Venezuela
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Last weekend's short-lived military coup in Venezuela has left most of the media there with much to apologize for. When President Hugo Chavez appeared to have been removed from office, newspapers rushed to publish congratulatory ads, celebrating the end of the ex-president of the ex-democratic government. But on the day after the coup crumbled, most major newspapers failed even to print a daily edition, and Venezuelan television offered little of the Chavez return to power. The media's jubilation followed by its silence fueled speculation that they themselves were complicit in the attempt to topple the president. NPR's South American correspondent Martin Kaste has just returned from Venezuela and he joins us to assess the egg-smeared faces of the Venezuelan media. Martin, thanks for coming on the show.
MARTIN KASTE: No problem.
BOB GARFIELD: You said in one of your stories that the media have some explaining to do. What did you mean by that?
MARTIN KASTE: What I meant by that is that a lot, lot of people in Venezuela, especially those sympathetic to President Chavez simply believed that the commercial media in Venezuela omitted any reporting of the pro-Chavez demonstrations in the ours and, and day right after the coup. As you point out television was not covering it as sort of a blow by blow basis on Saturday as the coup was crumbling and as Chavez's supporters were coming out in the streets --we were watching cartoons and-- and exercise shows, and it was, it was eerie -- the difference between what was happening in the streets and what you saw on television.
BOB GARFIELD:So if you were a Chavez supporter, there was nothing that the media did after the coup to disabuse you of your sense that they were out to get him from the beginning.
MARTIN KASTE: In fact, not even if you were just a Chavez supporter. What's interesting about the whole situation -- a lot of Venezuelans I talked to that day - the end of Friday and on Saturday -who were not Chavez supporters -- frankly disliked him intensely - they were, they were appalled! They-- saw this as a coup d'etat, and that was what it was, and they were appalled at the, at how the media had simply accepted it! How there were full page ads in, in these newspapers celebrating what had happened, and the whole thing was, was Orwellian in, in their view and the rhetoric that the media used to describe what had happened I think was deeply disturbing, even for people that didn't support Chavez.
BOB GARFIELD:Now since President Chavez was returned to office there's been some hand-wringing in the media. The general manager of Globovision, the, the news channel apologized?
MARTIN KASTE: Yeah, they ran that all day on Tuesday. It was, if memory serves, about a 10 minute monologue where he sat at the anchor's desk there and he was wearing his Globovision jacket and he looked straight in the camera and he apologized but then also explained and justify [sic] -- I mean he never go to the point where he said we consciously decided to undermine the president, but he apologized for the network's simple disappearance - missing in action on Saturday in terms of reporting what was going on hour by hour, and he explained it in part with this argument about the danger to reporters. And I think these reporters, in their defense, really were very afraid. At one point on Saturday night when - as the coup was crumbling and the Chavez supporters were getting the upper hand - they were transmitting from the basement of a Globovision building, appealing directly to the camera desperately not to be killed. You know the - and while they were doing this there were mobs of people around their station and other commercial stations. So-- there was some fear and, and-- I - if I were a cameraman I'm not sure I - you know, if I were a Venezuelan cameraman, I would have thought 3 times before going out at that moment.
BOB GARFIELD:Well if Globovision was institutionally chastened, what about Chavez himself. He has been very rough in his public statements against the press, perceived at least to be rallying his supporters into violence against the press. Has he apologized for his - at all for his anti-press stand?
MARTIN KASTE: He's-- what he's done is he's repeated past calls in his re--supporters not to attack reporters. Probably most, most importantly he hinted, although he didn't say flat out, that he went a little too far in his use of what they call "the national network." Venezuelan law allows the president to simply commandeer the airwaves for important announcements and speeches. He's been using this to death for the last few years. He will just pre-empt whatever's on, all stations, all radio stations and TV stations. And, and in the days leading up to the coup he was doing this more and more and more and to the point where on Thursday as this huge anti-Chavez rally was building outside the palace, he simply imposed this national network rule on the networks and forced them not to cover or not to show images of this rally, and they finally rebelled, and they split their screens and showed Chavez calmly telling the nation that everything was fine on one side of the screen, and on the other they were showing a hundred thousand people plus converging on the, on the palace, and some of them getting shot.
BOB GARFIELD: Did you feel that you were in danger when you were covering the situation there?
MARTIN KASTE:I was a little apprehensive at first, but it quickly became apparent that once you made it clear that you were a foreign journalist, especially Chavez's supporters were very eager to talk to you, because they - their perception was that the only way to get their message out was via the foreign press.
BOB GARFIELD: And-- that wasn't necessarily a paranoid suspicion on their parts.
MARTIN KASTE:Yeah, I think at that moment-- there was very little reporting being done domestically, period, so for whatever, whatever motive -- it wasn't happening.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin, thank you very much.
MARTIN KASTE: You're welcome.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Kaste is the South America reporter for NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now the coverage of Venezuela's upheaval in the U.S. press has also been arguably odd. Oddest of all has been the behavior of the New York Times' editorial page. Last week it held the military removal of an elected president -- it didn't use the word "coup" -- as a positive step for Venezuelan democracy. Then this week the Times' editorial page conceded that it may have, quote, "overlooked the undemocratic manner in which Chavez was removed." Rachel Coen is media analyst for the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. You've been tracking this. The Times' behavior wasn't especially unusual. What gives?
RACHEL COEN: You're right. The Times wasn't unusual in this, unfortunately. Many of our top-circulation, prestigious papers reacted basically by applauding the coup -- although most of them didn't call it a coup -- the Chicago Tribune also did this. Their first editorial on April 14th said: "It's not every day that a democracy benefits from the military's intervention to force out an elected president--"
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I should say not!
RACHEL COEN:-- [LAUGHS] and in the Times even their apology or half-apology in their second editorial on Venezuela, they still stood their ground on the fact that the coup might be good in the long run. You know they emphasized, quote "We hope Mr. Chavez will act as a more responsible and moderate leader now that he seems to realize the anger that he has stirred," you know suggesting there that, well you know a military coup - we shouldn't cheer it but perhaps it's a good slap on the wrist for the president there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It seems to have benefitted the newspapers to withhold judgment for a couple of days. The L.A. Times gave a slightly more tempered initial reaction because it did wait a few days.
RACHEL COEN: That's true. The L.A. Times didn't run an editorial until April 17th, after the dust had settled a little bit. They were frank in pointing out that quote "It's one thing to oppose policies and another to back a coup." But they were also pretty critical of Chavez and dismissive of his status as an elected leader. You know they wrote that, quote "It goes against the grain to put the name Hugo Chavez and the word democracy in the same sentence."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But there's nothing wrong with condemning a bad leader, is there?
RACHEL COEN:No! That's a good thing for newspapers to do in editorials is to talk about policy, but I do find it disturbing when that turns into overlooking, as the New York Times put it, "a military intervention in a democracy."
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well interestingly enough, the Washington Post, the hometown paper of the federal government, seems to have had the most tempered reaction from the start!
RACHEL COEN: That's true. The Washington Post's first editorial came out on April 14th, and it led with the statement that any interruption of democracy in Latin America is wrong; the moreso when it involves the military. They were almost alone among the big papers in being that straightforward about it. But about the Post, even there they made a point in that editorial of saying quote "There's been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with this Latin America coup," which was a curious thing to do so early on because the details were so unclear as we've seen in the Post's own pages.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But there is as yet no proof that the United States had an active hand in this coup, is there?
RACHEL COEN:No, but there are good reasons to ask questions about it and not to dismiss it right away. The Washington Post and the New York Times have both run really interesting news reports saying that Pentagon and U.S. State Department officials were for months meeting with coup leaders and talking about removing Chavez with them. Now these are all, you know, unsubstantiated and they all need investigating. It's just an interesting and rather troubling thing that on the editorial pages the main reaction has still been initially not to call it a coup and to suggest that it might be a good thing rather than to highlight the serious questions about what this means for democracy not only in Latin America but in the U.S., considering the U.S.'s long history of involvement in Latin American turmoils and coups.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Rachel Coen, thank you very much.
RACHEL COEN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Rachel Coen is media analyst for the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Letters
April 20, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: Our mailbox this week was jammed with reactions to my interview with Michael Hoy of Loompanics, distributor of such useful titles as How to Circumvent a Security Alarm in Ten Seconds or Less, The Heroin User's Handbook, and The Black Book of Arson. The discussion centered on whether such books increased the FBI's impulse to snoop on all of us. It ended when I sort of lost my temper and we decided as an experiment not to edit that out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We got a few positive responses, and they tended to sound like this one from Guillermo Cano in Seattle. He writes, "Kudos to Garfield for having the journalistic discretion to end the interview with Michael Hoy. Mr. Hoy chooses to ignore the point that the right to free speech carries with it an equal responsibility for what is being conveyed. That is why it is unthinkable that even the most ardent advocates of free speech would today yell 'bomb' during a plane flight."
BOB GARFIELD:But most of the response, on the order of about 20 to 1, was negative -- like this one from Sarah Swift of Riverside, California. She writes whether the Mike Hoy interview was about security versus liberty or free speech rights, it struck me that Bob Garfield sounded more like a blue-haired anti-smut crusader than a thoughtful member of the news media. His simplistic stance on the issue --"Everyone knows what you're doing is wrong and you disgust me" -- did not seem fitting for the complicated question of whether the risks of propagating certain types of material outweigh the ideal of freedom of expression so valued in this society."
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Pat Fitzgerald from Brooklyn writes that he "loves the show. But I can't believe how easily Michael Hoy baited you into sounding so school-marmish. Loompanics isn't exactly NAMBLA, you know. I would have thought you'd believe the First Amendment is the First Amendment whether it's Mark Twain, Michael Hoy or, God forbid, Bill O'Reilly. By the way," adds Fitzgerald, "those anarchist bomb and drug cookbooks he sells are much more likely to blow up any reader who tries to follow their convoluted instructions. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] We welcome your comments, recollections and your recipes -- especially if they work. Send them to onthemedia@wnyc.org and please don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name.
BOB GARFIELD:Coming up, why you should be excited about the Data Quality Act -- really. And why financial shows hate to sell themselves short.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. “Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Plot”
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. On March 25th, Cynthia McKinney, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia made a little-heard appearance on a Pacifica radio program. Eventually a transcript of the program made its way into the hands of reporters from the Washington Post. They read, as McKinney called for hearings on why the Bush administration ignored warnings that she claimed could have prevented September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinney wondered was it because the administration and its friends would benefit financially from the inevitable military buildup? The resulting article which appeared on last Friday's Washington Post was titled Democrat Implies September 11th Administration Plot. After that, McKinney was universally denounced on cable TV; even in-house liberals like Alan Colmes on Fox and Paul Begala on CNN called McKinney's accusations irresponsible and outlandish. Her home town paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, wrote editorials against her and Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker called her "a dangerous fool whose voice needs to be stifled." Knowing that McKinney's remarks would provoke outrage and maybe end her political career, as a few are suggesting, the Post had quite a story on its hands. Juliet Eilperin wrote the story. Welcome to OTM.
JULIET EILPERIN: Thanks so much.
BOB GARFIELD: Now you took a look at this transcript and you said to yourself oh, my - that is really out there. What did you say to yourself?
JULIET EILPERIN: Exactly. You say-- well I mean - [going in,] I'm familiar with Cynthia McKinney, so it's not that it w-- that it was a shock to read what she had said, but at the same time, you looked at it and said well that's, that's terribly provocative - the kind of stuff she's saying and accusing the administration of. So that was really what struck me at first.
BOB GARFIELD:Okay, now you just said "accusing the administration of." She actually doesn't explicitly accuse them of anything. She cites some facts -- that there were some advance rumblings of September 11th; that the president's father and -- the former President Bush and their circle stand to gain financially at least indirectly from the ramping up of the defense budget, but she never actually connects the dots. She simply leads you to the inference.
JULIET EILPERIN: No. Yeah, no, no that's true. I guess what I mean is that she accuses them of essentially ignoring advance warnings of the September 11th attack, and that she is fairly explicit on.
BOB GARFIELD:The headline on the story referred to a plot -that she implies a September 11th plot by the administration. You didn't say that.
JULIET EILPERIN: No.
BOB GARFIELD: But the headline did. When you picked up the paper that morning, what was your reaction.
JULIET EILPERIN: Right. I mean it's one of those difficult things. I mean I tend - once I found my story - to leave and not be involved in it. I do think that that might not have been the best choice of wording.
BOB GARFIELD: Were you troubled with the word because it was indelicate or because it, it was simply impossible to back up.
JULIET EILPERIN: It's just you, you want to be sensitive and you want to be as nuanced as you can, which is always difficult in a headline.
BOB GARFIELD: Were you satisfied that the story that you wrote supported the use of the word "plot?"
JULIET EILPERIN:Yeah, I think you could make the argument that that's what she was certainly implying. You know she took pains to say she hasn't seen evidence but maybe that's the case, so she was really kind of raising the issue rather than saying that that absolutely is what happened.
BOB GARFIELD:You compared her statements to "a web of conspiracies theories that have been floating around since September 11th." You didn't compare what she had to say for example to what is the orthodoxy of the far left. What she had to say isn't vastly different from what has appeared in The Nation, for example. Was it dismissive of you to compare her to wild conspiracy theorists as opposed to those just coming from a leftist point of view?
JULIET EILPERIN: I don't think that it was kind of irresponsible or how I did it - and I did try to point out that she's a liberal member, and I also put it in the context of interviewing other members and trying to find out if they had heard similar things, which they had. So I tried to couch it by actually saying there, there are other people who are raising this issue.
BOB GARFIELD:U.S. Congressperson Invites America to Infer a Plot at the Highest Levels of Government in the Military Industrial Complex -- why wasn't that on page one?
JULIET EILPERIN: There was a discussion of whether the story should be broader and-- whether you should have given it better play, but I also think the fact of the matter is one thing you take into account is how likely is it that there will be an investigation to what extent - you know if she had managed to convince a lot of her colleagues that this was important, and you know several of them joined her in calling for that investigation, I think that would have given the story more heft.
BOB GARFIELD: Juliet Eilperin, thank you very much.
JULIET EILPERIN: Thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Juliet Eilperin covers the House of Representatives for the Washington Post. [MUSIC]
Short Sell Gets Short Shrift
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer recently turned up a series of e-mails from the Merrill Lynch investment firm in which analysts called certainly companies quote "crap" and "a dog" even as they were praising them as hot buys to the public. This week the firm responded by agreeing to post on its web site a list of companies reviewed by Merrill Lynch that are also customers of its investment services. That was a small concession in a sweeping investigation into the sweet talk of financial analysts with conflicts of interest; their unwavering calls to buy, buy, buy were a staple on cable TV financial shows from 1999 through last year. Nielsen ratings for financial shows soared with the Stock Market so much of the media eagerly gave a soap box to these relentlessly upbeat investment analysts. These days, of course, you're more likely to see financial news stations demanding full disclosure, but On the Media's Mike Pesca discovered that one bit of information that would balance out the ersatz optimism of financial analysts still has a tough time getting on the air. Here's the long and, more specifically, the short of it.
MIKE PESCA: Pets.com was a profitless internet company which lost money on every 20-pound bag of dog food it mailed out. Henry Blodgett, now Elliott Spitzer's main whipping boy, was the stock analyst who liked this idea enough to tell millions of TV viewers to buy Pets.com stock. A certain talking sock was the company's corporate spokes-puppet. Today not even the puppet remains. But still standing are the cable stations which gave Blodgett a forum for all those bad recommendations. Today CNBC and CNN-FN have reformed themselves somewhat. They've had to -- no one's buying relentlessly bullish advice in a down market. But watch financial cable for 24 hours straight and you might not see any guest actually saying "sell." To some extent, this is a function of a Wall Street culture where analysts issue sell recommendations on less than 3 percent of all companies. But it can also be attributed to a financial news culture where high ratings go hand in hand with bull markets, and negative news faces a higher hurdle than positive news because of the impact it can have on the economy.
SUSAN LEE: Positive news people forgive if you're wrong. Negative news they don't.
MIKE PESCA: Former Columbia University economic professor and current member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board Susan Lee says that emphasizing the positive and talking mostly about buying opportunities skews the markets.
SUSAN LEE: Stock prices really only reflect optimists. You don't hear what the pessimism is. So the market price tends to be higher than it might be if you had the full range of opinion.
MIKE PESCA: Which would include more utterances of the S-word -- Sell. But rarer than a network featuring a sell recommendation is putting a short seller on the air. Short selling or shorting a stock is betting that it will go down. Jim Chanos, a famous short seller, describes his status this way.
JIM CHANOS: Generally the, the overall financial media treats short sellers as, you know, the unwanted guest to the party.
MIKE PESCA: Who'd want a guest who spits out the hors d'oeuvres, investigates the vintage of the champagne and finds fault with the flower arrangements? But that's what shorts do with arcane financial data, and when they're right they profit off of pain. When they're wrong, their losses can be monumental. Let's say you buy a thousand dollars worth of stock. The most you can lose is that thousand dollars. But if you short a stock and it rises and rises, your losses will rise and rise with it. That's why any responsible advisor will tell you that short selling is a high wire act best avoided by investors without a keen understanding of balance sheets and accounting practices. Susan Lee theorizes that high stakes force better decisions.
SUSAN LEE: I think that short sellers are, because the risks are much greater in short selling than in long positions, they are much more likely to be accurate.
MIKE PESCA: A recent example of how a short seller's insights helped correct an over-valued stock is Enron. It was Jim Chanos who noticed early on that something was amiss in Enron's books, and it was his tip that prompted Fortune Magazine to take one of the first critical looks at Enron. Before that, Chanos and his fellow short sellers couldn't get arrested in this town, "this town" being Fort Lee, New Jersey -- home of CNBC.
BRUNO COHEN: You have to be careful, because rumors can affect the valuation of stocks in real time.
MIKE PESCA: Bruno Cohen is executive vice president for businesses programming at CNBC.
BRUNO COHEN: We want to be certain that if somebody has taken a negative position on a stock, be it a short seller or an analyst or whoever, that it's a responsible position; that it's thought-out; that there's justification for it. LOU DOBBS: We're far more careful on the sell side. There's no doubt about that. And anyone who tells you otherwise is simply not being straightforward.
MIKE PESCA: CNN's Lou Dobbs. LOU DOBBS: On short sellers, we not only look at why they're saying what they're saying, but what they're saying. We analyze it very carefully, and we corroborate it. Now frankly we don't do that on the buy side, and we should pr-- be just as careful.
MIKE PESCA: So here you have a struggle between competing codes of ethics -- one fiduciary -- shorting is dangerous -- and one journalistic -- short sellers have insights that would benefit financial news consumers. But Jim Chanos says he doesn't want to go on TV. He recognizes that the medium is ill-equipped to handle the kind of information he provides.
JIM CHANOS: We prefer to talk to journalists who understand the kinds of stories that we work on. Our situations tend to be somewhat financial puzzles. They don't lend themselves easily to-- 30-second sound bites.
MIKE PESCA: Don't cry for the under-interviewed Jim Chanos. He runs hedge funds worth over a billion dollars. As for the rest of us, we can only hope that the markets will price in the information that short sellers have, even if we don't see them on TV every day. Capitalism has always been described as "an invisible hand." [MUSIC UP AND UNDER/BYE BYE BLACKBIRD] It will just have to survive the invisible talking head. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca. Data Quality Act
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: On May 1st, government agencies must finish their drafts of new science quality procedures. This rather dry fact is the first stage in implementing a new law that could in the words of one pro-business advocate "have an impact far beyond anything people can imagine." The new law, called the Data Quality Act, requires that government ensure that its data, the data on which regulations are based, meet new quality control standards. Under the DQA, government information is wide open to challenges by any group or individual. If a challenger makes a good case, then the offending information is removed from public view. Well that sounds fair enough, but critics like Alan Morrison of the Public Citizen Litigation Group believe the Data Quality Act is intended to slow agencies down.
ALAN MORRISON: Nobody could be opposed to accurate information. But the problem is at what cost and what delay. This bill seems to me to put too much premium on accuracy, and it will be very difficult to measure how many agencies don't do something because they're afraid that they will have to spend time and money defending a decision in areas which are inevitably controversial. We're dealing with frontiers of scientific know; we're dealing with important economic questions; we're dealing with statistical analysis. The answer is not to suppress government information but to put out more information that responds to it and then the scientific or economic or other communities can decide for themselves which answer is closest to being right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If this law is so problematic why didn't you and other critics make more noise about it before it was passed?
ALAN MORRISON:Well I can only speak for myself but I think it's probably true for most other people --nobody heard of this law until it was enacted into a statute. It is 27 lines buried deep in an appropriation bill. There were no hearings. There was no committee report. There was no indication at all that this bill was even being considered. And the first thing anybody knew about it was when OMB got its direction and had to start preparing the guidelines.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It was passed by the Congress during the Clinton administration. It was made into law during the Bush administration. With the change of political orientation, what kind of data do you think is most likely to be challenged?
ALAN MORRISON: My real concern is that this bill is aimed largely, but not exclusively at the Environmental Protection Agency. It's a scientific agency; it produces a large amount of information every year. Eventually it bases its regulations and other activities on that information. Much of it is uncertain and sometimes it adversely affects businesses, and my fear is that the industries are going to come in and challenge and drive down the level of information dissemination under the guise that they're getting more accuracy. My understanding is that Jim Tozzia who is a highly regarded lobbyist for interests that are principally concerned about what's going on at EPA is at least one of the drafters of this legislation. I think the parentage, assuming that it is Jim Tozzia and his colleagues, gives you a good idea of what the purpose of this law was supposed to be.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
ALAN MORRISON: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Alan Morrison is the founder of the Public Citizen Litigation Group and he's now a visiting professor at Stanford University. And now I'm joined by Jim Tozzia, the founder of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness and a former official in the Office of Management and Budget and also the author of an early draft of the Data Quality Act. Mr. Tozzia, welcome to the show.
JIM TOZZIA: Glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sometimes it's useful when considering a new law to consider the people who wrote it. Now it's no secret that you're pro-market; that you're a friend of big business. Your principal funding does come from the business community.
JIM TOZZIA: Yes, trade associations and private firms, yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mr. Tozzia can you understand why consumer groups who are aware of this regulation tend to be opposed to it and big business groups tend to be in favor of it?
JIM TOZZIA: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do you think that is?
JIM TOZZIA: Well, I think both don't see the reverse side of the coin. I think some of business feel that the government has been utilizing shoddy science, so there's some people will, will see that as a very big plus. On the other hand, the - some of the consumer groups will feel the fact that the industries uses it that way, it's a negative. What I think the consumer groups fail to see is when industry presents data to the government, and it's - if it's adopted by the federal government - then the consumer groups can use the same law if it doesn't meet these standards to go through the same process that industry does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:There was a 1992 Environmental Protection Agency report that identified second hand smoke as a Group A human carcinogen. Would you use the Data Quality Act to challenge regulations regarding second hand smoke?
JIM TOZZIA: Well I'm not actually involved in that any more. I would tell you a more current one I think that it's most certainly sh-- might be used for. If you hear press reports of the term "dioxin," EPA has issued a preliminary risk assessment and said it's a carcinogen. However there's been 3 independent bodies; all 3 of those groups, the majority of people that voted of outside scientists voted that was not a human carcinogen.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well Mr. Tozzia can I ask you are any of the funders of your organization's companies that might be affected by anti-dioxin lawsuits and legislation?
JIM TOZZIA: Dioxin's a byproduct not intended - not made by anyone. So anyone that has a combustion burner could be affected by dioxin. So the answer is virtually all would be. Not all, but most would be.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So if you were to challenge the dioxin data that's out there, you would ask for that information then to be removed from the web site and the EPA would have to respond to you.
JIM TOZZIA: If we came to the conclusion that the data does not support it being upgraded to a Class A - the known human carcinogen, we would file petition with EPA; that's correct. We may - I didn't say we would, but that's a possibility. EPA would then take it and they'll have so many days to act on our petition. They'd either say yes or no. If they said no-- then there'll be an appellate process where you can appeal it to somebody in the agency and, and EPA and all the agencies are working out that appellate process.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Perhaps the reason why consumer groups tend to oppose the Data Quality Act and business tends to be in favor of it is because it tends to redound to the benefit of business if government does less, and if it can merely stall the government -- prevent them from promulgating new regulations -- that usually is to the benefit of business and not to those who are concerned with issues of consumer protection.
JIM TOZZIA: Well, if it delays the issuance of effective regulations that benefit the consumers, you're right. If it delays the issuance of ineffective regulations where the costs are enormous compared to the benefits, the consumer's better off.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
JIM TOZZIA: Well thanks for the opportunity to be on the NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Jim Tozzia is the founder of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness and the author of an early draft of the Data Quality Act scheduled to take effect in October of this year.
BOB GARFIELD: coming up, NPR's programming chief on the future of the network and how commercial music stations get you hooked.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. NPR’s Culture Clash
April 20, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The world of public radio was in a small uproar last week with the announcement by NPR of a major overhaul in its cultural programming. The reorganization will eliminate some 15 jobs at NPR's Washington headquarters, redirect resources from network-produced culture programs to its news magazines and substantially alter the daily classical program Performance Today. The network will also develop 24 hour streams of classical music that local stations can use as they choose.
BOB GARFIELD:There will also be more attention paid to developing entertainment programs and to the coverage within the news magazines of culture -- both high brow and popular. The architect of these changes is senior vice president for programming Jay Kernis, founding producer 23 years ago of Morning Edition. Kernis returned to NPR a year ago after a long stint with CBS News. He joins us now. Jay, welcome to the big, big show.
JAY KERNIS: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: All right now first as a matter of full disclosure we should say that On the Media is distributed by National Public Radio and as such you have a substantial amount of influence on our fate as a show. That out of the way, you've said that in essence less is more. You've cut jobs and said that cultural programming will increase and improve. Do the math for me.
JAY KERNIS: Well I think there's some things the audience should know first, and that is in my job I don't program 680 public radio stations across the country. I mean people think I sit in my office and I make decisions for local public radio stations. I don't.
BOB GARFIELD:So you're just trying to create a better palette of programs from which the station program directors and station managers can choose.
JAY KERNIS: Yeah. That's absolutely right. We asked the stations what's important to you in terms of what NPR is doing culturally. Here's what the stations told us: the cultural material that's on Morning Edition and All Things Considered -- very important. They also talked about Fresh Air with Terry Gross. They talked about Car Talk. Of lesser priority to them -- I mean look -- our stations are dedicated to classical music and jazz, but of less importance was the classical music programming that we were feeding nationally and, and the jazz programs that we were feeding nationally. And so I thought well that's-- that's sort of a problem! I mean we're asking very talented people to do wonderful programming, and if a local radio station is scheduling it at a time possibly when fewer people are listening or when very few people even listen to radio, it means that that program probably could be better.
BOB GARFIELD:To what extent are the stations in the NPR system as far as you know making decisions based purely on what the audience numbers seem to suggest, based on what generates the most pledge dollars as opposed to what I understood NPR's mission to be which is to serve the under-served.
JAY KERNIS: I, I, I - I mean to - I mean to interrupt there. That is not public radio's mission --to serve the under-served. Public radio's mission is to work in partnership with member stations to create a more informed public --one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of essential events, ideas and cultures.
BOB GARFIELD:All right, here's where I'm going with this Jay. Everyone loves Car talk, but presumably we don't want a whole network full of Car Talks. The commercial path would be to figure out what generates the most audience and come up with as many programs that the largest number of people are listening to and willing to write their pledge checks to support - but the public radio's model as I understand it is to use programming discretion to figure out what's good - not just what's popular but what's good. So is there a conflict between the desire to serve audiences and give NPR listeners what they've proved they want based on their pledge checks and the idea of creating quality programming.
JAY KERNIS: It depends how you use the research. I use research as a tool. We're s-- we're spending dollars hard earned, and I want to make sure and everyone at National Public Radio wants to make sure that we measure it in some way -that, that we're able to say to the public and to public radio listeners we're spending your money wisely. But that, that's just measuring the audience.
BOB GARFIELD:Are you telling me that you don't worry yourself that program directors and station managers aren't obsessed with audience and pledge results to the detriment of the mission? Don't you worry about that?
JAY KERNIS: I don't think I worry about it.
BOB GARFIELD: That the people you serve are, are taking their eye off of the mission ball?
JAY KERNIS: No. I have nev-- the-- I have never found that to be the case.
BOB GARFIELD: You have taken a lot of heat personally and NPR has over the announcement of these moves which I guess you believe have been somewhat misunderstood.
JAY KERNIS: Mm-hm.
BOB GARFIELD: There is the over-arching fear that the network is going to be taken down the path of pop culture--
JAY KERNIS: Here it comes -- there's that word -- popular culture.
BOB GARFIELD: -- to the-- [LAUGHS] - to the--
JAY KERNIS: Mm-hm.
BOB GARFIELD: -- exclusion or, or at least diminishment of true culture. Rant for me, please.
JAY KERNIS: [SIGHS] It so happens that the smart public radio audience does not only watch PBS. It watches CBS; it watches HBO. The public radio listener -- yeah! -- likes foreign films, a lot. Likes independent films. But the public radio listener goes to big blockbuster movies and rents big blockbuster DVDs. And all I've ever said is that when we cover popular culture, we should cover it with the same journalism filters that we use when we cover a news event, which is to say do the reporting -- ask tough questions -- tell a real story. I have never said more popular culture, more popular culture. But I have said: Don't be afraid to cover popular culture.
BOB GARFIELD:I don't think anybody believes that there's going to be the NPR equivalent of the Solid Gold Dancers but isn't news and information on popular culture vastly available elsewhere from Entertainment Tonight and the E Channel and-- MTV and many other sources?
JAY KERNIS: I've heard 31 years of public radio reporting. When we turn our ears and eyes on this material, we do it in a way that no one else does it.
BOB GARFIELD:Let's just say someone had the ability to sort of scan the entire universe of public radio stations around the country -- what will he or she hear that's noticeably different?
JAY KERNIS: I think we all hope at NPR that listeners hear better stuff. For some stations it'll mean more classical music. We're developing with our public radio stations a classical music stream. I hope on the news magazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, you hear better reporting! I mean this is subtle stuff that you're discussing. In some ways I'm amazed that it got the coverage in the print media that it did. I mean I'm doing my job. In, in some ways this is like watching me cut the lawn! I gotta cut the lawn every week! You know? I have to eventually programs!
BOB GARFIELD: But you're tinkering with an institution, and that's why people are very, very sensitive, irritable and maybe terrified.
JAY KERNIS:You know what -- there's no reason the audience should trust me. The audience does not know me, and it's not just me; it's many people at National Public Radio. But I'm the founding producer of Morning Edition. I was at a public radio station when I was 16 years old. I am very, very devoted to this and so is my staff.
BOB GARFIELD:You were quoted in the Washington Post as saying people unfairly say I am changing the course of public radio. If only I can do that. All I can do is ask what can we provide for our stations that they want to air? All right -- if you had the power -- if only you could, to paraphrase you, would you change the course of public radio?
JAY KERNIS: I, I think those of us in public radio programming have to figure out what the next generation wants to listen to. The core public radio listener is 48 years old. That listener is getting older and older. I want public radio to succeed and go on for years and years and years and years, and, and, and that means trying to figure out what younger audiences want.
BOB GARFIELD: Is this the beginning of something radical or is it just tinkering on the margin?
JAY KERNIS:You want to know something? I have a radical idea for a late night show. The only problem is, is that most people aren't listening to the radio late at night. That's my only radical idea.
BOB GARFIELD: No Solid Gold Dancers.
JAY KERNIS: Not unless they're dancing to Cole Porter or Jerome Kern. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: All right [LAUGHS]. Jay, thank you very much.
JAY KERNIS: You're welcome.
BOB GARFIELD: Jay Kernis is senior vice president for programming at NPR. Music Testing
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the early days of Top 40 radio, some 50 years ago, programmers used rather crude and unscientific methods to determine their playlists -- record store sales -- phone requests - the number of plays on the local juke box -- and of course some programmers and deejays took pride in their gut ability to pick the hits. In the '70s, as all-music stations specializing in different genres took over the dial, competition heated up. Stations experimented with more accurate devices to survey listeners music preferences. Today, most commercial music stations test each and every song in the laboratory of public opinion research. The listeners hoping these tests will mean longer play lists and less repetition -- the news isn't too good. OTM's Paul Ingles has the story.
MALE RESEARCHER: Put on your poker face. Don't let anyone know what you're thinking when a song, song comes on. How you feel about music is a very personal thing.
PAUL INGLES: A researcher we can't name is speaking to about 125 to-54-year-old men whom we can't name seated at long tables in a hotel meeting room in a city we can't name. To eavesdrop on this top secret music research session called an Auditorium Test we had to promise complete anonymity to the radio station that on this day is determining its play list for the next year. Each participant was pre-screened over the phone and offered about 40 bucks to come here to rate hundreds of song clips. Each has the old Scantron [sp?] sheet and the number 2 pencil ready to fill in a circle 1 through 5 -- 1 meaning you'd switch stations you hat the song so much -- 5 meaning "It rocks, dude!"
MAN: 57. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: 58. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
PAUL INGLES: The most recognizable 10 seconds of each song, called The Hooks go barreling by, about 5 a minute for over 2 hours. If the test takers don't recognize a song they fill in a box marked U for Unfamiliar. If they're just plain tired of hearing it on the radio they can also black in a box marked T.
MAN: 62. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
PAUL INGLES: This auditorium test is one of many kinds of music testing that costs stations 25 to 40,000 dollars a pop. There's also a high tech version wherein each participant gets a little transmitter.
ALAN KEPLER: It's a little box with a dial on it, and it allows the listener to respond more emotionally.
PAUL INGLES: Alan Kepler [sp?], who heads the research company Broadcast Architecture, says the dial twist is a more true-to-life measure.
ALAN KEPLER: You hear a song on the radio that you like, what do you do? You reach over the knob and you turn it up! Or if you hear a song that you really hate, you reach over and you turn the volume down or you punch to another station.
PAUL INGLES: But getting everyone who's invited to turn up on the given night of an auditorium test can be a trick. Weather, traffic, the prime time TV schedule can get in the way. So some stations are taking the test to their listeners via the telephone. WO
MAN: Now let's play the first song. You'll need to wait until it finishes playing. Then you can vote your opinion -- 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - or the star key if you don't recognize. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS - SONG YESTERDAY] [SHORT BEEP] [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS - ELVIS SONG ALL SHOOK UP] [SHORT BEEP]
PAUL INGLES: Mike Maloney whose company Music Tech [sp?] offers this phone method believes it's more natural and relaxing to take the test at home than with strangers in a hotel ballroom. People can take several days to finish if they choose, and there are built in safeties to prevent at-home distractions from contaminating results. Periodically through the test subjects are asked to state their name to confirm they haven't handed the phone to their kids to do the test. Maloney says they record the name and more.
MIKE MALONEY: We're able to record background noise. In other words if we get an idea that maybe there's-- a TV blaring or a child screaming, if there's something that tells us that they're not in, in an environment that allows them to sort of take the test conscientiously, we throw it out; we don't use it.
PAUL INGLES: For stations that play new music, frequent phone surveys are a way to keep tabs on the tastes of fickle fans.
CAROLINE GILBERT: They can warm up to and love an artist and 6 weeks later they're done.
PAUL INGLES: Caroline Gilbert oversees research for hundreds of Clear Channel radio stations across the country. She recommends that hit music stations do call out research 40 weeks a year to look for signs of song burnout which, she insists, comes much later than station staff thinks.
CAROLINE GILBERT: When you're sick of the song in the building, in the radio station, it's not time to stop playing it yet. When your core -- you know, 8, 9 hours a day people -- start burning on a song, it's still not time to stop playing it so much. When the broad base starts burning out on a record, that's when you back off on the rotation.
PAUL INGLES: To maximize audience, many programmers say they must minimize low testing and unfamiliar tunes that give listeners a reason to punch out. The result is active title lists of just a few hundred songs. Hit music stations have the shortest lists and play their best testing songs many times a day. Stations like oldies, classic rock or classic country play more songs but they're strongest play 3 or 4 times a week in different times of the day so people are less likely to hear them too much.
BILL LEWIS: You know when, when you drive right down the middle of the road, you, you don't have to worry about ending up in a ditch.
PAUL INGLES: Bill Lewis [sp?] is program director at WNCX, a classic rock station in Cleveland who cites another reason why playing less familiar album cuts is risky. The station wants the younger listener who had the original albums to begin with. Testing shows that 18 to 35 year old classic rock fans have had their music tastes completely defined by stations that have played, for example, only Steve Miller's biggest hits.
STEVE MILLER: [SINGING] I WANT TO FLY LIKE AN EAGLE TO THE....
BILL LEWIS: Those people are just wanting to hear Fly Like an Eagle and Jet Air Liner and, you know, they have no cognizance of the Sailor album, you know, nor will they ever unless they become dyed in the wool Steve Miller fans, but, you know -- I mean they - they're - they're just more Fly Like an Eagle fans.
PAUL INGLES: While like-formatted stations across the country may seem mostly the same, researcher Alan Kepler says local music testing will help stations reflect their own markets.
ALAN KEPLER: We see differences, and a lot of the differences are driven by what was played in that market years ago. For example, Denver is a real rock market, so even with an adult contemporary station you see much more a rock lean in the older music that the AC stations play, whereas in Philadelphia there was a lot of R&B music in the '60s and '70s, and you see a lot of that stuff pop. [STATION IDENTIFICATION: THAT BIG OLDIE 98.5]
PAUL INGLES: Still there are commercial stations that haven't hopped on the research bandwagon. Some can't afford it; some don't seem to need it. Lawrence Dominguez [sp?] programs big oldies KABG in Albuquerque and draws solid ratings.
LAWRENCE DOMINGUEZ: What we're doing is working, and we're not using consultants; we're not doing music testing; and you know we're not doing - we're not doing a l-- a whole hell of a lot of research out there.
PAUL INGLES: Deejay Bobby Vox [sp?] stands at the controls of his weekday morning show.
BOBBY VOX: Thank God, too. I want to tell you - these consultants - I, I've got a book to write about those guys, and it's, it's not good.
PAUL INGLES: Vox, who's been on Albuquerque radio for most of his 40 years in the business blames consultants and researchers for gutting the risk-taking heart from radio. Vox is given rare freedom to play tunes not on the station's regular oldies list. Muddy Waters' Hootchie Cootchie Man was blaring in when we came in.
MUDDY WATERS: [SINGING] WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT, BUT YOU KNOW I'M HERE....
PAUL INGLES: They're not concerned about playing a, a rare song like this on an oldies station having them punch away to your competitor.
BOBBY VOX: I, I guarantee it, they won't. The problem is when they turn to the competitor it's the same thing they heard yesterday and the day before and the day before. Now this is unique stuff and I'm very proud of it.
PAUL INGLES: The freewheeling KABG in Albuquerque may be a success, but still the vast majority of commercial stations in the country are programming just the top half of the results of their most recent music test. Bill Lewis at WNCX in Cleveland makes no apologies.
BILL LEWIS: You know we're commercial radio; we'll do anything not to have to have pledge drives. [LAUGHS]
PAUL INGLES: Hmmmm. Touche. Despite the practical attitude toward his station's play list, Lewis is himself a rock connoisseur and will slip in something like a rare David Bowie track late at night hoping to keep other rare rock and roll fans from abandoning his station for their own CD changers.
DAVID BOWIE: [SINGING] DON'T FAKE IT BABY....
PAUL INGLES: For On the Media, I'm Paul Ingles.
DAVID BOWIE: LAY THE REAL THING ON ME. THE CHURCH OF MAN LOVE'S A-- SUCH A HOLY PLACE TO BE TAKE ME BABY MAKE ME KNOW YOU REALLY CARE MAKE ME JUMP INTO THE AIR.... [MUSIC CONTINUING UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers with Sean Landis and Michael Kavanagh; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Irene Trudel and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Lu Olkowski. Our web master is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Brooke's friend, Bob. [MUSIC FADES]
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Last weekend's short-lived military coup in Venezuela has left most of the media there with much to apologize for. When President Hugo Chavez appeared to have been removed from office, newspapers rushed to publish congratulatory ads, celebrating the end of the ex-president of the ex-democratic government. But on the day after the coup crumbled, most major newspapers failed even to print a daily edition, and Venezuelan television offered little of the Chavez return to power. The media's jubilation followed by its silence fueled speculation that they themselves were complicit in the attempt to topple the president. NPR's South American correspondent Martin Kaste has just returned from Venezuela and he joins us to assess the egg-smeared faces of the Venezuelan media. Martin, thanks for coming on the show.
MARTIN KASTE: No problem.
BOB GARFIELD: You said in one of your stories that the media have some explaining to do. What did you mean by that?
MARTIN KASTE: What I meant by that is that a lot, lot of people in Venezuela, especially those sympathetic to President Chavez simply believed that the commercial media in Venezuela omitted any reporting of the pro-Chavez demonstrations in the ours and, and day right after the coup. As you point out television was not covering it as sort of a blow by blow basis on Saturday as the coup was crumbling and as Chavez's supporters were coming out in the streets --we were watching cartoons and-- and exercise shows, and it was, it was eerie -- the difference between what was happening in the streets and what you saw on television.
BOB GARFIELD:So if you were a Chavez supporter, there was nothing that the media did after the coup to disabuse you of your sense that they were out to get him from the beginning.
MARTIN KASTE: In fact, not even if you were just a Chavez supporter. What's interesting about the whole situation -- a lot of Venezuelans I talked to that day - the end of Friday and on Saturday -who were not Chavez supporters -- frankly disliked him intensely - they were, they were appalled! They-- saw this as a coup d'etat, and that was what it was, and they were appalled at the, at how the media had simply accepted it! How there were full page ads in, in these newspapers celebrating what had happened, and the whole thing was, was Orwellian in, in their view and the rhetoric that the media used to describe what had happened I think was deeply disturbing, even for people that didn't support Chavez.
BOB GARFIELD:Now since President Chavez was returned to office there's been some hand-wringing in the media. The general manager of Globovision, the, the news channel apologized?
MARTIN KASTE: Yeah, they ran that all day on Tuesday. It was, if memory serves, about a 10 minute monologue where he sat at the anchor's desk there and he was wearing his Globovision jacket and he looked straight in the camera and he apologized but then also explained and justify [sic] -- I mean he never go to the point where he said we consciously decided to undermine the president, but he apologized for the network's simple disappearance - missing in action on Saturday in terms of reporting what was going on hour by hour, and he explained it in part with this argument about the danger to reporters. And I think these reporters, in their defense, really were very afraid. At one point on Saturday night when - as the coup was crumbling and the Chavez supporters were getting the upper hand - they were transmitting from the basement of a Globovision building, appealing directly to the camera desperately not to be killed. You know the - and while they were doing this there were mobs of people around their station and other commercial stations. So-- there was some fear and, and-- I - if I were a cameraman I'm not sure I - you know, if I were a Venezuelan cameraman, I would have thought 3 times before going out at that moment.
BOB GARFIELD:Well if Globovision was institutionally chastened, what about Chavez himself. He has been very rough in his public statements against the press, perceived at least to be rallying his supporters into violence against the press. Has he apologized for his - at all for his anti-press stand?
MARTIN KASTE: He's-- what he's done is he's repeated past calls in his re--supporters not to attack reporters. Probably most, most importantly he hinted, although he didn't say flat out, that he went a little too far in his use of what they call "the national network." Venezuelan law allows the president to simply commandeer the airwaves for important announcements and speeches. He's been using this to death for the last few years. He will just pre-empt whatever's on, all stations, all radio stations and TV stations. And, and in the days leading up to the coup he was doing this more and more and more and to the point where on Thursday as this huge anti-Chavez rally was building outside the palace, he simply imposed this national network rule on the networks and forced them not to cover or not to show images of this rally, and they finally rebelled, and they split their screens and showed Chavez calmly telling the nation that everything was fine on one side of the screen, and on the other they were showing a hundred thousand people plus converging on the, on the palace, and some of them getting shot.
BOB GARFIELD: Did you feel that you were in danger when you were covering the situation there?
MARTIN KASTE:I was a little apprehensive at first, but it quickly became apparent that once you made it clear that you were a foreign journalist, especially Chavez's supporters were very eager to talk to you, because they - their perception was that the only way to get their message out was via the foreign press.
BOB GARFIELD: And-- that wasn't necessarily a paranoid suspicion on their parts.
MARTIN KASTE:Yeah, I think at that moment-- there was very little reporting being done domestically, period, so for whatever, whatever motive -- it wasn't happening.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin, thank you very much.
MARTIN KASTE: You're welcome.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Kaste is the South America reporter for NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now the coverage of Venezuela's upheaval in the U.S. press has also been arguably odd. Oddest of all has been the behavior of the New York Times' editorial page. Last week it held the military removal of an elected president -- it didn't use the word "coup" -- as a positive step for Venezuelan democracy. Then this week the Times' editorial page conceded that it may have, quote, "overlooked the undemocratic manner in which Chavez was removed." Rachel Coen is media analyst for the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. You've been tracking this. The Times' behavior wasn't especially unusual. What gives?
RACHEL COEN: You're right. The Times wasn't unusual in this, unfortunately. Many of our top-circulation, prestigious papers reacted basically by applauding the coup -- although most of them didn't call it a coup -- the Chicago Tribune also did this. Their first editorial on April 14th said: "It's not every day that a democracy benefits from the military's intervention to force out an elected president--"
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I should say not!
RACHEL COEN:-- [LAUGHS] and in the Times even their apology or half-apology in their second editorial on Venezuela, they still stood their ground on the fact that the coup might be good in the long run. You know they emphasized, quote "We hope Mr. Chavez will act as a more responsible and moderate leader now that he seems to realize the anger that he has stirred," you know suggesting there that, well you know a military coup - we shouldn't cheer it but perhaps it's a good slap on the wrist for the president there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It seems to have benefitted the newspapers to withhold judgment for a couple of days. The L.A. Times gave a slightly more tempered initial reaction because it did wait a few days.
RACHEL COEN: That's true. The L.A. Times didn't run an editorial until April 17th, after the dust had settled a little bit. They were frank in pointing out that quote "It's one thing to oppose policies and another to back a coup." But they were also pretty critical of Chavez and dismissive of his status as an elected leader. You know they wrote that, quote "It goes against the grain to put the name Hugo Chavez and the word democracy in the same sentence."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But there's nothing wrong with condemning a bad leader, is there?
RACHEL COEN:No! That's a good thing for newspapers to do in editorials is to talk about policy, but I do find it disturbing when that turns into overlooking, as the New York Times put it, "a military intervention in a democracy."
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well interestingly enough, the Washington Post, the hometown paper of the federal government, seems to have had the most tempered reaction from the start!
RACHEL COEN: That's true. The Washington Post's first editorial came out on April 14th, and it led with the statement that any interruption of democracy in Latin America is wrong; the moreso when it involves the military. They were almost alone among the big papers in being that straightforward about it. But about the Post, even there they made a point in that editorial of saying quote "There's been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with this Latin America coup," which was a curious thing to do so early on because the details were so unclear as we've seen in the Post's own pages.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But there is as yet no proof that the United States had an active hand in this coup, is there?
RACHEL COEN:No, but there are good reasons to ask questions about it and not to dismiss it right away. The Washington Post and the New York Times have both run really interesting news reports saying that Pentagon and U.S. State Department officials were for months meeting with coup leaders and talking about removing Chavez with them. Now these are all, you know, unsubstantiated and they all need investigating. It's just an interesting and rather troubling thing that on the editorial pages the main reaction has still been initially not to call it a coup and to suggest that it might be a good thing rather than to highlight the serious questions about what this means for democracy not only in Latin America but in the U.S., considering the U.S.'s long history of involvement in Latin American turmoils and coups.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Rachel Coen, thank you very much.
RACHEL COEN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Rachel Coen is media analyst for the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Letters
April 20, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: Our mailbox this week was jammed with reactions to my interview with Michael Hoy of Loompanics, distributor of such useful titles as How to Circumvent a Security Alarm in Ten Seconds or Less, The Heroin User's Handbook, and The Black Book of Arson. The discussion centered on whether such books increased the FBI's impulse to snoop on all of us. It ended when I sort of lost my temper and we decided as an experiment not to edit that out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We got a few positive responses, and they tended to sound like this one from Guillermo Cano in Seattle. He writes, "Kudos to Garfield for having the journalistic discretion to end the interview with Michael Hoy. Mr. Hoy chooses to ignore the point that the right to free speech carries with it an equal responsibility for what is being conveyed. That is why it is unthinkable that even the most ardent advocates of free speech would today yell 'bomb' during a plane flight."
BOB GARFIELD:But most of the response, on the order of about 20 to 1, was negative -- like this one from Sarah Swift of Riverside, California. She writes whether the Mike Hoy interview was about security versus liberty or free speech rights, it struck me that Bob Garfield sounded more like a blue-haired anti-smut crusader than a thoughtful member of the news media. His simplistic stance on the issue --"Everyone knows what you're doing is wrong and you disgust me" -- did not seem fitting for the complicated question of whether the risks of propagating certain types of material outweigh the ideal of freedom of expression so valued in this society."
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Pat Fitzgerald from Brooklyn writes that he "loves the show. But I can't believe how easily Michael Hoy baited you into sounding so school-marmish. Loompanics isn't exactly NAMBLA, you know. I would have thought you'd believe the First Amendment is the First Amendment whether it's Mark Twain, Michael Hoy or, God forbid, Bill O'Reilly. By the way," adds Fitzgerald, "those anarchist bomb and drug cookbooks he sells are much more likely to blow up any reader who tries to follow their convoluted instructions. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] We welcome your comments, recollections and your recipes -- especially if they work. Send them to onthemedia@wnyc.org and please don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name.
BOB GARFIELD:Coming up, why you should be excited about the Data Quality Act -- really. And why financial shows hate to sell themselves short.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. “Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Plot”
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. On March 25th, Cynthia McKinney, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia made a little-heard appearance on a Pacifica radio program. Eventually a transcript of the program made its way into the hands of reporters from the Washington Post. They read, as McKinney called for hearings on why the Bush administration ignored warnings that she claimed could have prevented September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinney wondered was it because the administration and its friends would benefit financially from the inevitable military buildup? The resulting article which appeared on last Friday's Washington Post was titled Democrat Implies September 11th Administration Plot. After that, McKinney was universally denounced on cable TV; even in-house liberals like Alan Colmes on Fox and Paul Begala on CNN called McKinney's accusations irresponsible and outlandish. Her home town paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, wrote editorials against her and Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker called her "a dangerous fool whose voice needs to be stifled." Knowing that McKinney's remarks would provoke outrage and maybe end her political career, as a few are suggesting, the Post had quite a story on its hands. Juliet Eilperin wrote the story. Welcome to OTM.
JULIET EILPERIN: Thanks so much.
BOB GARFIELD: Now you took a look at this transcript and you said to yourself oh, my - that is really out there. What did you say to yourself?
JULIET EILPERIN: Exactly. You say-- well I mean - [going in,] I'm familiar with Cynthia McKinney, so it's not that it w-- that it was a shock to read what she had said, but at the same time, you looked at it and said well that's, that's terribly provocative - the kind of stuff she's saying and accusing the administration of. So that was really what struck me at first.
BOB GARFIELD:Okay, now you just said "accusing the administration of." She actually doesn't explicitly accuse them of anything. She cites some facts -- that there were some advance rumblings of September 11th; that the president's father and -- the former President Bush and their circle stand to gain financially at least indirectly from the ramping up of the defense budget, but she never actually connects the dots. She simply leads you to the inference.
JULIET EILPERIN: No. Yeah, no, no that's true. I guess what I mean is that she accuses them of essentially ignoring advance warnings of the September 11th attack, and that she is fairly explicit on.
BOB GARFIELD:The headline on the story referred to a plot -that she implies a September 11th plot by the administration. You didn't say that.
JULIET EILPERIN: No.
BOB GARFIELD: But the headline did. When you picked up the paper that morning, what was your reaction.
JULIET EILPERIN: Right. I mean it's one of those difficult things. I mean I tend - once I found my story - to leave and not be involved in it. I do think that that might not have been the best choice of wording.
BOB GARFIELD: Were you troubled with the word because it was indelicate or because it, it was simply impossible to back up.
JULIET EILPERIN: It's just you, you want to be sensitive and you want to be as nuanced as you can, which is always difficult in a headline.
BOB GARFIELD: Were you satisfied that the story that you wrote supported the use of the word "plot?"
JULIET EILPERIN:Yeah, I think you could make the argument that that's what she was certainly implying. You know she took pains to say she hasn't seen evidence but maybe that's the case, so she was really kind of raising the issue rather than saying that that absolutely is what happened.
BOB GARFIELD:You compared her statements to "a web of conspiracies theories that have been floating around since September 11th." You didn't compare what she had to say for example to what is the orthodoxy of the far left. What she had to say isn't vastly different from what has appeared in The Nation, for example. Was it dismissive of you to compare her to wild conspiracy theorists as opposed to those just coming from a leftist point of view?
JULIET EILPERIN: I don't think that it was kind of irresponsible or how I did it - and I did try to point out that she's a liberal member, and I also put it in the context of interviewing other members and trying to find out if they had heard similar things, which they had. So I tried to couch it by actually saying there, there are other people who are raising this issue.
BOB GARFIELD:U.S. Congressperson Invites America to Infer a Plot at the Highest Levels of Government in the Military Industrial Complex -- why wasn't that on page one?
JULIET EILPERIN: There was a discussion of whether the story should be broader and-- whether you should have given it better play, but I also think the fact of the matter is one thing you take into account is how likely is it that there will be an investigation to what extent - you know if she had managed to convince a lot of her colleagues that this was important, and you know several of them joined her in calling for that investigation, I think that would have given the story more heft.
BOB GARFIELD: Juliet Eilperin, thank you very much.
JULIET EILPERIN: Thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Juliet Eilperin covers the House of Representatives for the Washington Post. [MUSIC]
Short Sell Gets Short Shrift
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer recently turned up a series of e-mails from the Merrill Lynch investment firm in which analysts called certainly companies quote "crap" and "a dog" even as they were praising them as hot buys to the public. This week the firm responded by agreeing to post on its web site a list of companies reviewed by Merrill Lynch that are also customers of its investment services. That was a small concession in a sweeping investigation into the sweet talk of financial analysts with conflicts of interest; their unwavering calls to buy, buy, buy were a staple on cable TV financial shows from 1999 through last year. Nielsen ratings for financial shows soared with the Stock Market so much of the media eagerly gave a soap box to these relentlessly upbeat investment analysts. These days, of course, you're more likely to see financial news stations demanding full disclosure, but On the Media's Mike Pesca discovered that one bit of information that would balance out the ersatz optimism of financial analysts still has a tough time getting on the air. Here's the long and, more specifically, the short of it.
MIKE PESCA: Pets.com was a profitless internet company which lost money on every 20-pound bag of dog food it mailed out. Henry Blodgett, now Elliott Spitzer's main whipping boy, was the stock analyst who liked this idea enough to tell millions of TV viewers to buy Pets.com stock. A certain talking sock was the company's corporate spokes-puppet. Today not even the puppet remains. But still standing are the cable stations which gave Blodgett a forum for all those bad recommendations. Today CNBC and CNN-FN have reformed themselves somewhat. They've had to -- no one's buying relentlessly bullish advice in a down market. But watch financial cable for 24 hours straight and you might not see any guest actually saying "sell." To some extent, this is a function of a Wall Street culture where analysts issue sell recommendations on less than 3 percent of all companies. But it can also be attributed to a financial news culture where high ratings go hand in hand with bull markets, and negative news faces a higher hurdle than positive news because of the impact it can have on the economy.
SUSAN LEE: Positive news people forgive if you're wrong. Negative news they don't.
MIKE PESCA: Former Columbia University economic professor and current member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board Susan Lee says that emphasizing the positive and talking mostly about buying opportunities skews the markets.
SUSAN LEE: Stock prices really only reflect optimists. You don't hear what the pessimism is. So the market price tends to be higher than it might be if you had the full range of opinion.
MIKE PESCA: Which would include more utterances of the S-word -- Sell. But rarer than a network featuring a sell recommendation is putting a short seller on the air. Short selling or shorting a stock is betting that it will go down. Jim Chanos, a famous short seller, describes his status this way.
JIM CHANOS: Generally the, the overall financial media treats short sellers as, you know, the unwanted guest to the party.
MIKE PESCA: Who'd want a guest who spits out the hors d'oeuvres, investigates the vintage of the champagne and finds fault with the flower arrangements? But that's what shorts do with arcane financial data, and when they're right they profit off of pain. When they're wrong, their losses can be monumental. Let's say you buy a thousand dollars worth of stock. The most you can lose is that thousand dollars. But if you short a stock and it rises and rises, your losses will rise and rise with it. That's why any responsible advisor will tell you that short selling is a high wire act best avoided by investors without a keen understanding of balance sheets and accounting practices. Susan Lee theorizes that high stakes force better decisions.
SUSAN LEE: I think that short sellers are, because the risks are much greater in short selling than in long positions, they are much more likely to be accurate.
MIKE PESCA: A recent example of how a short seller's insights helped correct an over-valued stock is Enron. It was Jim Chanos who noticed early on that something was amiss in Enron's books, and it was his tip that prompted Fortune Magazine to take one of the first critical looks at Enron. Before that, Chanos and his fellow short sellers couldn't get arrested in this town, "this town" being Fort Lee, New Jersey -- home of CNBC.
BRUNO COHEN: You have to be careful, because rumors can affect the valuation of stocks in real time.
MIKE PESCA: Bruno Cohen is executive vice president for businesses programming at CNBC.
BRUNO COHEN: We want to be certain that if somebody has taken a negative position on a stock, be it a short seller or an analyst or whoever, that it's a responsible position; that it's thought-out; that there's justification for it. LOU DOBBS: We're far more careful on the sell side. There's no doubt about that. And anyone who tells you otherwise is simply not being straightforward.
MIKE PESCA: CNN's Lou Dobbs. LOU DOBBS: On short sellers, we not only look at why they're saying what they're saying, but what they're saying. We analyze it very carefully, and we corroborate it. Now frankly we don't do that on the buy side, and we should pr-- be just as careful.
MIKE PESCA: So here you have a struggle between competing codes of ethics -- one fiduciary -- shorting is dangerous -- and one journalistic -- short sellers have insights that would benefit financial news consumers. But Jim Chanos says he doesn't want to go on TV. He recognizes that the medium is ill-equipped to handle the kind of information he provides.
JIM CHANOS: We prefer to talk to journalists who understand the kinds of stories that we work on. Our situations tend to be somewhat financial puzzles. They don't lend themselves easily to-- 30-second sound bites.
MIKE PESCA: Don't cry for the under-interviewed Jim Chanos. He runs hedge funds worth over a billion dollars. As for the rest of us, we can only hope that the markets will price in the information that short sellers have, even if we don't see them on TV every day. Capitalism has always been described as "an invisible hand." [MUSIC UP AND UNDER/BYE BYE BLACKBIRD] It will just have to survive the invisible talking head. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca. Data Quality Act
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: On May 1st, government agencies must finish their drafts of new science quality procedures. This rather dry fact is the first stage in implementing a new law that could in the words of one pro-business advocate "have an impact far beyond anything people can imagine." The new law, called the Data Quality Act, requires that government ensure that its data, the data on which regulations are based, meet new quality control standards. Under the DQA, government information is wide open to challenges by any group or individual. If a challenger makes a good case, then the offending information is removed from public view. Well that sounds fair enough, but critics like Alan Morrison of the Public Citizen Litigation Group believe the Data Quality Act is intended to slow agencies down.
ALAN MORRISON: Nobody could be opposed to accurate information. But the problem is at what cost and what delay. This bill seems to me to put too much premium on accuracy, and it will be very difficult to measure how many agencies don't do something because they're afraid that they will have to spend time and money defending a decision in areas which are inevitably controversial. We're dealing with frontiers of scientific know; we're dealing with important economic questions; we're dealing with statistical analysis. The answer is not to suppress government information but to put out more information that responds to it and then the scientific or economic or other communities can decide for themselves which answer is closest to being right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If this law is so problematic why didn't you and other critics make more noise about it before it was passed?
ALAN MORRISON:Well I can only speak for myself but I think it's probably true for most other people --nobody heard of this law until it was enacted into a statute. It is 27 lines buried deep in an appropriation bill. There were no hearings. There was no committee report. There was no indication at all that this bill was even being considered. And the first thing anybody knew about it was when OMB got its direction and had to start preparing the guidelines.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It was passed by the Congress during the Clinton administration. It was made into law during the Bush administration. With the change of political orientation, what kind of data do you think is most likely to be challenged?
ALAN MORRISON: My real concern is that this bill is aimed largely, but not exclusively at the Environmental Protection Agency. It's a scientific agency; it produces a large amount of information every year. Eventually it bases its regulations and other activities on that information. Much of it is uncertain and sometimes it adversely affects businesses, and my fear is that the industries are going to come in and challenge and drive down the level of information dissemination under the guise that they're getting more accuracy. My understanding is that Jim Tozzia who is a highly regarded lobbyist for interests that are principally concerned about what's going on at EPA is at least one of the drafters of this legislation. I think the parentage, assuming that it is Jim Tozzia and his colleagues, gives you a good idea of what the purpose of this law was supposed to be.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
ALAN MORRISON: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Alan Morrison is the founder of the Public Citizen Litigation Group and he's now a visiting professor at Stanford University. And now I'm joined by Jim Tozzia, the founder of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness and a former official in the Office of Management and Budget and also the author of an early draft of the Data Quality Act. Mr. Tozzia, welcome to the show.
JIM TOZZIA: Glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sometimes it's useful when considering a new law to consider the people who wrote it. Now it's no secret that you're pro-market; that you're a friend of big business. Your principal funding does come from the business community.
JIM TOZZIA: Yes, trade associations and private firms, yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mr. Tozzia can you understand why consumer groups who are aware of this regulation tend to be opposed to it and big business groups tend to be in favor of it?
JIM TOZZIA: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do you think that is?
JIM TOZZIA: Well, I think both don't see the reverse side of the coin. I think some of business feel that the government has been utilizing shoddy science, so there's some people will, will see that as a very big plus. On the other hand, the - some of the consumer groups will feel the fact that the industries uses it that way, it's a negative. What I think the consumer groups fail to see is when industry presents data to the government, and it's - if it's adopted by the federal government - then the consumer groups can use the same law if it doesn't meet these standards to go through the same process that industry does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:There was a 1992 Environmental Protection Agency report that identified second hand smoke as a Group A human carcinogen. Would you use the Data Quality Act to challenge regulations regarding second hand smoke?
JIM TOZZIA: Well I'm not actually involved in that any more. I would tell you a more current one I think that it's most certainly sh-- might be used for. If you hear press reports of the term "dioxin," EPA has issued a preliminary risk assessment and said it's a carcinogen. However there's been 3 independent bodies; all 3 of those groups, the majority of people that voted of outside scientists voted that was not a human carcinogen.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well Mr. Tozzia can I ask you are any of the funders of your organization's companies that might be affected by anti-dioxin lawsuits and legislation?
JIM TOZZIA: Dioxin's a byproduct not intended - not made by anyone. So anyone that has a combustion burner could be affected by dioxin. So the answer is virtually all would be. Not all, but most would be.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So if you were to challenge the dioxin data that's out there, you would ask for that information then to be removed from the web site and the EPA would have to respond to you.
JIM TOZZIA: If we came to the conclusion that the data does not support it being upgraded to a Class A - the known human carcinogen, we would file petition with EPA; that's correct. We may - I didn't say we would, but that's a possibility. EPA would then take it and they'll have so many days to act on our petition. They'd either say yes or no. If they said no-- then there'll be an appellate process where you can appeal it to somebody in the agency and, and EPA and all the agencies are working out that appellate process.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Perhaps the reason why consumer groups tend to oppose the Data Quality Act and business tends to be in favor of it is because it tends to redound to the benefit of business if government does less, and if it can merely stall the government -- prevent them from promulgating new regulations -- that usually is to the benefit of business and not to those who are concerned with issues of consumer protection.
JIM TOZZIA: Well, if it delays the issuance of effective regulations that benefit the consumers, you're right. If it delays the issuance of ineffective regulations where the costs are enormous compared to the benefits, the consumer's better off.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
JIM TOZZIA: Well thanks for the opportunity to be on the NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Jim Tozzia is the founder of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness and the author of an early draft of the Data Quality Act scheduled to take effect in October of this year.
BOB GARFIELD: coming up, NPR's programming chief on the future of the network and how commercial music stations get you hooked.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. NPR’s Culture Clash
April 20, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The world of public radio was in a small uproar last week with the announcement by NPR of a major overhaul in its cultural programming. The reorganization will eliminate some 15 jobs at NPR's Washington headquarters, redirect resources from network-produced culture programs to its news magazines and substantially alter the daily classical program Performance Today. The network will also develop 24 hour streams of classical music that local stations can use as they choose.
BOB GARFIELD:There will also be more attention paid to developing entertainment programs and to the coverage within the news magazines of culture -- both high brow and popular. The architect of these changes is senior vice president for programming Jay Kernis, founding producer 23 years ago of Morning Edition. Kernis returned to NPR a year ago after a long stint with CBS News. He joins us now. Jay, welcome to the big, big show.
JAY KERNIS: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: All right now first as a matter of full disclosure we should say that On the Media is distributed by National Public Radio and as such you have a substantial amount of influence on our fate as a show. That out of the way, you've said that in essence less is more. You've cut jobs and said that cultural programming will increase and improve. Do the math for me.
JAY KERNIS: Well I think there's some things the audience should know first, and that is in my job I don't program 680 public radio stations across the country. I mean people think I sit in my office and I make decisions for local public radio stations. I don't.
BOB GARFIELD:So you're just trying to create a better palette of programs from which the station program directors and station managers can choose.
JAY KERNIS: Yeah. That's absolutely right. We asked the stations what's important to you in terms of what NPR is doing culturally. Here's what the stations told us: the cultural material that's on Morning Edition and All Things Considered -- very important. They also talked about Fresh Air with Terry Gross. They talked about Car Talk. Of lesser priority to them -- I mean look -- our stations are dedicated to classical music and jazz, but of less importance was the classical music programming that we were feeding nationally and, and the jazz programs that we were feeding nationally. And so I thought well that's-- that's sort of a problem! I mean we're asking very talented people to do wonderful programming, and if a local radio station is scheduling it at a time possibly when fewer people are listening or when very few people even listen to radio, it means that that program probably could be better.
BOB GARFIELD:To what extent are the stations in the NPR system as far as you know making decisions based purely on what the audience numbers seem to suggest, based on what generates the most pledge dollars as opposed to what I understood NPR's mission to be which is to serve the under-served.
JAY KERNIS: I, I, I - I mean to - I mean to interrupt there. That is not public radio's mission --to serve the under-served. Public radio's mission is to work in partnership with member stations to create a more informed public --one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of essential events, ideas and cultures.
BOB GARFIELD:All right, here's where I'm going with this Jay. Everyone loves Car talk, but presumably we don't want a whole network full of Car Talks. The commercial path would be to figure out what generates the most audience and come up with as many programs that the largest number of people are listening to and willing to write their pledge checks to support - but the public radio's model as I understand it is to use programming discretion to figure out what's good - not just what's popular but what's good. So is there a conflict between the desire to serve audiences and give NPR listeners what they've proved they want based on their pledge checks and the idea of creating quality programming.
JAY KERNIS: It depends how you use the research. I use research as a tool. We're s-- we're spending dollars hard earned, and I want to make sure and everyone at National Public Radio wants to make sure that we measure it in some way -that, that we're able to say to the public and to public radio listeners we're spending your money wisely. But that, that's just measuring the audience.
BOB GARFIELD:Are you telling me that you don't worry yourself that program directors and station managers aren't obsessed with audience and pledge results to the detriment of the mission? Don't you worry about that?
JAY KERNIS: I don't think I worry about it.
BOB GARFIELD: That the people you serve are, are taking their eye off of the mission ball?
JAY KERNIS: No. I have nev-- the-- I have never found that to be the case.
BOB GARFIELD: You have taken a lot of heat personally and NPR has over the announcement of these moves which I guess you believe have been somewhat misunderstood.
JAY KERNIS: Mm-hm.
BOB GARFIELD: There is the over-arching fear that the network is going to be taken down the path of pop culture--
JAY KERNIS: Here it comes -- there's that word -- popular culture.
BOB GARFIELD: -- to the-- [LAUGHS] - to the--
JAY KERNIS: Mm-hm.
BOB GARFIELD: -- exclusion or, or at least diminishment of true culture. Rant for me, please.
JAY KERNIS: [SIGHS] It so happens that the smart public radio audience does not only watch PBS. It watches CBS; it watches HBO. The public radio listener -- yeah! -- likes foreign films, a lot. Likes independent films. But the public radio listener goes to big blockbuster movies and rents big blockbuster DVDs. And all I've ever said is that when we cover popular culture, we should cover it with the same journalism filters that we use when we cover a news event, which is to say do the reporting -- ask tough questions -- tell a real story. I have never said more popular culture, more popular culture. But I have said: Don't be afraid to cover popular culture.
BOB GARFIELD:I don't think anybody believes that there's going to be the NPR equivalent of the Solid Gold Dancers but isn't news and information on popular culture vastly available elsewhere from Entertainment Tonight and the E Channel and-- MTV and many other sources?
JAY KERNIS: I've heard 31 years of public radio reporting. When we turn our ears and eyes on this material, we do it in a way that no one else does it.
BOB GARFIELD:Let's just say someone had the ability to sort of scan the entire universe of public radio stations around the country -- what will he or she hear that's noticeably different?
JAY KERNIS: I think we all hope at NPR that listeners hear better stuff. For some stations it'll mean more classical music. We're developing with our public radio stations a classical music stream. I hope on the news magazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, you hear better reporting! I mean this is subtle stuff that you're discussing. In some ways I'm amazed that it got the coverage in the print media that it did. I mean I'm doing my job. In, in some ways this is like watching me cut the lawn! I gotta cut the lawn every week! You know? I have to eventually programs!
BOB GARFIELD: But you're tinkering with an institution, and that's why people are very, very sensitive, irritable and maybe terrified.
JAY KERNIS:You know what -- there's no reason the audience should trust me. The audience does not know me, and it's not just me; it's many people at National Public Radio. But I'm the founding producer of Morning Edition. I was at a public radio station when I was 16 years old. I am very, very devoted to this and so is my staff.
BOB GARFIELD:You were quoted in the Washington Post as saying people unfairly say I am changing the course of public radio. If only I can do that. All I can do is ask what can we provide for our stations that they want to air? All right -- if you had the power -- if only you could, to paraphrase you, would you change the course of public radio?
JAY KERNIS: I, I think those of us in public radio programming have to figure out what the next generation wants to listen to. The core public radio listener is 48 years old. That listener is getting older and older. I want public radio to succeed and go on for years and years and years and years, and, and, and that means trying to figure out what younger audiences want.
BOB GARFIELD: Is this the beginning of something radical or is it just tinkering on the margin?
JAY KERNIS:You want to know something? I have a radical idea for a late night show. The only problem is, is that most people aren't listening to the radio late at night. That's my only radical idea.
BOB GARFIELD: No Solid Gold Dancers.
JAY KERNIS: Not unless they're dancing to Cole Porter or Jerome Kern. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: All right [LAUGHS]. Jay, thank you very much.
JAY KERNIS: You're welcome.
BOB GARFIELD: Jay Kernis is senior vice president for programming at NPR. Music Testing
April 20, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the early days of Top 40 radio, some 50 years ago, programmers used rather crude and unscientific methods to determine their playlists -- record store sales -- phone requests - the number of plays on the local juke box -- and of course some programmers and deejays took pride in their gut ability to pick the hits. In the '70s, as all-music stations specializing in different genres took over the dial, competition heated up. Stations experimented with more accurate devices to survey listeners music preferences. Today, most commercial music stations test each and every song in the laboratory of public opinion research. The listeners hoping these tests will mean longer play lists and less repetition -- the news isn't too good. OTM's Paul Ingles has the story.
MALE RESEARCHER: Put on your poker face. Don't let anyone know what you're thinking when a song, song comes on. How you feel about music is a very personal thing.
PAUL INGLES: A researcher we can't name is speaking to about 125 to-54-year-old men whom we can't name seated at long tables in a hotel meeting room in a city we can't name. To eavesdrop on this top secret music research session called an Auditorium Test we had to promise complete anonymity to the radio station that on this day is determining its play list for the next year. Each participant was pre-screened over the phone and offered about 40 bucks to come here to rate hundreds of song clips. Each has the old Scantron [sp?] sheet and the number 2 pencil ready to fill in a circle 1 through 5 -- 1 meaning you'd switch stations you hat the song so much -- 5 meaning "It rocks, dude!"
MAN: 57. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: 58. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
PAUL INGLES: The most recognizable 10 seconds of each song, called The Hooks go barreling by, about 5 a minute for over 2 hours. If the test takers don't recognize a song they fill in a box marked U for Unfamiliar. If they're just plain tired of hearing it on the radio they can also black in a box marked T.
MAN: 62. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
PAUL INGLES: This auditorium test is one of many kinds of music testing that costs stations 25 to 40,000 dollars a pop. There's also a high tech version wherein each participant gets a little transmitter.
ALAN KEPLER: It's a little box with a dial on it, and it allows the listener to respond more emotionally.
PAUL INGLES: Alan Kepler [sp?], who heads the research company Broadcast Architecture, says the dial twist is a more true-to-life measure.
ALAN KEPLER: You hear a song on the radio that you like, what do you do? You reach over the knob and you turn it up! Or if you hear a song that you really hate, you reach over and you turn the volume down or you punch to another station.
PAUL INGLES: But getting everyone who's invited to turn up on the given night of an auditorium test can be a trick. Weather, traffic, the prime time TV schedule can get in the way. So some stations are taking the test to their listeners via the telephone. WO
MAN: Now let's play the first song. You'll need to wait until it finishes playing. Then you can vote your opinion -- 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - or the star key if you don't recognize. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS - SONG YESTERDAY] [SHORT BEEP] [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS - ELVIS SONG ALL SHOOK UP] [SHORT BEEP]
PAUL INGLES: Mike Maloney whose company Music Tech [sp?] offers this phone method believes it's more natural and relaxing to take the test at home than with strangers in a hotel ballroom. People can take several days to finish if they choose, and there are built in safeties to prevent at-home distractions from contaminating results. Periodically through the test subjects are asked to state their name to confirm they haven't handed the phone to their kids to do the test. Maloney says they record the name and more.
MIKE MALONEY: We're able to record background noise. In other words if we get an idea that maybe there's-- a TV blaring or a child screaming, if there's something that tells us that they're not in, in an environment that allows them to sort of take the test conscientiously, we throw it out; we don't use it.
PAUL INGLES: For stations that play new music, frequent phone surveys are a way to keep tabs on the tastes of fickle fans.
CAROLINE GILBERT: They can warm up to and love an artist and 6 weeks later they're done.
PAUL INGLES: Caroline Gilbert oversees research for hundreds of Clear Channel radio stations across the country. She recommends that hit music stations do call out research 40 weeks a year to look for signs of song burnout which, she insists, comes much later than station staff thinks.
CAROLINE GILBERT: When you're sick of the song in the building, in the radio station, it's not time to stop playing it yet. When your core -- you know, 8, 9 hours a day people -- start burning on a song, it's still not time to stop playing it so much. When the broad base starts burning out on a record, that's when you back off on the rotation.
PAUL INGLES: To maximize audience, many programmers say they must minimize low testing and unfamiliar tunes that give listeners a reason to punch out. The result is active title lists of just a few hundred songs. Hit music stations have the shortest lists and play their best testing songs many times a day. Stations like oldies, classic rock or classic country play more songs but they're strongest play 3 or 4 times a week in different times of the day so people are less likely to hear them too much.
BILL LEWIS: You know when, when you drive right down the middle of the road, you, you don't have to worry about ending up in a ditch.
PAUL INGLES: Bill Lewis [sp?] is program director at WNCX, a classic rock station in Cleveland who cites another reason why playing less familiar album cuts is risky. The station wants the younger listener who had the original albums to begin with. Testing shows that 18 to 35 year old classic rock fans have had their music tastes completely defined by stations that have played, for example, only Steve Miller's biggest hits.
STEVE MILLER: [SINGING] I WANT TO FLY LIKE AN EAGLE TO THE....
BILL LEWIS: Those people are just wanting to hear Fly Like an Eagle and Jet Air Liner and, you know, they have no cognizance of the Sailor album, you know, nor will they ever unless they become dyed in the wool Steve Miller fans, but, you know -- I mean they - they're - they're just more Fly Like an Eagle fans.
PAUL INGLES: While like-formatted stations across the country may seem mostly the same, researcher Alan Kepler says local music testing will help stations reflect their own markets.
ALAN KEPLER: We see differences, and a lot of the differences are driven by what was played in that market years ago. For example, Denver is a real rock market, so even with an adult contemporary station you see much more a rock lean in the older music that the AC stations play, whereas in Philadelphia there was a lot of R&B music in the '60s and '70s, and you see a lot of that stuff pop. [STATION IDENTIFICATION: THAT BIG OLDIE 98.5]
PAUL INGLES: Still there are commercial stations that haven't hopped on the research bandwagon. Some can't afford it; some don't seem to need it. Lawrence Dominguez [sp?] programs big oldies KABG in Albuquerque and draws solid ratings.
LAWRENCE DOMINGUEZ: What we're doing is working, and we're not using consultants; we're not doing music testing; and you know we're not doing - we're not doing a l-- a whole hell of a lot of research out there.
PAUL INGLES: Deejay Bobby Vox [sp?] stands at the controls of his weekday morning show.
BOBBY VOX: Thank God, too. I want to tell you - these consultants - I, I've got a book to write about those guys, and it's, it's not good.
PAUL INGLES: Vox, who's been on Albuquerque radio for most of his 40 years in the business blames consultants and researchers for gutting the risk-taking heart from radio. Vox is given rare freedom to play tunes not on the station's regular oldies list. Muddy Waters' Hootchie Cootchie Man was blaring in when we came in.
MUDDY WATERS: [SINGING] WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT, BUT YOU KNOW I'M HERE....
PAUL INGLES: They're not concerned about playing a, a rare song like this on an oldies station having them punch away to your competitor.
BOBBY VOX: I, I guarantee it, they won't. The problem is when they turn to the competitor it's the same thing they heard yesterday and the day before and the day before. Now this is unique stuff and I'm very proud of it.
PAUL INGLES: The freewheeling KABG in Albuquerque may be a success, but still the vast majority of commercial stations in the country are programming just the top half of the results of their most recent music test. Bill Lewis at WNCX in Cleveland makes no apologies.
BILL LEWIS: You know we're commercial radio; we'll do anything not to have to have pledge drives. [LAUGHS]
PAUL INGLES: Hmmmm. Touche. Despite the practical attitude toward his station's play list, Lewis is himself a rock connoisseur and will slip in something like a rare David Bowie track late at night hoping to keep other rare rock and roll fans from abandoning his station for their own CD changers.
DAVID BOWIE: [SINGING] DON'T FAKE IT BABY....
PAUL INGLES: For On the Media, I'm Paul Ingles.
DAVID BOWIE: LAY THE REAL THING ON ME. THE CHURCH OF MAN LOVE'S A-- SUCH A HOLY PLACE TO BE TAKE ME BABY MAKE ME KNOW YOU REALLY CARE MAKE ME JUMP INTO THE AIR.... [MUSIC CONTINUING UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers with Sean Landis and Michael Kavanagh; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Irene Trudel and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Lu Olkowski. Our web master is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Brooke's friend, Bob. [MUSIC FADES]
- Back to story:
- April 20, 2002
-
An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
-
Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
-
Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
-
A Source for Sources
-
Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
-
AdBlock Plus: The Internet's Ad Gatekeeper?
-
Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
-
Web Only Audio Extra - TV Cord Cutters
-
The Totally Legal Subpoena
-
A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
