Privacy
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Privacy concerns are not unique to Abiomed. Time Magazine just ran a cover story about Internet intrusion. Super Bowl attendees last winter had their faces photographed and compared to fugitives' mug shots, and every time we get caught with our pants down, in the back of our minds we have to wonder if we're on that newest network phenom-- Spy TV. No wonder a Lou Harris poll last year revealed that 92 percent of Americans are suddenly worried about their privacy. Is it possible that for the first time in the life of the American citizen we have ceased to be flesh and blood but merely the accumulation of our personal data?
BOB GARFIELD:I can answer that question. The answer is: No! Not because we shouldn't be concerned about surveillance and the long arm of the data base in the year 2001, but because we've always had to worry about it! I speak from experience here. [KIDS PLAYING ON PLAYGROUND] The year was 1965. I was 10 when I-- tossed a snowball against the brick facade of Kingwood Elementary School-- [WHISTLE BLOWS] and got caught. My insane act of violence against masonry got me dragged into the principal's office to be read the riot act.
STERN PRINCIPAL: Bobby-- you better straighten up. This is going on your-- permanent record.
BOB GARFIELD: Permanent record?! [GLOOMY MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Next year's teacher. Colleges! Employers! The military!-- they'd all know. I was doomed to a life of rejection -- revulsion -- fear. ECHOING VOICE: Rejection -- revulsion -- fear.
BOB GARFIELD:[ECHOING VOICE CONTINUING UNDER] I would never make colonel or Phi Beta Kappa! My dream to be undersecretary of commerce would go out the window! The snowball incident would-- snowball into my own ever-lasting hell!!!!
BOB GARFIELD:So-- for the next 8 years, I was disgustingly well-behaved -- blackmailed, basically, with my permanent record. And with all due respect for Time Magazine and the opinion poll industry, there is nothing new about that. For all the hand-wringing about a brave new world of intrusion, public records have always been public! Marketers have always collected data to understand and sell to us. Wiretaps and intimidation by dossier -- J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Furthermore Spy TV? -- Hah! CANDID CAMERA TV SHOW SONG: WHEN IT'S LEAST EXPECTED, YOU'RE ELECTED, YOU'RE THE STAR TODAY-- SMILE! YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA. IN THE HOCUS POCUS....
BOB GARFIELD:Richard Smith, chief technology officer of a research group called The Privacy Foundation makes a living by sounding alarms, but he understands what has never changed.
RICHARD SMITH: Human beings naturally like to snoop. [LAUGHS] It's part of our makeup.
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. 225 years into the life of the Republic, we're all worried about our privacy. Why?! What all of a sudden is so different?! Actually -- I can answer that question too. [MUSIC] Technology. It's not just that the intelligence community purportedly has a system called Echelon that scans every e-mail and satellite transmission foraging for security threats. It's that I myself went on the Internet the other day to a people-search site and within 5 seconds located my address and phone number. With that I went to a site called Acudata.com. For 30 dollars, giving that information, I was supplied my social security number. Then I went to a site called U. S. Search where for 69 colleague I obtained the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone I'd been in a real estate transaction with in the past 10 years. If I'd had any bankruptcies, a criminal record, tax liens, civil judgments or a merchant registered with the Coast Guard, they'd have found that too. Then years ago they'd have had to root around a fusty courthouse file room for two days. Big Brother, Big Smuther. Now any clown can sit naked in his den and for a hundred bucks terrorize me, steal my identity or God knows what.
BETH GIVENS: Government, corporations, nosy neighbors, criminals who are committing identity theft. What we have today are lots and lots of Little Brothers.
BOB GARFIELD:Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse isn't Chicken Little exactly. Just put her down for guardedly apocalyptic.
BETH GIVENS: A tremendous amount of information is being collected on us, and in the end it's being used in the same kind of way that George Orwell described in his book!
BOB GARFIELD: The book, by the way, is 1984. [MUSIC]
TV ANCHOR PETER JENNINGS: Police now have the ability to discover evidence of crimes inside a home without ever walking through the door.
WOMAN: The technology allows the FBI to sift through thousands of private e-mails, selecting out--
MAN: ...the rental car company Acme uses global positioning systems.... [AMBIENT SOUNDS OUTDOORS, VEHICLES PASSING]
BILL BROWN:Good morning. My name is Bill Brown. In this area there are approximately 139 different surveillance cameras of all different sorts, and we can be seen simultaneously by three different surveilling authorities.
BOB GARFIELD:Bill Brown, a currently out of work proofreader and self-described anarchist, leads a unique tour of New York's Time Square, pointing out for appalled visitors just how much they are being watched. Some of the camera emplacements are innocuous, like the ones ABC uses for sidewalk shots on Good Morning America. But in the aggregate, Brown believes, this is ground zero for citizen repression.
BILL BROWN: The first and most important is directly above us -- is a globe-shaped camera operated by the New York City Police Department. This is circular and hidden behind a translucent globe, and that spares us from the trauma of seeing a unit swerving around and staring right at us while we point back at it. Up to our right, about a hundred feet....
BOB GARFIELD:The truly chilling thing he says is that video images are increasingly digital and storable in perpetuity, there to cross-reference against any other data in any other file. And it's all happening so gently, so incrementally Brown says, we scarcely notice -- until one day we wake up as slaves. The analogy he likes is frog soup.
BILL BROWN: The way you make frog soup is you don't boil a frog all at once; you raise the temperature very gradually so the frog never realizes that it's being boiled. You could find yourself swimming in totalitarianism and think that you were having a nice bath!
BOB GARFIELD:He may have something there! I saw some Chicago high school girls clotted outside of the MTV studios on 44th and Broadway. They were making arrangements to be in the studio audience for the next day's broadcast of Total Request Live. I told them they were already on Times Square TV.
WOMAN: It's exciting! We love TV!
BOB GARFIELD: Does it bother you that Big Brother's watching you?
WOMAN: No!
BOB GARFIELD: You have any idea what I'm talking about when I say Big Brother?
WOMAN: The, the show Big Brother?
BOB GARFIELD: No, sweetheart; not the show Big Brother. But you have accidentally detected the paradox --we like to hide, but we also like to peek, and that's something else that's changed. Not technology alone but the powerful convergence of technology and the suddenly ready-for-prime-time surrender to our basest instincts. Jerry Springer, MTV's Real World, NBC's Spy TV. And need I mention, for viewing a young woman's every waking moment on the Worldwide Web -- JenniCam. In the past decade the hitherto social taboo called voyeurism has come out of the closet. It's no longer a secret shame. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] It's a genre!
ANNOUNCER: Twelve strangers have been locked in this house. There are no newspapers, no TV, no privacy. Previously on Big Brother....
BOB GARFIELD: Cameras, cameras everywhere. It's horrifying all right, but let he who is without titillation -- or just plain suspicion -- cast the first stone. The other day I myself got spammed with an offer to secretly monitor my computer to see what my wife and kids are up to -- every e-mail - every chat room - every web site - the ad for spyware promised. [LAUGHS] I deleted it, of course, but-- not before giving it some thought! Likewise the pop-under Internet ad that slips surreptitiously under my browser window every time I navigate the web. It's for a tiny wireless camera I can plant undetected anywhere, which reminds me -- there's a private detective in Pennsylvania I need to talk to. The name's Martin, Michael Martin, a real life shamus, gumshoe, private dick, [PHONE RINGING] and a man of few words.
MICHAEL MARTIN: Hello?
BOB GARFIELD: Say-- can you get me my permanent record?
MICHAEL MARTIN: We can do that!
BOB GARFIELD: That'd be swell. E-mail me when you get it. You know how to e-mail, don't you? Just lift up your finger and click. [PHONE HANGS UP]
BOB GARFIELD: Ohhh, right! In my haste to whip you into a panic, I neglected to present that other side of the story -- the side that says when you want information, you can go on line or call a private eye to get it -- that the ready access democratizes information, taking it out of the exclusive hands of government and into the hands of the people; that while we wish to be free and secure from surveillance, we demand surveillance to make us feel-- free and secure; and that all of this data floating around while potentially threatening also fuels and lubricates the consumer society.
MARTY ABRAMS: It means we have more immediacy in our lives.
BOB GARFIELD: Marty Abrams, director of the Information Policy Center for the Hunton and Williams law firm was the chief privacy officer for the data-aggregating giant Experian, a company that keeps profiles on 215 million Americans.
MAN: We can go into an appliance store on a Sunday afternoon at 6 o'clock; we can walk out of that appliance store with a 400 dollar television with instant credit, and we can do that because of the immediacy of the information flows and the fact that we understand the information better. It means that large manufacturer of automobiles will better be able to predict the types of cars that we will want 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road. It's really about an economy that is richer and more vibrant and creates more wealth for all of us.
BOB GARFIELD:See? What's good for General Motors is good for America! Or-- not. Man, at least in 4th grade I knew exactly what I had to fear. Now it's hard to know if the accumulation of my personal data liberates -- as Marty Abrams believes, or enslaves. Are we really being watched? Or just seen? Should I accept some level of risk of living in the information age like I risk driving in my car, or should I become some sort of e-survivalist, hunkered down in an unwired fortress, waiting for the final struggle? Well, you know what? I can answer those questions too. The answer is: I don't know! If I did know I'd write a book! I'd call it Frog Soup [SOUND OF BOILING LIQUID] for the Soul. [RIBIT, RIBIT] Sure, some of this stuff is extremely spooky and maybe even a very bad deal with the devil. But if you were a tradesman 140 years ago, so was the industrial revolution. Privacy hawks like Beth Givens and Richard Smith say that we must act now or dystopia is around the corner. Fair enough. Isn't that the way society has always dealt with change? With laws, vigilance and by the way, information-- simply to adjust. Meantime though, I've been dying to know whether the snowball incident was indeed immortalized in my dossier. Well, now I know.
BOB GARFIELD: So you got the dirt huh, Sherlock? Tell me about the snowball incident. How bad is it?
MICHAEL MARTIN: Your permanent record has been shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: Shredded?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It is the policy that files that old are shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: It's gone?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It's no more. [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Melissa Sanford and Katya Rogers; engineered by Irene Trudel and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Sean Landis, Kathleen Horan and Giselle Foss.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer, and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. [THEME MUSIC TAG UP AND UNDER] This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Changing of the Editorial Guard
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: 06:00 From WNYC in New York this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last week as we memorialized the passing of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, another historic figure departed journalism's arena -- Robert Bartley who spent the better part of 30 years transforming the Wall Street Journal's editorial page into what is regarded as the prime mover of conservative thought in America has retired. Bartley has passed the torch to the Journal's Washington columnist Paul Gigot who joins us now. Welcome to the show!
PAUL GIGOT: Good to be with you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is a tricky question to throw at you right off the bat, but why not? The Journal's editorial page is at the same time probably the most read and probably the most reviled in the country! Let's face it, the, the editor of the National Review said rather than making grand pronouncements the Journal's willing to knock the teeth out of its opponents. It's a ferocious page!
PAUL GIGOT: I don't think -- I wouldn't describe it as ferocious. I would say that we're not a "on the one hand, on the other hand" page. I think our style is - it can be pugnacious at times, but if our style is so ferocious I think that we must be doing something right, because Howell Raines of the New York Times when he was editorial page editor did seem to imitate some of the, the style of, of, of Bartley and what Bob Bartley liked to call "muzzle velocity" for editorials. But I think it's too much to say we're ferocious.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And you say the New York Times or, or rather the New York Times under Howell Raines made an alteration in its pages -- by that you mean it--
PAUL GIGOT: Stylistically. Stylistically. I mean he, he revved up the RPMs. He also adopted one other thing that I think was a Bartley innovation which is the campaign. That is if you get an, an issue which you really are promoting -- in Howell Raines's case it was camp--has been campaign finance reform -- you keep going back and you keep going back. We've done that with supply side economics, tax cutting--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And specifically and probably overwhelmingly Whitewater.
PAUL GIGOT: The-- the, the Clinton ethics story, broadly defined; no question.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:This may distress you a bit Mr. Gigot, but even liberals hail you as the "smart guy conservative" -- somebody willing to lay out a well-reasoned argument to defend conservative policies and even think outside party rhetoric on occasion--
PAUL GIGOT: You trying to damage my career?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I - yeah, I'm really-- [LAUGHTER] just think of it now - with every word is going down, down, down. Everyone writing about this seems to expect a kinder, gentler editorial page under your watch. Is that what you plan to give it?
PAUL GIGOT: Well, I'm a sweet guy--; we'll see. I mean it's going to be mostly the same staff which I think is a tremendous staff, and philosophically-- I'm very similar to-- to, to Bob Bartley.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:You may very well share most of Mr. Bartley's opinions and, and those of the editorial page, but-- not that many people listen to this show, so just tell me -- haven't you ever read the page and gone -- ogh! That really went too far.
PAUL GIGOT: Yeah, I have. On occasion I have read the page -- on occasion I've read my column after I've written it [LAUGHTER] and I've said -- you went too far. So--[LAUGHS] I, I, I think that is an occupational hazard.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you're a political guy. Your, your column that you've written from Washington is called Potomac Watch. But when I think of issues concerning family values -- homosexuality, abortion -- I don't immediately associate them with the opinion of Paul Gigot! How are you planning to handle these social issues?
PAUL GIGOT: Actually I've written a fair number of pieces about abortion politics and abortion policy over the years. I don't disagree with the Journal's editorial page position on that which has been that-- we're kind of in the middle. That is, we think that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided because it was judicial fiat. When it comes to the gay issue-- I'm-- we--have written about it from time to time but mostly - I think most recently only when it comes to the Boy Scouts and their First Amendment rights which we believe their First Amendment rights to, to hire the scoutmasters they want.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you said that the paper's editorial page was opposed to Roe v. Wade because it was judicial fiat.
PAUL GIGOT: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I didn't actually look it up, but then I can assume you were also opposed to the Supreme Court decision with regard to the Florida recount.
PAUL GIGOT: [LAUGHS] Oh, that's highly tendentious. I think those are completely separate issues.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well-- Paul Gigot, thank you very much.
PAUL GIGOT: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Recently a big change at the other most influential editorial page -- that of the New York Times. Times' Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins will take over from Howell Raines who has been elevated to the paper's editorship. Collins' work is known for sharp political humor on what is seen as a generally liberal editorial page. She joins us now. Welcome to On the Media!
GAIL COLLINS: Thank you!
BOB GARFIELD: Well first of all, congratulations!
GAIL COLLINS: Thanks!
BOB GARFIELD: This is really something! After a long and distinguished career as a reporter and a columnist, you've been promoted to--anonymity!
GAIL COLLINS: [LAUGHS] Well you know I've done that -actually I wrote my last column about a week ago, and I realized looking up on my bulletin board that I had from 1979 a column that was entitled My Last Column, and I've written last columns I think three other times since then.
BOB GARFIELD:Before Howell Raines who has just ascended to the editorship, the editorial page at the New York Times had a reputation for equivocating -for being compulsively evenhanded as opposed to - well, opinionated. Is it a tough act to follow?
GAIL COLLINS: Howell is an extraordinarily tough act to follow, but on the other hand I gave up a column to come to the Times to write editorials because of Howell, because it was so clear to me that he made this so much --writing editorials seem to be so much fun, and so exciting.
BOB GARFIELD:Now obviously the New York Times isn't just another newspaper. When it itches, governments all over the world scratch. But a big part of the job involves - I mean not - I can't think of a more felicitous way of phrasing this - elites writing for elites!
GAIL COLLINS: Well-- I think one of the attractions of the page is that you do have a sense that like decision-makers read it. I don't know that it influences the decisions so much as it influences the conversation but that's the important thing about the Times -- that it does sort of in-- have a big voice in the national conversation about important issues. And-- to that extent you're writing for elites, but if the stuff that you write isn't written in a way that regular people --regular readers want to read it -- I guarantee you the elites [LAUGHS] -- the elites aren't that diligent themselves. They're not going to necessarily even follow through. You've got to be able to write stuff that's --everybody wants to read.
BOB GARFIELD:When politicians are given free rein to write on the editorial pages -- famously or maybe infamously the New York Times has been in that position itself when it allowed Bill Clinton to explain his pardons of Marc Rich. Did anything happen at the New York Times to re-examine the policy of giving editorial space over to politicians?
GAIL COLLINS: No, but I must say that I was I think in China when that happened, so I, I can't really comment on what people said or didn't say.
BOB GARFIELD:All right. Fair enough. But I'm wondering if the things that have happened in the past, like the Bill Clinton episode; like the-- Wen Ho Lee episode, are going to inform the way you run the pages.
GAIL COLLINS: Well everything that the Times has done informs the pages in the sense that we have this enor--no, not enormous but we have a very strongly-held and fairly extensive list of core beliefs that we just have always believed in and you know, the issues change every day, and the things that were written about last year or the year before are probably not going to have much direct bearing on the things that are written about next year.
BOB GARFIELD: Congratulations again, and thanks for joining us!
GAIL COLLINS: Thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Gail Collins is the newly-anointed editorial page editor of the New York Times. [MUSIC TAG] Mayan Scribes
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Today when a celebrity gets bad press he's likely to fire his publicist. That may seem harsh, but not compared to his Mayan forefathers writing the king's press releases in the first century A.D. When he screwed up, he lost a lot more than a client. Kevin Johnston is a Maya archeologist at Ohio State University. Welcome to the show!
KEVIN JOHNSTON: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We marvel at the persuasive powers of publicists today, but back in the Maya period, the scribes, as they were known then, were responsible for preserving the power of kings! How did they do that?
KEVIN JOHNSTON: What's interesting about the Maya society, like many ancient societies and what made the writing of the scribes so powerful is that only a small portion of the society could read and write, and in these early societies, writing had tremendous power; so much so that texts were generally read aloud to assembled crowds in large public ceremonies, some of them violent, some of them not; some of them involving captives, some of them not. But these must have been very-- politically powerful and persuasive spectacles.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So were the scribes reporters or were they publicists?
KEVIN JOHNSTON:The scribes were publicists. We don't have any illusions about this information that's being reported as being objective and reliable. That is, the scribes sang the praises of the kings and that was their duty. They were there to cast the accomplishments of the kings in the most favorable light. In some cases we have conflicting records of events in the Maya lowlands which makes us suspect that the reporting is not always accurate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A lot of times I'll talk to fellow journalists who say oh, I think I'm just going to sell out and become a publicist. [LAUGHTER] Did scribes make a really good living?
KEVIN JOHNSTON:We know that many of them did. We know for example that scribes, almost all of them and perhaps all of them, were the kin of kings, and we've found their houses at sites like Aguateca in Guatemala, and there the, the scribes lived in grand palaces, almost as large as the palace of the kings, which tells us first of all that they were wealthy people to begin with, but also that they played a very prominent and prestigious role in Maya society.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what happened when the scribe's patron monarch was overthrown?
KEVIN JOHNSTON:Well this is a very interesting event that, that occurs. It turns out that in warfare not only were kings, enemy kings, targeted for battle and not only were their courts targeted for battle, but scribes in particular were targeted for capture, and when captured they went through a series of events which are shown on Maya styli. First they were displayed publicly. They were humiliated; stripped of their clothing, although they weren't shown entirely naked. They often were shown wearing loin cloths which is nonetheless something which is humiliating for someone of an elite background. And then in a very peculiar and bizarre practice their fingers were broken - the fingernails were pulled out - and the fingers themselves were snapped, tearing the ligaments at the joints so that the hands were greatly disfigured. And then the scribes were killed. Often they underwent what we call genital sacrifice where their genitals were slashed. And then quite frequently their hearts were cut out or their heads were cut off which is a standard form of Maya execution or sacrifice. But what's interesting about these styli in the Maya case is that they emphasize not the execution, which is the end point of this sequence of events, but the act of finger-breaking.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You found a quote in a 16th century Maya dictionary assembled by the Spanish that seems to drive this point home.
KEVIN JOHNSTON:I looked up the word "fingernails" just to see what I would find -- expecting to find quite a bit -- and in fact I found one entry, and the entry's extremely interesting. It says: it's-- lists the word "fingernails," and then it gives a typical example of its usage, and translating its usage it says "I have no fingernails. I am no longer the person I used to be. I no longer have power or authority or money. I am no one." And what this seems to describe is what the mural shows -- the loss of fingernails seems to correspond to the loss of the ability to write which marks the loss of political power.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kevin Johnston, thank you very much!
KEVIN JOHNSTON: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kevin Johnston is a Maya archeologist at Ohio State University. MTV Grows Up
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Twenty years ago the miracle of converging self-interest created a television phenomenon. It was called MTV, a cable network that got free programming while record labels and artists got free promotion and American teenagers got free of the linear sitcom sensibility that had informed their parents' TV-gorging idleness. But what has 20 years wrought? Michael Nesmith, the ex-Monkee, country rock performer who imported the music video concept from Europe is unimpressed with the monster he created.
MICHAEL NESMITH: MTV is in its fading days and will slowly drift off the map. It served its purpose. Its time has come and gone. It's not global. It doesn't embrace, you know, the, the world village, so-- I, I look at it as a, as a fading star!
BOB GARFIELD:Whether or not the network will enjoy another two decades, MTV has undeniably had an impact. Ann Powers, pop music critic for the New York Times joins me now. Welcome to OTM!
ANN POWERS: Thanks for having me!
BOB GARFIELD: Michael Nesmith just got done telling us that he believes that MTV is over; that it is a falling star.
ANN POWERS: Hmmmmm. Well, Michael Nesmith was always an artiste of the form, and it is possible that on some level the jiggle videos of hip hop and the sort of fashion displays of teen pop have made it harder for artistic video to happen.
BOB GARFIELD:We're 20 years into the MTV age. The original MTV generation, you know, some of them are having stents implanted [LAUGHTER] in their coronary arteries. As we look back and take stock of the first two decades, what ultimately is MTV's contribution to the culture?
ANN POWERS: Well, one word: Madonna, for one thing. The great blockbuster artists of the '80s, Madonna and Michael Jackson, would not have had the same kinds of careers without video - without MTV. That's one specific thing. The shift from music as something you listened to in your room and made up your own story to music coming with a story -- that's something that I think is not that positive. But on the other hand it's allowed for a new form of visual creativity, a new way of looking at film. It's probably been better for film and television than it has for music, frankly.
BOB GARFIELD: To what degree do pop artists of 2001 depend on the video as opposed to their innate musical talents to sell their records?
ANN POWERS:Well that's the huge bone of contention among artists. I think, you know, rock & roll was always the place where you could be a freak, you could look weird -- it's not really been that true for women, but you would have a Janis Joplin for example who wasn't particularly photo-or video-genic but had such charisma and such a voice that she could be a star. Now I think often people, and especially women, are picked out because of their looks! Many kids are getting their primary source of music from MTV. They're not getting it from the radio. They're getting it from coming home and turning on Total Request Live. So looks matter much more, and I think the pressure for artists, especially women artists, to conform to a certain look, has just grown much more extreme.
BOB GARFIELD: Is there any chance that the next ten years will see MTV going back to its more experimental, conceptual roots?
ANN POWERS:Well you already see the--that happening on M2 - the other station that tends to show more innovative videos. For example, the number one nominated video this year at the video awards is this Fat Boy Slim video starring Christopher Walken which is just Christopher Walken dancing. [LAUGHS] It's very bizarre and compelling -- and that's the one that people liked the best! You know? So I think there's an interest and a hunger for that, and like most media outlets, MTV feels itself having got into a rut, I think, and that's why M2 turns toward videos; MTV itself is experimenting with lots of different kinds of programming and never quite knows what to do. I think desperation will lead them back toward innovation as it does every media outlet that survives. And I do think MTV will survive for better or worse.
BOB GARFIELD: Very good! Ann Powers, thanks for joining us!
ANN POWERS: Thank you!
BOB GARFIELD: Ann Powers is a pop music critic for the New York Times. MTV: Pulling Back the Curtain on Pulling back the Curtain
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Above all, MTV sends out the message to kids: you matter. Your tastes matter. Your discretionary income matters. Naturally the kids agree. They identify with MTV. They want to go behind the scenes. So MTV has obliged its viewers by taking as its central theme the other shows on MTV! On the Media's producer at large Mike Pesca entered this endless feedback loop and emerged with this report.
MIKE PESCA: To be a member of Generation Y is to have your every curiosity catered to. It's to know that you can clog your hard drive with information about the walk on character who flitted across Dawson's consciousness for two episodes.
BRIAN GRADEN: I think now in, in a culture of 200 channels and infinite Internet content, what we want to do is deconstruct and understand every little aspect about how something is made famous and proliferated.
MIKE PESCA: Brian Graden is MTV's president of programming. That job once meant deciding if the 99 Luft Balloons video would go into high rotation. Now a lot of the programming on MTV is shows about other shows on MTV. Take for instance the Video Music Awards. [MUSIC]
MAN: What the hell was Rage Against the Machine bassist Kim C. doing atop our set at the 2000 Video Music Awards?
MIKE PESCA: The VMA's are more than the biggest night on MTV. Because of repeats they are many, many nights. Tack on another dozen or so nights of reruns of the documentary on the making of the Video Music Awards. Brian Graden explains the making of the first making of the VMAs.
BRIAN GRADEN: You know it was, it was sort of almost accidental. We were sitting around maybe 3 years ago, and, and we were reminiscing about the Video Music Awards that we had loved, and then we realized well-- these were moments that really happen in culture. To get people excited for this year's show, why don't we go back and remind them how cool the prior shows were? So it sort of just happened as a promotional whim, and then [LAUGHS] when we first aired it, the ratings went through the roof. It was probably quadruple the time period, and it was like oh, my God - we could really mine this, because the audience seems to have an insatiable appetite for behind the scenes information.
MAN: Now MTV has shown you our best this and hottest that and counted down our hundred greatest other things, but now to celebrate MTV's 20....
MIKE PESCA: These days the M in MTV stands for "Making of" - the making of the VMAs. The Making of the Movie Awards. A new show called Making the Video. Brian Graden says MTVs viewers identify. Those idiots on spring break, the cast of the Real World, the guy who won't the contest to be a veejay -- Graden thinks every kid is secretly saying - hey! - I can do that!
BRIAN GRADEN: If you think about the people who are in the MTV generation now, they were raised on the Real World, on Monica Lewinsky, on O.J.; they were raised on Survivor -- so they're used to the fact that sort of relatively ordinary people can be plucked out of obscurity and suddenly made famous and all the accoutrements of fame are opened to them. So I think they're fascinated by that process, because they're like oh, my God -- even if I'm not a talented [LAUGHS] singer or dancer or politician, that could be me. And so I think they want the process deconstructed to know how they get access to it.
MIKE PESCA: The low tech way of getting access is showing up in person. That's what dozens of MTV fans, [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] some with guitars, do each weekday in an effort to be invited on to Total Request Live, MTV's popular after school show based in Times Square. [GUITAR MUSIC, CROWD SHOUTING AND CHEERING]
MIKE PESCA: The kids' love to shout from the sidewalks below served as the perfect focus group of heavy MTV viewers. John McSweeney told me that all the making of documentaries do creep into his mind when he's watching the source material.
JOHN McSWEENEY: If I think like something on the Video Music Awards was cool or something was like, you know, something like weird went on -- yeah! Then you look forward to seeing it. But otherwise, like it's something fun to watch.
MIKE PESCA: It's just a thing. Now you were nodding your head - do you - when you watch the awards-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: Yeah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MIKE PESCA: -- you kind of know that there'll be the special on it eventually?
MAN: Yeah, anything I want to know I'm sure MTV would put it on and--
MIKE PESCA: Right, they're not going to deprive you of information about-- [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: [LAUGHS] Exactly.
MAN: [MOCK SHOUTING] Oh, no!
MIKE PESCA: At a, at a certain point watching these specials, do you say you know enough already, I don't care that much about MTV?
MAN: Well-- I, I care a lot about MTV. Like him, whenever I'm home I, I watch it, cause that's pretty much it. So.
MIKE PESCA: So when you watch the shows about the shows on MTV, have you ever said to yourself, it's all just a big commercial for MTV?
MAN: Definitely not. It-- There are a lot of great shows on. I mean it's one of the greatest channels out there, but it's, it's not a big commercial.
MIKE PESCA: Brian Graden sees his audience as possessing a level of sophistication unfathomable to anyone who's ever had to get up to change the channel.
BRIAN GRADEN: They can know, for example, a group like the Back Street Boys was quote/unquote "manufactured," right, put together down in Florida -- there are a lot of great producers [...?...] behind -- they can learn all that stuff from behind the scenes information. They can sort of know that there's a level of artifice to it because it's been deconstructed for them in a documentary and at the same time they're like yeah, I know all that but I'm still going to kind of enjoy the music and buy into the fantasy. I think they get it on both levels.
MIKE PESCA: So many shows about so many shows has another effect. It trains the viewers to become perfect characters for other MTV shows. Take MTV's attempt at totally transparent programming -- the Real World. Not only does MTV ask real people to live in front of a camera, they have to try out in front of a camera!-- so that the losers can be humiliated by other real people -- on camera! It's the Real World Casting Special. Mike, whose dream it is to be on the Real World, has been playing close attention.
MIKE PESCA: It's shown me not--what not to do, because you know people get on there and they're like -they're being naked - they're running around naked, and the way I see it, they're looking for people that are real. You have to be real. You can't go do a--any of these like crazy stunts and stuff like that cause that's not you. You're not being real.
MIKE PESCA: A few years ago MTV tried to put viewer submissions on the air in a program called: You Wrote it: You Watch It. It flopped. But now Graden says the talent pool might be up to the challenge.
BRIAN GRADEN: You know by sheer coincidence we're actually doing a pilot called My Life Is a Movie where we have asked our ordinary viewers, you know, ages 19 or whatever, to send us stories and you'll be - you'll just be so amazed that the stories [LAUGHS] are completely literate to how they expect and know a script will, you know, break down and-- so we are pursuing that idea to n-- today even though it didn't work 5 or 10 years ago.
MIKE PESCA: From audience to artists in 5 to 10 years. Even if only a tiny fraction of MTV's viewers ever become on screen or off screen talent, MTV will be able to stock its shelves with programming. The training videos are being delivered via cable lines into the homes of America -- 24 hours a day. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca. The Art of Price is Right
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Now kids may scream to get on Total Request Live, but once in a simpler time, their grandparents lined up to guess the price of a Maytag washer! In fact, people still do. The Price is Right is the quintessential game show and one of the longest lived now in its 26th season with Bob Barker on CBS. The program has so seeped into the collective unconscious it's inspired an art exhibit in Washington, DC -- but we'll get to that in a minute. Long before Bob Barker, the Price is Right had a brief run on ABC and NBC as Peter Breslow knows too well. In 1967, as other teens were grooving to the Summer of Love, he sat in the studio audience of The Newlywed Game. He won [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] an Allan Sherman record on another game show that summer--
PETER BRESLOW: But my game show way of knowledge actually began years earlier, as a little kid attending a taping of the original The Price is Right with host Bill Cullen. It was then that I had my first inkling into television's ability to fool us. I had watched the show when I was home sick from school, but this time I was sitting in the studio audience. Everything on the set was brighter and smaller than I imagined. But the epiphany came before the theme music started when Bill first walked on stage. He had a serious limp, a legacy of polio. But then, just before the red light on top of the camera flashed on, he perched himself on the side of his game show host desk and folks in television land had no idea he was disabled. Bill Cullen, Bob Eubanks, Art Fleming, Gene Rayburn, Gary Moore -- all game show gods --but really who's the most powerful lord in the pantheon of hosts? Bob Barker, that's who. [AUDIENCE CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]
BOB BARKER: I thank you for that wonderful welcome. Let us see the first item up for bids today please!
ANNOUNCER: It's an enchanting adventure playhouse! [AUDIENCE CHEERS]
PETER BRESLOW: The Price is Right was just set up to be-- an approachable Game Show. It's easily understandable and people can relate to the concepts behind it, you know, without conceptualizing about the whole thing. [LAUGHS]
PETER BRESLOW: Bob Barker is the leitmotif of artist David Jung's show at the Newmark Gallery in Washington this month. All around are paintings with obscured images of Bob and contestants rejoicing over winning items such as a 1972 Vega. You remember that compact Chevy with the aluminum engine that tended to melt? The art works all look like stylized television screens with painted horizontal lines of bad reception. But at the heart of the exhibit are real TVs -- 6 teeny tiny 4-inch ones -- all broadcasting the same black and white noirish image: Bob Barker, the tall, a little smarmy television version of a carnival barker, transformed into a chiseled-jawed romantic leading man -- all set to a homemade soundtrack. [EXCEPT OF HOMEMADE SOUND TRACK] Each TV is actually screening 900 stills, taken shot by shot that when played look like a single flickering image. Again, obscured by lines of static. It's a shadowy closeup of Bob Barker and an overjoyed winning contestant puckering up for a big smooch. But really, with all the romantic heat being generated, it could be a smoldering scene between Bogart and Bacall in Key Largo.
DAVID JUNG: This is by far I think the most powerful image out of the whole group -- the gaze within them is, is so anti-game show - it, it's probably the, the image - as an image it's probably the epitome of what I've been looking for within these images, focusing more on the romantic narratives within them and then their, their connection to romantic cinema and then '40s and '50s cinema. [HOMEMADE SOUNDTRACK UP AND UNDER]
PETER BRESLOW: And that soundtrack -- all noises created in the artist's mouth -- humming and whistling and fake static sounds that are electronically manipulated. David Jung says the mumbling is the man in the image, and the whistling is the woman, and they're trying to have a conversation. As he points out, this is all very deep.
DAVID JUNG: If you throw that into the-- to the formula of-- Hegel's dialectical theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the conversation which should be the thesis and the antithesis working against each other -- the idea of the synthesis is that it should bring the two together, and the static noise is actually -is not allowing the conversation to continue.
PETER BRESLOW: So Jung, who started out poking fun at America's excessive consumerism, has ended up with some serious art, and just maybe the apotheosis of our most enuring game show host.
DAVID JUNG: As a spinoff of this, I've, I've actually had this - have an idea of portraying Bob Barker as a figure from Persian mythology -- Perry at the Gates of Paradise, trying to bring gifts to God in order to get into heaven. [LAUGHS]
PETER BRESLOW: Whether or not God will have to guess their actual retail price remains to be seen. For On the Media, this is Peter Preslow in Washington.
PETER BRESLOW: I have just-- one more question for you.
DAVID JUNG: [Okay.]
PETER BRESLOW: Can you tell me the manufacturer's suggested price for an Amana freezer?
DAVID JUNG: An Amana freezer-- 659 dollars.
PETER BRESLOW: Have you considered going on The Price is Right? [LAUGHTER] [HOMEMADE SOUND TRACK CONTINUES, THEN OUT] AM Apes
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The last blockbuster film of summer opened this weekend. Planet of the Apes transports moviegoers to a world where apes have taken over every aspect of civilization. But director Tim Burton fails to clue us in to what AM radio would sound like in an ape-run society. On the Media thinks it might just sound like this. [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: Gonzo in Saddle River, you're on the bench.
MAN: Thank you, I, I love the show. You could not survive in this league without an alpha male please. We have to have an alpha male in the forespot, and can we get at least one pitcher, just one, with an opposable thumb? I mean you don't gotta be Dr. Zeas to figure this stuff out! [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: Coco in Sioux City, you're question for Gerry Spence.
WOMAN: ...deeply regret the hurt my poorly-chosen words have caused the baboon and banobo community. [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: ...not bananas -- [SHOUTING] bananeek! [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: ...if's, and's or but's -- brace yourself, it's time for the Grease Man Sh-- [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS] [MUSIC FOR WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN] MARVIN GAYE: [SINGING] WHEN A CHIMP LOVES A MONKEY CAN'T KEEP HIS PAWS ON NO ONE ELSE.... [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: ...of e-volution -- the school board wants to teach...just maybe we did not evolve from the human.... [HYSTERICAL CHIMP-LIKE SOUNDS]
WOMAN: NPR senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr. [HYSTERICAL CHIMP-LIKE SOUNDS] [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS] [MUSIC FOR NATURAL WOMAN UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN: [SINGING] YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A NATURAL MONKEY-- BACKUP SINGERS: [SINGING] MONKEY--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, is Big Brother watching us? Garfield doesn't care.
BOB GARFIELD: [A LA ORANGE CAT GARFIELD] I care. Stay tuned to On the Media from National Public Radio. Abiomed
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Last week we interviewed the New York Times medical correspondent, Dr. Lawrence Altman. He was exasperated by a company called Abiomed which had slapped a month long news blackout on the recent implantation of its newly developed artificial heart. Altman wrote a scathing article quoting ethicists and physicians who all agreed the blackout wasn't serving the public! Abiomed has since allowed its doctors to speak to reporters. We invited Abiomed to respond to its critics. Brooke has the company's response.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The company writes: Larry Altman seems to believe that patients surrender their rights to privacy and personal dignity when they volunteer to participate in high profile medical device trials. Loss of privacy is indeed a risk of trial participation, but it need not be passively accepted. No one, not the press, not the general public, has a right for or right to real-time intimately personal clinical details about trial participants. On this point, the presence of federal research funding is a straw man. Researchers are accountable to the public through full and complete reports of results supported by documentation of unimpeachable integrity, not through patient-specific news briefings. And the company goes on: Abiomed believes that individual clinical trial participants can be sheltered from unwanted intrusions without compromising the integrity of public reporting of the progress and results of ongoing research. We've designed and tried to implement policies that serve the public's legitimate interest without victimizing the patient. We announced our policies well before the heart trial began. They are independent of how individual patients fare. Our efforts have engendered many more positive comments than criticisms from ethicists and physicians, and we are committed to the path we have chosen. [MUSIC TAG] Erik Barnouw
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week federal regulators made Rupert Murdoch's Fox Television Group the most powerful in the country by allowing it to buy rival broadcaster Chris-Craft. The purchase gives Fox ownership of two stations each in New York and Los Angeles. Such "duopolies," as they're called, were forbidden until the FCC issued new rules in 1999. It's the sort of news that would have dismayed Erik Barnouw. He died this week at the age of 93 after taking jobs in nearly every facet of a century of broadcasting -- as ad man, radio producer, filmmaker, teacher, historian and archivist -- and that's just a few. In fact, he wrote the book. His three volume history of broadcasting in the United States is the work that critic John Leonard says everyone who writes about television steals from. Patricia Zimmerman is an author and broadcast historian. She says Barnouw had an indelible impact on virtually every field he entered!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: You know one of my colleagues said here is a man who didn't live just one life but lived many lives. You know we often call him the shuttler -- that he shuttled between so many different media worlds, it was hard to ever place him in one.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's talk about some of those lives that he lived, first as a practitioner. He wrote commercials, he did propaganda and probably one of the most important films he made is Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945.
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: This film is a compilation film produced in I believe 1970 from footage that had been squirreled away, confiscated and hidden.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This footage was kept under seal by the U.S. government!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sealed by the U.S. government and through a very complicated set of machinations, Barnouw secured the footage.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now they say that this is the most widely-taught documentary in documentary studies and also one of the most potent expressions of anti-war sentiment ever put on film!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: Yes, it is. 31 years after it was produced, you can show it to students and they're moved and crying and touched. You can trace films like Eyes on the Prize and millions of public television documentaries, feminist documentaries, civil rights documentaries, all these films that narrate the history of America can really -- you could see as having their forefather, if you will, in this film.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Having written the history of broadcasting he then went on to look ahead and what he saw was a nation that was producing huge media mega-companies. Media conglomerates.
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: He once said to me, these companies are now larger than most nations. Yet at the same time, rather than just focusing on gloom and doom, he would constantly say to me: you know any good independent documentary media that's blowing the cover of these people? So what I would say -- his whole life is a life marked by worry about what are the media doing in American society and internationally and also hope that there's always people doing courageous work.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Just this week you were at a conference that included archivists and people interested in independent film and documentary film. What is it like in all those communities to lose somebody like Erik Barnouw?
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: The passing of Erik Barnouw is for us as though Ghandi has died. A person always steering us towards an ethical and moral and democratic course.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Patricia Zimmerman is a professor at Ithaca College, author and media historian.
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Privacy concerns are not unique to Abiomed. Time Magazine just ran a cover story about Internet intrusion. Super Bowl attendees last winter had their faces photographed and compared to fugitives' mug shots, and every time we get caught with our pants down, in the back of our minds we have to wonder if we're on that newest network phenom-- Spy TV. No wonder a Lou Harris poll last year revealed that 92 percent of Americans are suddenly worried about their privacy. Is it possible that for the first time in the life of the American citizen we have ceased to be flesh and blood but merely the accumulation of our personal data?
BOB GARFIELD:I can answer that question. The answer is: No! Not because we shouldn't be concerned about surveillance and the long arm of the data base in the year 2001, but because we've always had to worry about it! I speak from experience here. [KIDS PLAYING ON PLAYGROUND] The year was 1965. I was 10 when I-- tossed a snowball against the brick facade of Kingwood Elementary School-- [WHISTLE BLOWS] and got caught. My insane act of violence against masonry got me dragged into the principal's office to be read the riot act.
STERN PRINCIPAL: Bobby-- you better straighten up. This is going on your-- permanent record.
BOB GARFIELD: Permanent record?! [GLOOMY MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Next year's teacher. Colleges! Employers! The military!-- they'd all know. I was doomed to a life of rejection -- revulsion -- fear. ECHOING VOICE: Rejection -- revulsion -- fear.
BOB GARFIELD:[ECHOING VOICE CONTINUING UNDER] I would never make colonel or Phi Beta Kappa! My dream to be undersecretary of commerce would go out the window! The snowball incident would-- snowball into my own ever-lasting hell!!!!
BOB GARFIELD:So-- for the next 8 years, I was disgustingly well-behaved -- blackmailed, basically, with my permanent record. And with all due respect for Time Magazine and the opinion poll industry, there is nothing new about that. For all the hand-wringing about a brave new world of intrusion, public records have always been public! Marketers have always collected data to understand and sell to us. Wiretaps and intimidation by dossier -- J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Furthermore Spy TV? -- Hah! CANDID CAMERA TV SHOW SONG: WHEN IT'S LEAST EXPECTED, YOU'RE ELECTED, YOU'RE THE STAR TODAY-- SMILE! YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA. IN THE HOCUS POCUS....
BOB GARFIELD:Richard Smith, chief technology officer of a research group called The Privacy Foundation makes a living by sounding alarms, but he understands what has never changed.
RICHARD SMITH: Human beings naturally like to snoop. [LAUGHS] It's part of our makeup.
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. 225 years into the life of the Republic, we're all worried about our privacy. Why?! What all of a sudden is so different?! Actually -- I can answer that question too. [MUSIC] Technology. It's not just that the intelligence community purportedly has a system called Echelon that scans every e-mail and satellite transmission foraging for security threats. It's that I myself went on the Internet the other day to a people-search site and within 5 seconds located my address and phone number. With that I went to a site called Acudata.com. For 30 dollars, giving that information, I was supplied my social security number. Then I went to a site called U. S. Search where for 69 colleague I obtained the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone I'd been in a real estate transaction with in the past 10 years. If I'd had any bankruptcies, a criminal record, tax liens, civil judgments or a merchant registered with the Coast Guard, they'd have found that too. Then years ago they'd have had to root around a fusty courthouse file room for two days. Big Brother, Big Smuther. Now any clown can sit naked in his den and for a hundred bucks terrorize me, steal my identity or God knows what.
BETH GIVENS: Government, corporations, nosy neighbors, criminals who are committing identity theft. What we have today are lots and lots of Little Brothers.
BOB GARFIELD:Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse isn't Chicken Little exactly. Just put her down for guardedly apocalyptic.
BETH GIVENS: A tremendous amount of information is being collected on us, and in the end it's being used in the same kind of way that George Orwell described in his book!
BOB GARFIELD: The book, by the way, is 1984. [MUSIC]
TV ANCHOR PETER JENNINGS: Police now have the ability to discover evidence of crimes inside a home without ever walking through the door.
WOMAN: The technology allows the FBI to sift through thousands of private e-mails, selecting out--
MAN: ...the rental car company Acme uses global positioning systems.... [AMBIENT SOUNDS OUTDOORS, VEHICLES PASSING]
BILL BROWN:Good morning. My name is Bill Brown. In this area there are approximately 139 different surveillance cameras of all different sorts, and we can be seen simultaneously by three different surveilling authorities.
BOB GARFIELD:Bill Brown, a currently out of work proofreader and self-described anarchist, leads a unique tour of New York's Time Square, pointing out for appalled visitors just how much they are being watched. Some of the camera emplacements are innocuous, like the ones ABC uses for sidewalk shots on Good Morning America. But in the aggregate, Brown believes, this is ground zero for citizen repression.
BILL BROWN: The first and most important is directly above us -- is a globe-shaped camera operated by the New York City Police Department. This is circular and hidden behind a translucent globe, and that spares us from the trauma of seeing a unit swerving around and staring right at us while we point back at it. Up to our right, about a hundred feet....
BOB GARFIELD:The truly chilling thing he says is that video images are increasingly digital and storable in perpetuity, there to cross-reference against any other data in any other file. And it's all happening so gently, so incrementally Brown says, we scarcely notice -- until one day we wake up as slaves. The analogy he likes is frog soup.
BILL BROWN: The way you make frog soup is you don't boil a frog all at once; you raise the temperature very gradually so the frog never realizes that it's being boiled. You could find yourself swimming in totalitarianism and think that you were having a nice bath!
BOB GARFIELD:He may have something there! I saw some Chicago high school girls clotted outside of the MTV studios on 44th and Broadway. They were making arrangements to be in the studio audience for the next day's broadcast of Total Request Live. I told them they were already on Times Square TV.
WOMAN: It's exciting! We love TV!
BOB GARFIELD: Does it bother you that Big Brother's watching you?
WOMAN: No!
BOB GARFIELD: You have any idea what I'm talking about when I say Big Brother?
WOMAN: The, the show Big Brother?
BOB GARFIELD: No, sweetheart; not the show Big Brother. But you have accidentally detected the paradox --we like to hide, but we also like to peek, and that's something else that's changed. Not technology alone but the powerful convergence of technology and the suddenly ready-for-prime-time surrender to our basest instincts. Jerry Springer, MTV's Real World, NBC's Spy TV. And need I mention, for viewing a young woman's every waking moment on the Worldwide Web -- JenniCam. In the past decade the hitherto social taboo called voyeurism has come out of the closet. It's no longer a secret shame. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] It's a genre!
ANNOUNCER: Twelve strangers have been locked in this house. There are no newspapers, no TV, no privacy. Previously on Big Brother....
BOB GARFIELD: Cameras, cameras everywhere. It's horrifying all right, but let he who is without titillation -- or just plain suspicion -- cast the first stone. The other day I myself got spammed with an offer to secretly monitor my computer to see what my wife and kids are up to -- every e-mail - every chat room - every web site - the ad for spyware promised. [LAUGHS] I deleted it, of course, but-- not before giving it some thought! Likewise the pop-under Internet ad that slips surreptitiously under my browser window every time I navigate the web. It's for a tiny wireless camera I can plant undetected anywhere, which reminds me -- there's a private detective in Pennsylvania I need to talk to. The name's Martin, Michael Martin, a real life shamus, gumshoe, private dick, [PHONE RINGING] and a man of few words.
MICHAEL MARTIN: Hello?
BOB GARFIELD: Say-- can you get me my permanent record?
MICHAEL MARTIN: We can do that!
BOB GARFIELD: That'd be swell. E-mail me when you get it. You know how to e-mail, don't you? Just lift up your finger and click. [PHONE HANGS UP]
BOB GARFIELD: Ohhh, right! In my haste to whip you into a panic, I neglected to present that other side of the story -- the side that says when you want information, you can go on line or call a private eye to get it -- that the ready access democratizes information, taking it out of the exclusive hands of government and into the hands of the people; that while we wish to be free and secure from surveillance, we demand surveillance to make us feel-- free and secure; and that all of this data floating around while potentially threatening also fuels and lubricates the consumer society.
MARTY ABRAMS: It means we have more immediacy in our lives.
BOB GARFIELD: Marty Abrams, director of the Information Policy Center for the Hunton and Williams law firm was the chief privacy officer for the data-aggregating giant Experian, a company that keeps profiles on 215 million Americans.
MAN: We can go into an appliance store on a Sunday afternoon at 6 o'clock; we can walk out of that appliance store with a 400 dollar television with instant credit, and we can do that because of the immediacy of the information flows and the fact that we understand the information better. It means that large manufacturer of automobiles will better be able to predict the types of cars that we will want 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road. It's really about an economy that is richer and more vibrant and creates more wealth for all of us.
BOB GARFIELD:See? What's good for General Motors is good for America! Or-- not. Man, at least in 4th grade I knew exactly what I had to fear. Now it's hard to know if the accumulation of my personal data liberates -- as Marty Abrams believes, or enslaves. Are we really being watched? Or just seen? Should I accept some level of risk of living in the information age like I risk driving in my car, or should I become some sort of e-survivalist, hunkered down in an unwired fortress, waiting for the final struggle? Well, you know what? I can answer those questions too. The answer is: I don't know! If I did know I'd write a book! I'd call it Frog Soup [SOUND OF BOILING LIQUID] for the Soul. [RIBIT, RIBIT] Sure, some of this stuff is extremely spooky and maybe even a very bad deal with the devil. But if you were a tradesman 140 years ago, so was the industrial revolution. Privacy hawks like Beth Givens and Richard Smith say that we must act now or dystopia is around the corner. Fair enough. Isn't that the way society has always dealt with change? With laws, vigilance and by the way, information-- simply to adjust. Meantime though, I've been dying to know whether the snowball incident was indeed immortalized in my dossier. Well, now I know.
BOB GARFIELD: So you got the dirt huh, Sherlock? Tell me about the snowball incident. How bad is it?
MICHAEL MARTIN: Your permanent record has been shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: Shredded?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It is the policy that files that old are shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: It's gone?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It's no more. [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Melissa Sanford and Katya Rogers; engineered by Irene Trudel and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Sean Landis, Kathleen Horan and Giselle Foss.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer, and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. [THEME MUSIC TAG UP AND UNDER] This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Changing of the Editorial Guard
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: 06:00 From WNYC in New York this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last week as we memorialized the passing of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, another historic figure departed journalism's arena -- Robert Bartley who spent the better part of 30 years transforming the Wall Street Journal's editorial page into what is regarded as the prime mover of conservative thought in America has retired. Bartley has passed the torch to the Journal's Washington columnist Paul Gigot who joins us now. Welcome to the show!
PAUL GIGOT: Good to be with you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is a tricky question to throw at you right off the bat, but why not? The Journal's editorial page is at the same time probably the most read and probably the most reviled in the country! Let's face it, the, the editor of the National Review said rather than making grand pronouncements the Journal's willing to knock the teeth out of its opponents. It's a ferocious page!
PAUL GIGOT: I don't think -- I wouldn't describe it as ferocious. I would say that we're not a "on the one hand, on the other hand" page. I think our style is - it can be pugnacious at times, but if our style is so ferocious I think that we must be doing something right, because Howell Raines of the New York Times when he was editorial page editor did seem to imitate some of the, the style of, of, of Bartley and what Bob Bartley liked to call "muzzle velocity" for editorials. But I think it's too much to say we're ferocious.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And you say the New York Times or, or rather the New York Times under Howell Raines made an alteration in its pages -- by that you mean it--
PAUL GIGOT: Stylistically. Stylistically. I mean he, he revved up the RPMs. He also adopted one other thing that I think was a Bartley innovation which is the campaign. That is if you get an, an issue which you really are promoting -- in Howell Raines's case it was camp--has been campaign finance reform -- you keep going back and you keep going back. We've done that with supply side economics, tax cutting--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And specifically and probably overwhelmingly Whitewater.
PAUL GIGOT: The-- the, the Clinton ethics story, broadly defined; no question.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:This may distress you a bit Mr. Gigot, but even liberals hail you as the "smart guy conservative" -- somebody willing to lay out a well-reasoned argument to defend conservative policies and even think outside party rhetoric on occasion--
PAUL GIGOT: You trying to damage my career?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I - yeah, I'm really-- [LAUGHTER] just think of it now - with every word is going down, down, down. Everyone writing about this seems to expect a kinder, gentler editorial page under your watch. Is that what you plan to give it?
PAUL GIGOT: Well, I'm a sweet guy--; we'll see. I mean it's going to be mostly the same staff which I think is a tremendous staff, and philosophically-- I'm very similar to-- to, to Bob Bartley.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:You may very well share most of Mr. Bartley's opinions and, and those of the editorial page, but-- not that many people listen to this show, so just tell me -- haven't you ever read the page and gone -- ogh! That really went too far.
PAUL GIGOT: Yeah, I have. On occasion I have read the page -- on occasion I've read my column after I've written it [LAUGHTER] and I've said -- you went too far. So--[LAUGHS] I, I, I think that is an occupational hazard.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you're a political guy. Your, your column that you've written from Washington is called Potomac Watch. But when I think of issues concerning family values -- homosexuality, abortion -- I don't immediately associate them with the opinion of Paul Gigot! How are you planning to handle these social issues?
PAUL GIGOT: Actually I've written a fair number of pieces about abortion politics and abortion policy over the years. I don't disagree with the Journal's editorial page position on that which has been that-- we're kind of in the middle. That is, we think that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided because it was judicial fiat. When it comes to the gay issue-- I'm-- we--have written about it from time to time but mostly - I think most recently only when it comes to the Boy Scouts and their First Amendment rights which we believe their First Amendment rights to, to hire the scoutmasters they want.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you said that the paper's editorial page was opposed to Roe v. Wade because it was judicial fiat.
PAUL GIGOT: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I didn't actually look it up, but then I can assume you were also opposed to the Supreme Court decision with regard to the Florida recount.
PAUL GIGOT: [LAUGHS] Oh, that's highly tendentious. I think those are completely separate issues.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well-- Paul Gigot, thank you very much.
PAUL GIGOT: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Recently a big change at the other most influential editorial page -- that of the New York Times. Times' Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins will take over from Howell Raines who has been elevated to the paper's editorship. Collins' work is known for sharp political humor on what is seen as a generally liberal editorial page. She joins us now. Welcome to On the Media!
GAIL COLLINS: Thank you!
BOB GARFIELD: Well first of all, congratulations!
GAIL COLLINS: Thanks!
BOB GARFIELD: This is really something! After a long and distinguished career as a reporter and a columnist, you've been promoted to--anonymity!
GAIL COLLINS: [LAUGHS] Well you know I've done that -actually I wrote my last column about a week ago, and I realized looking up on my bulletin board that I had from 1979 a column that was entitled My Last Column, and I've written last columns I think three other times since then.
BOB GARFIELD:Before Howell Raines who has just ascended to the editorship, the editorial page at the New York Times had a reputation for equivocating -for being compulsively evenhanded as opposed to - well, opinionated. Is it a tough act to follow?
GAIL COLLINS: Howell is an extraordinarily tough act to follow, but on the other hand I gave up a column to come to the Times to write editorials because of Howell, because it was so clear to me that he made this so much --writing editorials seem to be so much fun, and so exciting.
BOB GARFIELD:Now obviously the New York Times isn't just another newspaper. When it itches, governments all over the world scratch. But a big part of the job involves - I mean not - I can't think of a more felicitous way of phrasing this - elites writing for elites!
GAIL COLLINS: Well-- I think one of the attractions of the page is that you do have a sense that like decision-makers read it. I don't know that it influences the decisions so much as it influences the conversation but that's the important thing about the Times -- that it does sort of in-- have a big voice in the national conversation about important issues. And-- to that extent you're writing for elites, but if the stuff that you write isn't written in a way that regular people --regular readers want to read it -- I guarantee you the elites [LAUGHS] -- the elites aren't that diligent themselves. They're not going to necessarily even follow through. You've got to be able to write stuff that's --everybody wants to read.
BOB GARFIELD:When politicians are given free rein to write on the editorial pages -- famously or maybe infamously the New York Times has been in that position itself when it allowed Bill Clinton to explain his pardons of Marc Rich. Did anything happen at the New York Times to re-examine the policy of giving editorial space over to politicians?
GAIL COLLINS: No, but I must say that I was I think in China when that happened, so I, I can't really comment on what people said or didn't say.
BOB GARFIELD:All right. Fair enough. But I'm wondering if the things that have happened in the past, like the Bill Clinton episode; like the-- Wen Ho Lee episode, are going to inform the way you run the pages.
GAIL COLLINS: Well everything that the Times has done informs the pages in the sense that we have this enor--no, not enormous but we have a very strongly-held and fairly extensive list of core beliefs that we just have always believed in and you know, the issues change every day, and the things that were written about last year or the year before are probably not going to have much direct bearing on the things that are written about next year.
BOB GARFIELD: Congratulations again, and thanks for joining us!
GAIL COLLINS: Thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Gail Collins is the newly-anointed editorial page editor of the New York Times. [MUSIC TAG] Mayan Scribes
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Today when a celebrity gets bad press he's likely to fire his publicist. That may seem harsh, but not compared to his Mayan forefathers writing the king's press releases in the first century A.D. When he screwed up, he lost a lot more than a client. Kevin Johnston is a Maya archeologist at Ohio State University. Welcome to the show!
KEVIN JOHNSTON: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We marvel at the persuasive powers of publicists today, but back in the Maya period, the scribes, as they were known then, were responsible for preserving the power of kings! How did they do that?
KEVIN JOHNSTON: What's interesting about the Maya society, like many ancient societies and what made the writing of the scribes so powerful is that only a small portion of the society could read and write, and in these early societies, writing had tremendous power; so much so that texts were generally read aloud to assembled crowds in large public ceremonies, some of them violent, some of them not; some of them involving captives, some of them not. But these must have been very-- politically powerful and persuasive spectacles.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So were the scribes reporters or were they publicists?
KEVIN JOHNSTON:The scribes were publicists. We don't have any illusions about this information that's being reported as being objective and reliable. That is, the scribes sang the praises of the kings and that was their duty. They were there to cast the accomplishments of the kings in the most favorable light. In some cases we have conflicting records of events in the Maya lowlands which makes us suspect that the reporting is not always accurate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A lot of times I'll talk to fellow journalists who say oh, I think I'm just going to sell out and become a publicist. [LAUGHTER] Did scribes make a really good living?
KEVIN JOHNSTON:We know that many of them did. We know for example that scribes, almost all of them and perhaps all of them, were the kin of kings, and we've found their houses at sites like Aguateca in Guatemala, and there the, the scribes lived in grand palaces, almost as large as the palace of the kings, which tells us first of all that they were wealthy people to begin with, but also that they played a very prominent and prestigious role in Maya society.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what happened when the scribe's patron monarch was overthrown?
KEVIN JOHNSTON:Well this is a very interesting event that, that occurs. It turns out that in warfare not only were kings, enemy kings, targeted for battle and not only were their courts targeted for battle, but scribes in particular were targeted for capture, and when captured they went through a series of events which are shown on Maya styli. First they were displayed publicly. They were humiliated; stripped of their clothing, although they weren't shown entirely naked. They often were shown wearing loin cloths which is nonetheless something which is humiliating for someone of an elite background. And then in a very peculiar and bizarre practice their fingers were broken - the fingernails were pulled out - and the fingers themselves were snapped, tearing the ligaments at the joints so that the hands were greatly disfigured. And then the scribes were killed. Often they underwent what we call genital sacrifice where their genitals were slashed. And then quite frequently their hearts were cut out or their heads were cut off which is a standard form of Maya execution or sacrifice. But what's interesting about these styli in the Maya case is that they emphasize not the execution, which is the end point of this sequence of events, but the act of finger-breaking.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You found a quote in a 16th century Maya dictionary assembled by the Spanish that seems to drive this point home.
KEVIN JOHNSTON:I looked up the word "fingernails" just to see what I would find -- expecting to find quite a bit -- and in fact I found one entry, and the entry's extremely interesting. It says: it's-- lists the word "fingernails," and then it gives a typical example of its usage, and translating its usage it says "I have no fingernails. I am no longer the person I used to be. I no longer have power or authority or money. I am no one." And what this seems to describe is what the mural shows -- the loss of fingernails seems to correspond to the loss of the ability to write which marks the loss of political power.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kevin Johnston, thank you very much!
KEVIN JOHNSTON: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kevin Johnston is a Maya archeologist at Ohio State University. MTV Grows Up
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Twenty years ago the miracle of converging self-interest created a television phenomenon. It was called MTV, a cable network that got free programming while record labels and artists got free promotion and American teenagers got free of the linear sitcom sensibility that had informed their parents' TV-gorging idleness. But what has 20 years wrought? Michael Nesmith, the ex-Monkee, country rock performer who imported the music video concept from Europe is unimpressed with the monster he created.
MICHAEL NESMITH: MTV is in its fading days and will slowly drift off the map. It served its purpose. Its time has come and gone. It's not global. It doesn't embrace, you know, the, the world village, so-- I, I look at it as a, as a fading star!
BOB GARFIELD:Whether or not the network will enjoy another two decades, MTV has undeniably had an impact. Ann Powers, pop music critic for the New York Times joins me now. Welcome to OTM!
ANN POWERS: Thanks for having me!
BOB GARFIELD: Michael Nesmith just got done telling us that he believes that MTV is over; that it is a falling star.
ANN POWERS: Hmmmmm. Well, Michael Nesmith was always an artiste of the form, and it is possible that on some level the jiggle videos of hip hop and the sort of fashion displays of teen pop have made it harder for artistic video to happen.
BOB GARFIELD:We're 20 years into the MTV age. The original MTV generation, you know, some of them are having stents implanted [LAUGHTER] in their coronary arteries. As we look back and take stock of the first two decades, what ultimately is MTV's contribution to the culture?
ANN POWERS: Well, one word: Madonna, for one thing. The great blockbuster artists of the '80s, Madonna and Michael Jackson, would not have had the same kinds of careers without video - without MTV. That's one specific thing. The shift from music as something you listened to in your room and made up your own story to music coming with a story -- that's something that I think is not that positive. But on the other hand it's allowed for a new form of visual creativity, a new way of looking at film. It's probably been better for film and television than it has for music, frankly.
BOB GARFIELD: To what degree do pop artists of 2001 depend on the video as opposed to their innate musical talents to sell their records?
ANN POWERS:Well that's the huge bone of contention among artists. I think, you know, rock & roll was always the place where you could be a freak, you could look weird -- it's not really been that true for women, but you would have a Janis Joplin for example who wasn't particularly photo-or video-genic but had such charisma and such a voice that she could be a star. Now I think often people, and especially women, are picked out because of their looks! Many kids are getting their primary source of music from MTV. They're not getting it from the radio. They're getting it from coming home and turning on Total Request Live. So looks matter much more, and I think the pressure for artists, especially women artists, to conform to a certain look, has just grown much more extreme.
BOB GARFIELD: Is there any chance that the next ten years will see MTV going back to its more experimental, conceptual roots?
ANN POWERS:Well you already see the--that happening on M2 - the other station that tends to show more innovative videos. For example, the number one nominated video this year at the video awards is this Fat Boy Slim video starring Christopher Walken which is just Christopher Walken dancing. [LAUGHS] It's very bizarre and compelling -- and that's the one that people liked the best! You know? So I think there's an interest and a hunger for that, and like most media outlets, MTV feels itself having got into a rut, I think, and that's why M2 turns toward videos; MTV itself is experimenting with lots of different kinds of programming and never quite knows what to do. I think desperation will lead them back toward innovation as it does every media outlet that survives. And I do think MTV will survive for better or worse.
BOB GARFIELD: Very good! Ann Powers, thanks for joining us!
ANN POWERS: Thank you!
BOB GARFIELD: Ann Powers is a pop music critic for the New York Times. MTV: Pulling Back the Curtain on Pulling back the Curtain
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Above all, MTV sends out the message to kids: you matter. Your tastes matter. Your discretionary income matters. Naturally the kids agree. They identify with MTV. They want to go behind the scenes. So MTV has obliged its viewers by taking as its central theme the other shows on MTV! On the Media's producer at large Mike Pesca entered this endless feedback loop and emerged with this report.
MIKE PESCA: To be a member of Generation Y is to have your every curiosity catered to. It's to know that you can clog your hard drive with information about the walk on character who flitted across Dawson's consciousness for two episodes.
BRIAN GRADEN: I think now in, in a culture of 200 channels and infinite Internet content, what we want to do is deconstruct and understand every little aspect about how something is made famous and proliferated.
MIKE PESCA: Brian Graden is MTV's president of programming. That job once meant deciding if the 99 Luft Balloons video would go into high rotation. Now a lot of the programming on MTV is shows about other shows on MTV. Take for instance the Video Music Awards. [MUSIC]
MAN: What the hell was Rage Against the Machine bassist Kim C. doing atop our set at the 2000 Video Music Awards?
MIKE PESCA: The VMA's are more than the biggest night on MTV. Because of repeats they are many, many nights. Tack on another dozen or so nights of reruns of the documentary on the making of the Video Music Awards. Brian Graden explains the making of the first making of the VMAs.
BRIAN GRADEN: You know it was, it was sort of almost accidental. We were sitting around maybe 3 years ago, and, and we were reminiscing about the Video Music Awards that we had loved, and then we realized well-- these were moments that really happen in culture. To get people excited for this year's show, why don't we go back and remind them how cool the prior shows were? So it sort of just happened as a promotional whim, and then [LAUGHS] when we first aired it, the ratings went through the roof. It was probably quadruple the time period, and it was like oh, my God - we could really mine this, because the audience seems to have an insatiable appetite for behind the scenes information.
MAN: Now MTV has shown you our best this and hottest that and counted down our hundred greatest other things, but now to celebrate MTV's 20....
MIKE PESCA: These days the M in MTV stands for "Making of" - the making of the VMAs. The Making of the Movie Awards. A new show called Making the Video. Brian Graden says MTVs viewers identify. Those idiots on spring break, the cast of the Real World, the guy who won't the contest to be a veejay -- Graden thinks every kid is secretly saying - hey! - I can do that!
BRIAN GRADEN: If you think about the people who are in the MTV generation now, they were raised on the Real World, on Monica Lewinsky, on O.J.; they were raised on Survivor -- so they're used to the fact that sort of relatively ordinary people can be plucked out of obscurity and suddenly made famous and all the accoutrements of fame are opened to them. So I think they're fascinated by that process, because they're like oh, my God -- even if I'm not a talented [LAUGHS] singer or dancer or politician, that could be me. And so I think they want the process deconstructed to know how they get access to it.
MIKE PESCA: The low tech way of getting access is showing up in person. That's what dozens of MTV fans, [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] some with guitars, do each weekday in an effort to be invited on to Total Request Live, MTV's popular after school show based in Times Square. [GUITAR MUSIC, CROWD SHOUTING AND CHEERING]
MIKE PESCA: The kids' love to shout from the sidewalks below served as the perfect focus group of heavy MTV viewers. John McSweeney told me that all the making of documentaries do creep into his mind when he's watching the source material.
JOHN McSWEENEY: If I think like something on the Video Music Awards was cool or something was like, you know, something like weird went on -- yeah! Then you look forward to seeing it. But otherwise, like it's something fun to watch.
MIKE PESCA: It's just a thing. Now you were nodding your head - do you - when you watch the awards-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: Yeah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
MIKE PESCA: -- you kind of know that there'll be the special on it eventually?
MAN: Yeah, anything I want to know I'm sure MTV would put it on and--
MIKE PESCA: Right, they're not going to deprive you of information about-- [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: [LAUGHS] Exactly.
MAN: [MOCK SHOUTING] Oh, no!
MIKE PESCA: At a, at a certain point watching these specials, do you say you know enough already, I don't care that much about MTV?
MAN: Well-- I, I care a lot about MTV. Like him, whenever I'm home I, I watch it, cause that's pretty much it. So.
MIKE PESCA: So when you watch the shows about the shows on MTV, have you ever said to yourself, it's all just a big commercial for MTV?
MAN: Definitely not. It-- There are a lot of great shows on. I mean it's one of the greatest channels out there, but it's, it's not a big commercial.
MIKE PESCA: Brian Graden sees his audience as possessing a level of sophistication unfathomable to anyone who's ever had to get up to change the channel.
BRIAN GRADEN: They can know, for example, a group like the Back Street Boys was quote/unquote "manufactured," right, put together down in Florida -- there are a lot of great producers [...?...] behind -- they can learn all that stuff from behind the scenes information. They can sort of know that there's a level of artifice to it because it's been deconstructed for them in a documentary and at the same time they're like yeah, I know all that but I'm still going to kind of enjoy the music and buy into the fantasy. I think they get it on both levels.
MIKE PESCA: So many shows about so many shows has another effect. It trains the viewers to become perfect characters for other MTV shows. Take MTV's attempt at totally transparent programming -- the Real World. Not only does MTV ask real people to live in front of a camera, they have to try out in front of a camera!-- so that the losers can be humiliated by other real people -- on camera! It's the Real World Casting Special. Mike, whose dream it is to be on the Real World, has been playing close attention.
MIKE PESCA: It's shown me not--what not to do, because you know people get on there and they're like -they're being naked - they're running around naked, and the way I see it, they're looking for people that are real. You have to be real. You can't go do a--any of these like crazy stunts and stuff like that cause that's not you. You're not being real.
MIKE PESCA: A few years ago MTV tried to put viewer submissions on the air in a program called: You Wrote it: You Watch It. It flopped. But now Graden says the talent pool might be up to the challenge.
BRIAN GRADEN: You know by sheer coincidence we're actually doing a pilot called My Life Is a Movie where we have asked our ordinary viewers, you know, ages 19 or whatever, to send us stories and you'll be - you'll just be so amazed that the stories [LAUGHS] are completely literate to how they expect and know a script will, you know, break down and-- so we are pursuing that idea to n-- today even though it didn't work 5 or 10 years ago.
MIKE PESCA: From audience to artists in 5 to 10 years. Even if only a tiny fraction of MTV's viewers ever become on screen or off screen talent, MTV will be able to stock its shelves with programming. The training videos are being delivered via cable lines into the homes of America -- 24 hours a day. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca. The Art of Price is Right
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Now kids may scream to get on Total Request Live, but once in a simpler time, their grandparents lined up to guess the price of a Maytag washer! In fact, people still do. The Price is Right is the quintessential game show and one of the longest lived now in its 26th season with Bob Barker on CBS. The program has so seeped into the collective unconscious it's inspired an art exhibit in Washington, DC -- but we'll get to that in a minute. Long before Bob Barker, the Price is Right had a brief run on ABC and NBC as Peter Breslow knows too well. In 1967, as other teens were grooving to the Summer of Love, he sat in the studio audience of The Newlywed Game. He won [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] an Allan Sherman record on another game show that summer--
PETER BRESLOW: But my game show way of knowledge actually began years earlier, as a little kid attending a taping of the original The Price is Right with host Bill Cullen. It was then that I had my first inkling into television's ability to fool us. I had watched the show when I was home sick from school, but this time I was sitting in the studio audience. Everything on the set was brighter and smaller than I imagined. But the epiphany came before the theme music started when Bill first walked on stage. He had a serious limp, a legacy of polio. But then, just before the red light on top of the camera flashed on, he perched himself on the side of his game show host desk and folks in television land had no idea he was disabled. Bill Cullen, Bob Eubanks, Art Fleming, Gene Rayburn, Gary Moore -- all game show gods --but really who's the most powerful lord in the pantheon of hosts? Bob Barker, that's who. [AUDIENCE CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]
BOB BARKER: I thank you for that wonderful welcome. Let us see the first item up for bids today please!
ANNOUNCER: It's an enchanting adventure playhouse! [AUDIENCE CHEERS]
PETER BRESLOW: The Price is Right was just set up to be-- an approachable Game Show. It's easily understandable and people can relate to the concepts behind it, you know, without conceptualizing about the whole thing. [LAUGHS]
PETER BRESLOW: Bob Barker is the leitmotif of artist David Jung's show at the Newmark Gallery in Washington this month. All around are paintings with obscured images of Bob and contestants rejoicing over winning items such as a 1972 Vega. You remember that compact Chevy with the aluminum engine that tended to melt? The art works all look like stylized television screens with painted horizontal lines of bad reception. But at the heart of the exhibit are real TVs -- 6 teeny tiny 4-inch ones -- all broadcasting the same black and white noirish image: Bob Barker, the tall, a little smarmy television version of a carnival barker, transformed into a chiseled-jawed romantic leading man -- all set to a homemade soundtrack. [EXCEPT OF HOMEMADE SOUND TRACK] Each TV is actually screening 900 stills, taken shot by shot that when played look like a single flickering image. Again, obscured by lines of static. It's a shadowy closeup of Bob Barker and an overjoyed winning contestant puckering up for a big smooch. But really, with all the romantic heat being generated, it could be a smoldering scene between Bogart and Bacall in Key Largo.
DAVID JUNG: This is by far I think the most powerful image out of the whole group -- the gaze within them is, is so anti-game show - it, it's probably the, the image - as an image it's probably the epitome of what I've been looking for within these images, focusing more on the romantic narratives within them and then their, their connection to romantic cinema and then '40s and '50s cinema. [HOMEMADE SOUNDTRACK UP AND UNDER]
PETER BRESLOW: And that soundtrack -- all noises created in the artist's mouth -- humming and whistling and fake static sounds that are electronically manipulated. David Jung says the mumbling is the man in the image, and the whistling is the woman, and they're trying to have a conversation. As he points out, this is all very deep.
DAVID JUNG: If you throw that into the-- to the formula of-- Hegel's dialectical theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the conversation which should be the thesis and the antithesis working against each other -- the idea of the synthesis is that it should bring the two together, and the static noise is actually -is not allowing the conversation to continue.
PETER BRESLOW: So Jung, who started out poking fun at America's excessive consumerism, has ended up with some serious art, and just maybe the apotheosis of our most enuring game show host.
DAVID JUNG: As a spinoff of this, I've, I've actually had this - have an idea of portraying Bob Barker as a figure from Persian mythology -- Perry at the Gates of Paradise, trying to bring gifts to God in order to get into heaven. [LAUGHS]
PETER BRESLOW: Whether or not God will have to guess their actual retail price remains to be seen. For On the Media, this is Peter Preslow in Washington.
PETER BRESLOW: I have just-- one more question for you.
DAVID JUNG: [Okay.]
PETER BRESLOW: Can you tell me the manufacturer's suggested price for an Amana freezer?
DAVID JUNG: An Amana freezer-- 659 dollars.
PETER BRESLOW: Have you considered going on The Price is Right? [LAUGHTER] [HOMEMADE SOUND TRACK CONTINUES, THEN OUT] AM Apes
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The last blockbuster film of summer opened this weekend. Planet of the Apes transports moviegoers to a world where apes have taken over every aspect of civilization. But director Tim Burton fails to clue us in to what AM radio would sound like in an ape-run society. On the Media thinks it might just sound like this. [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: Gonzo in Saddle River, you're on the bench.
MAN: Thank you, I, I love the show. You could not survive in this league without an alpha male please. We have to have an alpha male in the forespot, and can we get at least one pitcher, just one, with an opposable thumb? I mean you don't gotta be Dr. Zeas to figure this stuff out! [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: Coco in Sioux City, you're question for Gerry Spence.
WOMAN: ...deeply regret the hurt my poorly-chosen words have caused the baboon and banobo community. [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: ...not bananas -- [SHOUTING] bananeek! [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: ...if's, and's or but's -- brace yourself, it's time for the Grease Man Sh-- [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS] [MUSIC FOR WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN] MARVIN GAYE: [SINGING] WHEN A CHIMP LOVES A MONKEY CAN'T KEEP HIS PAWS ON NO ONE ELSE.... [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS]
MAN: ...of e-volution -- the school board wants to teach...just maybe we did not evolve from the human.... [HYSTERICAL CHIMP-LIKE SOUNDS]
WOMAN: NPR senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr. [HYSTERICAL CHIMP-LIKE SOUNDS] [RUNNING ACROSS SEVERAL STATIONS] [MUSIC FOR NATURAL WOMAN UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN: [SINGING] YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A NATURAL MONKEY-- BACKUP SINGERS: [SINGING] MONKEY--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, is Big Brother watching us? Garfield doesn't care.
BOB GARFIELD: [A LA ORANGE CAT GARFIELD] I care. Stay tuned to On the Media from National Public Radio. Abiomed
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Last week we interviewed the New York Times medical correspondent, Dr. Lawrence Altman. He was exasperated by a company called Abiomed which had slapped a month long news blackout on the recent implantation of its newly developed artificial heart. Altman wrote a scathing article quoting ethicists and physicians who all agreed the blackout wasn't serving the public! Abiomed has since allowed its doctors to speak to reporters. We invited Abiomed to respond to its critics. Brooke has the company's response.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The company writes: Larry Altman seems to believe that patients surrender their rights to privacy and personal dignity when they volunteer to participate in high profile medical device trials. Loss of privacy is indeed a risk of trial participation, but it need not be passively accepted. No one, not the press, not the general public, has a right for or right to real-time intimately personal clinical details about trial participants. On this point, the presence of federal research funding is a straw man. Researchers are accountable to the public through full and complete reports of results supported by documentation of unimpeachable integrity, not through patient-specific news briefings. And the company goes on: Abiomed believes that individual clinical trial participants can be sheltered from unwanted intrusions without compromising the integrity of public reporting of the progress and results of ongoing research. We've designed and tried to implement policies that serve the public's legitimate interest without victimizing the patient. We announced our policies well before the heart trial began. They are independent of how individual patients fare. Our efforts have engendered many more positive comments than criticisms from ethicists and physicians, and we are committed to the path we have chosen. [MUSIC TAG] Erik Barnouw
July 28, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week federal regulators made Rupert Murdoch's Fox Television Group the most powerful in the country by allowing it to buy rival broadcaster Chris-Craft. The purchase gives Fox ownership of two stations each in New York and Los Angeles. Such "duopolies," as they're called, were forbidden until the FCC issued new rules in 1999. It's the sort of news that would have dismayed Erik Barnouw. He died this week at the age of 93 after taking jobs in nearly every facet of a century of broadcasting -- as ad man, radio producer, filmmaker, teacher, historian and archivist -- and that's just a few. In fact, he wrote the book. His three volume history of broadcasting in the United States is the work that critic John Leonard says everyone who writes about television steals from. Patricia Zimmerman is an author and broadcast historian. She says Barnouw had an indelible impact on virtually every field he entered!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: You know one of my colleagues said here is a man who didn't live just one life but lived many lives. You know we often call him the shuttler -- that he shuttled between so many different media worlds, it was hard to ever place him in one.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's talk about some of those lives that he lived, first as a practitioner. He wrote commercials, he did propaganda and probably one of the most important films he made is Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945.
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: This film is a compilation film produced in I believe 1970 from footage that had been squirreled away, confiscated and hidden.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This footage was kept under seal by the U.S. government!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sealed by the U.S. government and through a very complicated set of machinations, Barnouw secured the footage.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now they say that this is the most widely-taught documentary in documentary studies and also one of the most potent expressions of anti-war sentiment ever put on film!
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: Yes, it is. 31 years after it was produced, you can show it to students and they're moved and crying and touched. You can trace films like Eyes on the Prize and millions of public television documentaries, feminist documentaries, civil rights documentaries, all these films that narrate the history of America can really -- you could see as having their forefather, if you will, in this film.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Having written the history of broadcasting he then went on to look ahead and what he saw was a nation that was producing huge media mega-companies. Media conglomerates.
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: He once said to me, these companies are now larger than most nations. Yet at the same time, rather than just focusing on gloom and doom, he would constantly say to me: you know any good independent documentary media that's blowing the cover of these people? So what I would say -- his whole life is a life marked by worry about what are the media doing in American society and internationally and also hope that there's always people doing courageous work.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Just this week you were at a conference that included archivists and people interested in independent film and documentary film. What is it like in all those communities to lose somebody like Erik Barnouw?
PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN: The passing of Erik Barnouw is for us as though Ghandi has died. A person always steering us towards an ethical and moral and democratic course.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Patricia Zimmerman is a professor at Ithaca College, author and media historian.
- Back to story:
- July 28, 2001
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Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
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An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
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Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
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A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
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A Source for Sources
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OTM Staff Picks, Volume 52
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A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
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Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
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The Totally Legal Subpoena
