Bill O’Reilly
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Among the many strong media personalities the Bush administration will encounter over the next four years, one of the most pungent is Bill O'Reilly, host of The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel.
BOB GARFIELD:The O'Reilly Factor is rated the number one cable news program in prime time. His book, also called The O'Reilly Factor, is a New York Times Bestseller! In fact it has been the number one bestseller in America for a total of eight weeks, including this one. Just who is the man who vanquished Larry King in the ratings and the Beatles Book in the stacks? Our producer at large Mike Pesca reports. You decide.
MAN: Five seconds-- music come up - cue - the O'Reilly Factor is on tonight - the tension mounts as the Florida Supreme Court takes its time in deciding....
MIKE PESCA: In the basement of the midtown Manhattan headquarters of the Fox News Channel the reigning king of cable news, Bill O'Reilly, has just set the table for another episode of the O'Reilly Factor.
BILL O'REILLY: Caution: You are about to enter a no-spin zone!
MIKE PESCA: O'Reilly says he'll smack the spin right out of you, unless it's spin O'Reilly agrees with - but then, that's not spin! O'Reilly's viewers, the "Folks" he calls them, won't countenance spin either. But they love O'Reilly. Or maybe they love to disagree with O'Reilly. Either way, and this is all that matters to Fox, they watch O'Reilly. On a good night, a million households tune in. A million households isn't enough to keep network programming on the air. It's not close to the ratings of a Rush Limbaugh, and if a million households watch a Hollywood movie, it's dubbed a flop. But in the world of cable news, it's blockbuster, and O'Reilly is a star.
ANN KLANK: He doesn't just accept the spin from his guests, and I don't think he seems like he's controlled! He is oddly attractive. He's very, very masculine--
MIKE PESCA: Ann Klank is a veteran television producer who created the MSNBC program Equal Time and turned Mary Matlin into a TV personality. She advises talk show talent but when it comes to O'Reilly she wouldn't change a thing. She says the entire format needs exactly the kind of jolt that O'Reilly provides.
BILL O'REILLY: Shouldn't Hilary Clinton, then, when it was proven that she was used by her husband, shut up? Shut up? Not continue to support the man?
MIKE PESCA: While the bulk of cable news is comfortable being a.m. radio on TV, O'Reilly and his rival Larry King host two of the only programs where the dominant image is of two people talking --no panel of pundits - not two headed anchors, one from the right, one from the left -- one host - one guest - having it out.
BILL O'REILLY: And you're a supporter of Hilary Clinton, I understand, correct?
ANN KLANK: Yes, I am.
MIKE PESCA: Here O'Reilly's brought on Linda Waite, author of a book on marriage. On the pages of the New York Times, Waite opined that it was unfair to pummel Hilary Clinton for not getting a divorce. O'Reilly quickly dismisses that narrow argument and has the University of Chicago professor answer for all the wrongs of Hilary's tenure as First Lady.
BILL O'REILLY: How can you support someone who the Justice Department says is a perjurer?
ANN KLANK: Well, I, I have to tell you Bill you're getting outside my area of expertise.
BILL O'REILLY: But you're an American citizen! Why would you, as a college professor vote for somebody who lied under oath?
ANN KLANK: Well I think because in my view she's extremely bright, very well trained, extremely I think politically savvy--
BILL O'REILLY: So was Mao Tse Tung!
MIKE PESCA: It's a favorite tactic of O'Reilly's. Barbecuing sacred cows through surrogates, be they official spokesmen or flimsy front men. Where did O'Reilly learn such tricks?
BILL O'REILLY: People have to be persuaded to even listen nowadays! Now I'm not trying to convert 'em a la Rush Limbaugh, but I just want 'em to see my point, and I learned that at Harvard.
MIKE PESCA: O'Reilly's probably the only the person in news with entries on his resume from both Harvard and Inside Edition. One gave him standing as a serious thinker; the other taught him to connect to an audience. His audience.
BILL O'REILLY: The O'Reilly Factor TV show and the O'Reilly Factor book is basically the first national presentation on television and I think in non-fiction literature that was written expressly for working Americans. That's who I represent.
MIKE PESCA: When you add the part in your book about how when you doubledated with Donald Trump, how do you think your audience is going to react to that - as you as this champion of the working class.
BILL O'REILLY: If a working class guy like me makes it, they're happy for me! And I think I have an obligation to help them as well with the knowledge that I've accumulated.
MIKE PESCA: But not everyone's gracious enough to accept O'Reilly's help. ALAN DERSHOWITZ: The fact that he's so popular and that his insipid book is the number one bestseller to me is a very symptomatic of what's happened to talk radio and talk television -- that the worse you are, the baser you are, the more popular your ratings seem to be.
MIKE PESCA: Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz is a ubiquitous cable presence, but he draws the line at O'Reilly. In fact he boycotts all of Fox programming, both local and national because of O'Reilly. Dershowitz says that it has nothing to do with O'Reilly's conservatism. On that point he won't get an argument. O'Reilly says he's not a conservative. His political hero is Bobby Kennedy. He supports gun control. He opposes the death penalty. Instead of executions, here's O'Reilly's solution.
BILL O'REILLY: Much better is to banish them to a life of hard labor! Look--: a death in - by injection or gas or whatever you're going to do is 2 minutes. There's a little suffering, mostly psychological before you get there - and you're gone! Most of the time they sedate these people! I don't know if people know that, but they give 'em a sedative before they execute them. That's not the worst death in the world! It's--
MAN: Well considered humane to do it that way.
BILL O'REILLY: Whatever it is.
MIKE PESCA: A recurrent them of O'Reilly's talk show career has been positioning himself beyond political parties.
BILL O'REILLY: Everybody tries to label me, and, and I don't like it. I'm an - registered Independent politically and I'm a journalist who looks at life the way it is, not the way I want it to be.
MIKE PESCA: In reality, O'Reilly is not a registered Independent. He's been a registered Republican since 1994. When this information came to light after our original interview, O'Reilly said he made a mistake when registering to vote in Nassau County, Long Island six years ago. But records show that he's voted in at least five elections since then, each time being confronted with his party registration which he never took any steps to change. O'Reilly now says that the mistake has been corrected and he finally is a registered Independent. That also is not entirely true. Nassau County does not allow someone to re-register until one general election has passed. So he won't be a registered Independent until November 2002. But why is O'Reilly so eager to be seen as an Independent? Political talk show consultant Ann Klank. WO
MAN: I watched these shows, the left and the right, so often. They are really put in a partisan straightjacket. Go into the green room! It's all gray area. I mean-- these political talk shows are similar to professional wrestling, and these are fake fights!
MIKE PESCA: Fake is anathema to O'Reilly. He has somehow managed to balance honesty and self-promotion. Granted, he postures as a hero to the working man. His book is full of grooming advice, and he has three chapters on child rearing even though he has less than two years experience as a parent. He knows he's sometimes rude.
BILL O'REILLY: I just have no diplomatic skills!
MIKE PESCA: He plays the huckster.
BILL O'REILLY: Appreciate your getting the book very much, and that goes for everybody else who has picked up The Factor tome--
MIKE PESCA: And he's as ratings conscious as anyone on TV.
MAN: 8 o'clock CNN 1.2; Larry King Live - 1.4.
BILL O'REILLY: Yes!
MAN: Hardball at 8 on - Hardball at 5 on MS had a 1.3.
BILL O'REILLY: Oh, they run that fifteen times a day and then MSNBC at 8--
MIKE PESCA: Despite the showmanship, this is not a role. Unlike almost any other political chat show, you can't recast the lead in the O'Reilly Factor. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE] On this night Bill O'Reilly has just thrown the program to commercial. Only the people in the control room and O'Reilly in the studio can see the next guest on the feed from Washington. Laura Ingram is a smart, very attractive conservative commentator who's latest book is called The Hilary Trap. To O'Reilly, who brags about his success with the ladies in his own book, Ingram's next words couldn't be more gratifying.
LAURA INGRAM: How does it feel to be the Elvis of, of talk?
BILL O'REILLY: Is that what I am now?
LAURA INGRAM: That's basically all the girls are saying down here.
BILL O'REILLY: I'm the Elvis of talk. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE: GROANS]
MIKE PESCA: Groans aside, O'Reilly's staff knows it's working for the king of cable news. This show ends, but Elvis can't leave the building. He's taping again in two hours, just enough time to order dinner. Part showman, part wonk, graduate of Harvard and Inside edition, O'Reilly calls out: Turkey burger. Two slices of American cheese. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.
George W. Bush and the Press
January 13, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. George W. Bush is coming to Washington, and even though he's been in the media's glare for most of his life, he's never experienced the high voltage scrutiny he's under now.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The President-elect is not a great fan of the press corps. He's had the occasional fight with reporters and more than the occasional harsh words. Most of those incidents date back before his years in the Texas Statehouse. But a hint of that old hostility emerged during the campaign. Bill Minutaglio joins us now. He's a reporter for the Dallas Morning News and the author of First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. Mr. Minutaglio -- hello!
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Hi! How are you?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Good! I'm going to play that famous off mike moment of Mr. Bush during the campaign, commenting on a member of the press. GEORGE W. BUSH: Where did they ever find a major league asshole [....?....]. DICK CHENEY: Oh, yeah. Yeah -- big time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Was that fair? Was this just an unguarded aside in a tense moment or is this an accurate reflection of how he generally regards the media?
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Well it, it was all of that actually. It was an unguarded [LAUGHS] aside and a true, true reflection of-- of his feelings for some members of the media. I frankly think a lot of members of the national media were surprised when they had heard that. He had worked very, very hard and vigorously over the last year and a half as his campaign rolled forward to present himself as a, as a gregarious, likable-- frankly, compassionate conservative, to use his, his title for himself. There have been a few other moments here and there where the, the volcanic Mount Vesuvius type anger toward the media's cropped up. And most notably I, I think it really emerged during his father's presidency. George W. was known as a, kind of a loyalty-enforcer or kind of a, a media - a backroom media monitor if you will, a guy who, if he had determined that some member of the media had slighted his father, would approach that member of the media and essentially tell them hey, you're frozen.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And as you say he blamed the media for his father's loss.
BILL MINUTAGLIO:Absolutely. He is very suspicious of the media. I, I can tell you [LAUGHS] it was real interesting when I was starting work on my book, he asked-- the name of my publisher. I told him it was Times Books, a division of Random House. He immediately began railing and I'm almost using his exact words here about the liberal Northeast media establishment, and for a second I literally thought he was kidding, but, but he was serious! He feels I think in his soul--, in his marrow that there is a liberal bias in the media that's probably concentrated somewhere in the Northeast and--and it's out to do his family and his own political interests a disservice.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet George W. had a pretty cozy relationship with the Texas press corps. In fact Molly Ivins who you probably know--
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Sure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star Telegram once observed that the Texas media has, with a few notable exceptions, and this is her quote, "been in the tank for Bush to an embarrassing extent." [LAUGHTER] How did he manage that?
BILL MINUTAGLIO: He's extraordinarily charming, gregarious. He threw a lot of stardust at the Texas media, and Molly will, will be the first to admit this, as fierce a critic as she is of George W., she'll tell you that this is the kind of guy that one on one can be very disarming. I should tell you George W.'s -- one of his favorite expressions, and, and he mentioned this to me when I was with him, he pointed his index finger at me and said this: perception is everything in politics. He is wise enough to know that the media has a great hand in shaping your public image, your perception and probably your re-electability.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, if perception is everything, then the President-elect is in really big trouble already! Because he's been saddled with an image in the popular mind [LAUGHTER] nurtured by the media that he's a big, goofy dope!
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Yeah, I'm afraid that that's set in, in stone and I, I maintained a long time ago that George W. is already suffering from a, you know, premature case of Dan Quayle-itis and, and I don't know how you ever escape from that. His buffers elected some time early on to, to hide him, to keep him under wraps -- I think partially out of fear for his perhaps inability at times to answer a question about a policy area, the fact that he might mangle the King's English here and there. I think beyond that though they did him a disservice by almost exacerbating that feeling and accentuating that possibility about him by keeping him hidden. I don't think that they can afford to do that any more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Minutaglio, thank you very much.
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Minutaglio writes for the Dallas Morning News and is author of First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. Ari Fleischer
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: One of the president's main buffers is his press secretary. George W. Bush has had his mouthpiece working for him already this week. His name is Ari Fleischer, a loyal staffer for New Mexico Senator Pete Dominici; able spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee and deputy spokesman for the Bush/Quayle Campaign in 1992.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Earlier this season Fleischer was Elizabeth Dole's spokesman, but when she withdrew, the Bush campaign swiftly recruited him. We asked Amy Dickenson to prepare this profile of Ari Fleischer.
ARI FLEISCHER: I'd be happy to take the question and say that I know that the President-elect and David spoke to each other probably--
AMY DICKENSON: Ari Fleischer stands at the podium of his temporary press room and drops his phrase for the day.
MAN: Ari you, you referred to President Clinton as a "busy beaver." Right--
ARI FLEISCHER: I said the administration has been a busy beaver.
AMY DICKENSON: Busy Beaver. Fleischer test drove it earlier in the day at what is known as the 10 a.m. Gaggle -- an off camera daily briefing for a few reporters. Then he waited to see if it took. Sure enough by 2 o'clock he was being asked a question to which the perfect response - the best possible punchline was:
ARI FLEISCHER: Busy Beaver. You - I choose my words with care. And so I said that, knowing that it would spark some interest from the press in a legitimate story about the last minute executive orders and the regulations and the recess appointments that President Clinton is making here in the final days of his administration. But he has been busy, and so I noted it.
AMY DICKENSON: As a phrase, "busy beaver" doesn't have long legs. It's no "read my lips," but it did surface on some live shots, network stories and in the Washington Post and New York Times the following day. Busy Beaver did what it needed to do; it carried George Bush's message of the day. Ari Fleischer is the consummate Washington functionary. A 40 year old insider who's been working in politics and with the press for half his life. He grew up the youngest of 3 boys in little Pound Ridge, New York. He describes his childhood as idyllic except for one thing. Ari Fleischer's parents are Democrats, and he has been drifting to the right since he first split with them politically when he was in 3rd grade.
ARI FLEISCHER: I think although my, my parents are wrong about most things; all things politically. But I really learned from them, on politics at least, how even though you have a diametrically different political approach than somebody else you can love them and respect them.
AMY DICKENSON: Fleischer says his political views, even if they are in lock step with the administration, will not interfere with his position as press secretary.
ARI FLEISCHER: My politics are my politics. A staffer represents the boss, and that is more - even more true as a press secretary.
AMY DICKENSON: And as a staffer, especially that staffer, any mistakes or missteps by an administration will land on his head. John Dickerson covered the Bush campaign for Time Magazine and is now its White House correspondent.
JOHN DICKERSON: The biggest pitfall will be that the press shop almost always gets blamed early for failures and problems -- both - it gets blamed from the press's point of view and it also gets blamed internally because the messenger is the one who gets shot, and often his job will be to carry ugly messages back in to the administration.
AMY DICKENSON: Fleischer doesn't take risks in his briefings. He doesn't leak to reporters and he plays the party line.
JOHN DICKERSON: He is rigidly on message, and he - he doesn't really step much out of the confines of the day's talking points.
AMY DICKENSON: That's not very satisfying, but reporters say at least Fleischer doesn't add insult to injury by lying to your face.
BILL PLANTE: Well there are some people who speak for government officials -- press secretaries --whether the White House or other places - who would not tell you if your shirt were on fire. But Fleischer does not seem to be like that at all.
AMY DICKENSON: Bill Plante has covered the White House for CBS news for 16 years.
BILL PLANTE: Ari has a good sense of what works in Washington, and it's not a surprise because he comes off the hill, and on the hill, the sort of comedy is a - is a way of life, and it's really clear, watching Ari Fleischer, that he's not going to get tripped up and venture where he knows he shouldn't go.
AMY DICKENSON: One place he must go is the oval office, because if he doesn't have the president's ear, the press will go around him to find someone who does.
BILL PLANTE: When DeeDee Myers became the press secretary, she was kept out of the inner circle, and it showed.
AMY DICKENSON: Reporters speculate that Ari Fleischer's access to George Bush may be blocked by Karen Hughes, Bush's formidable counselor. As for his relationship with the media, various members of the press corps have given Fleischer gifts, but the requisite period of mutual gladhanding is over. Now the arm wrestling begins. Blame the Media
January 13, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One nominee, Linda Chavez, who was up for the job of secretary of labor, withdrew this week. She was accused of hiring an illegal alien to work for her in her home, an accusation that had sunk Zoe Baird's chance at a cabinet post in the Clinton administration in 1993. Chavez denied it, but before she left the stage, she took a parting shot at the media. Garfield shoots back.
LINDA CHAVEZ: Because of the way in which the stories have played over the last few days, the fact that all of you have made, I think, a great deal more of this story than need be and have, in my view, not told the story of some of the people around me, I have decided that I am becoming a distraction and therefore I have asked President Bush to withdraw my name for secretary of labor.
BOB GARFIELD:Dear Linda, Be quiet! Forgetting for a moment whether the Democrats might rightly regard you as a fox in the henhouse or the Department of Labor, did you not know that they would still be vengeful over the Republican-scuttled Zoe Baird nomination 8 years ago? Did you forget how Washington works? Did you think that once your political enemies unearthed your skeleton from its preposterously shallow grave, the media would just ignore it?
Blaming the press for your lost cabinet post, Linda, is like blaming St. Matthew for the Crucifixion. Committing the act is one thing; spreading the news to modern man is quite another.
But of course, you knew that. You were in no way shocked -- shocked! -- by what transpired. What is pretty shock -- shocking is that you, upon being asked to serve by the Bush administration didn't immediately disclose your potentially dirty laundry! I guess that's because Marta Mercado, strictly as a favor to you, of course, had just washed it.
Anyway, Linda. I'm just puzzled that you, a member of the media, chose to so loudly attack the media in the media! It wouldn't be that you just knew it would play with the media-loathing public, would it? That you were cushioning your fallback position in the media by coming out slugging.
Your own syndicate says the controversy will improve your newspaper column distribution eight-fold. That's a nice bump. No wonder you're biting the hand that feeds you. But really, now it's time to shut up. It's not polite to talk with your mouth full. 1939 Radio
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: With the proliferation of electronic media delivered by cable, satellite and the Internet, it's hard to remember that once there was only one kind of box connecting us to the rest of the world -- the creaky, squeaky device known as radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Recently we got hold of a set of twelve cassettes from a company called Great Tapes in Minneapolis that capture an entire day on radio. It happens to be WJSV in Washington, DC on September 21, 1939. And we didn't want just any critical ear on all this ancient radio. We wanted one that had been recently assaulted by hours and hours of television. Jack Lechner is a film and television producer and author of Can't Take My Eyes Off of You for which he watched a week of television, 12 TVs at once for 15 hours a day. Jack Lechner, how did that compare to 18 hours of radio?
JACK LECHNER: Eighteen hours of radio is a breeze in comparison. I have to say it wasn't [LAUGHS] necessarily always better. I mean when, when--you, you listen to this 18 hours, it reminds you that-- as I say in my book, the, the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said that 90 percent of everything is crap. That certainly applied to a week of watching television, and it certainly applies to a day of listening to the radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So give me an example of some monumental crap you heard during this 18 hours.
JACK LECHNER:Well, there are a lot of soap operas. A lot, a lot of soap operas, and their interesting -they're, they're a little different from soap operas now. They're 15 minutes long. Each one has a sponsor, because everything has a sponsor-- [ORGAN MUSIC] and they have this ironclad format that's almost like kabuki. [LAUGHS] You know they, they start with an organ intro--; you hear so much organ in this one day of radio that you can't believe it. [ORGAN MUSIC]
JACK LECHNER: There's a show called Your Family and Mine. It's every, you know, soppy, corny thing you've ever heard all wrapped up into one and very badly acted to boot!
MAN: Judy what about - well what about your own happiness? What about your own right to a normal life?
WOMAN: I'll make my life with him normal! Other people have done it! I know, I know it takes courage, but I'll have to find the courage--
MAN: But Judy what about us?
WOMAN: We must forget about that--
MAN: I need you, Judy.
WOMAN: His need is greater!
MAN: I can't give you up.
WOMAN: You, you've got to forget about me!
MAN: Judy I was just a hobo until I met you. You took me by the hand and showed me the way to a new life!
JACK LECHNER: Interestingly you've got all - these hours of soap operas, and just as soap operas do now, the soap operas are the only place where you recognize the class system on radio, and in fact, you know, when you - if you watch, as I did, a week of television now, the soap operas are the only place where you can tell that there are rich people, poor people, middle class people -- people of all different economic brackets in America.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The, the Goldbergs -- this was a program that ran for 15 years and moved to television --now this kind of - and, and this is a family who lived on the Lower East Side of New York. This kind of blatant ethnicity is something we haven't begun to see again in mass media until recently. What do you make of that?
JACK LECHNER: Well there's more of an acknowledgement in show - in all of show business at that point that America is a melting pot, and a celebration of that. It goes, in some ways, straight back to Vaudeville. It's also the 30s, you know; it, it's the Depression and-- there, there's something that actually feels very right when you listen to it about a show about poor people! I have to say this is one of the cases where nostalgia seems to have gone a long way. When you actually listen to the Goldbergs, it's not that good. [LAUGHTER] Maybe it's just an off episode, but-- you know it's sort of in this uncomfortable boundary between sitcom and soap opera, and I kept listening to it thinking what was all the fuss about? I can't tell.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And--
JACK LECHNER: It's not even that Jewish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's not even that Jewish.
BOB GARFIELD: No. It's just a little - there's a little sprinkling here and there.
WOMAN: Look, e--e--even the dress-- all-- all handmade Jake. Jake there's clothes and then there's clothes!
MAN: So what? Tsk! Something awfully funny here.
MAN:Please! Not so funny! How do you know where these clothes came from? He must have been a chauffeur for rich people before he took this job! And maybe the gave the clothes to him!
WOMAN: But one thing they pulled off very well was the live broadcast of FDR from the Congress. Was that a high point for you?
JACK LECHNER: It was, actually! It, it - first of all it's just remarkable to hear history in the making, and that's why incidentally they chose this day -- September 21, 1939 -- to record. One of the things about FDR is he - it, it's the degree to which he doesn't sound like any modern politician.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: I regret that the Congress passed that Act. I regret equally that I signed that Act.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now this day in radio begins in Washington, DC with Arthur Godfrey who's so companionable, who has such a way of drawing you in to this 1930s sphere I almost felt a gingham apron materializing around my waist as I listened to him.
JACK LECHNER: He's just great, and that was actually one of the most enjoyable things was just to listen to this little embryonic portrait of Arthur Godfrey just before he became an enormous national celebrity. [BELL RINGS]
ARTHUR GODFREY: 6:29 and a half. Good morning one and all. 'Tis the sun dial - WJSV - Washington, DC -any music you hear is recorde--; this is Thursday morning, September the 21st. If I am not mistook -- took with a mistake, this is the autumnal equinox, isn't it?
JACK LECHNER: This is the part of radio that didn't get hyped off to television - the things that aren't enhanced by pictures, and Godfrey in 1939 is doing pretty much what any deejay does now except he, he doesn't have to resort to some of the tactics that Howard Stern does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And then on around eleven o'clock you come to the Jean Abbey show which, you know, we all thought that the infomercial was a new idea, but apparently it's a pretty old idea!
JACK LECHNER: It's remarkable! Here you have a 15 minute infomercial for a Washington department store. Jean Abbey is a woman with kind of cut glass diction who talks you through what's on sale in each department, floor by floor. That's the whole show.
JEAN ABBEY: Fundamentally, the new corsets give a new redistribution of flesh, giving a new economy of waistline and blessed comfort. No longer is that feigned hourglass look achieved through torturous steel casings, lacings and constant discomfort. Not if you're properly fitted by a competent corsettiere. That's why I dropped in at S.K. & Son to shop foundations. They have a very efficient staff of 8 finished school graduate corsettieres, each with a diploma thus proving their knowledge.
JACK LECHNER: We think of television now as being the most commercial any medium has ever been? Television now has nothing on 1939, and there's no boundaries between show and commercial! The same person who is delivering the news is in the next breath giving you a plug for Arrow Beer -- Better, not Bitter. It, it's really as if Dan Rather were holding up a product at the beginning and end of the CBS News!
ARTHUR GODFREY: [SINGING, HUMMING] How do you like Pepsi Cola, mother? You like Pepsi Cola? Why don't you get a lot of it and keep it around the house and serve it to the kids when they come home from school. It won't hurt 'em. It's good for 'em. Wholesome, healthful, made from the essence of pure fruit juices. You couldn't hurt anybody with it. And its tangy fruit flavor appeals to young and old alike. And it's only 5 cents.
WOMAN: What did this day in radio tell you about America in 1939?
JACK LECHNER: It, it's a slower place! I mean partly it's a slower place cause they've just been through ten years of Depression, but also-- the rhythms are slower! I mean when you listen to Arthur Godfrey in the morning talking about Washington, Washington, DC is a small town! You know half of the Godfrey show is someone left a pair of sunglasses at the corner of Tenth and F. Well, [LAUGHS] you know come by the station and pick 'em up. I guess the biggest surprise for me was that commercialism. It, it's so pervasive in this day of radio. There's a great commercial for Zlotnick the Furrier.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is - is that after the Goldbergs? or--?
BOB GARFIELD:Actually that's, that's all through the day. Zlotnick the Furrier in Washington, DC anticipated the trouble in Europe and brought a lot of furs over from Europe just before you couldn't get 'em any more-- [LAUGHTER] and so he's got them at remarkable rates. That, that's actually in many shows the only mention of what's going on in Europe. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks a lot.
JACK LECHNER: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Lechner, film and television producer, is author of Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. AOL / Time Warner Merger
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The Leviathan called AOL/Time Warner is finally among us, passing through regulatory bodies in the United States and Europe along the way. A lot of ink has been spilled over this deal; a lot of worries voiced about what the creation of the world's biggest media giant will mean to the consumer. Aaron Pressman has been following this story for the Industry Standard and he joins us now. Aaron, the last stop on the road to the creation of AOL/Time Warner, a year and a day in the making by the way, was the approval it got this week from the FCC. Now the Democrats on the commission imposed a few conditions. Actually it was just one condition on instant messaging. Why was that so important?
AARON PRESSMAN: The concern there is that instant messaging which is sending these immediate little text messages to friends or colleagues in business is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon. People are relying on it as a means of communication just like the telephone or e-mail, and it's also a gateway into new services that all these companies like AOL/Time Warner hope to offer us like Internet on our wireless phones and interactive TV services and things like that so it's become an increasing focus.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What were the other conditions?
AARON PRESSMAN:The other conditions largely backed up things that the Federal Trade Commission had done last month. They required that AOL/Time Warner share its high speed Internet service with competing Internet service providers; allow those competitors to directly bill customers; and also that AT&T which is the largest cable company in the country and Time Warner not collude to keep out other Internet service providers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, so now the merged company is free to move forward, so what does it plan to do first to exploit all of this much-vaunted synergy?
AARON PRESSMAN: Right. The much-vaunted synergy. Some of it they've already been doing. If you get any of Time Warner's magazines like Sports Illustrated or People you'll see they're selling - they're putting little AOL disks in there and conversely AOL has been promoting magazine subscriptions, apparently selling hundreds of thousands of them. Digital music is a big part of this merger. Time Warner owns many record labels, and they hope that as people start connecting to the Internet more quickly they'll be able to sell some of that music to America on Line subscribers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Has the fact that AOL has lost a certain amount of its value during this market downturn had any impact on any of this or on the forecasts of any this?
AARON PRESSMAN: Well Wall Street analysts are now starting to worry that the company is not going to be able to meet the forecast for growth that it had made originally a year ago. The company says it's going to have revenue over 40 billion dollars a year and grow at 12 or 15 percent a year which means, you know, 4, 5 billion dollars in new revenue a year. With the economy slowing down, with the Internet slowing down and advertising being cut back, it looks like that might be a pretty tough-- condition to meet.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now all the observers of this - the consumer advocates as well as the Wall Street types -declared that the merger was bound to have a huge impact on the converging worlds of media and entertainment and on line services. Well now it's a done deal. So what do you think that huge impact is going to be?
AARON PRESSMAN: Right. Well all these new services like interactive television and high speed Internet suffered from a little bit of a chicken and egg problem in that people, consumers, didn't want to pay for these new services until there was good stuff there to pay-- to see or listen to, and companies conversely didn't want to offer new stuff and spend a lot of money developing new stuff until there were a lot of consumers. Now there's one company that has all kinds of content and movies and music and exciting things, and a big huge on line audience. So they will hopefully have the incentive to develop these new products that have been creeping along but maybe needed a boost.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And are there going to be room for other companies like this? There's always been consumers on line and there's always been consumers for movies. Is this company going to crowd them all into one little box?
AARON PRESSMAN: There is a danger that for these new services and all these new developments on line, that this one company will have-- a huge advantage over its competitors who provide other content like Dis--Walt Disney or a company like Viacom. Those companies don't really have anyone they can turn to who has the same on--that has the same on line reach that America on Line has.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So they don't have this reach now, so what position does this deal put them in?
AARON PRESSMAN:Well it's a tough position! I think they're going to get together with some of the smaller on line players - maybe like Earthlink or Microsoft - maybe like a company like Yahoo which only exists on the Internet - and try and cobble together an on line strategy. The regulators have told AOL/Time Warner that they cannot block other companies' content on line and that they can't discriminate. So those companies are in a position of weakness, but they don't have - they have some options.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what you're saying though is they - it takes a mega company to beat a mega company.
AARON PRESSMAN: It looks like it, yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks very much!
BOB GARFIELD: It was great to be here. Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Aaron Pressman is the senior correspondent for the Industry Standard. Future of Music on the Internet
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: The Coalition for the Future of Music Policy is a non-profit group of artists, activists and music professionals who are trying to address some of the issues that the big players -- Internet and media conglomerates like AOL/Time Warner for example -- haven't yet put on the agenda in Washington, DC. The CFMP held a conference last week at Georgetown University and NPR cultural correspondent Rick Karr was there. He joins us now. Hey, Rick!
RICK KARR: Hello, Bob!
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so here's the thing. I've just gotten accustomed to not putting those little plastic disks in the middle of my Donovan Leach 45, [LAUGHTER] and now come to discover everything's changing again. Simple question -- what is the future of music?
RICK KARR: We don't know for sure. One thing that I think just about everybody's agreed on is that round plastic disks of any sort, whether they very easy analog or digital are on their way out. Whether it's five years down the line or ten years down the line, music is something that's going to be delivered to us over the Internet, whether we're downloading it, whether it's being streamed to us -- and maybe the best way to put it -- something that Walter McDonough said to me - and Walter McDonough is an Internet and music attorney based in Needham, Massachusetts, and he was one of the organizers of-- The Coalition for the Future of Music Policy Conference.
WALTER McDONOUGH: People need to find out how to market music through the Internet! And no one's done it yet, and we have the best, the brightest minds from technology and music trying to figure out that, and they still haven't figured it out!
BOB GARFIELD: Haven't figured it out. What's the timetable?
RICK KARR: We don't know what the timetable is because there are things standing in the way. Now technology people have great ideas! They have things like Napster, mymp3.com, Scour -- the music people love the ideas -- the lawyers haven't figured it out yet. The issue is that there are two sort of legal points standing in the way of making some of these technologies widely available. One of them is this notion of licensing which sounds a little arcane but what it boils down to is the music industry owns all the music right now. They own the copyrights. And the law doesn't force them to let the Internet companies use the music the way they want. Now we in radio - we can play any song we want at any point because there's something known as "a compulsory license." So long as we pay the royalty fees to the relevant bodies, we can use any music we want. The Internet people, by law, don't have that right, and that's one of the things that kept coming up time and again. So that's one point. The other sort of stumbling block that people are citing is an aspect of the current copyright law that's out there; it's called Section 12 01 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and what it does is if you do something with the music that you've always been able to do like make a tape to listen to in your car, or make a tape for your friend, you can be criminally liable. Now a lot of the civil libertarians are saying that's a term in the law that has to go because it gives all the power to the content owners and none of the power to the consumers. I spoke with John Perry Barlow who's the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and he's a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and he said this:
JOHN PERRY BARLOW: People need to find out how to market music through the Internet! And no one's done it yet, and we have the best, the brightest minds from technology and music trying to figure out that, and they still haven't figured it out!
MAN: This does not in any way serve the public interest! It only serves the interests of some essentially moribund institutions as they try to perpetuate themselves beyond their useful life span. One of two things are going to happen. Either we're going to get rid of it in the courts, or we're simply going to ignore it--
RICK KARR: Which means we're going to go on with the world of sort of rampant copying on Napster and artists not getting paid.
BOB GARFIELD: Civil disobedience in other words.
RICK KARR: That's exactly what John Perry Barlow calls it, because he and other people say that the, the sort of the social contract behind copyright has been broken by this law. Now, interestingly, the man who helped draft that copyright law, Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was the first keynote speaker at the conference, and he actually is starting to sound like he thinks that the system needs to change. See, right around the time that he was drafting the Digital and Millennium Copyright Act he started writing songs. So now he has sort of inside, firsthand experience of the way the music industry works, and it sounds like he's not terribly happy with the way it works, and he certainly sounds like he doesn't want the way it works now to be carried over into the on line world.
BOB GARFIELD:All right let's listen to the artist formerly known as Senator. SENATOR ORRIN HATCH: I do not think that it is any benefit for artists or fans to have all the new, wide distribution channels controlled by those who have controlled all of the old narrow ones!
RICK KARR: Senator Hatch actually also went on to say basically the same thing about the large Internet service provider companies - about Time Warner/AOL for instance saying that they shouldn't be able to use their dominance to force AOL users to listen only to Time Warner music.
BOB GARFIELD: So these issues of technology and intellectual property are not confined to the music industry at all.
RICK KARR:They're not confined to the music industry at all, and the reason a lot of the academics are interested in music is because music is the easiest medium to transmit over the Internet. It requires less band width than video does, and it carries on the Internet a little more clearly than the printed word does. And so it's kind of the canary in the coal mine as one of the participants said. It-- the rules for music are going to determine the rules for the way all of the other media are carried over the Internet.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Rick Karr, thanks very much for being with us!
RICK KARR: It's a pleasure to be here, Bob. The Magical Alan Greenspan
January 13, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's see what happened in the market this week. After a huge early January selloff on dismal economic signs, bad corporate news again came fast and furious. Yet the Nasdaq Index actually recovered because Wall Street is expecting another interest rate cut from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, or at least that's what we've been hearing. As Bob discovered this week, it seems there's hardly a question about the economy for which - in the media at least - Alan Greenspan isn't the answer!
BOB GARFIELD: The lengths people go to, to divine to divine the intentions of Alan Greenspan!
MAN: Let's check the brief case-- [MUSIC] indicator-- [MISSION IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD:No matter how impossible that mission, the financial markets and the media that cover them keep on trying. The daily CNBC program Squawk Box actually examines the thickness of Greenspan's satchel to conclude whether an interest rate change is in the offing.
WOMAN It does look kind of chubby.
MAN: I don't think so.
MAN: Yeah! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN Let's - come on - let's get another shot of it - let me see from the side-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: I, I thi-- that looks pretty good! Look at the way the line of the leather breaks--
BOB GARFIELD: Squawk Box is by no means alone in the effort to interpret every move, every utterance, every non-utterance of the inscrutable Fed Chairman for signs of his intentions. Greenspan, he of the owlish expression and opaque public persona, is stalked by the press as if he were the Princess Diana, the JFK, Jr., the Marilyn Monroe of Monetary Policy! Except-- he isn't dead -- no matter what you may have concluded by listening to his congressional testimony.
FED CHAIRMAN ALAN GREENSPAN: When confronted with a period of structural change, our policy actions must be based in large part on identifying emerging trends from surprises and anomalies in the data--
BILL GRIFFITHS:When he sits down to discuss monetary policy or the course of interest rates -- when he's sitting down in Congress there -- nobody knows what he's talking about, and that's on purpose!
BOB GARFIELD: Bill Griffiths is host of CNBC's midday Power Lunch program.
BILL GRIFFITHS:He doesn't say left or right, up or down, north or south; when all is said and done you still don't know how hot it's going to be tomorrow!
BOB GARFIELD:Doesn't matter though. The Great Man has spoken. Consider Lisa Sing Honya. She's an Associated Press reporter in New York who has the unenviable duty in each day's market wrap-up story to synthesize from the billion or two billion shares traded what particular news or economic forces moved the market. This exercise is approximately like finding a key phrase to describe the Collected Works of Aristotle.
BILL GRIFFITHS: It's a lot of educated guesswork. And one of the things you realize very quickly is that nobody knows quite what's going on in the market, but on a day where Alan Greenspan is going to do something -- when the Federal Reserve is going to meet -- I think it's safe to say that you won't have to worry about your lead for the day.
BOB GARFIELD:It's strange to recall that this man was on Gerald Ford's Council of Economic Advisors during the days of 20 percent inflation and was viewed skeptically by Wall Street 13 and a half years ago as a supposed political animal subject to presidential manipulation. Now he is virtually synonymous with independence, perspicacity and something approaching papal infallibility. In a story about OPEC oil ministers this week, the New York Times used the phrase, without feeling any need for further explanation, "Greenspan-like precision." Furthermore, he's a bone fide celebrity!
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Alan Greenspan?
WOMAN I heard that if - whatever he says, the market follows.
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Dennis Hastert?
WOMAN I don't know who that is.
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Alan Greenspan?
MAN: I think he's doing a good job!
BOB GARFIELD: How about Vladimir Putin? Any thoughts?
MAN: Don't know him.
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Alan Greenspan?
WOMAN I think he's doing a good job.
BOB GARFIELD: With the--
WOMAN With the market and the situation, yeah.
BOB GARFIELD: And what about Justin Timberlake. How do you feel about him?
WOMAN Who is this?
BOB GARFIELD: Lead singer for 'N Sync.
WOMAN Don't know him.
BOB GARFIELD:It's hard to believe that any Federal Reserve Board Member could be a household name, but thanks in no small part to the media's obsession with him, Greenspan has transcended his carefully cultivated dullness to become a short, balding, somewhat aged matinee idol.
LLOYD GROVE: He's-- at the top of the Ziggurat.
BOB GARFIELD: Lloyd Grove writes the Reliable Source Gossip Column for the Washington Post and is himself poised, ever-vigilant, on the Greenspan watch because -- well - duh!
LLOYD GROVE: He's-- the most powerful man in the world! At least that's what I'm saying.
BOB GARFIELD: And that means tracking his every after 5:00 p.m. move -- not that Greenspan swoops through Washington with Henry Kissinger-like flamboyance. He swoops through Washington on the arm of his wife, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, with studied diffidence. He put the "reserve" in Federal Reserve. He is the center of a worldwide cult of non-personality.
LLOYD GROVE: He's not really an ebullient sort of guy. The most fascinating thing I ever heard about him is that when he takes a, a bath at 5:30 in the morning and-- thinks the great thoughts about the economy, he adjusts the water temperature by manipulating the taps with his toes.
BOB GARFIELD:Yeah, yeah, yeah - finding just the right balance - neither too cool nor overheated. The point is the man is of such mythic stature that the Washington Post is trading in his metatarsal bathwater adjustment behaviors! How weird is that?! Well, actually, upon further reflection, it's not weird at all, because Greenspan is no longer merely the steward of economic expansion nor even the master of economic expansion. Under the ever-more-bearish circumstances wherein all hope is invested in one historic figure, he has become the messiah of economic expansion for the investment community and especially for those who cover it. CNBC's Bill Griffiths.
BILL GRIFFITHS: Now he's God! The media need a symbol. We need a catch phrase. We need, you know, something that will personalize a story - that we when all is said and done don't fully understand. I mean who understands economics? If you can give it a face - if you give it a personality [LAUGHS] -- you can better explain what this is all about.
BOB GARFIELD:So: load up on Greenspan futures, no matter how bad the corporate news, no matter how rapidly we veer toward recession, no matter how thin the man's briefcase is, you don't have to worry about a bear market for Alan Greenspan. Because the media's obsessive fixation on the chairman of the Federal Reserve is not based on what he actually does nor even on irrational exuberance. It is based at least as much on naked self interest, and media self interest, unlike economic expansion, is immutable and forever.
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Among the many strong media personalities the Bush administration will encounter over the next four years, one of the most pungent is Bill O'Reilly, host of The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel.
BOB GARFIELD:The O'Reilly Factor is rated the number one cable news program in prime time. His book, also called The O'Reilly Factor, is a New York Times Bestseller! In fact it has been the number one bestseller in America for a total of eight weeks, including this one. Just who is the man who vanquished Larry King in the ratings and the Beatles Book in the stacks? Our producer at large Mike Pesca reports. You decide.
MAN: Five seconds-- music come up - cue - the O'Reilly Factor is on tonight - the tension mounts as the Florida Supreme Court takes its time in deciding....
MIKE PESCA: In the basement of the midtown Manhattan headquarters of the Fox News Channel the reigning king of cable news, Bill O'Reilly, has just set the table for another episode of the O'Reilly Factor.
BILL O'REILLY: Caution: You are about to enter a no-spin zone!
MIKE PESCA: O'Reilly says he'll smack the spin right out of you, unless it's spin O'Reilly agrees with - but then, that's not spin! O'Reilly's viewers, the "Folks" he calls them, won't countenance spin either. But they love O'Reilly. Or maybe they love to disagree with O'Reilly. Either way, and this is all that matters to Fox, they watch O'Reilly. On a good night, a million households tune in. A million households isn't enough to keep network programming on the air. It's not close to the ratings of a Rush Limbaugh, and if a million households watch a Hollywood movie, it's dubbed a flop. But in the world of cable news, it's blockbuster, and O'Reilly is a star.
ANN KLANK: He doesn't just accept the spin from his guests, and I don't think he seems like he's controlled! He is oddly attractive. He's very, very masculine--
MIKE PESCA: Ann Klank is a veteran television producer who created the MSNBC program Equal Time and turned Mary Matlin into a TV personality. She advises talk show talent but when it comes to O'Reilly she wouldn't change a thing. She says the entire format needs exactly the kind of jolt that O'Reilly provides.
BILL O'REILLY: Shouldn't Hilary Clinton, then, when it was proven that she was used by her husband, shut up? Shut up? Not continue to support the man?
MIKE PESCA: While the bulk of cable news is comfortable being a.m. radio on TV, O'Reilly and his rival Larry King host two of the only programs where the dominant image is of two people talking --no panel of pundits - not two headed anchors, one from the right, one from the left -- one host - one guest - having it out.
BILL O'REILLY: And you're a supporter of Hilary Clinton, I understand, correct?
ANN KLANK: Yes, I am.
MIKE PESCA: Here O'Reilly's brought on Linda Waite, author of a book on marriage. On the pages of the New York Times, Waite opined that it was unfair to pummel Hilary Clinton for not getting a divorce. O'Reilly quickly dismisses that narrow argument and has the University of Chicago professor answer for all the wrongs of Hilary's tenure as First Lady.
BILL O'REILLY: How can you support someone who the Justice Department says is a perjurer?
ANN KLANK: Well, I, I have to tell you Bill you're getting outside my area of expertise.
BILL O'REILLY: But you're an American citizen! Why would you, as a college professor vote for somebody who lied under oath?
ANN KLANK: Well I think because in my view she's extremely bright, very well trained, extremely I think politically savvy--
BILL O'REILLY: So was Mao Tse Tung!
MIKE PESCA: It's a favorite tactic of O'Reilly's. Barbecuing sacred cows through surrogates, be they official spokesmen or flimsy front men. Where did O'Reilly learn such tricks?
BILL O'REILLY: People have to be persuaded to even listen nowadays! Now I'm not trying to convert 'em a la Rush Limbaugh, but I just want 'em to see my point, and I learned that at Harvard.
MIKE PESCA: O'Reilly's probably the only the person in news with entries on his resume from both Harvard and Inside Edition. One gave him standing as a serious thinker; the other taught him to connect to an audience. His audience.
BILL O'REILLY: The O'Reilly Factor TV show and the O'Reilly Factor book is basically the first national presentation on television and I think in non-fiction literature that was written expressly for working Americans. That's who I represent.
MIKE PESCA: When you add the part in your book about how when you doubledated with Donald Trump, how do you think your audience is going to react to that - as you as this champion of the working class.
BILL O'REILLY: If a working class guy like me makes it, they're happy for me! And I think I have an obligation to help them as well with the knowledge that I've accumulated.
MIKE PESCA: But not everyone's gracious enough to accept O'Reilly's help. ALAN DERSHOWITZ: The fact that he's so popular and that his insipid book is the number one bestseller to me is a very symptomatic of what's happened to talk radio and talk television -- that the worse you are, the baser you are, the more popular your ratings seem to be.
MIKE PESCA: Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz is a ubiquitous cable presence, but he draws the line at O'Reilly. In fact he boycotts all of Fox programming, both local and national because of O'Reilly. Dershowitz says that it has nothing to do with O'Reilly's conservatism. On that point he won't get an argument. O'Reilly says he's not a conservative. His political hero is Bobby Kennedy. He supports gun control. He opposes the death penalty. Instead of executions, here's O'Reilly's solution.
BILL O'REILLY: Much better is to banish them to a life of hard labor! Look--: a death in - by injection or gas or whatever you're going to do is 2 minutes. There's a little suffering, mostly psychological before you get there - and you're gone! Most of the time they sedate these people! I don't know if people know that, but they give 'em a sedative before they execute them. That's not the worst death in the world! It's--
MAN: Well considered humane to do it that way.
BILL O'REILLY: Whatever it is.
MIKE PESCA: A recurrent them of O'Reilly's talk show career has been positioning himself beyond political parties.
BILL O'REILLY: Everybody tries to label me, and, and I don't like it. I'm an - registered Independent politically and I'm a journalist who looks at life the way it is, not the way I want it to be.
MIKE PESCA: In reality, O'Reilly is not a registered Independent. He's been a registered Republican since 1994. When this information came to light after our original interview, O'Reilly said he made a mistake when registering to vote in Nassau County, Long Island six years ago. But records show that he's voted in at least five elections since then, each time being confronted with his party registration which he never took any steps to change. O'Reilly now says that the mistake has been corrected and he finally is a registered Independent. That also is not entirely true. Nassau County does not allow someone to re-register until one general election has passed. So he won't be a registered Independent until November 2002. But why is O'Reilly so eager to be seen as an Independent? Political talk show consultant Ann Klank. WO
MAN: I watched these shows, the left and the right, so often. They are really put in a partisan straightjacket. Go into the green room! It's all gray area. I mean-- these political talk shows are similar to professional wrestling, and these are fake fights!
MIKE PESCA: Fake is anathema to O'Reilly. He has somehow managed to balance honesty and self-promotion. Granted, he postures as a hero to the working man. His book is full of grooming advice, and he has three chapters on child rearing even though he has less than two years experience as a parent. He knows he's sometimes rude.
BILL O'REILLY: I just have no diplomatic skills!
MIKE PESCA: He plays the huckster.
BILL O'REILLY: Appreciate your getting the book very much, and that goes for everybody else who has picked up The Factor tome--
MIKE PESCA: And he's as ratings conscious as anyone on TV.
MAN: 8 o'clock CNN 1.2; Larry King Live - 1.4.
BILL O'REILLY: Yes!
MAN: Hardball at 8 on - Hardball at 5 on MS had a 1.3.
BILL O'REILLY: Oh, they run that fifteen times a day and then MSNBC at 8--
MIKE PESCA: Despite the showmanship, this is not a role. Unlike almost any other political chat show, you can't recast the lead in the O'Reilly Factor. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE] On this night Bill O'Reilly has just thrown the program to commercial. Only the people in the control room and O'Reilly in the studio can see the next guest on the feed from Washington. Laura Ingram is a smart, very attractive conservative commentator who's latest book is called The Hilary Trap. To O'Reilly, who brags about his success with the ladies in his own book, Ingram's next words couldn't be more gratifying.
LAURA INGRAM: How does it feel to be the Elvis of, of talk?
BILL O'REILLY: Is that what I am now?
LAURA INGRAM: That's basically all the girls are saying down here.
BILL O'REILLY: I'm the Elvis of talk. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE: GROANS]
MIKE PESCA: Groans aside, O'Reilly's staff knows it's working for the king of cable news. This show ends, but Elvis can't leave the building. He's taping again in two hours, just enough time to order dinner. Part showman, part wonk, graduate of Harvard and Inside edition, O'Reilly calls out: Turkey burger. Two slices of American cheese. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.
George W. Bush and the Press
January 13, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. George W. Bush is coming to Washington, and even though he's been in the media's glare for most of his life, he's never experienced the high voltage scrutiny he's under now.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The President-elect is not a great fan of the press corps. He's had the occasional fight with reporters and more than the occasional harsh words. Most of those incidents date back before his years in the Texas Statehouse. But a hint of that old hostility emerged during the campaign. Bill Minutaglio joins us now. He's a reporter for the Dallas Morning News and the author of First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. Mr. Minutaglio -- hello!
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Hi! How are you?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Good! I'm going to play that famous off mike moment of Mr. Bush during the campaign, commenting on a member of the press. GEORGE W. BUSH: Where did they ever find a major league asshole [....?....]. DICK CHENEY: Oh, yeah. Yeah -- big time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Was that fair? Was this just an unguarded aside in a tense moment or is this an accurate reflection of how he generally regards the media?
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Well it, it was all of that actually. It was an unguarded [LAUGHS] aside and a true, true reflection of-- of his feelings for some members of the media. I frankly think a lot of members of the national media were surprised when they had heard that. He had worked very, very hard and vigorously over the last year and a half as his campaign rolled forward to present himself as a, as a gregarious, likable-- frankly, compassionate conservative, to use his, his title for himself. There have been a few other moments here and there where the, the volcanic Mount Vesuvius type anger toward the media's cropped up. And most notably I, I think it really emerged during his father's presidency. George W. was known as a, kind of a loyalty-enforcer or kind of a, a media - a backroom media monitor if you will, a guy who, if he had determined that some member of the media had slighted his father, would approach that member of the media and essentially tell them hey, you're frozen.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And as you say he blamed the media for his father's loss.
BILL MINUTAGLIO:Absolutely. He is very suspicious of the media. I, I can tell you [LAUGHS] it was real interesting when I was starting work on my book, he asked-- the name of my publisher. I told him it was Times Books, a division of Random House. He immediately began railing and I'm almost using his exact words here about the liberal Northeast media establishment, and for a second I literally thought he was kidding, but, but he was serious! He feels I think in his soul--, in his marrow that there is a liberal bias in the media that's probably concentrated somewhere in the Northeast and--and it's out to do his family and his own political interests a disservice.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet George W. had a pretty cozy relationship with the Texas press corps. In fact Molly Ivins who you probably know--
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Sure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star Telegram once observed that the Texas media has, with a few notable exceptions, and this is her quote, "been in the tank for Bush to an embarrassing extent." [LAUGHTER] How did he manage that?
BILL MINUTAGLIO: He's extraordinarily charming, gregarious. He threw a lot of stardust at the Texas media, and Molly will, will be the first to admit this, as fierce a critic as she is of George W., she'll tell you that this is the kind of guy that one on one can be very disarming. I should tell you George W.'s -- one of his favorite expressions, and, and he mentioned this to me when I was with him, he pointed his index finger at me and said this: perception is everything in politics. He is wise enough to know that the media has a great hand in shaping your public image, your perception and probably your re-electability.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, if perception is everything, then the President-elect is in really big trouble already! Because he's been saddled with an image in the popular mind [LAUGHTER] nurtured by the media that he's a big, goofy dope!
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Yeah, I'm afraid that that's set in, in stone and I, I maintained a long time ago that George W. is already suffering from a, you know, premature case of Dan Quayle-itis and, and I don't know how you ever escape from that. His buffers elected some time early on to, to hide him, to keep him under wraps -- I think partially out of fear for his perhaps inability at times to answer a question about a policy area, the fact that he might mangle the King's English here and there. I think beyond that though they did him a disservice by almost exacerbating that feeling and accentuating that possibility about him by keeping him hidden. I don't think that they can afford to do that any more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Minutaglio, thank you very much.
BILL MINUTAGLIO: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Minutaglio writes for the Dallas Morning News and is author of First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. Ari Fleischer
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: One of the president's main buffers is his press secretary. George W. Bush has had his mouthpiece working for him already this week. His name is Ari Fleischer, a loyal staffer for New Mexico Senator Pete Dominici; able spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee and deputy spokesman for the Bush/Quayle Campaign in 1992.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Earlier this season Fleischer was Elizabeth Dole's spokesman, but when she withdrew, the Bush campaign swiftly recruited him. We asked Amy Dickenson to prepare this profile of Ari Fleischer.
ARI FLEISCHER: I'd be happy to take the question and say that I know that the President-elect and David spoke to each other probably--
AMY DICKENSON: Ari Fleischer stands at the podium of his temporary press room and drops his phrase for the day.
MAN: Ari you, you referred to President Clinton as a "busy beaver." Right--
ARI FLEISCHER: I said the administration has been a busy beaver.
AMY DICKENSON: Busy Beaver. Fleischer test drove it earlier in the day at what is known as the 10 a.m. Gaggle -- an off camera daily briefing for a few reporters. Then he waited to see if it took. Sure enough by 2 o'clock he was being asked a question to which the perfect response - the best possible punchline was:
ARI FLEISCHER: Busy Beaver. You - I choose my words with care. And so I said that, knowing that it would spark some interest from the press in a legitimate story about the last minute executive orders and the regulations and the recess appointments that President Clinton is making here in the final days of his administration. But he has been busy, and so I noted it.
AMY DICKENSON: As a phrase, "busy beaver" doesn't have long legs. It's no "read my lips," but it did surface on some live shots, network stories and in the Washington Post and New York Times the following day. Busy Beaver did what it needed to do; it carried George Bush's message of the day. Ari Fleischer is the consummate Washington functionary. A 40 year old insider who's been working in politics and with the press for half his life. He grew up the youngest of 3 boys in little Pound Ridge, New York. He describes his childhood as idyllic except for one thing. Ari Fleischer's parents are Democrats, and he has been drifting to the right since he first split with them politically when he was in 3rd grade.
ARI FLEISCHER: I think although my, my parents are wrong about most things; all things politically. But I really learned from them, on politics at least, how even though you have a diametrically different political approach than somebody else you can love them and respect them.
AMY DICKENSON: Fleischer says his political views, even if they are in lock step with the administration, will not interfere with his position as press secretary.
ARI FLEISCHER: My politics are my politics. A staffer represents the boss, and that is more - even more true as a press secretary.
AMY DICKENSON: And as a staffer, especially that staffer, any mistakes or missteps by an administration will land on his head. John Dickerson covered the Bush campaign for Time Magazine and is now its White House correspondent.
JOHN DICKERSON: The biggest pitfall will be that the press shop almost always gets blamed early for failures and problems -- both - it gets blamed from the press's point of view and it also gets blamed internally because the messenger is the one who gets shot, and often his job will be to carry ugly messages back in to the administration.
AMY DICKENSON: Fleischer doesn't take risks in his briefings. He doesn't leak to reporters and he plays the party line.
JOHN DICKERSON: He is rigidly on message, and he - he doesn't really step much out of the confines of the day's talking points.
AMY DICKENSON: That's not very satisfying, but reporters say at least Fleischer doesn't add insult to injury by lying to your face.
BILL PLANTE: Well there are some people who speak for government officials -- press secretaries --whether the White House or other places - who would not tell you if your shirt were on fire. But Fleischer does not seem to be like that at all.
AMY DICKENSON: Bill Plante has covered the White House for CBS news for 16 years.
BILL PLANTE: Ari has a good sense of what works in Washington, and it's not a surprise because he comes off the hill, and on the hill, the sort of comedy is a - is a way of life, and it's really clear, watching Ari Fleischer, that he's not going to get tripped up and venture where he knows he shouldn't go.
AMY DICKENSON: One place he must go is the oval office, because if he doesn't have the president's ear, the press will go around him to find someone who does.
BILL PLANTE: When DeeDee Myers became the press secretary, she was kept out of the inner circle, and it showed.
AMY DICKENSON: Reporters speculate that Ari Fleischer's access to George Bush may be blocked by Karen Hughes, Bush's formidable counselor. As for his relationship with the media, various members of the press corps have given Fleischer gifts, but the requisite period of mutual gladhanding is over. Now the arm wrestling begins. Blame the Media
January 13, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One nominee, Linda Chavez, who was up for the job of secretary of labor, withdrew this week. She was accused of hiring an illegal alien to work for her in her home, an accusation that had sunk Zoe Baird's chance at a cabinet post in the Clinton administration in 1993. Chavez denied it, but before she left the stage, she took a parting shot at the media. Garfield shoots back.
LINDA CHAVEZ: Because of the way in which the stories have played over the last few days, the fact that all of you have made, I think, a great deal more of this story than need be and have, in my view, not told the story of some of the people around me, I have decided that I am becoming a distraction and therefore I have asked President Bush to withdraw my name for secretary of labor.
BOB GARFIELD:Dear Linda, Be quiet! Forgetting for a moment whether the Democrats might rightly regard you as a fox in the henhouse or the Department of Labor, did you not know that they would still be vengeful over the Republican-scuttled Zoe Baird nomination 8 years ago? Did you forget how Washington works? Did you think that once your political enemies unearthed your skeleton from its preposterously shallow grave, the media would just ignore it?
Blaming the press for your lost cabinet post, Linda, is like blaming St. Matthew for the Crucifixion. Committing the act is one thing; spreading the news to modern man is quite another.
But of course, you knew that. You were in no way shocked -- shocked! -- by what transpired. What is pretty shock -- shocking is that you, upon being asked to serve by the Bush administration didn't immediately disclose your potentially dirty laundry! I guess that's because Marta Mercado, strictly as a favor to you, of course, had just washed it.
Anyway, Linda. I'm just puzzled that you, a member of the media, chose to so loudly attack the media in the media! It wouldn't be that you just knew it would play with the media-loathing public, would it? That you were cushioning your fallback position in the media by coming out slugging.
Your own syndicate says the controversy will improve your newspaper column distribution eight-fold. That's a nice bump. No wonder you're biting the hand that feeds you. But really, now it's time to shut up. It's not polite to talk with your mouth full. 1939 Radio
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: With the proliferation of electronic media delivered by cable, satellite and the Internet, it's hard to remember that once there was only one kind of box connecting us to the rest of the world -- the creaky, squeaky device known as radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Recently we got hold of a set of twelve cassettes from a company called Great Tapes in Minneapolis that capture an entire day on radio. It happens to be WJSV in Washington, DC on September 21, 1939. And we didn't want just any critical ear on all this ancient radio. We wanted one that had been recently assaulted by hours and hours of television. Jack Lechner is a film and television producer and author of Can't Take My Eyes Off of You for which he watched a week of television, 12 TVs at once for 15 hours a day. Jack Lechner, how did that compare to 18 hours of radio?
JACK LECHNER: Eighteen hours of radio is a breeze in comparison. I have to say it wasn't [LAUGHS] necessarily always better. I mean when, when--you, you listen to this 18 hours, it reminds you that-- as I say in my book, the, the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said that 90 percent of everything is crap. That certainly applied to a week of watching television, and it certainly applies to a day of listening to the radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So give me an example of some monumental crap you heard during this 18 hours.
JACK LECHNER:Well, there are a lot of soap operas. A lot, a lot of soap operas, and their interesting -they're, they're a little different from soap operas now. They're 15 minutes long. Each one has a sponsor, because everything has a sponsor-- [ORGAN MUSIC] and they have this ironclad format that's almost like kabuki. [LAUGHS] You know they, they start with an organ intro--; you hear so much organ in this one day of radio that you can't believe it. [ORGAN MUSIC]
JACK LECHNER: There's a show called Your Family and Mine. It's every, you know, soppy, corny thing you've ever heard all wrapped up into one and very badly acted to boot!
MAN: Judy what about - well what about your own happiness? What about your own right to a normal life?
WOMAN: I'll make my life with him normal! Other people have done it! I know, I know it takes courage, but I'll have to find the courage--
MAN: But Judy what about us?
WOMAN: We must forget about that--
MAN: I need you, Judy.
WOMAN: His need is greater!
MAN: I can't give you up.
WOMAN: You, you've got to forget about me!
MAN: Judy I was just a hobo until I met you. You took me by the hand and showed me the way to a new life!
JACK LECHNER: Interestingly you've got all - these hours of soap operas, and just as soap operas do now, the soap operas are the only place where you recognize the class system on radio, and in fact, you know, when you - if you watch, as I did, a week of television now, the soap operas are the only place where you can tell that there are rich people, poor people, middle class people -- people of all different economic brackets in America.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The, the Goldbergs -- this was a program that ran for 15 years and moved to television --now this kind of - and, and this is a family who lived on the Lower East Side of New York. This kind of blatant ethnicity is something we haven't begun to see again in mass media until recently. What do you make of that?
JACK LECHNER: Well there's more of an acknowledgement in show - in all of show business at that point that America is a melting pot, and a celebration of that. It goes, in some ways, straight back to Vaudeville. It's also the 30s, you know; it, it's the Depression and-- there, there's something that actually feels very right when you listen to it about a show about poor people! I have to say this is one of the cases where nostalgia seems to have gone a long way. When you actually listen to the Goldbergs, it's not that good. [LAUGHTER] Maybe it's just an off episode, but-- you know it's sort of in this uncomfortable boundary between sitcom and soap opera, and I kept listening to it thinking what was all the fuss about? I can't tell.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And--
JACK LECHNER: It's not even that Jewish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's not even that Jewish.
BOB GARFIELD: No. It's just a little - there's a little sprinkling here and there.
WOMAN: Look, e--e--even the dress-- all-- all handmade Jake. Jake there's clothes and then there's clothes!
MAN: So what? Tsk! Something awfully funny here.
MAN:Please! Not so funny! How do you know where these clothes came from? He must have been a chauffeur for rich people before he took this job! And maybe the gave the clothes to him!
WOMAN: But one thing they pulled off very well was the live broadcast of FDR from the Congress. Was that a high point for you?
JACK LECHNER: It was, actually! It, it - first of all it's just remarkable to hear history in the making, and that's why incidentally they chose this day -- September 21, 1939 -- to record. One of the things about FDR is he - it, it's the degree to which he doesn't sound like any modern politician.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: I regret that the Congress passed that Act. I regret equally that I signed that Act.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now this day in radio begins in Washington, DC with Arthur Godfrey who's so companionable, who has such a way of drawing you in to this 1930s sphere I almost felt a gingham apron materializing around my waist as I listened to him.
JACK LECHNER: He's just great, and that was actually one of the most enjoyable things was just to listen to this little embryonic portrait of Arthur Godfrey just before he became an enormous national celebrity. [BELL RINGS]
ARTHUR GODFREY: 6:29 and a half. Good morning one and all. 'Tis the sun dial - WJSV - Washington, DC -any music you hear is recorde--; this is Thursday morning, September the 21st. If I am not mistook -- took with a mistake, this is the autumnal equinox, isn't it?
JACK LECHNER: This is the part of radio that didn't get hyped off to television - the things that aren't enhanced by pictures, and Godfrey in 1939 is doing pretty much what any deejay does now except he, he doesn't have to resort to some of the tactics that Howard Stern does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And then on around eleven o'clock you come to the Jean Abbey show which, you know, we all thought that the infomercial was a new idea, but apparently it's a pretty old idea!
JACK LECHNER: It's remarkable! Here you have a 15 minute infomercial for a Washington department store. Jean Abbey is a woman with kind of cut glass diction who talks you through what's on sale in each department, floor by floor. That's the whole show.
JEAN ABBEY: Fundamentally, the new corsets give a new redistribution of flesh, giving a new economy of waistline and blessed comfort. No longer is that feigned hourglass look achieved through torturous steel casings, lacings and constant discomfort. Not if you're properly fitted by a competent corsettiere. That's why I dropped in at S.K. & Son to shop foundations. They have a very efficient staff of 8 finished school graduate corsettieres, each with a diploma thus proving their knowledge.
JACK LECHNER: We think of television now as being the most commercial any medium has ever been? Television now has nothing on 1939, and there's no boundaries between show and commercial! The same person who is delivering the news is in the next breath giving you a plug for Arrow Beer -- Better, not Bitter. It, it's really as if Dan Rather were holding up a product at the beginning and end of the CBS News!
ARTHUR GODFREY: [SINGING, HUMMING] How do you like Pepsi Cola, mother? You like Pepsi Cola? Why don't you get a lot of it and keep it around the house and serve it to the kids when they come home from school. It won't hurt 'em. It's good for 'em. Wholesome, healthful, made from the essence of pure fruit juices. You couldn't hurt anybody with it. And its tangy fruit flavor appeals to young and old alike. And it's only 5 cents.
WOMAN: What did this day in radio tell you about America in 1939?
JACK LECHNER: It, it's a slower place! I mean partly it's a slower place cause they've just been through ten years of Depression, but also-- the rhythms are slower! I mean when you listen to Arthur Godfrey in the morning talking about Washington, Washington, DC is a small town! You know half of the Godfrey show is someone left a pair of sunglasses at the corner of Tenth and F. Well, [LAUGHS] you know come by the station and pick 'em up. I guess the biggest surprise for me was that commercialism. It, it's so pervasive in this day of radio. There's a great commercial for Zlotnick the Furrier.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is - is that after the Goldbergs? or--?
BOB GARFIELD:Actually that's, that's all through the day. Zlotnick the Furrier in Washington, DC anticipated the trouble in Europe and brought a lot of furs over from Europe just before you couldn't get 'em any more-- [LAUGHTER] and so he's got them at remarkable rates. That, that's actually in many shows the only mention of what's going on in Europe. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks a lot.
JACK LECHNER: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Lechner, film and television producer, is author of Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. AOL / Time Warner Merger
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The Leviathan called AOL/Time Warner is finally among us, passing through regulatory bodies in the United States and Europe along the way. A lot of ink has been spilled over this deal; a lot of worries voiced about what the creation of the world's biggest media giant will mean to the consumer. Aaron Pressman has been following this story for the Industry Standard and he joins us now. Aaron, the last stop on the road to the creation of AOL/Time Warner, a year and a day in the making by the way, was the approval it got this week from the FCC. Now the Democrats on the commission imposed a few conditions. Actually it was just one condition on instant messaging. Why was that so important?
AARON PRESSMAN: The concern there is that instant messaging which is sending these immediate little text messages to friends or colleagues in business is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon. People are relying on it as a means of communication just like the telephone or e-mail, and it's also a gateway into new services that all these companies like AOL/Time Warner hope to offer us like Internet on our wireless phones and interactive TV services and things like that so it's become an increasing focus.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What were the other conditions?
AARON PRESSMAN:The other conditions largely backed up things that the Federal Trade Commission had done last month. They required that AOL/Time Warner share its high speed Internet service with competing Internet service providers; allow those competitors to directly bill customers; and also that AT&T which is the largest cable company in the country and Time Warner not collude to keep out other Internet service providers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, so now the merged company is free to move forward, so what does it plan to do first to exploit all of this much-vaunted synergy?
AARON PRESSMAN: Right. The much-vaunted synergy. Some of it they've already been doing. If you get any of Time Warner's magazines like Sports Illustrated or People you'll see they're selling - they're putting little AOL disks in there and conversely AOL has been promoting magazine subscriptions, apparently selling hundreds of thousands of them. Digital music is a big part of this merger. Time Warner owns many record labels, and they hope that as people start connecting to the Internet more quickly they'll be able to sell some of that music to America on Line subscribers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Has the fact that AOL has lost a certain amount of its value during this market downturn had any impact on any of this or on the forecasts of any this?
AARON PRESSMAN: Well Wall Street analysts are now starting to worry that the company is not going to be able to meet the forecast for growth that it had made originally a year ago. The company says it's going to have revenue over 40 billion dollars a year and grow at 12 or 15 percent a year which means, you know, 4, 5 billion dollars in new revenue a year. With the economy slowing down, with the Internet slowing down and advertising being cut back, it looks like that might be a pretty tough-- condition to meet.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now all the observers of this - the consumer advocates as well as the Wall Street types -declared that the merger was bound to have a huge impact on the converging worlds of media and entertainment and on line services. Well now it's a done deal. So what do you think that huge impact is going to be?
AARON PRESSMAN: Right. Well all these new services like interactive television and high speed Internet suffered from a little bit of a chicken and egg problem in that people, consumers, didn't want to pay for these new services until there was good stuff there to pay-- to see or listen to, and companies conversely didn't want to offer new stuff and spend a lot of money developing new stuff until there were a lot of consumers. Now there's one company that has all kinds of content and movies and music and exciting things, and a big huge on line audience. So they will hopefully have the incentive to develop these new products that have been creeping along but maybe needed a boost.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And are there going to be room for other companies like this? There's always been consumers on line and there's always been consumers for movies. Is this company going to crowd them all into one little box?
AARON PRESSMAN: There is a danger that for these new services and all these new developments on line, that this one company will have-- a huge advantage over its competitors who provide other content like Dis--Walt Disney or a company like Viacom. Those companies don't really have anyone they can turn to who has the same on--that has the same on line reach that America on Line has.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So they don't have this reach now, so what position does this deal put them in?
AARON PRESSMAN:Well it's a tough position! I think they're going to get together with some of the smaller on line players - maybe like Earthlink or Microsoft - maybe like a company like Yahoo which only exists on the Internet - and try and cobble together an on line strategy. The regulators have told AOL/Time Warner that they cannot block other companies' content on line and that they can't discriminate. So those companies are in a position of weakness, but they don't have - they have some options.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what you're saying though is they - it takes a mega company to beat a mega company.
AARON PRESSMAN: It looks like it, yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks very much!
BOB GARFIELD: It was great to be here. Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Aaron Pressman is the senior correspondent for the Industry Standard. Future of Music on the Internet
January 13, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: The Coalition for the Future of Music Policy is a non-profit group of artists, activists and music professionals who are trying to address some of the issues that the big players -- Internet and media conglomerates like AOL/Time Warner for example -- haven't yet put on the agenda in Washington, DC. The CFMP held a conference last week at Georgetown University and NPR cultural correspondent Rick Karr was there. He joins us now. Hey, Rick!
RICK KARR: Hello, Bob!
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so here's the thing. I've just gotten accustomed to not putting those little plastic disks in the middle of my Donovan Leach 45, [LAUGHTER] and now come to discover everything's changing again. Simple question -- what is the future of music?
RICK KARR: We don't know for sure. One thing that I think just about everybody's agreed on is that round plastic disks of any sort, whether they very easy analog or digital are on their way out. Whether it's five years down the line or ten years down the line, music is something that's going to be delivered to us over the Internet, whether we're downloading it, whether it's being streamed to us -- and maybe the best way to put it -- something that Walter McDonough said to me - and Walter McDonough is an Internet and music attorney based in Needham, Massachusetts, and he was one of the organizers of-- The Coalition for the Future of Music Policy Conference.
WALTER McDONOUGH: People need to find out how to market music through the Internet! And no one's done it yet, and we have the best, the brightest minds from technology and music trying to figure out that, and they still haven't figured it out!
BOB GARFIELD: Haven't figured it out. What's the timetable?
RICK KARR: We don't know what the timetable is because there are things standing in the way. Now technology people have great ideas! They have things like Napster, mymp3.com, Scour -- the music people love the ideas -- the lawyers haven't figured it out yet. The issue is that there are two sort of legal points standing in the way of making some of these technologies widely available. One of them is this notion of licensing which sounds a little arcane but what it boils down to is the music industry owns all the music right now. They own the copyrights. And the law doesn't force them to let the Internet companies use the music the way they want. Now we in radio - we can play any song we want at any point because there's something known as "a compulsory license." So long as we pay the royalty fees to the relevant bodies, we can use any music we want. The Internet people, by law, don't have that right, and that's one of the things that kept coming up time and again. So that's one point. The other sort of stumbling block that people are citing is an aspect of the current copyright law that's out there; it's called Section 12 01 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and what it does is if you do something with the music that you've always been able to do like make a tape to listen to in your car, or make a tape for your friend, you can be criminally liable. Now a lot of the civil libertarians are saying that's a term in the law that has to go because it gives all the power to the content owners and none of the power to the consumers. I spoke with John Perry Barlow who's the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and he's a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and he said this:
JOHN PERRY BARLOW: People need to find out how to market music through the Internet! And no one's done it yet, and we have the best, the brightest minds from technology and music trying to figure out that, and they still haven't figured it out!
MAN: This does not in any way serve the public interest! It only serves the interests of some essentially moribund institutions as they try to perpetuate themselves beyond their useful life span. One of two things are going to happen. Either we're going to get rid of it in the courts, or we're simply going to ignore it--
RICK KARR: Which means we're going to go on with the world of sort of rampant copying on Napster and artists not getting paid.
BOB GARFIELD: Civil disobedience in other words.
RICK KARR: That's exactly what John Perry Barlow calls it, because he and other people say that the, the sort of the social contract behind copyright has been broken by this law. Now, interestingly, the man who helped draft that copyright law, Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was the first keynote speaker at the conference, and he actually is starting to sound like he thinks that the system needs to change. See, right around the time that he was drafting the Digital and Millennium Copyright Act he started writing songs. So now he has sort of inside, firsthand experience of the way the music industry works, and it sounds like he's not terribly happy with the way it works, and he certainly sounds like he doesn't want the way it works now to be carried over into the on line world.
BOB GARFIELD:All right let's listen to the artist formerly known as Senator. SENATOR ORRIN HATCH: I do not think that it is any benefit for artists or fans to have all the new, wide distribution channels controlled by those who have controlled all of the old narrow ones!
RICK KARR: Senator Hatch actually also went on to say basically the same thing about the large Internet service provider companies - about Time Warner/AOL for instance saying that they shouldn't be able to use their dominance to force AOL users to listen only to Time Warner music.
BOB GARFIELD: So these issues of technology and intellectual property are not confined to the music industry at all.
RICK KARR:They're not confined to the music industry at all, and the reason a lot of the academics are interested in music is because music is the easiest medium to transmit over the Internet. It requires less band width than video does, and it carries on the Internet a little more clearly than the printed word does. And so it's kind of the canary in the coal mine as one of the participants said. It-- the rules for music are going to determine the rules for the way all of the other media are carried over the Internet.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Rick Karr, thanks very much for being with us!
RICK KARR: It's a pleasure to be here, Bob. The Magical Alan Greenspan
January 13, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's see what happened in the market this week. After a huge early January selloff on dismal economic signs, bad corporate news again came fast and furious. Yet the Nasdaq Index actually recovered because Wall Street is expecting another interest rate cut from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, or at least that's what we've been hearing. As Bob discovered this week, it seems there's hardly a question about the economy for which - in the media at least - Alan Greenspan isn't the answer!
BOB GARFIELD: The lengths people go to, to divine to divine the intentions of Alan Greenspan!
MAN: Let's check the brief case-- [MUSIC] indicator-- [MISSION IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD:No matter how impossible that mission, the financial markets and the media that cover them keep on trying. The daily CNBC program Squawk Box actually examines the thickness of Greenspan's satchel to conclude whether an interest rate change is in the offing.
WOMAN It does look kind of chubby.
MAN: I don't think so.
MAN: Yeah! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN Let's - come on - let's get another shot of it - let me see from the side-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: I, I thi-- that looks pretty good! Look at the way the line of the leather breaks--
BOB GARFIELD: Squawk Box is by no means alone in the effort to interpret every move, every utterance, every non-utterance of the inscrutable Fed Chairman for signs of his intentions. Greenspan, he of the owlish expression and opaque public persona, is stalked by the press as if he were the Princess Diana, the JFK, Jr., the Marilyn Monroe of Monetary Policy! Except-- he isn't dead -- no matter what you may have concluded by listening to his congressional testimony.
FED CHAIRMAN ALAN GREENSPAN: When confronted with a period of structural change, our policy actions must be based in large part on identifying emerging trends from surprises and anomalies in the data--
BILL GRIFFITHS:When he sits down to discuss monetary policy or the course of interest rates -- when he's sitting down in Congress there -- nobody knows what he's talking about, and that's on purpose!
BOB GARFIELD: Bill Griffiths is host of CNBC's midday Power Lunch program.
BILL GRIFFITHS:He doesn't say left or right, up or down, north or south; when all is said and done you still don't know how hot it's going to be tomorrow!
BOB GARFIELD:Doesn't matter though. The Great Man has spoken. Consider Lisa Sing Honya. She's an Associated Press reporter in New York who has the unenviable duty in each day's market wrap-up story to synthesize from the billion or two billion shares traded what particular news or economic forces moved the market. This exercise is approximately like finding a key phrase to describe the Collected Works of Aristotle.
BILL GRIFFITHS: It's a lot of educated guesswork. And one of the things you realize very quickly is that nobody knows quite what's going on in the market, but on a day where Alan Greenspan is going to do something -- when the Federal Reserve is going to meet -- I think it's safe to say that you won't have to worry about your lead for the day.
BOB GARFIELD:It's strange to recall that this man was on Gerald Ford's Council of Economic Advisors during the days of 20 percent inflation and was viewed skeptically by Wall Street 13 and a half years ago as a supposed political animal subject to presidential manipulation. Now he is virtually synonymous with independence, perspicacity and something approaching papal infallibility. In a story about OPEC oil ministers this week, the New York Times used the phrase, without feeling any need for further explanation, "Greenspan-like precision." Furthermore, he's a bone fide celebrity!
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Alan Greenspan?
WOMAN I heard that if - whatever he says, the market follows.
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Dennis Hastert?
WOMAN I don't know who that is.
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Alan Greenspan?
MAN: I think he's doing a good job!
BOB GARFIELD: How about Vladimir Putin? Any thoughts?
MAN: Don't know him.
BOB GARFIELD: What do you think of Alan Greenspan?
WOMAN I think he's doing a good job.
BOB GARFIELD: With the--
WOMAN With the market and the situation, yeah.
BOB GARFIELD: And what about Justin Timberlake. How do you feel about him?
WOMAN Who is this?
BOB GARFIELD: Lead singer for 'N Sync.
WOMAN Don't know him.
BOB GARFIELD:It's hard to believe that any Federal Reserve Board Member could be a household name, but thanks in no small part to the media's obsession with him, Greenspan has transcended his carefully cultivated dullness to become a short, balding, somewhat aged matinee idol.
LLOYD GROVE: He's-- at the top of the Ziggurat.
BOB GARFIELD: Lloyd Grove writes the Reliable Source Gossip Column for the Washington Post and is himself poised, ever-vigilant, on the Greenspan watch because -- well - duh!
LLOYD GROVE: He's-- the most powerful man in the world! At least that's what I'm saying.
BOB GARFIELD: And that means tracking his every after 5:00 p.m. move -- not that Greenspan swoops through Washington with Henry Kissinger-like flamboyance. He swoops through Washington on the arm of his wife, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, with studied diffidence. He put the "reserve" in Federal Reserve. He is the center of a worldwide cult of non-personality.
LLOYD GROVE: He's not really an ebullient sort of guy. The most fascinating thing I ever heard about him is that when he takes a, a bath at 5:30 in the morning and-- thinks the great thoughts about the economy, he adjusts the water temperature by manipulating the taps with his toes.
BOB GARFIELD:Yeah, yeah, yeah - finding just the right balance - neither too cool nor overheated. The point is the man is of such mythic stature that the Washington Post is trading in his metatarsal bathwater adjustment behaviors! How weird is that?! Well, actually, upon further reflection, it's not weird at all, because Greenspan is no longer merely the steward of economic expansion nor even the master of economic expansion. Under the ever-more-bearish circumstances wherein all hope is invested in one historic figure, he has become the messiah of economic expansion for the investment community and especially for those who cover it. CNBC's Bill Griffiths.
BILL GRIFFITHS: Now he's God! The media need a symbol. We need a catch phrase. We need, you know, something that will personalize a story - that we when all is said and done don't fully understand. I mean who understands economics? If you can give it a face - if you give it a personality [LAUGHS] -- you can better explain what this is all about.
BOB GARFIELD:So: load up on Greenspan futures, no matter how bad the corporate news, no matter how rapidly we veer toward recession, no matter how thin the man's briefcase is, you don't have to worry about a bear market for Alan Greenspan. Because the media's obsessive fixation on the chairman of the Federal Reserve is not based on what he actually does nor even on irrational exuberance. It is based at least as much on naked self interest, and media self interest, unlike economic expansion, is immutable and forever.
- Back to story:
- January 13, 2001
-
Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
-
An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
-
Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
-
A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
-
A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
-
A Source for Sources
-
Web Only Audio Extra - TV Cord Cutters
-
Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
-
With IRS Scandal, Conservative Bloggers Feel Vindicated
-
Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
