recently. You wrote that, 1 of the problems ?is-? where Crouse "Boys On The Bus" left off and where other people have been- David Broder's done some work David Broder done some work on this, that the field of vision of correspondence, let's say, covering a political campaign, or, um, a threatened execution of a convict, we won't mention any names, They tend to see what the event is that is before them, in the threatened execution of a convict, is the judge and the

paraphernalia of the law and the- and so on- the mother, in regard to the election campaign the headquarters that there at, the news that is coming in, the speech that the fellow was making at the moment at that time, is their real problem so far as communication is concerned that people look at what is in front of them and there aren't enough artists to say look we have all of these things coming in everybody sore from 1 tiny little 5 degree angle let's even get up to 15 degrees. Well, I- I- I would agree with you. Uh, ?we? again we seem to be- we- we tend to come back to television because he's the biggest- biggest noisemaker and the biggest boy on the bal- block. But, ?a uh,? take a, uh, a- a Gary Gilmore case or a Ford kind of debate. If indeed our ?only's? channel of information about this or on Angola was the evening network news. And those 2- 1- minute 45 or 2 minutes

10, Cronkite, intro, film, soundbite, exit line, kicker, Cronkite ?again.? We would be in trouble if all we had was that single channel of communication -But Ed ?inaudible? But we have- But we have a thou- a hundred flowers bloom. ?Yeah? but let me have it let me throw WGBH question back at you. We're talking about those who are not in trouble, who read the magazines, th- the newspapers, see the television. But we know from- from surveys that a great many people- especially a great many poorer people and deprived people depend upon that medium almost totally for their- and that's what we get kicking back now- OK, here's where I'm glad you- glad you said that- OK. Of course it's the usual TV ads, you know it's we- Now demolish that argument ?T V H unintelligible? It's we happy few- we happy few who read the news magazines and subscribe to weeklies and watch tv and read- I would- I would just ?soon forget ab- out us. We- We are okay but if they whose in trouble.?

Well this is what Benjamin Hooks said when he attacked so many educational television stations, he said they are the Harvard University's when we need street academies. You know but poor people, they, aren't all that bad off. Let me give, I hope, although it's a grim example, I'll try to keep it short. In the Vietnam War, which we talked about, there is sufficient perhaps distance from that now that we can- we can deal with it in some- in some intelligent sensible way as analysts anyway. Now you could say that in Vietnam ?or? all the channel communication for- for these people was mainly television. It showed the forces advancing here, the Viet moving back and forth and- and people who didn't read Frances Fitzgerald or The New Yorker or New Republic had- all they had was television. But there isn't all that had with ?television- in television? they had something else. They had reality. the intrusion of the real world, the return home of

caskets, from Vietnam, that came into poor neighborhoods. And I had ?huts-? I talked to a- a- a, I'll call them, you know, and I hate to fall into this Washington buzzword, but a leading administration official of the Johnson era. And I asked him about Vietnam in the media and what brought the war home. Was it the marching? Was it the- was it the fact that the Wall Street Journal concluded that war was bad for business? Was it Newsweek's covers? Was that the pictures on Cronkite? No, he said it was the caskets coming back home, when they were 10 or 15 or 20 G.I. dead a week. We ?spread? over a big country. and the war was bearable by the administration. It could be handled. When they were 50 or 60 caskets coming home, It was still bearable by the- this is a message now caskets coming home. But when the casualties hit 300 a week and 350 a week when a casket was coming home to every congressional district. Then the Johnson administration, the

politicians began feeling public anger and public unhappiness rising when the message, not delivered by Cronkite, but delivered by reality of caskets coming home, began to hit enough communities, enough people began saying why did Johnny down the street die? What's this war? So is this was a combination of tactical, that's right, and ?tactial? information with supplementary media information. Yes. You Again, you say it better because- ?I don't I was trying to- drawing to take it from you-? If people would- if people would realize that Cronkite isn't our only window to the world. There is a window literally in our houses which we look outside and know something about. We don't need Cronkite to tell us about a lot of realities. K. The- the- the, uh, group that you represent that's coming in to take over the professional world almost imminently. Uh, when you started in college you had the impression you were really television happy group and when I saw you leaving college and a great many of these people don't watch the news anymore

at night, where everyone could tell me what two or three programs were the night before. K. Why. Why did this happen? Was it because you know Ed is absolutely right and that the world of reality comes together with a world of media? I think we have to consider the audience, I think part of our problem is that the audience we deal with is perhaps, uh, In that WGBH group, you're talking, about I think, in reality, that, uh, if we're talking about the other group I think they are watching TV. I think they are pretty much buying the same habits. I think the difference is, as Ed has implied they're a little more sophisticated. And this is I think we get back to the one area that I slightly disagree with it on which is I think that perhaps that sophistication may have become a disadvantage as well. In the sense that, uh, we all know, for example, that Nixon used the notebooks in his famous speech ah- to- as props. The result is now we expect props whenever we see something in the background. The result is- is- You mean we suspect it. Yes, the result is that at times reality is not accepted as reality but [laughter] due to our sophistication we

assume that they are props. The White House is no longer a White House but rather it's a backdrop for Daniel Schorr, or whomever else is on TV at that point, as he explains what happens in the news. And I think that's part of the problem. Uh, we have become so sophisticated that times we have a hard time- Right, Let me- let me just pick up on that and throw this over to Ed now. Ed, taking Kay's point that we have become so sophisticated. Suppose somebody comes up and upgrades the techniques of distortion using the media. Are we so sophisticated that we reach a plateau with media recognition. Or can we be conned very nicely by a smarter group. Well see I've got to create, uh, Humphrey-Hawkins full employment act for people like us. One of the roles of the critic and the professor, and the would-be professor, is to keep them- to keep- to keep track of the game to call him. To blow the whistle on 'em and make them pull up their socks when this goes on.

If Jimmy Carter's artfulness is going to be artful artlessness, you know and he's going to go the route of the Log Cabin-izing, you know, talk about how poor he was as a boy and- and his farm roots and everything, well it's up to us to point, and the- because that fits in with a kind of ?Gestal? going around the land these days, it's up to us to say, "Hey, yeah, th- the- this- these- this poor boy, they had a tennis court, swimming pools, you know, I mean, let's- let's put this in perspective." I mean there's a role for us. When the techniques change, and ?yet-? uh, ?yet? if the techniques of manipulating the audience change and the audience is going to get, uhhh, get manipulated then it's us up to us to blow a whistle. I think, um- We've got to watch them. I think your point is well taken. I found it interesting in showing students at MIT or Boston University commercials that are about six months old. It's interesting to watch the way they view it, because they find them strictly comedy, and what it boils down to is the fact again that our sophistication generally is about, what, six months behind,

in that sense, and what you do this year can't be duplicated next year and I think look at political spots that's the constant lesson we learned. You can't use last year's methods and still win an election. Well, ne of the things ?burn? we did at MIT and- and K knows about this, uh, We- we do record the political commercials through time and through space to see how they change. And one of our findings was in the last campaign, that, uh, both- both media campaigns are talking about the selling of the candidates. Both media campaigns, at some point in the campaign called in help, and what, uh, they're worried about what they were doing, their image making. And in one case, uh, the Carter campaign, they call for a particular image maker whose skill is the simple commercial, the one head, tightly framed, talking head looking at the viewer and talking to him head to head. Eyeball to eyeball with no artifice and no prop at all.

No props at all. I'd like to get back to something, and I keep getting intrigued, Edwin, by- by what you hypothesize, because I'm not that far from you, but I'm sort of taking us both down another road. Um, OK, uh, the, uh the people who are the critics ca- their job is to alert the audience, But I'm just- Provided they're awake themselves so- I suppose they're awake themselves, but it seems to me that if the critics, as a whole, like the subject as they liked Franklin Roosevelt, that they don't do this job. If they are frightened, as a whole, as they were frightened after 59 and ?agnew-? 69 in Agnew' speech about the media then, they stay away as a group. There are always great men of the media who never desist. But the media as a whole doesn't have much gumption when it comes to critical- uh, critical position taking. Well there's no one who- uh, I- I think- I yield to no man or woman on the issue of

being critical of my- my friends. And that's exactly what- journalists can't have too many friends. Or friends who can't stand the heat or pressure. And critics can't have too many friends or friends that can't stand the heat or pressure too. I think it's- it's up to us to to blow the whistle on our friends as well as on- our friends as well as on the politicians. So you're no longer going to have dinner privately with people like President Kennedy at the start of his administration to get the inside scoop. A lot of us were- were seduced by Camelot and taken in. And there were a lot of us, and you're looking at one, have a lot to answer for because I was part of that establishment, that- that was bewitched by Camelot. I don't think it's going to happen anymore. I don't think- I don't think, um- that no, they're not going to be any honeymoons, and I think that's a good thing. I'm in good company too, I think, because I think that's what the founding fathers, I know that the continuing title

of the series mentions the First Amendment, ?You-? and I think of- it was thrown in there. I know my American history, because the man who framed the Constitution and started this country believed you trust your mother but you make her cut the cards. They believed in an adversarial relationship. Also it was because of, uh, Thomas Jefferson who sent the document back and he said until you give me something to add to it, that it is not self explaining in terms of background to it, I want something concrete. You have to satisfy Jefferson to get the- the, uh, Bill of Rights thrown in. It was a lot of political compromising going on between the people who want their rights literally spelled out and those who said that they're self evident. Also criticism is never self-evident it always takes the individual to- to start something doesn't it. [clearing throat] The, uh, history of journalism in the last 10 15 years would not be the history of a sustained institutional and intelligent organized institutional approach but of

individual stars. Woodward and Bernstein, ?Sai? Harsh, Rachel Carson, if I may appropriate her, as- One of the great investigative reporters of all time would you say? Her silent spring did a great deal more than- than many other things. Started- started a many- many m- started a lot of movements in- in the 60- the whole environmental, the, questions. Ralph Nader, I think of him as a journalist, I- he used the written word to- to get his message across first which was- I don't now, K, you're the youngest one here, you may not know but Ralph Nader's initial- input- uh, output, was uh- those MIT words creeping in but um, was a book about automobile safety. -Unsafe at any speed- Unsafe at any put speed. I do know. K- K, who the first heroes as- as you- you look back at the critic group you said this man is or this woman is telling me what I ought to know. I think many of us felt, uh, that, uh, occurring, at least within my age group, around the 66-67 period, uh, with the emergence of Fulbright

and ?Candy Anderson? of the war. I think, uh, it was the fact that it finally became permissible to stand back and criticize. And, uh, although some of us may feel that the hearings may not have had a significant effect on national opinion I think in a way it did shape our attitudes and it made it all right to finally stand back, just once in a while, to evaluate what's going on. I think that same thing became more evident in 68 through the McCarthy campaign and the Kennedy campaign and, uh, if the McGovern campaign did nothing else in 72 it was to show that occasionally it's alright to criticize even if it is an incumbent president. You know there was a man who taught me as a young professor what criticism was all about when I was teaching at Rutgers in the 50s, ?Broadis? Mitchell, who did the works on Alexander Hamilton, who happens to be one of those deep dyed in the wool civil libertarians and the very best sense. Something sounds wrong to him and he goes jumping off. We have some good people today like Ben ?Beck? Dickey and Walter Lippmann in his early days was no slouch

either. I think, I.F. Stone is another ?man?- I.F. Stone. [fumbling over words] and the documentary about him. I.F. Stones Weekly is played on campuses, seen a lot. People like Tom Wicker, Tony Lewis- Edward R. Murrow when he did that, I think that Ford Foundation sponsored interviews with Robert Oppenheimer at the time which were- went the rounds. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, in those days to send a critical assessment around was considered to be a major act of courage. You- Uh- Uh- K, you mentioned Daniel Schorr who who was a porky kind of guy, bu- in sense of porcupine, you know bristles, the difficult man perhaps to work with or compete with. I've competed with him. But- but he, uh, is popular on campuses and gets audiences in hearings, in Rolling Stone, and- and other places. Yeah, I would think that the Schorr image or that of, uh, Dan Rathers, that of the individual that's constantly being kicked out because he's too much of a nuisance. And I think that's what may explain the popularity with the, uh- Well, I think you know, constantly kicked out,

I mean CBS, uh, they- I don't - not too literally, but uh, -leave without pay and paid for his lawyers and [laughs] made him a beautiful ?settle? [unintelligible fumbling] If it was a shaft, it was the golden shaft, no I think- you know- I was- -I seldom defend big institutions like CBS but certainly in this matter CBS behaved, uh, in certain- you know- I was thinking more of- 'course what's money- what's a hundred thousand dollars to corporations- I just thinking more in terms of we'll say Dan Schorr being, uh, manhandled or whatever else during- at the convention. You mean Dan Rather being hit by the security guard- Yes, exactly that kind of thing the- the gadfly approach and that's- And Wallis actually dragged out of the convention hall wasn't he? ?Oh it's chance that, uh? with this great- great line, live in history as a Chicago security guys moved off the convention floor, so there's John Chance reporting from somewhere in custody ?I don't know? in Chicago or San Francisco, all those things begin to emerge- It's almost- almost as interesting as Norman Mailer trying to get arrested during the Pentagon [sounds of agreement] surround

they- the police wouldn't arrest him, if you remember, he reported on himself. Yes. Well I- I, uh- I think that we're explaining that the American people in terms of criticism have a- a long tradition and one that we can look back on with some- with some confidence that was ?saying?? I guess they call the muckrakers in the- in the 1890s, I don't know what the phrase was in the- from Tom Paine Common Sense pamphleteers. Now we got a high class word called critics- Or even politicians like Norman Thomas essentially was a journalist to use politics- Michael Harrington. Michael Harrington, H.L. Mencken, Haywood ?Brune?. We're all great, uh- You're making me feel better by the minute here! [laughter] Good, well this is one of our up programs, you see, we'll have to schedule in one of the ?dodgers.? But maybe the fact we can name them all suggests that it's a spall band. Well I- I just wanted to say that it is been a great pleasure having such distinguished guests. Edwin Diamond, uh, of MIT and the world of the media. And K. Israel of the- of the world of political campaigning and scholarship. Uh, I think we have done something to explain that there are myths of media power

which, Diamond is absolutely right, deserves looking at. This is Bernard Rubin saying good night. [outro music] WGBH radio in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communications at the School of Communications at Boston University has presented the First Amendment and a Free People, an examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s. This program was produced in the studios of WGBH Boston.