Bush Knew
May 25, 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. For almost two weeks now in press conferences and on talk shows the White House has made its case that whatever information it had before September 11th does not mean that the terrorism of that day could possibly have been foreseen or countered. "Dots to be connected" is the most popular way to look at these bits of information. A Phoenix flight school; a memo to the president while he was in Crawford, Texas; a 1999 report titled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why. The last dot was a document that had been in the public record for two years at the time of the terrorist attacks. The National Intelligent Council and the Library of Congress prepared the report, and it was never a classified document, but that doesn't mean it was widely known before this week. John Solomon of the Associated Press was the first to report on the existence of this paper. He joins us now. John, welcome to OTM.
JOHN SOLOMON: Well thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: This document was posted on line -- kind of hidden in plain view. Nobody knew about it or at least no members of the administration or of the press knew about it. How did you find it?
JOHN SOLOMON: Around -- just bef-- in the days before this story, the Bush administration began to say they -- no one in government ever envisioned a suicide jetliner attack like the ones that occurred on September 11th, and so we went to take a look and see how much people in government knew about the idea that an Al Qaeda operative had in '95 to dive-bomb an airplane into the CIA or another government building. And in the course of that we came across this very open source public document written for the National Intelligence Council.
BOB GARFIELD:When you say "you came upon it," I mean was it like Hillary Clinton and the-- Rose Law firm records? Did you just find them in a file folder on your desk? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JOHN SOLOMON: Oh, no. [LAUGHS] I did a lot of interviews with experts in the-- terrorism field asking, you know, how much has the government debated this possibility; they mentioned this report. Didn't remember who had written it; remembered it was for the National Intelligence Council. Did some phone calls over there. Tracked down the proper source which is an office of the Library of Congress and-- and then went up on the web site and found the report.
BOB GARFIELD:To the extent that the government was asleep at the switch I guess the media have been too if it's taken these 8 months for this document to materialize. If it took you so long and if it took the media so long to unearth this fairly eerie prediction of what might take place, is it fair to suggest that the government somehow was-- derelict in its--duties?
JOHN SOLOMON: We certainly could have done a better job before September 11th of identifying the potential threats and sharing information among government so that we had a complete picture, yet if you were to go back and look, you'll find all sorts of testimony up on the Hill before September 11th -- George Tenet twice in two years went up and gave very stark assessments -- our CIA director did -- about the threat of terrorism. If you go look at the Q&A after that, no one in Congress wanted to talk about it. There was only maybe 2 or 3 questions when I went back through the Q&A that went back to his, you know, very stark warning. The media covered what it knew. I think a lot of the threats about terrorism are things that were classified. Soon as September 11th happened, I think you have to take a look at the media reporting very closely, because there were a lot of very strong pieces of reporting identifying things we knew about before September 11th within a couple of days -- AP and the Washington Post and others in the Minneapolis newspapers reported Moussaoui and the fact that he was sitting in the jail. September 24th the Washington Post had a wonderful story taking a look at some of the early threats of hijackers and the idea that flying a plane into a building wasn't new. It didn't have the level of detail that we've come across in, in recent days, as we've done more reporting, but I think you - if you were to go back through the archives, you'll see a tremendous amount of journalism committed, taking a look at these various threats.
BOB GARFIELD:And yet in the same way that the U.S. intelligence agencies were unable to protect against a specific attack on a specific day at a specific location, the media world was unable to connect the dots before September 11th.
JOHN SOLOMON: That's a very fair assessment.
BOB GARFIELD: I mean I've seen in many newspapers - and I -who knows? - maybe the AP supplied one of these - I don't know - a time line - and on the time line are 5 or 6 bits of information -- Arabs in flight schools - Moussaoui in Minnesota -- this document that we're discussing now and, and you know and a clear pattern emerges. But what gets forgotten when these time lines are printed is that you - for all of these 5 or 6 bits of information -- these dots --there are millions and millions of other bits - other dots of irrelevant or untrue or totally unrelated bits of information. Do you think the press is doing a good enough job, particularly in the current furor of what the president knew and when did he know it, to contextualize the difficulty in, in separating the signal from the noise?
JOHN SOLOMON: It is a challenge, and you have to overlay something else that's going on which - there's politics in Washington. I know that's surprising but-- a lot of the distribution of information or the control of information right now comes from people who have a partisan mode of moving into a very important election year. And I'll give you a very good example. Earlier this week I, I ascertained some information related to the Phoenix memo that I thought was relevant, and, and separated a little bit of the - put some perspective into all this breathless reporting that's going on, and that was that the agent himself, Ken Williams, who wrote the memo from Phoenix warning of the Arabs in flight schools back in July of last year himself marked the memo "routine." Now I wrote that on a day where there was a lot of spin control going on in Washington and a lot of other news organizations had a completely different take on their story the next day which is that he considered it urgent - im--important-- serious information. Now that's true -- but in fact he did mark it "routine," and you really had to separate the facts. At the end of the day I think by talking to 4 or 5 different people from 4 or 5 different perspectives, you have a much more toned, balanced, fair and complete story, and I think that process is what needs to happen. If journalists just go out the first time they hear a breathless piece of information and they stop their reporting at that point, they're doing a disservice to the public.
BOB GARFIELD: John Solomon, thank you very much.
JOHN SOLOMON: Okay!
BOB GARFIELD:John Solomon supervises the Associated Press's investigative unit which has been looking into what the government knew before September 11th and what it has been doing since. [MUSIC] Zimbabwe
May 25, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Under the repressive government of Robert Mugabe, the independent media in Zimbabwe have become a public enemy, and since his re-election in March, the situation has worsened. One of Mugabe's first acts in his new term was to sign the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act -- a tough anti-press law that empowers the government to close down newspapers, restrict access to government documents and imprison journalists for publishing falsehoods. One of the first journalists to be arrested for quote "abuse of journalistic privilege" was Andrew Meldrum, the Zimbabwe correspondent for the British paper The Guardian and the London-based magazine The Economist. Last December Andrew Meldrum was on OTM describing the deteriorating press conditions in Zimbabwe.
BOB GARFIELD:The story that landed Meldrum and several other journalists in jail briefly this month was first reported in Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper, The Daily News. The story involved a charge of political violence -- the alleged decapitation of a woman by Mugabe supporters -- or so her husband said at the time.
ANDREW MELDRUM: As it turns out, the man apparently was not telling the truth. His wife had died, but not of political violence. And he has since disappeared. The government pounced on The Daily News and on me-- for publishing a falsehood, although The Daily News retracted their story immediately and I had a correction.
BOB GARFIELD: What's the mood among journalists right now in Zimbabwe?
ANDREW MELDRUM:There is a very beleaguered feeling because it's not just me and these two other journalists from The Daily News who have been arrested. Since the middle of March, there are a dozen journalists who have been arrested; several of us have been jailed; and 11 of us face these charges which, by the way, carries a sentence of up to a 100,000 dollar fine or up to 2 years in prison.
BOB GARFIELD:The Access to Information and Privacy Act obviously was enacted to intimidate journalists and to put a chilling effect on free and fair reporting of what the government is up to. Do you think that the press has been cowed by the, the threat of, of arrest and prosecution?
ANDREW MELDRUM: There is an ai--element of self-censorship that is going on, and in a few cases in the past couple of weeks, we've passed up on stories that we would have done in the past.
BOB GARFIELD: Give me an example.
ANDREW MELDRUM:There is a list that was made by the Commercial Farmers Union -- in other words the white farmers -- of about 40 or 50 Zimbabwean cabinet ministers, brothers in law of the president, people connected to Robert Mugabe who have benefitted from these land seizures, who have taken over farms. And of course these farms were seized, supposedly, to be distributed to poor black peasants, and instead we have a list of 40 or 50 bigwigs well-connected to Robert Mugabe and the party who have taken over farms. The list was published in the Financial Gazette newspaper which is an independent, privately-owned paper in Harare, and it was also published by The Daily News, and yet the major international news agencies and I have to say myself, we decided not to do the story because we can't go out to the 40 or 50 farms in one day and interview them and just ascertain that every single one of them is true, and if you get one wrong, why then that's a little cell in jail.
BOB GARFIELD:There must be a way around that. To say that the list was printed by another organization and to-- say that these are cronies of Mugabe who have been apparently enriched by the land seizures -- isn't the way the report the story while, while staying on the right side of the press repression law?
ANDREW MELDRUM: You're quite right. I mean to give full attribution and to put it in its full context, but remember my story about the woman who was beheaded - I didn't say a woman was beheaded. I wrote The Daily News reported that a woman was beheaded. I said the alleged killers. You know, the accused. I gave, you know, what the police will refuse to comment. You know, I gave every possible attribution and caveat in my story, and it made absolutely no difference.
BOB GARFIELD:When last we spoke we discussed the potential for backlash -- that the repressive measures would come back and bite the Mugabe government as the populace might begin to get nervous. Is there any evidence that the people of Zimbabwe are beginning to react negatively to the heavy-handed tactics of the government?
ANDREW MELDRUM: Yeah. There are plenty. I think probably one of the best is circulation figures of the state media versus the privately-owned media and The Sunday Mail newspaper which is state owned and has become an instrument of high propaganda, the circulation of The Sunday Mail has dropped from 160,000 to just 60,000. People have stopped watching the state television, and of course they have a monopoly on all television broadcasts. Now video stores have in the past two months have seen a marked up surge in video rentals because people are watching videos; they're not watching the television any more.
BOB GARFIELD: Andrew Meldrum, thank you very much, and once again, please -- take care.
ANDREW MELDRUM: Well, thanks very much for calling, and I appreciate the interest.
BOB GARFIELD:Andrew Meldrum is the Zimbabwe correspondent for The Economist Magazine and the newspaper The Guardian. He spoke to us from Harare, Zimbabwe where he awaits trial for violating the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, what happened to TV news since 9/11; when activists report; and Umberto Eco -- on the media.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. Hard News After September 11th
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A few months ago, we reviewed the coverage of foreign news post 9/11 and found that -- stop the presses! -- TV news had not changed much since then. Foreign stories are still under-covered; the networks are still cutting back their foreign bureaus; and judging by the rate of tuneout, they're still failing to make the few foreign stories they choose to cover relevant to their viewers. This week the Project for Excellence in Journalism released their study of news coverage since 9/11. Tom Rosenstiel is the project's director, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Good to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, in 1977 more than two thirds of evening news topics were hard news, and then in '77 [sic] that dropped to about 41 percent -- that was part of continuing trend. And then 9/11 happened, and hard news soared to 80 percent. So how long did that last?
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Well, it lasted through the fall, and when we studied what had happened this year we found a big dropoff. By January we were back to numbers that were pretty close to what the network news looked like last June, before September 11th. That got even truer in February. And interestingly, morning news seems to have been transformed by the War on Terrorism more than evening news, whereas they had virtually abandoned covering traditional news, hard news topics by last summer -- now 20 percent of what you would see on a morning news program would be considered traditional hard news, and indeed the viewership numbers for morning news have held up better than the viewership numbers for evening news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does your report really make the definitive case that an audience will stay around and grow for hard news?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:No, and we're not trying to. We don't argue in the study that, that more people are watching cause the news is harder. What we argue with is that the news got softer cause that's what people wanted. We don't see any evidence of that since network news viewership has dropped by half in the last decade, as the news got lighter.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Could you summarize the more surprising conclusions in your report?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:I think one of the most surprising conclusions is this idea that formula is driving what we see in network television rather than the news itself, and that what we are getting is in a sense not driven by the marketplace of demand but by the cost structure that is allowed in network news and in networks in general.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so the audience really isn't king any more -- or so your findings suggest.
TOM ROSENSTIEL:No. I think that's true. Companies are dictated by who are the institutional investors that buy media companies and how many properties do they want to own and-- the viewer is absent from many of the equations that news executives are making today.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Don't media companies derive most of their profits from advertisers who in turn invest according to how big the audience is?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:Yeah, they do, and you're operating in a universe that is very different than 20 years ago. There is no way that you can have the same size audience in a 500 channel universe that you had in a 5 channel universe. And it doesn't really matter what product you put on the air -- how good it is -- if people have that many more choices, and there's that much more narrow casting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what about the influence of 9/11 on all of this?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:News consumption is up. And the attitude of the public towards journalists is up. For the first time in 15 years, people have a higher opinion of journalists.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you remember all those speeches that a lot of network news execs were making after 9/11 about how they needed to keep the public better informed about what was going on in the world?
TOM ROSENSTIEL: I, I think they believed that, and I think that those speeches were aimed at their corporate betters more than they were to the public -- that these were pleas for resources and time and-- and patience on behalf of the companies to let them do the news again the way that they want to. I mean after all, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were forged in an environment that produced a very different kind of network news, and that's a model they're much more comfortable with than the one that they are overseeing today.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Rosenstiel, thank you very much.
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Bye.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bye.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Rosenstiel is the director of The Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Indy Media
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: The media organization that may have experienced the biggest growth in the past 2 years doesn't have a budget or a full time staff of in many cases even an office. OTM's Jad Abumrad takes a look at how the upstart Independent Media Center is raising some interesting questions about the direction journalism is taking.
JAD ABUMRAD: It all started in 1999 in Seattle. [CROWD CHANTING, DRUMS] The Independent Media Center was born. But not amidst these WTO protests. Rather it happened, members say, at an internet cafe a few blocks away. A Seattle techie created a couple of lines of code that allowed anyone to post audio, video or text to a web site.
ANNA NAGERA: The concept of open publishing is fundamental to anarchist principles.
ARUN GUPTA: We don't have to rely on journalists, on these paid professionals, to tell us what's going on in the world.
JAD ABUMRAD: According to Anna Nagera [sp?] and Arun Gupta [sp?], within those few lines of code was a seed of anarchy that began to grow as hundreds of activists and journalists posted updates to the site.
ARUN GUPTA: And so you got all these different like nuggets of information -- all these different pieces -- and you could put the whole puzzle together.
JAD ABUMRAD: All that was needed to really make the thing take off, they say, was for the corporate media to completely miss the story, which happened in Seattle according to IMC member John Tarleton [sp?]. Tarleton had been in the thick of the protestors as they blocked delegates and official press from entering the WTO meetings.
JOHN TARLETON: I remember one German journalist is like -you, you must let me through your blockade, and I've got to get in there and write my story, and we were like -- look, [LAUGHS] the story is happening right in front of you! And he just turned around and left in a huff.
JAD ABUMRAD: Fast forward to now. Over a hundred independent media centers or IMC's in 60 different countries have popped up in the wake of the battle in Seattle. Some IMC's remain just web sites, but others like the New York City chapter have a permanent office.
WOMAN: Anyone have an idea with what to lead the local section? Page [...?...].
JAD ABUMRAD: Several nights a week Arun, Anna, John and a handful of believers meet in this cramped room stocked with salvaged Macs and hand-me-down video equipment. They take stock of this week's reporting, checking the web site often. When you log on to the IMC, usually the first thing you'll notice is 3 columns of text. Starting at the right -- The Newswire - an unfiltered listing of all posts. In the center, teams of IMC members will place what they feel are the most important and best-reported posts from the wire. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: Leave a hole there and see what else comes in.
MAN: Hopefully we'll have more good coverage. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN: Leave a hole -- okay.
MAN: The community garden pageant this weekend is going to be a big deal--
WOMAN: Oh!
MAN: This weekend - yeah.
MAN: --and I'm going to that, and I'd be happy to--
JAD ABUMRAD: The New York City chapter also draws on the newswire to put out a print publication. There's no budget here. Everything from time to post-it notes to printing costs are donated or paid for through small fundraisers. So it's not surprising that the internet connection in their office is not the most reliable, but each time it's up, The Newswire contains a greater number of postings! Everything from 2,000 word missives to brief updates on incremental stories to clips of audio.
ANNOUNCER: The Independent Media Center Radio News. [MUSIC] [CONTINUES SPEAKING IN ITALIAN LANGUAGE]
JAD ABUMRAD: This bit of tape is off the Italian IMC site. From July 21st, 2001 during the G-8 Summit of the world's economic superpowers, in a pre-dawn blitz Italian police stormed a school where anti-G-8 protestors were sleeping. Reports of activists being severely beaten in their sleep surfaced on the Italian IMC site within minutes.
THEDA PAVIS: The coverage of that by the Italian IMC was really, really good.
JAD ABUMRAD: Journalist Theda Pavis [sp?] has written extensively about the IMC in the On Line Journalism Review, a web site maintained by the Journalism Department of the University of Southern California.
THEDA PAVIS: If I wanted to, to really get first hand accounts of what was happening as an American media consumer, I could really get a lot of good news off that Italian IMC site, including amazing pictures.
JAD ABUMRAD: Some of the people beaten, it turned out, were IMC reporters. Although "reporter" is not a term every media watchdog would agree with.
THEDA PAVIS: We've been having this debate before -- really before IMC's started popping up. When I first started writing about this stuff, we were all debating Matt Drudge! And what did that mean? And could anybody just walk into the room and say now I'm a journalist and I can put my stuff up on the internet and there you go --I'm reporting.
JAD ABUMRAD: Though the IMC does attract its fair share of seasoned journalists, other IMC quote/unquote "reporters" prefer the term "media-makers" because they don't consider what they're doing journalism. They don't subscribe to the creed of balanced reporting; they don't necessarily even believe in objectivity. They think all media are subjective.
THEDA PAVIS: They definitely have a point of view. But I also think that there's a history in this country of journalists reporting stories that have a point of view. If you look at the work of Ida B. Wells [sp?], I mean she was an activist and a journalist, right? She spent years chronicling lynching, and she was methodical in her research. And, and I find that, you know, on certain topics some of the stories coming out of the IMC's have that same kind of exhaustive research that's going into it -- not always -but sometimes.
JAD ABUMRAD: The debate notwithstanding, the Independent Media Center credits the Italian IMC with dragging the corporate press into covering a story they would have otherwise ignored. It says the same was true more recently in Israel.
KEVIN SKAVORAK: A lot of the press was very afraid to move over there.
JAD ABUMRAD: Kevin Skavorak [sp?] spent 6 weeks in the occupied territories, splitting his time protesting and filing reports for two of the IMC's newest chapters -- the Jerusalem and Palestine sites.
KEVIN SKAVORAK: We were doing actions, and we were all marching, and we'd surround an ambulance and go marching up to the checkpoints and singing peace songs and stuff and the press would be like 200 feet back. The Israelis had shot at them a number of times; had killed a number of them. The reason we were a little bit different I think is because we didn't wear big [LAUGHS] signs on us that said "press."
JAD ABUMRAD: On April 16th, Kevin and a few other activists infiltrated the Jenin Refugee Camp just days after Israel had concluded its military operation. Two days before, mainstream press organizations were allowed in. He sent the IMC stills of stray limbs, burnt flesh, bodies covered in maggots. The images were later picked up by Reuters. [SOUNDS OF WARFARE]
WOMAN: I'm working in the IMC at the moment as a volunteer-- [SOUNDS OF WARFARE] just as I'm speaking to you some gunfights [DOGS BARKING] have just erupted.
ARUN GUPTA: We're not looking to like seize power. We're looking to re-imagine power. We went self-determination. And right now we don't have that.
JAD ABUMRAD: Arun Gupta admits that the IMC doesn't do well when the seas are calm. There aren't the resources for beat reporters. But during a crisis -- forget about it. "Activists," he says, "are willing to eat tear gas to get a story." For On the Media I'm Jad Abumrad. [MUSIC]
Umberto Eco
May 25, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Umberto Eco is most famous in the United States for his engaging and challenging novels like The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. But among his "day jobs" Umberto Eco is actually an accomplished media critic as well as a professor of semeiotics, a historian of medieval theology, the author of more than 20 books of non-fiction and a columnist for the Italian weekly Espresso. He is Italy's foremost public intellectual and an insatiable consumer of all things media, and since he happened to be in New York this week, we invited him to our studios to chat about whatever he wants. Umberto Eco, welcome to On the Media.
UMBERTO ECO: Hi. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let me read you a quotation from a lecture that you gave about the role of the press. You said "once the press has demonstrated its self-flagellating impartiality, it no longer feels any interest in reforming itself." Now this program, On the Media, we take it as our job here to criticize and analyze the media, but are you saying that basically what we're doing is just giving a sort of a moral pass to all the people we bring on who say yes, we did wrong -- therefore you can't criticize us?
UMBERTO ECO: No. I, I am convinced that media criticism is indispensable. As you said, I have a column; I devote my column frequently to the criticism of newspaper and of magazines. Sometime of the same magazine on which I write. I publish it, [LAUGHS] and I keep going in the same, in the same way. Okay. That's, that is the, the, the risk between-- silence and what Marcuse called "repressive tolerance." [LAUGHTER] Well, better the repressive tolerance that [sic] absolute silence. Right? [LAUGHTER] On the Pravda it was impossible - not even to criticize the video. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now actually bringing up Pravda, you famously suggested that the Sunday New York Times is not that different from Pravda during Stalin's time. What on earth could you possibly have meant by that.
UMBERTO ECO: No, it, it, it was the, the abundance of information can-- become no information at all. I simply said that the Sunday New York Time has more or less in the good seasons 600 pages; one week is not enough to, to read all the 600 pages -- so such an enormous amount of information equals-- nothing. Like the Pravda, [LAUGHS] which had no information. Oh, but it was-- a paradox.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But to say that there is too much information implies that one is incapable of making a choice. When I get the Sunday New York Times I dump the section on automobiles and real estate and the want ads--
UMBERTO ECO: Yes--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- and I go to the Week in Review and the daily news section and the Arts and Leisure and I have a nice Sunday afternoon's read and I haven't taxed myself too much. I've simply made a choice. Why can't they do the same thing?
UMBERTO ECO: But you and me, we know how to make a choice -- until a certain point, but we, we had a university education. I mean that today a lot of people is in the position of having more information than, than before, but they are not educated to make a choice! It's, it's a very difficult problem. Don't ask me the recipe for, for solving it. I am neither an oracle nor a preacher. But I think is the educational problem of our time. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let me ask you another unanswerable question. The question of Berlusconi [sp?] who owns I would say the majority of the Italian media. Is it possible to get a straight and honest account in the Italian media these days?
UMBERTO ECO: Imagine: that President Bush is the owner of NBC, CBS, CNN -- of 80 percent of Hollywood --of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post -- of all the Macy's chain and probably of a good part of Microsoft. Would you consider that an acceptable situation for a democracy? It's a new invention -- it's the corporation-government -- a government that thinks that what is good for the corporation is good for the country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that's a terrible threat or do you think that the media really can't control how people think?
UMBERTO ECO:Obviously the concentration is a great risk but there is a sort of inner anti-virus. When the concentration is very big, it's difficult for the owners of the concentration to control every aspect, so in, in a way there is a sort of biological ability in reacting to the injection of dangerous viruses.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What infuriates you most about the media? What would you change?
UMBERTO ECO:A typical feature of Italian newspapers, not happily of the American ones, is that if there is an important event -- well, let's say recently a mother allegedly killed her son. They devote to the event 4 pages with 6 articles, but I admit that since Hegel said that reading newspaper is the everyday prayer of the modern man -- when having my coffee I enjoy this stupid activity of reading-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Each and every one.
UMBERTO ECO:-- 6 time s--the same, the same story because it's, it's relaxing. So we are all responsible. The possibilities of doing different exist but probably we would refuse that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So to review: you don't think that media criticism has any effect; you, you think that the corporatization of media can't be stopped; and you yourself can't stop reading the sorts of sensational stories that are emblematic of everything that's wrong with the media--
UMBERTO ECO: No, but there is this - the virtue of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy was thought to be a great homage to virtue. [LAUGHTER] Hm? You are a sinner. But you have the duty of saying that that is wrong. [LAUGHS] [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
UMBERTO ECO: Thanks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Umberto Eco is the author of over 20 works of fiction and non-fiction. His new novel, Baudolino [sp?], will be published in an English translation this October.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, foreign relations and public relations and why songs like Wipeout are locked out of the airwaves.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. “Saudi Arabia: Allies Against Terrorism”
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with OTM. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The country of Saudi Arabia faced the mother of all public relations problems after September 11th. The country's leaders cringed every time a reporter referred to "Saudi dissident" Osama bin Laden or mentioned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. So the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia did what any media-savvy monarchy would do. [MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: We've been allies for more than 60 years, working together to solve the world's toughest problems.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It hired Washington, DC-based PR firm Qorvis Communications to give the country a media makeover in the U.S., complete with an ad campaign. It's proved a tough sell so far. When Qorvis tried to place the ads, every national network declined to air them but one -- Fox Sports Net. As Kathy Lane of the Weather Channel explained to us: "It doesn't fit our brand image." Michael Petruzzello is in charge of the Saudi account for Qorvis, and he joins us on the phone. Michael, welcome to On the Media.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So first of all let's talk about what's gotten Saudi Arabia the best press since September 11th. You didn't happen to suggest to Crown Prince Abdullah that he propose an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: No, we, we didn't suggest that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the proposal did seem to give the Crown Prince new status, and were you able to take advantage of that windfall?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Well, you know I think the peace plan and the attention that it has, has done a couple of things - is - one is has affirmed Saudi Arabia's role as the leading advocate for peace in the Middle East, and second it also affirmed that the United States and Saudi Arabia are very much on the same side of peace and justice here, and, and that the crown prince and the president are now working very closely together to try and bring about a peaceful resolution.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Mr. Petruzzello, you know that we're not actually doing an ad right now. We're talking about the ad campaign.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Right. [LAUGHS] Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So what's the premise behind it? What's the principal message you're trying to convey?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:Three things -- one is that U.S. and Saudi Arabia are friends and allies; second that Saudi Arabia is contributing greatly to the War on Terrorism; and third that Saudi Arabia is working with America to [MUSIC SLOWLY UP AND UNDER] try and find peace in the Middle East.
ANNOUNCER: Read the editorials. Tune in to Sunday morning news shows. [PIANO] Or listen to talk radio. If you want opinions. [VIOLINS] Listen to America's leaders if you want the facts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And one of the ads quotes President Bush saying: "As far as the Saudi Arabians go, they have been nothing less than cooperative." But as any of us knows who looks at that remark in context, it was in response to reports in very reputable papers that there had been quite a bit of resistance from Saudi Arabia -- at least in connection with the U.S. government's anti-terrorist operations. Don't you think you were taking President Bush's words a little bit out of context, especially when the subscript to the ad says: "Don't believe what you read in the papers?"
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Not at all, [...?...] because that's exactly the point. These reports that the Saudis weren't cooperating were not true. The president, the secretary of state, the secretary of treasury and other U.S. leaders have all affirmed that Saudi Arabia has done everything it's been asked to do and, and more!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do you think the networks have declined to run your ad?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:That story has created yet another myth and misconception about Saudi Arabia. We had no problem getting our ads on the air; those ads from day one ran in every market that we wanted them to run.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We called A&E, AMC, Bravo, The History Channel, Lifetime, the USA Network and the Weather Channel. They were all approached by you, and they all turned down the ad.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Well see that's the part that I get confused about, because our plan was to run opposite public affairs programming and news. While I like to watch The Weather Channel, we did--never thought that that was an appropriate place for those ads, and we never really asked the Weather Channel to be part of our media strategy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're basically saying you were never turned down by any media outlet you went to?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:Well I'm s-- I'm - I don't do the actual media buying so I'm not quite sure, you know, what happened, and I know in issue advertising it's always a little bit difficult in getting things aired.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: People told us directly that they rejected your pitch! Are you saying they're, they're making it up?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:I don't kno-- you know, I did-- these people weren't [quoted ?], and I never talked to them, but I will tell you that we had no problems getting them on the air.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:How does it work -- providing a media boost for an entire country? Saudi Arabia's favorable rating in the United States hung around 35 percent and they were looking to you to push it up to greater than 60 percent. Newsweek reports that about 6 months into the campaign Saudi Arabia's favorability rating hangs around 43 percent?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: That's consistent with our own polling and other polling I've seen.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So that's a gain of about 8 points.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is the Saudi government happy with that?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: They're hap-- very happy with the overall campaign, and they feel like they're getting a clear and consistent message out against all odds because there is still a lot of confusion out there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Okay!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Petruzzello heads the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia's account for Qorvis Communication. The Rendon Group
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: Saudi Arabia isn't the only country buying the services of a Washington PR firm. America's propaganda war is led by the Rendon Group. John Rendon started out as a Democratic political consultant working on elections abroad, but since the first Bush administration Rendon's PR campaigns have been at the front lines of the Panama Invasion, the Gulf War and Kosovo. So Pentagon officials didn't have to think hard when considering whom to ask for assistance in Afghanistan. Joining us now is Franklin Foer whose profile of Rendon appears in the May 20 issue of The New Republic. Frank, welcome to OTM.
FRANKLIN FOER: Thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: So when John Rendon shows up and says here's what I can do for you-- what can he do for us?
FRANKLIN FOER: He's mainly applying all the modern techniques of American political campaigns: focus groups, polling, TV advertising, rapid response. He actually produces ads for broadcast in places like Indonesia that try to put the findings of his focus groups and polls into action. In addition to all that work, he's encouraged the government to take a posture where it's competing quite vigorously to win the news cycle. They were scheduling American officials on television broadcasts on Al Jazeera and other networks throughout the Muslim world. So he is actually shaping the message.
BOB GARFIELD: Now there is one point when -- after the Gulf War -- part of his job involved radio broadcasts, but that didn't go very well.
FRANKLIN FOER:It didn't. He was put in charge of producing material for two radio stations that were beaming information into Iraq. This is where I begin to question perhaps his ability to negotiate the complexities of the Muslim world, because the scripts for these broadcasts were produced by 20-somethings in Washington who'd been veterans of typically democratic party politics and not terribly keyed into the nuances of the Middle East. These scripts which were then recorded in a studio in Boston were actually recorded by guys with Jordanian and Egyptian accents that weren't terribly comprehensible to Iraqis. Coupled with this, the messages that they were reading weren't terribly effective. Just to give you an example, one of the things that the Rendon scripts tended to harp on was the gassing of the Kurds. In terms of persuading Americans of the evils of Saddam, talking about the gassing of the Kurds is an incredibly effective talking point. But the sad truth is, is that most Iraqis didn't care about the gassing of the Kurds or were actively supportive of it. So as a device of stirring up resentment towards Saddam, I can't say that it was terribly effective.
BOB GARFIELD: What you've described in your piece is reminiscent of the work of political operatives like Michael Deaver--
FRANKLIN FOER: Exactly.
BOB GARFIELD: -- who made an art form of mastering the news cycles. Is Rendon a, a Deaver character?
FRANKLIN FOER:He's very much in that mold. You've got to control stories as they develop. You've got to beat the other guy to the punch. You can't let any points go unanswered. And that's the mind set that a political consultant like Rendon brings to this sort of operation.
BOB GARFIELD:If your goal is to influence the domestic debate, those tactics would probably serve you very well, but your article suggests that if your goal is to change the hearts and minds of the Arab and Islamic worlds, it's a silly and superficial approach.
FRANKLIN FOER: That's right. I mean just consider so many of the stories that have been in the ether since September 11th -- this idea that Mossad was somehow responsible for the World Trade Center collapse or that Purim pastry for the Jewish holiday was made out of the blood of adolescent Muslims. These stories are ridiculous, and people who believe them aren't going to believe you if you simply say no, no it's not true that Mossad was responsible. We have evidence that Al Qaeda was responsible. You've got to change a world view -- not just win a news cycle.
BOB GARFIELD: How is Rendon held accountable for success or failure? He, he continues to get work.
FRANKLIN FOER:There are many ways in which Rendon is a very savvy politician, and one of them is that he has compiled a network in the Pentagon and White House. He has a very close relationship to Carl Rove. The other part of it is that this sort of activity is very hard to judge in a quantifiable way, and because the Defense Department and CIA have been so desperate for anybody who can fill the void that they've faced since the end of the Cold War, they've just stuck with the guy.
BOB GARFIELD: Frank, thanks very much.
FRANKLIN FOER: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Franklin Foer is a staff writer for The New Republic. [MUSIC]
Instrumental Rock
May 25, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Though his youthful legions of fans are probably unaware of this fact, the quirky musician known as Moby provides a vital link to pop music's past. Moby is one of the few thriving practitioners of the not-so-ancient art: the rock instrumental. Once a staple of top 40 radio in the '50s and '60s, lyricless pop has all but evaporated from the airwaves. On the Media's Rex Doane tried to track it down.
PETE "MAD DADDY" MYERS: Mad Daddy giggle jiggles -- never chicken! [ELECTRIC GUITAR CHORD] Yeah! Oxxy Briar [sp?] will give your sound a tumble-- all the cats really flip over this crazy, wavy Rumble!! [LAUGHS] [SONG RUMBLE PLAYS UNDER]
REX DOANE: Among the many changes top 40 radio has endured over the past 4 decades, it is the disappearance of rock instrumentals that rates as one of the more painful losses for pop purists. Records like Rumble as presented here by Cleveland deejay Pete "Mad Daddy" Myers back in 1958 used to be heard liberally alongside vocal hits. For Steven Otfinoski, author of The Golden Age of Instrumentals, top 40 radio of the '50s and '60s was an embarrassment of riches. [SONG TEQUILA PLAYS UNDER]
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: The democracy of music at that point was just incredible. AM radio had everything from pop to jazz to R&B to rock & roll, country and western. Everything was in the top 40 of that, of that period, and instrumentals was part of that mix.
REX DOANE: Top 40 radio stations not only featured a broad spectrum of music, but the instrumental hits they played ran the gamut of styles as well.
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: And we'd call it rock instrumentals, but it really was many, many different kinds of music that fed into rock & roll and R&B were part of that format at the time. [MAN IN SONG SAYS: TEQUILA] [SONG MISERLOU PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Surf tunes along with country, soul, R&B and even easy listening songs were all part of the instrumental rock phenomena. And then there were those instrumental chart toppers that defied description. [SONG GREEN MOSQUITO PLAYS]
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: There were strange gimmicks with the sound effects; there was a thing called The Green Mosquito where you had a mosquito buzzing around. You had Rockin Crickets where you had the sound of crickets in, in, in between the musical passages; you had all sorts of crazy things and, and these songs today might never make the charts, but back then that kind of novelty in an instrumental [...?...] people [...?...] and sold records. [SONG ROCKIN CRICKETS PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Instrumental records, even Rockin Crickets, were being purchased and played in appreciable numbers. As Otfinoski points out, there was no shortage of instrumental hits when guitar licks and saxophone riffs ruled the airwaves. [SONG HONKY TONK PLAYS]
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: As I state in my book there were at least 250 charting songs in the top 40 that were instrumentals between, say, 1956 when really the, the genre took off with a song called Honky Tonk by Bill Doggett and his combo until about 1966 which is when the last great instrumental burst came through with Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass which was kind of the last word in instrumentals. [SONG PLAYED BY TIJUANA BRASS PLAYS]
REX DOANE: The pseudo-Mariachi sounds of Alpert made several forays into the pop charts. Alpert along with Duane Eddy, Link Wray and groups like [...?...] Booker T and the MG's [sp?] all enjoyed fruitful and sustained careers as instrumental-only artists. And while their careers began to wane in the late 60s, a new brand of instrumental was being heard on the radio. [THEME FROM SWAT PLAYS]
SEAN ROSS: Yeah, during the '70s and early '80s it certainly still had some currency because of TV themes, because of the Rockford Files, because of the Theme from SWAT.
REX DOANE: Sean Ross is the group editor at Billboard Airplane Monitor.
SEAN ROSS: Eventually, of course, the whole TV and movie sound track business changed and even there the focus went away from instrumentals. [SONG POPCORN PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Instrumental hits that didn't have the benefit of being tied to a hit television show were becoming rarer still. While the hit Popcorn for better or worse peaked at number 9 in 1972, it was the disco craze that temporarily spared the instrumental. [SONG TRUE SOUNDS OF PHILADELPHIA PLAYS] While hits like the True Sounds of Philadelphia saw plenty of chart action, by the time the '80s rolled around, radio gave a firm veto to nearly any song without a vocal. Monica Lynch, former president of Tommy Boy Records, provides perspective on the plight of the all-instrumental act.
MONICA LYNCH: In today's landscape image is paramount, and it's very difficult for the most part in today's industry which is so high stakes and where there's so much money involved, they want to know that when a single comes out by an artist, that the public and the radio stations and the video outlets will immediately grasp the image, the concept, the performer, and that may be a much more difficult thing to do if it's an instrumental with no vocal or lyrical hook. [LAUGHING INTRO TO THE SONG WIPEOUT PLAYS]
REX DOANE: The emphasis major labels began to place on music videos as a primary means of marketing also helped place the instrumental on the endangered species list. [WIPEOUT PLAYS]
MONICA LYNCH: You know in the past 20 years the visualization of music has just intensified. Certainly since the birth of MTV, and that has effectively pushed out a lot of niches of the pop spectrum. [SONG PLAYS]
REX DOANE: The reluctance of the record industry to push instrumentals is equaled only by the reluctance of commercial radio to play them.
ERIC BOEHLERT: Radio has changed so dramatically since the last time instrumentals had any play on radio that the barriers may be too difficult to, to get around or to get over.
REX DOANE: Eric Boehlert writes for Salon.com.
ERIC BOEHLERT: I mean if radio does play an instrumental and they fall in love with it, and then for instance there's no video, you know, radio doesn't like playing artists that don't have a video or a record company that's not willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars to make a video. There has to be a whole package. You know, it can't just be a great song. [SONG TELSTAR PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Certainly there are those instrumentals that have gained a second life as cannibalized clips in commercials or samples on hip hop records. But to hear anything new in the instrumental vein or even well-remembered tunes like Telstar, you may well need to look beyond radio and follow the lead of high tech teenagers.
ERIC BOEHLERT: Teenagers in America are not wed to their radios. They're wed to their MP3's and they're wed to their computers and they love their CDs. They're not turning on the radio to hear, you know, great new music first. [SONG GREEN ONIONS UP AND UNDER]
REX DOANE: And for the digitally-disinclined who hope and pray for the return to radio of more rock and soul without all the verbiage, the wait continues. In New York for On the Media I'm Rex Doane.
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 George Edwards and Dylan Keefe, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Eric Wellman. 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 Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And he's been nothing but cooperative. [GREEN ONIONS FADES]
May 25, 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. For almost two weeks now in press conferences and on talk shows the White House has made its case that whatever information it had before September 11th does not mean that the terrorism of that day could possibly have been foreseen or countered. "Dots to be connected" is the most popular way to look at these bits of information. A Phoenix flight school; a memo to the president while he was in Crawford, Texas; a 1999 report titled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why. The last dot was a document that had been in the public record for two years at the time of the terrorist attacks. The National Intelligent Council and the Library of Congress prepared the report, and it was never a classified document, but that doesn't mean it was widely known before this week. John Solomon of the Associated Press was the first to report on the existence of this paper. He joins us now. John, welcome to OTM.
JOHN SOLOMON: Well thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: This document was posted on line -- kind of hidden in plain view. Nobody knew about it or at least no members of the administration or of the press knew about it. How did you find it?
JOHN SOLOMON: Around -- just bef-- in the days before this story, the Bush administration began to say they -- no one in government ever envisioned a suicide jetliner attack like the ones that occurred on September 11th, and so we went to take a look and see how much people in government knew about the idea that an Al Qaeda operative had in '95 to dive-bomb an airplane into the CIA or another government building. And in the course of that we came across this very open source public document written for the National Intelligence Council.
BOB GARFIELD:When you say "you came upon it," I mean was it like Hillary Clinton and the-- Rose Law firm records? Did you just find them in a file folder on your desk? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JOHN SOLOMON: Oh, no. [LAUGHS] I did a lot of interviews with experts in the-- terrorism field asking, you know, how much has the government debated this possibility; they mentioned this report. Didn't remember who had written it; remembered it was for the National Intelligence Council. Did some phone calls over there. Tracked down the proper source which is an office of the Library of Congress and-- and then went up on the web site and found the report.
BOB GARFIELD:To the extent that the government was asleep at the switch I guess the media have been too if it's taken these 8 months for this document to materialize. If it took you so long and if it took the media so long to unearth this fairly eerie prediction of what might take place, is it fair to suggest that the government somehow was-- derelict in its--duties?
JOHN SOLOMON: We certainly could have done a better job before September 11th of identifying the potential threats and sharing information among government so that we had a complete picture, yet if you were to go back and look, you'll find all sorts of testimony up on the Hill before September 11th -- George Tenet twice in two years went up and gave very stark assessments -- our CIA director did -- about the threat of terrorism. If you go look at the Q&A after that, no one in Congress wanted to talk about it. There was only maybe 2 or 3 questions when I went back through the Q&A that went back to his, you know, very stark warning. The media covered what it knew. I think a lot of the threats about terrorism are things that were classified. Soon as September 11th happened, I think you have to take a look at the media reporting very closely, because there were a lot of very strong pieces of reporting identifying things we knew about before September 11th within a couple of days -- AP and the Washington Post and others in the Minneapolis newspapers reported Moussaoui and the fact that he was sitting in the jail. September 24th the Washington Post had a wonderful story taking a look at some of the early threats of hijackers and the idea that flying a plane into a building wasn't new. It didn't have the level of detail that we've come across in, in recent days, as we've done more reporting, but I think you - if you were to go back through the archives, you'll see a tremendous amount of journalism committed, taking a look at these various threats.
BOB GARFIELD:And yet in the same way that the U.S. intelligence agencies were unable to protect against a specific attack on a specific day at a specific location, the media world was unable to connect the dots before September 11th.
JOHN SOLOMON: That's a very fair assessment.
BOB GARFIELD: I mean I've seen in many newspapers - and I -who knows? - maybe the AP supplied one of these - I don't know - a time line - and on the time line are 5 or 6 bits of information -- Arabs in flight schools - Moussaoui in Minnesota -- this document that we're discussing now and, and you know and a clear pattern emerges. But what gets forgotten when these time lines are printed is that you - for all of these 5 or 6 bits of information -- these dots --there are millions and millions of other bits - other dots of irrelevant or untrue or totally unrelated bits of information. Do you think the press is doing a good enough job, particularly in the current furor of what the president knew and when did he know it, to contextualize the difficulty in, in separating the signal from the noise?
JOHN SOLOMON: It is a challenge, and you have to overlay something else that's going on which - there's politics in Washington. I know that's surprising but-- a lot of the distribution of information or the control of information right now comes from people who have a partisan mode of moving into a very important election year. And I'll give you a very good example. Earlier this week I, I ascertained some information related to the Phoenix memo that I thought was relevant, and, and separated a little bit of the - put some perspective into all this breathless reporting that's going on, and that was that the agent himself, Ken Williams, who wrote the memo from Phoenix warning of the Arabs in flight schools back in July of last year himself marked the memo "routine." Now I wrote that on a day where there was a lot of spin control going on in Washington and a lot of other news organizations had a completely different take on their story the next day which is that he considered it urgent - im--important-- serious information. Now that's true -- but in fact he did mark it "routine," and you really had to separate the facts. At the end of the day I think by talking to 4 or 5 different people from 4 or 5 different perspectives, you have a much more toned, balanced, fair and complete story, and I think that process is what needs to happen. If journalists just go out the first time they hear a breathless piece of information and they stop their reporting at that point, they're doing a disservice to the public.
BOB GARFIELD: John Solomon, thank you very much.
JOHN SOLOMON: Okay!
BOB GARFIELD:John Solomon supervises the Associated Press's investigative unit which has been looking into what the government knew before September 11th and what it has been doing since. [MUSIC] Zimbabwe
May 25, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Under the repressive government of Robert Mugabe, the independent media in Zimbabwe have become a public enemy, and since his re-election in March, the situation has worsened. One of Mugabe's first acts in his new term was to sign the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act -- a tough anti-press law that empowers the government to close down newspapers, restrict access to government documents and imprison journalists for publishing falsehoods. One of the first journalists to be arrested for quote "abuse of journalistic privilege" was Andrew Meldrum, the Zimbabwe correspondent for the British paper The Guardian and the London-based magazine The Economist. Last December Andrew Meldrum was on OTM describing the deteriorating press conditions in Zimbabwe.
BOB GARFIELD:The story that landed Meldrum and several other journalists in jail briefly this month was first reported in Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper, The Daily News. The story involved a charge of political violence -- the alleged decapitation of a woman by Mugabe supporters -- or so her husband said at the time.
ANDREW MELDRUM: As it turns out, the man apparently was not telling the truth. His wife had died, but not of political violence. And he has since disappeared. The government pounced on The Daily News and on me-- for publishing a falsehood, although The Daily News retracted their story immediately and I had a correction.
BOB GARFIELD: What's the mood among journalists right now in Zimbabwe?
ANDREW MELDRUM:There is a very beleaguered feeling because it's not just me and these two other journalists from The Daily News who have been arrested. Since the middle of March, there are a dozen journalists who have been arrested; several of us have been jailed; and 11 of us face these charges which, by the way, carries a sentence of up to a 100,000 dollar fine or up to 2 years in prison.
BOB GARFIELD:The Access to Information and Privacy Act obviously was enacted to intimidate journalists and to put a chilling effect on free and fair reporting of what the government is up to. Do you think that the press has been cowed by the, the threat of, of arrest and prosecution?
ANDREW MELDRUM: There is an ai--element of self-censorship that is going on, and in a few cases in the past couple of weeks, we've passed up on stories that we would have done in the past.
BOB GARFIELD: Give me an example.
ANDREW MELDRUM:There is a list that was made by the Commercial Farmers Union -- in other words the white farmers -- of about 40 or 50 Zimbabwean cabinet ministers, brothers in law of the president, people connected to Robert Mugabe who have benefitted from these land seizures, who have taken over farms. And of course these farms were seized, supposedly, to be distributed to poor black peasants, and instead we have a list of 40 or 50 bigwigs well-connected to Robert Mugabe and the party who have taken over farms. The list was published in the Financial Gazette newspaper which is an independent, privately-owned paper in Harare, and it was also published by The Daily News, and yet the major international news agencies and I have to say myself, we decided not to do the story because we can't go out to the 40 or 50 farms in one day and interview them and just ascertain that every single one of them is true, and if you get one wrong, why then that's a little cell in jail.
BOB GARFIELD:There must be a way around that. To say that the list was printed by another organization and to-- say that these are cronies of Mugabe who have been apparently enriched by the land seizures -- isn't the way the report the story while, while staying on the right side of the press repression law?
ANDREW MELDRUM: You're quite right. I mean to give full attribution and to put it in its full context, but remember my story about the woman who was beheaded - I didn't say a woman was beheaded. I wrote The Daily News reported that a woman was beheaded. I said the alleged killers. You know, the accused. I gave, you know, what the police will refuse to comment. You know, I gave every possible attribution and caveat in my story, and it made absolutely no difference.
BOB GARFIELD:When last we spoke we discussed the potential for backlash -- that the repressive measures would come back and bite the Mugabe government as the populace might begin to get nervous. Is there any evidence that the people of Zimbabwe are beginning to react negatively to the heavy-handed tactics of the government?
ANDREW MELDRUM: Yeah. There are plenty. I think probably one of the best is circulation figures of the state media versus the privately-owned media and The Sunday Mail newspaper which is state owned and has become an instrument of high propaganda, the circulation of The Sunday Mail has dropped from 160,000 to just 60,000. People have stopped watching the state television, and of course they have a monopoly on all television broadcasts. Now video stores have in the past two months have seen a marked up surge in video rentals because people are watching videos; they're not watching the television any more.
BOB GARFIELD: Andrew Meldrum, thank you very much, and once again, please -- take care.
ANDREW MELDRUM: Well, thanks very much for calling, and I appreciate the interest.
BOB GARFIELD:Andrew Meldrum is the Zimbabwe correspondent for The Economist Magazine and the newspaper The Guardian. He spoke to us from Harare, Zimbabwe where he awaits trial for violating the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, what happened to TV news since 9/11; when activists report; and Umberto Eco -- on the media.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. Hard News After September 11th
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A few months ago, we reviewed the coverage of foreign news post 9/11 and found that -- stop the presses! -- TV news had not changed much since then. Foreign stories are still under-covered; the networks are still cutting back their foreign bureaus; and judging by the rate of tuneout, they're still failing to make the few foreign stories they choose to cover relevant to their viewers. This week the Project for Excellence in Journalism released their study of news coverage since 9/11. Tom Rosenstiel is the project's director, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Good to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, in 1977 more than two thirds of evening news topics were hard news, and then in '77 [sic] that dropped to about 41 percent -- that was part of continuing trend. And then 9/11 happened, and hard news soared to 80 percent. So how long did that last?
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Well, it lasted through the fall, and when we studied what had happened this year we found a big dropoff. By January we were back to numbers that were pretty close to what the network news looked like last June, before September 11th. That got even truer in February. And interestingly, morning news seems to have been transformed by the War on Terrorism more than evening news, whereas they had virtually abandoned covering traditional news, hard news topics by last summer -- now 20 percent of what you would see on a morning news program would be considered traditional hard news, and indeed the viewership numbers for morning news have held up better than the viewership numbers for evening news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does your report really make the definitive case that an audience will stay around and grow for hard news?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:No, and we're not trying to. We don't argue in the study that, that more people are watching cause the news is harder. What we argue with is that the news got softer cause that's what people wanted. We don't see any evidence of that since network news viewership has dropped by half in the last decade, as the news got lighter.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Could you summarize the more surprising conclusions in your report?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:I think one of the most surprising conclusions is this idea that formula is driving what we see in network television rather than the news itself, and that what we are getting is in a sense not driven by the marketplace of demand but by the cost structure that is allowed in network news and in networks in general.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so the audience really isn't king any more -- or so your findings suggest.
TOM ROSENSTIEL:No. I think that's true. Companies are dictated by who are the institutional investors that buy media companies and how many properties do they want to own and-- the viewer is absent from many of the equations that news executives are making today.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Don't media companies derive most of their profits from advertisers who in turn invest according to how big the audience is?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:Yeah, they do, and you're operating in a universe that is very different than 20 years ago. There is no way that you can have the same size audience in a 500 channel universe that you had in a 5 channel universe. And it doesn't really matter what product you put on the air -- how good it is -- if people have that many more choices, and there's that much more narrow casting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what about the influence of 9/11 on all of this?
TOM ROSENSTIEL:News consumption is up. And the attitude of the public towards journalists is up. For the first time in 15 years, people have a higher opinion of journalists.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you remember all those speeches that a lot of network news execs were making after 9/11 about how they needed to keep the public better informed about what was going on in the world?
TOM ROSENSTIEL: I, I think they believed that, and I think that those speeches were aimed at their corporate betters more than they were to the public -- that these were pleas for resources and time and-- and patience on behalf of the companies to let them do the news again the way that they want to. I mean after all, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were forged in an environment that produced a very different kind of network news, and that's a model they're much more comfortable with than the one that they are overseeing today.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Rosenstiel, thank you very much.
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Bye.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bye.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Rosenstiel is the director of The Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Indy Media
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: The media organization that may have experienced the biggest growth in the past 2 years doesn't have a budget or a full time staff of in many cases even an office. OTM's Jad Abumrad takes a look at how the upstart Independent Media Center is raising some interesting questions about the direction journalism is taking.
JAD ABUMRAD: It all started in 1999 in Seattle. [CROWD CHANTING, DRUMS] The Independent Media Center was born. But not amidst these WTO protests. Rather it happened, members say, at an internet cafe a few blocks away. A Seattle techie created a couple of lines of code that allowed anyone to post audio, video or text to a web site.
ANNA NAGERA: The concept of open publishing is fundamental to anarchist principles.
ARUN GUPTA: We don't have to rely on journalists, on these paid professionals, to tell us what's going on in the world.
JAD ABUMRAD: According to Anna Nagera [sp?] and Arun Gupta [sp?], within those few lines of code was a seed of anarchy that began to grow as hundreds of activists and journalists posted updates to the site.
ARUN GUPTA: And so you got all these different like nuggets of information -- all these different pieces -- and you could put the whole puzzle together.
JAD ABUMRAD: All that was needed to really make the thing take off, they say, was for the corporate media to completely miss the story, which happened in Seattle according to IMC member John Tarleton [sp?]. Tarleton had been in the thick of the protestors as they blocked delegates and official press from entering the WTO meetings.
JOHN TARLETON: I remember one German journalist is like -you, you must let me through your blockade, and I've got to get in there and write my story, and we were like -- look, [LAUGHS] the story is happening right in front of you! And he just turned around and left in a huff.
JAD ABUMRAD: Fast forward to now. Over a hundred independent media centers or IMC's in 60 different countries have popped up in the wake of the battle in Seattle. Some IMC's remain just web sites, but others like the New York City chapter have a permanent office.
WOMAN: Anyone have an idea with what to lead the local section? Page [...?...].
JAD ABUMRAD: Several nights a week Arun, Anna, John and a handful of believers meet in this cramped room stocked with salvaged Macs and hand-me-down video equipment. They take stock of this week's reporting, checking the web site often. When you log on to the IMC, usually the first thing you'll notice is 3 columns of text. Starting at the right -- The Newswire - an unfiltered listing of all posts. In the center, teams of IMC members will place what they feel are the most important and best-reported posts from the wire. [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
MAN: Leave a hole there and see what else comes in.
MAN: Hopefully we'll have more good coverage. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
WOMAN: Leave a hole -- okay.
MAN: The community garden pageant this weekend is going to be a big deal--
WOMAN: Oh!
MAN: This weekend - yeah.
MAN: --and I'm going to that, and I'd be happy to--
JAD ABUMRAD: The New York City chapter also draws on the newswire to put out a print publication. There's no budget here. Everything from time to post-it notes to printing costs are donated or paid for through small fundraisers. So it's not surprising that the internet connection in their office is not the most reliable, but each time it's up, The Newswire contains a greater number of postings! Everything from 2,000 word missives to brief updates on incremental stories to clips of audio.
ANNOUNCER: The Independent Media Center Radio News. [MUSIC] [CONTINUES SPEAKING IN ITALIAN LANGUAGE]
JAD ABUMRAD: This bit of tape is off the Italian IMC site. From July 21st, 2001 during the G-8 Summit of the world's economic superpowers, in a pre-dawn blitz Italian police stormed a school where anti-G-8 protestors were sleeping. Reports of activists being severely beaten in their sleep surfaced on the Italian IMC site within minutes.
THEDA PAVIS: The coverage of that by the Italian IMC was really, really good.
JAD ABUMRAD: Journalist Theda Pavis [sp?] has written extensively about the IMC in the On Line Journalism Review, a web site maintained by the Journalism Department of the University of Southern California.
THEDA PAVIS: If I wanted to, to really get first hand accounts of what was happening as an American media consumer, I could really get a lot of good news off that Italian IMC site, including amazing pictures.
JAD ABUMRAD: Some of the people beaten, it turned out, were IMC reporters. Although "reporter" is not a term every media watchdog would agree with.
THEDA PAVIS: We've been having this debate before -- really before IMC's started popping up. When I first started writing about this stuff, we were all debating Matt Drudge! And what did that mean? And could anybody just walk into the room and say now I'm a journalist and I can put my stuff up on the internet and there you go --I'm reporting.
JAD ABUMRAD: Though the IMC does attract its fair share of seasoned journalists, other IMC quote/unquote "reporters" prefer the term "media-makers" because they don't consider what they're doing journalism. They don't subscribe to the creed of balanced reporting; they don't necessarily even believe in objectivity. They think all media are subjective.
THEDA PAVIS: They definitely have a point of view. But I also think that there's a history in this country of journalists reporting stories that have a point of view. If you look at the work of Ida B. Wells [sp?], I mean she was an activist and a journalist, right? She spent years chronicling lynching, and she was methodical in her research. And, and I find that, you know, on certain topics some of the stories coming out of the IMC's have that same kind of exhaustive research that's going into it -- not always -but sometimes.
JAD ABUMRAD: The debate notwithstanding, the Independent Media Center credits the Italian IMC with dragging the corporate press into covering a story they would have otherwise ignored. It says the same was true more recently in Israel.
KEVIN SKAVORAK: A lot of the press was very afraid to move over there.
JAD ABUMRAD: Kevin Skavorak [sp?] spent 6 weeks in the occupied territories, splitting his time protesting and filing reports for two of the IMC's newest chapters -- the Jerusalem and Palestine sites.
KEVIN SKAVORAK: We were doing actions, and we were all marching, and we'd surround an ambulance and go marching up to the checkpoints and singing peace songs and stuff and the press would be like 200 feet back. The Israelis had shot at them a number of times; had killed a number of them. The reason we were a little bit different I think is because we didn't wear big [LAUGHS] signs on us that said "press."
JAD ABUMRAD: On April 16th, Kevin and a few other activists infiltrated the Jenin Refugee Camp just days after Israel had concluded its military operation. Two days before, mainstream press organizations were allowed in. He sent the IMC stills of stray limbs, burnt flesh, bodies covered in maggots. The images were later picked up by Reuters. [SOUNDS OF WARFARE]
WOMAN: I'm working in the IMC at the moment as a volunteer-- [SOUNDS OF WARFARE] just as I'm speaking to you some gunfights [DOGS BARKING] have just erupted.
ARUN GUPTA: We're not looking to like seize power. We're looking to re-imagine power. We went self-determination. And right now we don't have that.
JAD ABUMRAD: Arun Gupta admits that the IMC doesn't do well when the seas are calm. There aren't the resources for beat reporters. But during a crisis -- forget about it. "Activists," he says, "are willing to eat tear gas to get a story." For On the Media I'm Jad Abumrad. [MUSIC]
Umberto Eco
May 25, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Umberto Eco is most famous in the United States for his engaging and challenging novels like The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. But among his "day jobs" Umberto Eco is actually an accomplished media critic as well as a professor of semeiotics, a historian of medieval theology, the author of more than 20 books of non-fiction and a columnist for the Italian weekly Espresso. He is Italy's foremost public intellectual and an insatiable consumer of all things media, and since he happened to be in New York this week, we invited him to our studios to chat about whatever he wants. Umberto Eco, welcome to On the Media.
UMBERTO ECO: Hi. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let me read you a quotation from a lecture that you gave about the role of the press. You said "once the press has demonstrated its self-flagellating impartiality, it no longer feels any interest in reforming itself." Now this program, On the Media, we take it as our job here to criticize and analyze the media, but are you saying that basically what we're doing is just giving a sort of a moral pass to all the people we bring on who say yes, we did wrong -- therefore you can't criticize us?
UMBERTO ECO: No. I, I am convinced that media criticism is indispensable. As you said, I have a column; I devote my column frequently to the criticism of newspaper and of magazines. Sometime of the same magazine on which I write. I publish it, [LAUGHS] and I keep going in the same, in the same way. Okay. That's, that is the, the, the risk between-- silence and what Marcuse called "repressive tolerance." [LAUGHTER] Well, better the repressive tolerance that [sic] absolute silence. Right? [LAUGHTER] On the Pravda it was impossible - not even to criticize the video. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now actually bringing up Pravda, you famously suggested that the Sunday New York Times is not that different from Pravda during Stalin's time. What on earth could you possibly have meant by that.
UMBERTO ECO: No, it, it, it was the, the abundance of information can-- become no information at all. I simply said that the Sunday New York Time has more or less in the good seasons 600 pages; one week is not enough to, to read all the 600 pages -- so such an enormous amount of information equals-- nothing. Like the Pravda, [LAUGHS] which had no information. Oh, but it was-- a paradox.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But to say that there is too much information implies that one is incapable of making a choice. When I get the Sunday New York Times I dump the section on automobiles and real estate and the want ads--
UMBERTO ECO: Yes--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- and I go to the Week in Review and the daily news section and the Arts and Leisure and I have a nice Sunday afternoon's read and I haven't taxed myself too much. I've simply made a choice. Why can't they do the same thing?
UMBERTO ECO: But you and me, we know how to make a choice -- until a certain point, but we, we had a university education. I mean that today a lot of people is in the position of having more information than, than before, but they are not educated to make a choice! It's, it's a very difficult problem. Don't ask me the recipe for, for solving it. I am neither an oracle nor a preacher. But I think is the educational problem of our time. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let me ask you another unanswerable question. The question of Berlusconi [sp?] who owns I would say the majority of the Italian media. Is it possible to get a straight and honest account in the Italian media these days?
UMBERTO ECO: Imagine: that President Bush is the owner of NBC, CBS, CNN -- of 80 percent of Hollywood --of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post -- of all the Macy's chain and probably of a good part of Microsoft. Would you consider that an acceptable situation for a democracy? It's a new invention -- it's the corporation-government -- a government that thinks that what is good for the corporation is good for the country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that's a terrible threat or do you think that the media really can't control how people think?
UMBERTO ECO:Obviously the concentration is a great risk but there is a sort of inner anti-virus. When the concentration is very big, it's difficult for the owners of the concentration to control every aspect, so in, in a way there is a sort of biological ability in reacting to the injection of dangerous viruses.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What infuriates you most about the media? What would you change?
UMBERTO ECO:A typical feature of Italian newspapers, not happily of the American ones, is that if there is an important event -- well, let's say recently a mother allegedly killed her son. They devote to the event 4 pages with 6 articles, but I admit that since Hegel said that reading newspaper is the everyday prayer of the modern man -- when having my coffee I enjoy this stupid activity of reading-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Each and every one.
UMBERTO ECO:-- 6 time s--the same, the same story because it's, it's relaxing. So we are all responsible. The possibilities of doing different exist but probably we would refuse that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So to review: you don't think that media criticism has any effect; you, you think that the corporatization of media can't be stopped; and you yourself can't stop reading the sorts of sensational stories that are emblematic of everything that's wrong with the media--
UMBERTO ECO: No, but there is this - the virtue of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy was thought to be a great homage to virtue. [LAUGHTER] Hm? You are a sinner. But you have the duty of saying that that is wrong. [LAUGHS] [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
UMBERTO ECO: Thanks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Umberto Eco is the author of over 20 works of fiction and non-fiction. His new novel, Baudolino [sp?], will be published in an English translation this October.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, foreign relations and public relations and why songs like Wipeout are locked out of the airwaves.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio. “Saudi Arabia: Allies Against Terrorism”
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with OTM. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The country of Saudi Arabia faced the mother of all public relations problems after September 11th. The country's leaders cringed every time a reporter referred to "Saudi dissident" Osama bin Laden or mentioned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. So the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia did what any media-savvy monarchy would do. [MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: We've been allies for more than 60 years, working together to solve the world's toughest problems.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It hired Washington, DC-based PR firm Qorvis Communications to give the country a media makeover in the U.S., complete with an ad campaign. It's proved a tough sell so far. When Qorvis tried to place the ads, every national network declined to air them but one -- Fox Sports Net. As Kathy Lane of the Weather Channel explained to us: "It doesn't fit our brand image." Michael Petruzzello is in charge of the Saudi account for Qorvis, and he joins us on the phone. Michael, welcome to On the Media.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So first of all let's talk about what's gotten Saudi Arabia the best press since September 11th. You didn't happen to suggest to Crown Prince Abdullah that he propose an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: No, we, we didn't suggest that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the proposal did seem to give the Crown Prince new status, and were you able to take advantage of that windfall?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Well, you know I think the peace plan and the attention that it has, has done a couple of things - is - one is has affirmed Saudi Arabia's role as the leading advocate for peace in the Middle East, and second it also affirmed that the United States and Saudi Arabia are very much on the same side of peace and justice here, and, and that the crown prince and the president are now working very closely together to try and bring about a peaceful resolution.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Mr. Petruzzello, you know that we're not actually doing an ad right now. We're talking about the ad campaign.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Right. [LAUGHS] Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So what's the premise behind it? What's the principal message you're trying to convey?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:Three things -- one is that U.S. and Saudi Arabia are friends and allies; second that Saudi Arabia is contributing greatly to the War on Terrorism; and third that Saudi Arabia is working with America to [MUSIC SLOWLY UP AND UNDER] try and find peace in the Middle East.
ANNOUNCER: Read the editorials. Tune in to Sunday morning news shows. [PIANO] Or listen to talk radio. If you want opinions. [VIOLINS] Listen to America's leaders if you want the facts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And one of the ads quotes President Bush saying: "As far as the Saudi Arabians go, they have been nothing less than cooperative." But as any of us knows who looks at that remark in context, it was in response to reports in very reputable papers that there had been quite a bit of resistance from Saudi Arabia -- at least in connection with the U.S. government's anti-terrorist operations. Don't you think you were taking President Bush's words a little bit out of context, especially when the subscript to the ad says: "Don't believe what you read in the papers?"
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Not at all, [...?...] because that's exactly the point. These reports that the Saudis weren't cooperating were not true. The president, the secretary of state, the secretary of treasury and other U.S. leaders have all affirmed that Saudi Arabia has done everything it's been asked to do and, and more!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do you think the networks have declined to run your ad?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:That story has created yet another myth and misconception about Saudi Arabia. We had no problem getting our ads on the air; those ads from day one ran in every market that we wanted them to run.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We called A&E, AMC, Bravo, The History Channel, Lifetime, the USA Network and the Weather Channel. They were all approached by you, and they all turned down the ad.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Well see that's the part that I get confused about, because our plan was to run opposite public affairs programming and news. While I like to watch The Weather Channel, we did--never thought that that was an appropriate place for those ads, and we never really asked the Weather Channel to be part of our media strategy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're basically saying you were never turned down by any media outlet you went to?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:Well I'm s-- I'm - I don't do the actual media buying so I'm not quite sure, you know, what happened, and I know in issue advertising it's always a little bit difficult in getting things aired.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: People told us directly that they rejected your pitch! Are you saying they're, they're making it up?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO:I don't kno-- you know, I did-- these people weren't [quoted ?], and I never talked to them, but I will tell you that we had no problems getting them on the air.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:How does it work -- providing a media boost for an entire country? Saudi Arabia's favorable rating in the United States hung around 35 percent and they were looking to you to push it up to greater than 60 percent. Newsweek reports that about 6 months into the campaign Saudi Arabia's favorability rating hangs around 43 percent?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: That's consistent with our own polling and other polling I've seen.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So that's a gain of about 8 points.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is the Saudi government happy with that?
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: They're hap-- very happy with the overall campaign, and they feel like they're getting a clear and consistent message out against all odds because there is still a lot of confusion out there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
MICHAEL PETRUZZELLO: Okay!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Petruzzello heads the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia's account for Qorvis Communication. The Rendon Group
May 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: Saudi Arabia isn't the only country buying the services of a Washington PR firm. America's propaganda war is led by the Rendon Group. John Rendon started out as a Democratic political consultant working on elections abroad, but since the first Bush administration Rendon's PR campaigns have been at the front lines of the Panama Invasion, the Gulf War and Kosovo. So Pentagon officials didn't have to think hard when considering whom to ask for assistance in Afghanistan. Joining us now is Franklin Foer whose profile of Rendon appears in the May 20 issue of The New Republic. Frank, welcome to OTM.
FRANKLIN FOER: Thank you very much.
BOB GARFIELD: So when John Rendon shows up and says here's what I can do for you-- what can he do for us?
FRANKLIN FOER: He's mainly applying all the modern techniques of American political campaigns: focus groups, polling, TV advertising, rapid response. He actually produces ads for broadcast in places like Indonesia that try to put the findings of his focus groups and polls into action. In addition to all that work, he's encouraged the government to take a posture where it's competing quite vigorously to win the news cycle. They were scheduling American officials on television broadcasts on Al Jazeera and other networks throughout the Muslim world. So he is actually shaping the message.
BOB GARFIELD: Now there is one point when -- after the Gulf War -- part of his job involved radio broadcasts, but that didn't go very well.
FRANKLIN FOER:It didn't. He was put in charge of producing material for two radio stations that were beaming information into Iraq. This is where I begin to question perhaps his ability to negotiate the complexities of the Muslim world, because the scripts for these broadcasts were produced by 20-somethings in Washington who'd been veterans of typically democratic party politics and not terribly keyed into the nuances of the Middle East. These scripts which were then recorded in a studio in Boston were actually recorded by guys with Jordanian and Egyptian accents that weren't terribly comprehensible to Iraqis. Coupled with this, the messages that they were reading weren't terribly effective. Just to give you an example, one of the things that the Rendon scripts tended to harp on was the gassing of the Kurds. In terms of persuading Americans of the evils of Saddam, talking about the gassing of the Kurds is an incredibly effective talking point. But the sad truth is, is that most Iraqis didn't care about the gassing of the Kurds or were actively supportive of it. So as a device of stirring up resentment towards Saddam, I can't say that it was terribly effective.
BOB GARFIELD: What you've described in your piece is reminiscent of the work of political operatives like Michael Deaver--
FRANKLIN FOER: Exactly.
BOB GARFIELD: -- who made an art form of mastering the news cycles. Is Rendon a, a Deaver character?
FRANKLIN FOER:He's very much in that mold. You've got to control stories as they develop. You've got to beat the other guy to the punch. You can't let any points go unanswered. And that's the mind set that a political consultant like Rendon brings to this sort of operation.
BOB GARFIELD:If your goal is to influence the domestic debate, those tactics would probably serve you very well, but your article suggests that if your goal is to change the hearts and minds of the Arab and Islamic worlds, it's a silly and superficial approach.
FRANKLIN FOER: That's right. I mean just consider so many of the stories that have been in the ether since September 11th -- this idea that Mossad was somehow responsible for the World Trade Center collapse or that Purim pastry for the Jewish holiday was made out of the blood of adolescent Muslims. These stories are ridiculous, and people who believe them aren't going to believe you if you simply say no, no it's not true that Mossad was responsible. We have evidence that Al Qaeda was responsible. You've got to change a world view -- not just win a news cycle.
BOB GARFIELD: How is Rendon held accountable for success or failure? He, he continues to get work.
FRANKLIN FOER:There are many ways in which Rendon is a very savvy politician, and one of them is that he has compiled a network in the Pentagon and White House. He has a very close relationship to Carl Rove. The other part of it is that this sort of activity is very hard to judge in a quantifiable way, and because the Defense Department and CIA have been so desperate for anybody who can fill the void that they've faced since the end of the Cold War, they've just stuck with the guy.
BOB GARFIELD: Frank, thanks very much.
FRANKLIN FOER: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Franklin Foer is a staff writer for The New Republic. [MUSIC]
Instrumental Rock
May 25, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Though his youthful legions of fans are probably unaware of this fact, the quirky musician known as Moby provides a vital link to pop music's past. Moby is one of the few thriving practitioners of the not-so-ancient art: the rock instrumental. Once a staple of top 40 radio in the '50s and '60s, lyricless pop has all but evaporated from the airwaves. On the Media's Rex Doane tried to track it down.
PETE "MAD DADDY" MYERS: Mad Daddy giggle jiggles -- never chicken! [ELECTRIC GUITAR CHORD] Yeah! Oxxy Briar [sp?] will give your sound a tumble-- all the cats really flip over this crazy, wavy Rumble!! [LAUGHS] [SONG RUMBLE PLAYS UNDER]
REX DOANE: Among the many changes top 40 radio has endured over the past 4 decades, it is the disappearance of rock instrumentals that rates as one of the more painful losses for pop purists. Records like Rumble as presented here by Cleveland deejay Pete "Mad Daddy" Myers back in 1958 used to be heard liberally alongside vocal hits. For Steven Otfinoski, author of The Golden Age of Instrumentals, top 40 radio of the '50s and '60s was an embarrassment of riches. [SONG TEQUILA PLAYS UNDER]
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: The democracy of music at that point was just incredible. AM radio had everything from pop to jazz to R&B to rock & roll, country and western. Everything was in the top 40 of that, of that period, and instrumentals was part of that mix.
REX DOANE: Top 40 radio stations not only featured a broad spectrum of music, but the instrumental hits they played ran the gamut of styles as well.
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: And we'd call it rock instrumentals, but it really was many, many different kinds of music that fed into rock & roll and R&B were part of that format at the time. [MAN IN SONG SAYS: TEQUILA] [SONG MISERLOU PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Surf tunes along with country, soul, R&B and even easy listening songs were all part of the instrumental rock phenomena. And then there were those instrumental chart toppers that defied description. [SONG GREEN MOSQUITO PLAYS]
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: There were strange gimmicks with the sound effects; there was a thing called The Green Mosquito where you had a mosquito buzzing around. You had Rockin Crickets where you had the sound of crickets in, in, in between the musical passages; you had all sorts of crazy things and, and these songs today might never make the charts, but back then that kind of novelty in an instrumental [...?...] people [...?...] and sold records. [SONG ROCKIN CRICKETS PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Instrumental records, even Rockin Crickets, were being purchased and played in appreciable numbers. As Otfinoski points out, there was no shortage of instrumental hits when guitar licks and saxophone riffs ruled the airwaves. [SONG HONKY TONK PLAYS]
STEVEN OTFINOSKI: As I state in my book there were at least 250 charting songs in the top 40 that were instrumentals between, say, 1956 when really the, the genre took off with a song called Honky Tonk by Bill Doggett and his combo until about 1966 which is when the last great instrumental burst came through with Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass which was kind of the last word in instrumentals. [SONG PLAYED BY TIJUANA BRASS PLAYS]
REX DOANE: The pseudo-Mariachi sounds of Alpert made several forays into the pop charts. Alpert along with Duane Eddy, Link Wray and groups like [...?...] Booker T and the MG's [sp?] all enjoyed fruitful and sustained careers as instrumental-only artists. And while their careers began to wane in the late 60s, a new brand of instrumental was being heard on the radio. [THEME FROM SWAT PLAYS]
SEAN ROSS: Yeah, during the '70s and early '80s it certainly still had some currency because of TV themes, because of the Rockford Files, because of the Theme from SWAT.
REX DOANE: Sean Ross is the group editor at Billboard Airplane Monitor.
SEAN ROSS: Eventually, of course, the whole TV and movie sound track business changed and even there the focus went away from instrumentals. [SONG POPCORN PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Instrumental hits that didn't have the benefit of being tied to a hit television show were becoming rarer still. While the hit Popcorn for better or worse peaked at number 9 in 1972, it was the disco craze that temporarily spared the instrumental. [SONG TRUE SOUNDS OF PHILADELPHIA PLAYS] While hits like the True Sounds of Philadelphia saw plenty of chart action, by the time the '80s rolled around, radio gave a firm veto to nearly any song without a vocal. Monica Lynch, former president of Tommy Boy Records, provides perspective on the plight of the all-instrumental act.
MONICA LYNCH: In today's landscape image is paramount, and it's very difficult for the most part in today's industry which is so high stakes and where there's so much money involved, they want to know that when a single comes out by an artist, that the public and the radio stations and the video outlets will immediately grasp the image, the concept, the performer, and that may be a much more difficult thing to do if it's an instrumental with no vocal or lyrical hook. [LAUGHING INTRO TO THE SONG WIPEOUT PLAYS]
REX DOANE: The emphasis major labels began to place on music videos as a primary means of marketing also helped place the instrumental on the endangered species list. [WIPEOUT PLAYS]
MONICA LYNCH: You know in the past 20 years the visualization of music has just intensified. Certainly since the birth of MTV, and that has effectively pushed out a lot of niches of the pop spectrum. [SONG PLAYS]
REX DOANE: The reluctance of the record industry to push instrumentals is equaled only by the reluctance of commercial radio to play them.
ERIC BOEHLERT: Radio has changed so dramatically since the last time instrumentals had any play on radio that the barriers may be too difficult to, to get around or to get over.
REX DOANE: Eric Boehlert writes for Salon.com.
ERIC BOEHLERT: I mean if radio does play an instrumental and they fall in love with it, and then for instance there's no video, you know, radio doesn't like playing artists that don't have a video or a record company that's not willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars to make a video. There has to be a whole package. You know, it can't just be a great song. [SONG TELSTAR PLAYS]
REX DOANE: Certainly there are those instrumentals that have gained a second life as cannibalized clips in commercials or samples on hip hop records. But to hear anything new in the instrumental vein or even well-remembered tunes like Telstar, you may well need to look beyond radio and follow the lead of high tech teenagers.
ERIC BOEHLERT: Teenagers in America are not wed to their radios. They're wed to their MP3's and they're wed to their computers and they love their CDs. They're not turning on the radio to hear, you know, great new music first. [SONG GREEN ONIONS UP AND UNDER]
REX DOANE: And for the digitally-disinclined who hope and pray for the return to radio of more rock and soul without all the verbiage, the wait continues. In New York for On the Media I'm Rex Doane.
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 George Edwards and Dylan Keefe, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Eric Wellman. 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 Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And he's been nothing but cooperative. [GREEN ONIONS FADES]
- Back to story:
- May 25, 2002
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The Edward Snowden Narrative, Privacy vs. Convenience, and More
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'Is Anybody Down' is Gone - For Now
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Happy Birthday
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Is Snowden a Hero, Traitor, or Something Else
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Thanks For Everything, Bing
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Our Privacy Delusions
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Surveillance Revelations, Turkish Media Looks Away, and More
