BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brook Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. The inauguration Thursday was a chance for Americans to experience life -- in a monarchy [MUSIC: GOD SAVE THE QUEEN] [RECORD SCRATCH] -- American style. [MUSIC: HAIL TO THE CHIEF] Though TV news producers appeared to be working off the same shot list they had used for President Reagan's funeral, the anchors were divided on the appropriate tone. Some treated it like the Oscars…
COMMENTATOR: She had on a beautiful white ensemble by Oscar de la Renta.
BOB GARFIELD: Still others, like NBC's Al Roker, a hometown Parade.
AL ROKER: [SHOUTING] How you feeling, Mr. President? You feeling good? [PEOPLE CHEERING, SHOUTING, WHISTLING] Yeah, the weather's good, sir.
BOB GARFIELD: It was easy to miss, but we did notice small pockets of journalism - not on the cable news channels, but in the coverage of Peter, Dan and Brian. Guests included former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who gave the rare critical commentary on the president's speech, and there was even a piece about the power of Washington lobbyists.
WOMAN: Inaugural week has become a celebration of both democracy and of deep corporate pockets.
BOB GARFIELD: But there was no real news. This was just our quadrennial American coronation. Still, at a real coronation, people do not organize to turn their backs on the queen. At a real coronation, people don't hold up signs saying, "Hitler was democratically elected, too." Despite TV's passion for pomp and ceremony, it was all a little untidy -- in the American style. BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, with the inauguration, an invigorated news media readies itself for a second term. May it be better than the coverage of the first term. Never has media behavior been more closely scrutinized than it has these past four years - sliced and diced by all and sundry like a frog in a high school biology class. But in this case, the frog was alive during the procedure, and even apologized when its less savory innards were exposed. Most unappetizing to many media critics: a press initially hamstrung by an aloof president with a questionable mandate; then by an aloof president with wars to wage. Just weeks after the 2001 inauguration, reporter Greg Palast was covering the disenfranchisement of thousands of African American voters in Florida for the liberal British paper The Guardian. "Where," he asked, "was the American press?"
GREG PALAST: What's missing in the US, frankly, is more courage. Once the governor of Florida says, "I did nothing. These allegations are baloney," to them, story closed. Good night. See you tomorrow. That's it. That's American news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Courage and caution - the yin and yang of good reporting - often fell out of balance in the coverage of the president's first term -- nudged towards caution by the September 11th attacks. Right after 9/11, polls showed public respect for journalists soaring to new heights, but then it plunged again, according to Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.
ANDREW KOHUT: On patriotism, and on a number of values -- professionalism, morality - the media has taken some very big hits.
BILL MAHER: We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away - that's cowardly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: After uttering those words on the now-defunct Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher lost his advertisers, and then his entire program. It's hard to quantify a chilling effect, but subsequent events suggest that mainstream media were growing fearful, not only of terrorists - remember the anthrax attacks at NBC? - but also of their own audiences and advertisers. During the Afghanistan war, then-chairman of CNN Walter Isaacson, ordered his staff to exercise caution in its images of civilian suffering, (quote) "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields, and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people." And then Phil Donahue's short-lived MSNBC talk show was killed, ostensibly because of low ratings, though they were the highest on the channel. Rick Ellis, who runs a website called All Your TV dot com, got hold of a revealing NBC internal report, though how influential it was, no one can say.
RICK ELLIS: I can quote a couple of sentences from it that "Donohue presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war," and that there was a fear that Donohue's show might become a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: War coverage provided the media's biggest breakthrough and their greatest controversy. Like every American military operation after Vietnam, the Afghanistan war was virtually unreported, because reporters were barred from the field of battle. Then the Pentagon proposed embedding reporters with the troops. Military historian Major Roger Bateman.
ROGER BATE
MAN: It's great to get reporters down there where they can't help but fall in love with our soldiers. These are 18, 19 year old kids from the Bronx, and from Nebraska, and you know, plucks at some heart strings.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Reporters would be assigned to units, but they would lose their places if they left to cover the war from the other side. Some embeds went native immediately, like CNN Reporter Walter Rodgers. Notice the personal pronoun.
WALTER RODGERS: So we pulled back for that, and as I say, when we were pulling back, we could see the area we had fought through two and a half days ago, and when we pulled back, there were lots of…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Others, like NPR's John Burnett, recognized that it was something of a Faustian bargain, but better than nothing, as long as there were reporters placed to tell the rest of the story. But there were only a handful of unembedded reporters, and they could not move freely in Iraq.
JOHN BURNETT: And I think that's been a mistake in the coverage of this war. The importance of going back to the places that the Marines charged through and find out what were behind the smiling faces, and the importance of finding out where the bombs hit was really driven home to me just by happenstance, really. I stopped in to a small village which had been bombed by the US Air Force - 30 men, women and children were killed in their beds, as they slept.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was some fine newspaper reporting from Iraqi towns and villages, but many Americans relied on cable for war news. If it was unbalanced, the fault lay not with the embeds, but with editors and producers who could have supplemented their coverage, but often chose not to. The reason suggested by Ken Auletta, media writer for the New Yorker, is that Fox News was setting the agenda.
KEN AULETTA: The American flag in the, in the left corner of the screen, and it became America's network. I had a fair number of stories about soldiers in Iraq, American soldiers, saying to people - "Are you with Fox News?" and saying, when they said, "No, we're with the Washington Post," they said, "Well, we're not going to talk to you. We would talk to you if you were Fox News." So Fox News has sold this message that they are the pro-American station. Now, that means that if you're a journalist, and you criticize or you raise questions about whether American military had planned for policing Iraq, and whether they had covered not just the oil ministry but whether they had covered the Museum of Baghdad to prevent looting, suddenly you're accused of being unpatriotic. That's not unpatriotic. That's, that's Reporting 101.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In an article in The Nation, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus quoted something that Senator Eugene McCarthy once told him - that the press is a bunch of blackbirds - all are on a wire, and one will go to another wire, and when that bird doesn't get electrocuted, all the birds will go to that other wire. With a White House so secretive, and a Congress largely silent, the media were obliged to fly to those wires all on their own, while dodging charges of media bias. And only a few, Pincus among them, did. Meanwhile, the press tended to embrace what little information was at hand without much investigation. For instance, the Washington Post had to correct its initial hook, line and sinker account of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from behind enemy lines, and the New York Times conceded that in reporting on Iraqi WMD, it relied far too much on, (quote) "a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change." Facts became even more elusive in the last quarter of the president's term, because then it was all about the campaign. Despite an avalanche of fact checking by both mainstream media and the blogs, some unsubstantiated charges enjoyed undue coverage because, in reporter's slang, they were "too good to check." It was far more entertaining to air the slanders and cover them with the fig leaf of he said/she said. [NEWS INTRO MUSIC]
MAN: We begin this hour with a display of political showmanship, gamesmanship, brinksmanship that's sure to keep the swift boat flap afloat for a few more days.
WOMAN: A lot of theater here - he said, she said and so forth. You've got some angry Vietnam veterans who are angry at John Kerry…
MAN: What his fellow Vietnam guys are saying, what they experienced with him, they contradict just about every story…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Equal time offered the appearance of objectivity without its substance, but with so much time to fill, this became cable news' operating principle - so blatant over the last four years, that the ongoing argument within the news media over what constitutes objectivity has become a matter of public debate and some pretty pointed ridicule.
JON STEWART: You've seen the records, haven't you? What's your opinion?
STEPHEN COLBERT: I'm sorry? My opinion? [LAUGHTER] No, I don't have o-pin-ee-ons. [LAUGHTER] I'm a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity. You might want to look it up some day. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was from Comedy Central's Daily Show, obviously. It's worth noting that the self-styled "fake news show" has become a force to reckon with in the president's first term - not because it's fair - because it's not. Just this week, it took a John Kerry comment viciously out of context. But because it has guts. A comedy show has the freedom to call a spade a spade. Of course, sometimes it calls a spade an octopus, but for now, it's probably the best media criticism available on TV. Maybe with time, we'll get some pungent analysis without the cover of comedy.
BROOKS JACKSON: I don't despair. I just think that we've been, as journalists, outclassed by those who would spin us.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Brooks Jackson is director of Fact Check dot org - a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
BROOKS JACKSON: Whether they're elected officials or, or people seeking elective office or special interest groups, the world's just gotten to be, every year that I've been alive, a more complicated and bewildering place, and I don't think journalists' skills and the dedication of their bosses has kept up with the need to explain this world to our audiences.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even Fox News stalwart Shepard Smith sometimes found it hard to reconcile upbeat statements from the White House with the daily carnage in Iraq.
SHEPARD SMITH: We keep hearing that the situation is, is safe enough in most areas that they'll now be able to have this election. We, you know, we get so many different stories - I mean somebody out there is telling some huge lies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The news media are in a quandary. The last four years offers many examples of courageous, significant reporting. But the profession has been tarred by its widely reported failures, ranging from weak reporting in the run up to war to the botched 60 Minutes story on President Bush's National Guard service. It's the easy error - the 60 Minutes piece - that seems to have hurt the public perception of news media the most. That story has allowed the people who don't recognize the role of a free press in a democracy (among them the president, who has been surprisingly explicit on this point) to disparage the whole enterprise.
GEORGE W. BUSH: In all due respect, I'm not sure it is credible to quote leading news organizations about… Never mind. [LAUGHS] Anyway…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So is the stage set for a media even more cautious and less courageous than during the first term? As Brooks Jackson suggests, no need to despair. Congress is showing signs of life, and so many eyes are bearing down on the media now, from the blogs, from the public, from within the media themselves, that even caution, taken too far, has a price. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Next week, we'll review the four year reign of FCC Chairman Michael Powell. On Friday he announced he'd be stepping down.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The White House changing of the guard is in full swing, marked by the confirmation hearings this week for secretary of state nominee Condoleezza Rice. Another promotion of particular interest to us is that of the newly appointed White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. She's not unknown, having run communications for Bush's re-election campaign and served as Jeb Bush's press secretary.
Initial reports suggest the change might make life a little easier for White House reporters, but Washingtonian magazine national Harry Jaffe thinks the primary beneficiary will be President Bush.
HARRY JAFFE: A very, very smart move on the part of the White House. From what I've heard about Nicole, she is a genuinely nice person. She's a young woman, she's attractive, who doesn't come from the Texas group of pugnacious, we-hate-the-press point of view.
You know, we journalists are actually human beings, and dealing with us in a straightforward, kind of warmhearted kind of way actually will get the proper response, or a better response. So, I think that she understands that. And the other thing is, is that her role in the White House heretofore was to deal with the regional press.
That means that if you're the Washington Post, you might not get an interview with the president. But if you come from a radio station in Dubuque, or you work for a newspaper in, I don't know, Kansas City, and you want to come in and have an audience with the president, you're quite likely to get one.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, that was always the Bush strategy - to go past the big-timers who knew a lot and go to the regional press where it was assumed they wouldn't have the facts necessarily at their fingertips about geopolitics.
HARRY JAFFE: Who ran that part of the press operation? Nicolle Devenish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. She's made nice so far with a, a bruised and battered press. The New York Times profile, Elisabeth Bumiller's profile of Devenish was described by CJR's Campaign Desk as about as hard-hitting as an US Weekly profile of Hilary Duff. Is she going to be getting this sort of hands-off treatment, or is this just what Bumiller does?
HARRY JAFFE: You know, look - this is a game we're playing here. Elisabeth Bumiller needs information from the White House. You know, the journalists really, in this town, really would rather not get totally frozen out. They'd like to have their questions answered. Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a very sweet profile of Nicolle Devenish. Well, why not? Nicole Devenish is not walking into the situation and saying, you know, you're a bunch of slime and you know, stay out of the White House, we're not going to talk to you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. I'll tell you why not, Harry. The reason why not is because of the phenomenon in Washington called the beat sweetener. You do a lot of pieces that the White House will like, and then you can assume that the White House will talk to you. Well, it hasn't worked much in the first term, because the Bush White House spoke to practically nobody. But if this means that there's an opening, then that means there'll also be a lot more beat sweetener stories, and those aren't necessarily going to inform the public.
HARRY JAFFE: Look - this is the beginning of the dance of the second term. You know, why not sweeten the beat a little bit? You know, in talking to Harry Jaffe, let's face it, you're talking to a member of the Washington press corps. That's how the game is played here. It didn't play well in the first term, because I think that the press did a terrible job at ferreting out information leading up to the war in Iraq, so that was a major, major series of missed opportunities by the Washington press corps.
I truly believe that this second term will be different on both sides. I think that the team that the Washington Post has in place is a very, very good team. They're not willing to play footsie with the White House, and I think the same is true of the New York Times.
You know, let's not also forget the fact that we reporters can only report what the Democrats do and what the Republicans do. I just think that there is going to be much more conflict within the Republican Party, and if the troops are not going to be lockstep with what Karl Rove wants them to do, that will make great reporting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Harry, thank you very much.
HARRY JAFFE: A pleasure to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Harry Jaffe is national editor at the Washingtonian magazine.
[MUSIC] BOB GARFIELD: One journalist with no bridges to build with the current administration is syndicated columnist and TV personality Robert Novak, the so-called "Prince of Darkness." Novak has built a mini-media empire by tapping highly-placed sources for news and gossip that have won him fame, fortune and, recently, a great deal of animus after he outed undercover CIA official Valerie Plame via a politically-motivated White House leak.
The search for the leaker is the subject of a federal investigation that has earned contempt of court convictions for two prominent journalists, but so far, Novak himself plies his trade with no apparent consequences. When Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan sat with Novak recently, she wasn't even permitted to raise the Plame matter on pain of having the interview instantly canceled. She joins us now. Amy, welcome to OTM.
AMY SULLIVAN: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: First, let's discuss the Plame issue. Is he getting a free ride from his colleagues in the Washington press corps?
AMY SULLIVAN:I think, on balance, you'd have to say that he is. Bob Novak has a pretty important reputation in Washington - much of it deserved. He is still, after 40-something years of writing this column, writing three columns a week and breaking news in every single one of them. It takes a lot of work and a lot of phone calling and a lot of shoe leather reporting to do that. So, he has a well-earned reputation as a reporter.
But he has been able to coast on that through quite a few ethical slips that would, I think, do in any other reporter.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, give me some examples.
AMY SULLIVAN:One of the incidents that came up earliest in Novak's career was a quote that he reported in one of his columns and attributed it to a senator, saying that George McGovern's politics could be characterized as all about acid, amnesty and abortion, which is kind of catchy and got around town pretty quickly and was repeated by a lot of people. Turns out that nobody actually ever said that.
Another example of that was in the late '80s when he helped promote a rumor that then-house speaker Tom Foley was gay, leading eventually to Foley going in front of a national press conference and declaring that he was not, in fact, a homosexual. It was kind of a measure of Novak's column that everybody had read it and everybody started to believe it.
BOB GARFIELD: And he was subsequently defeated in his own congressional district. In your piece you also mentioned suggestions that Novak has used his column to flog books from a Washington publishing house that he has I'd say less than an arm's length relationship with.
AMY SULLIVAN:Novak's son, Alex, is the head of marketing for Regnery Publishing, which among other things is the publisher of the book by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Only after he was really pushed, he disclosed the fact that his son works there, but he has also over the past I think five or six years continued to promote and positively review Regnery books without ever disclosing the fact that the guy who owns Regnery, Tom Phillips, publishes Novak's newsletter that goes out for a subscription of almost 300 dollars a year to many subscribers.
BOB GARFIELD: Maybe most interestingly in the list of sort of eyebrow-raising incidents was his use as a source an FBI counter-espionage agent who turned out to be a spy for the Soviets. Tell me that story.
AMY SULLIVAN:Well, among many of the anti-Clinton columns that Novak ran in the 1990s, one was about Janet Reno and some FBI agents who were quite upset with Reno. One of those happened to be Robert Hansen, who we know now was later discovered to be a spy and was convicted as a traitor. It's one of the most extreme examples of Novak not being terribly discerning in who he uses as his sources.
But I think it's illustrative of the fact that he will go for the best story, regardless of whether the information is necessarily accurate and regardless of who his source is.
BOB GARFIELD: Novak once was sued for libel, and the court found in his favor because it said in its words, a columnist is entitled to the use of "reckless hyperbole" in making a case. Now, Novak is mainly a reporter. Is this court opinion just the world's best get-out-of-jail-free for someone who does a column like his?
AMY SULLIVAN:It's not a bad deal. If he's pushed on whether he really has the facts to be able to report something, then he's a reporter, and people tend to back off, because everybody knows Bob Novak has the best sources in town. On the other hand, if he's being sued for libel, as in this case, he can put on his columnist hat and say, "Come on. Give me a little license here."
BOB GARFIELD: So Bob Novak is essentially answerable to nobody. He, he doesn't have an editor, because he's an independent syndicated columnist, and he - he's the executive producer of his own TV show. If Bob Novak is playing fast and loose with journalistic ethics, what's to be done about it?
AMY SULLIVAN:Well, as you point out, there's very little that can be done, because as a syndicated columnist, he really doesn't have much of an editor for his columns. If a newspaper doesn't like it, they could ask him to change some of the, the facts in the columns, but they don't, and so their really only option is to stop running his column, and given that he's one of the five most widely read columnists in the country, they're unlikely to want to annoy their readers by dropping his column.
CNN could, in theory, crack down when he says things on it that are not necessarily backed up by fact or sources, but he's one of the staples of their conservative programming particularly. He's been on CNN since the very first weekend it started, and they're proud of him.
BOB GARFIELD: Respond to my assertion. I believe that there are 360 newspaper editors who continue to run his column who have a lot to answer for. Do you agree?
AMY SULLIVAN:I think the fact that Novak continues to be run in 360 newspapers more than a year after this column ran printing Valerie Plame's name and that virtually no one has raised any questions about the propriety of what he did is surprising and quite disappointing. It's hard to think of another reporter or another columnist in American journalism who would be able to do something like this and then not be questioned on it.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Amy, thank you very much.
AMY SULLIVAN: Thank you. It's my pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: Amy Sullivan is an editor of the Washington Monthly. Her piece about Robert Novak was titled Bob in Paradise.
[MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Novak is just one, albeit very loud, voice in a media market now exploding with voices all talking to each other. That's a new development, but also a very old one, according to National Journal reporter William Powers. In the 19th Century, America was awash in biased newspapers, and that's what built our democracy. "Now," he writes in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, "newfangled niche marketing will pick up where those papers left off, after the long dry spell of consensus fueled by mainstream media." "It is," he says, "the oldest American paradox. Nothing unifies like individualism."
WILLIAM POWERS: Exactly. What happened in the 19th Century, Brooke, thanks in part to actually government policies, you had this amazing flowering of the newspaper culture in America. There were newspapers everywhere. There were hundreds and hundreds and thousands of them, and that continued right through that period, and my argument is that those newspapers, in a very real way, sort of taught us how to listen to each other and how to live with a diversity of opinions, and in a way, to be a stronger democracy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, technology, it seems, had the initial impact of bringing us all together in front of the little screen. Now, with cable TV and satellite radio and especially the internet, it's dividing us up again. So, is this all about technology in the end?
WILLIAM POWERS: No, it's not. The media tend to mirror broader things that are happening in the culture, so in the 19th Century, you had this incredible diverse flowering of political parties - the Whigs, the Know Nothing, the Free Soil, the Republican - they all arose in the 19th Century. And that was actually mirrored in the press, many of which were kind of wholly owned subsidiaries of parties, actually, and you had this media political sort of mirror image happening.
The same thing happened in the middle of the 20th Century, just as we got out of World War II and entered the Cold War period, and this broad sort of cultural establishment formed in the '50s. You had this real sort of one establishment voice that appeared in the form of those networks and became in a way a kind of pater familias for our culture, and finally, you know, took the shape of Walter Cronkite.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Right. Our universal uncle. I do buy the idea that the media mirror the political trends in the country, but you also had a limited resource - the broadcast frequencies - and so did regulation play a role?
WILLIAM POWERS: Regulation played a role. The networks were regulated in terms of content. I mean there was a real movement toward safer discourse and a more centralized kind of forum for argument. It was never specific - you know, we are a democracy, and you could go on the air and you were free to say a lot of things, but there was also kind of for business reasons and also for like regulatory reasons there was a kind of a weeding out of anything that felt sort of radical - you were trying to reach the broad middle - and that's how those networks became sort of the voice of the mainstream.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here's a bead that I thought you drew very interestingly in your piece, when you suggest that this business model that called for a centrist attitude and a political climate that seemed to demand it, was how we ended up with this cult of objectivity that you say was a short-lived phenomenon.
WILLIAM POWERS: Thanks to people like the Washington journalist Walter Lippmann, people began encouraging the idea of objectivity in journalism as an ideal that you could reach. That jibed very nicely with the rise of these powerful networks, because they had set themselves up as these authority figures, and now they were saying not only are we authority figures, but we can find some kind of objective truth. And this is how it appeared, and it became a very powerful force.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah, but where does it stand today? It seems that objectivity has taken quite a hit. In fact most of us, me included, don't believe it really can exist. The best you can be is fair.
WILLIAM POWERS: No, I agree, and that's what I think is one of the salutary effects of the niche media. The niche media offer you all these options - all kinds of variance on the truth - some of which are openly not even pretending to be objective, and many of which are actually seeking still to be objective, and all competing for attention.
And the idea is that, as in the 19th Century, it's an education about other points of view. The establishment media of the 20th Century gave us the illusion that we all agreed in these centrist points of view, when we didn't. I mean in a way, they were ironing out some of the most interesting differences in our society.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're right. We had a very narrow range of opinion then. But I wonder whether it isn't even narrower now and more extreme, because unlike the early days of our democracy, you can go through your whole life picking just one or two media outlets, and you don't hear what anybody else says. Back in the old days, we literally had public squares. Now, we all live in our individual bubbles.
And I know you spoke to scholars who told you that this is how it was back in the early days of revolutionary America. We spoke to a scholar, Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and he says that the echo chambers we live in today actually foster extremism, because people only talking to themselves echo back the most extreme views. We don't inform each other at all. We're able, because of technology, to ignore each other completely.
WILLIAM POWERS: I don't know if I agree with that, Brooke. I mean first of all, the jury is still out. I could be dead wrong. But I think that if you look back at that 19th Century period, I would argue that people had less access then to other people's views, because they were living in relative isolation from each other. There was no TV screen where you could switch back and forth, and if you were a Fox person, you could at least come across what was being said on CNN by using the clicker.
And there's no evidence that people are sticking on one channel and just staying there. In fact, what I think is that ideologues at this moment, people who do tend toward one side or the other, are in a moment of kind of elated fascination with the idea that there are media channels that look and feel just like them, because it's something we haven't had in our lifetimes. It's a brand new thing.
I do believe that the novelty of that is going to wear off, because everybody gets tired of themselves.
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, I wish that were true, Bill. That's not my experience. But we just don't know yet, do we?
WILLIAM POWERS: Well, could I add one more thought?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sure.
WILLIAM POWERS:I also think that, to believe that niche-driven media are going to fail, in my opinion, is not to have faith in human nature, because media channels are just a reflection of the people who start them up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Define failure.
WILLIAM POWERS: Failure would be the world that you limned - that we are all in our little pods and never hear each other. That would not be the kind of democracy I want to live in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Bill, thank you very much.
WILLIAM POWERS: Thank you, Brooke. Good to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Powers' story The Massless Media is in the current edition of the Atlantic Monthly.
[MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, analog audiotape passes from the scene, with some sorrow. So do rock critics over 50. Sorrow? Mmmm-not so much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In a recent piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, David Hiltbrand observed that U2, soon to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hasn't put out a decent album since Achtung Baby in 1991, even though the critics have propelled its latest release up the charts.
"I'll let you in on a little secret," he writes. "Under their cynical crusts, music critics are a remarkably nostalgic breed. Over and over you'll find them fulsomely praising the newest release from faded heroes such as REM, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Prince or Elvis Costello." "Their loyalty is a disservice to consumers," he goes on, "because, swayed by their enthusiasm, we go out and plunk down some serious coinage for yet another stale and dreary disappointment."
That's pretty brutal, but our reporter Brian Wise suggests that you save your pity for the aging critics, because they don't even have a hall of fame.
[MUSIC CLIP: "BROWN SUGAR"]
BRIAN WISE: Rock critic Larry Nager had just turned 50 last January when he was fired from his job at the Cincinnati Enquirer. The paper claimed that he wasn't being aggressive enough in his reporting, but Nager believes that his age was an expiration date in a business obsessed with youth.
LARRY NAGER: Turning 50 was not a problem, but being unemployed and turning 50 - terminated without a dime in severance pay - I mean, after 8 years and after - I mean, Best of the Enquirer for the entire year of 2000, and then I need to be escorted out of the building?
BRIAN WISE: Nager also contends that he was discriminated against not only for his age, but also for his gender.
LARRY NAGER: There were literal signs that the Enquirer was trying to attract a younger and more female readership. There were signs posted in the newsroom: Remember the Ladies - Think Women 18 to 34 - and we were instructed to write with women in mind - to get as many women in our stories as we could. And then it went further than that in the belief, apparently, that only young female writers could attract young female readers, which I feel is incredibly condescending and patronizing to young women.
[ROCK MUSIC CLIP]
BRIAN WISE: Nager is suing the Enquirer for age and gender discrimination. His lawsuit asks for his job back as well as compensatory and punitive damages. Enquirer editor Tom Callinan declined to comment for this story, citing the pending suit.
Nager's case is not unique. In 2002, San Francisco Chronicle senior music critic Joel Selvin was a 30 year veteran of the paper when he was re-assigned to a staff writer job and re-instated only after extensive negotiations with the paper. And in 2000, Richard Harrington, a 57 year old music critic for the Washington Post, was re-assigned to a part-time position, prompting an age discrimination suit that was eventually settled out of court.
RICHARD HARRINGTON: You know, if you've committed yourself to being a music journalist for a long period of time, there's nothing usually to suggest you're ready to call it quits.
JIM DeROGATIS: I think there are older critics at established papers who - it's almost as if, you know, their job has been given to them by divine right.
BRIAN WISE: Jim DeRogatis is the pop music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. He says that age matters less than one's enthusiasm.
JIM DeROGATIS: I've seen 22 year old reporters who are no longer doing their job, and I've seen 62 year old reporters who are no longer doing their job, and it comes down to a certain fire in the belly. I don't think you have to know who the Rolling Stones are. You could be completely clueless before you get the assignment to go see that concert, but you will go in as a prepared journalist, and you will find out who they are, and if you're a good listener, and I trust you as a writer and a critic and a listener, I know you're going to come back with something interesting.
[ROCK MUSIC CLIP - BRITNEY SPEARS]
BRIAN WISE: So what causes this divide between older male critics and younger music consumers, if not age?
[CLIP PLAYS] Some say it's the gender gap. Evelyn McDonnell is the pop music critic at the Miami Herald. She says the music industry, in promoting acts like Britney Spears and 'N Sync acknowledges the fact that young women have become the most influential music consumers.
EVELYN McDONNELL: Certainly the success of Britney Spears or of 'N Sync, which were the biggest records of the last several years, could never have happened without the female market, and you know, I think that was a wakeup call.
ASHLEE SIMPSON:
[SINGING] ON A MONDAY
I AM WAITING,
TUESDAY,
I AM WAITING…
BRIAN WISE: Others say the problem has to do with the biases that a critic forms during his or her younger years. Roger Catlin was the music critic of the Hartford Courant from 1988 to 2002. During his time on the music beat, he found himself frequently at odds with audiences when he criticized artists who would lip sync on stage.
[CLIP OF SIMPSON SINGING]
ROGER CATLIN: There was a period there where the music that was popular with young people was music that was not popular with critics, and that had to do with - they were pop stars, and they were cute, and you know, I'd write about lip-synching all the time, and the fans of the artists wouldn't really care about it, and…
BRIAN WISE: This divide between a critic and his subject can work both ways. Think about the younger critics who are increasingly forced to cover geriatric rockers like the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney or Simon and Garfunkel, all in an attempt to capture aging Baby Boomers. Still, it's up to every music critic to recognize his or her own personal moment of truth. Roger Catlin.
ROGER CATLIN: There were some, just some strange scenarios. I mean I remember one being at a, at a club where a band, a young band was playing, and they stopped and said - "Oh, our parents are here. We want to introduce them," And all the kids clapped, and I saw the parents and I saw, I saw that I was older than the parents, too. So there's these points where you find yourself in a room of rock and roll, and you suddenly feel very self-conscious that you're the oldest person in the building.
BRIAN WISE: Catlin now covers TV for the Courant, and he isn't planning a comeback tour as a music critic any time soon. For On the Media, I'm Brian Wise.
BOB GARFIELD: If you're older than 15, and you have ears, then analog tape has probably defined the way you've heard recorded sound. Your favorite albums, the dialogue and score in your favorite films, radio shows like this one - even data from your favorite space shuttle missions - all have been captured on analog magnetic tape. It's been the standard since World War II, but gradually it's been overtaken by cheaper digital technology.
And so, almost inevitably, on December 31st, the last tape manufacturer, Quantegy, filed for bankruptcy and abruptly closed its doors. As far as anyone knows, it represents the end of a medium. Musicians like the indy band Wilco felt the loss immediately. They continue to rely on analog tape for the warmth and richness they say it conveys, and they found unlikely company with NASA, which is stockpiling the same tape for use on the space shuttle.
Culture maven Rick Karr has been watching analog tape's slow demise. He joins us once again. Rick, welcome back.
RICK KARR: Bob, it's always a pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: Very briefly, tell me the entire history of magnetic tape.
[LAUGHTER] How did it come to be so much the standard?
RICK KARR:Well, it was way better than what came before it. The kind of analog magnetic tape that we've been using until recently really came about in the 1940s. It was the Germans during World War II who perfected it, and the reason that it was great was, number one, it sounded better than anything we had prior to that that could record sound. That would have been wax cylinders or shellacked discs. Number two, you could record for a long time. I mean you could just put reel after reel after reel up and keep going, so you could record an entire symphony in one go. And third, you could eliminate mistakes. You could just use a razor blade, and suddenly mistakes disappeared from musical recordings.
So for all these reasons, by the late 1940s, early 1950s, when these machines and this tape were available in the United States, the old ways of recording direct to discs were pretty much dead at that point.
BOB GARFIELD: So, not to belabor the obvious, but why is it going away? If it's so great, why has it been so universally replaced by digital technology?
RICK KARR: Well, because the digital stuff is in some ways greater. I mean I've seen 14 year olds with Apple ibooks making records in their bedrooms that sound better than the kinds of things that you could do on hundreds of dollars of analog equipment 15, 20 years ago.
Why spend money on a tape machine? If you run a facility that's making radio commercials, there's no reason for you to maintain a tape machine any more. You just give everybody a computer and let them do all the work right there on their desktop.
BOB GARFIELD: There's some audiophiles who believe, despite the ubiquity of digital, despite its ease of use, despite its low cost, despite all of its advantages, they can still tell the difference between an analog recording and a digital recording. Are they imagining that? Are they sentimentalizing old technology? Or is there some there, there?
RICK KARR: There are a couple of things going on there. I mean first of all, what you have to remember is that as recording technologies have evolved through history, there have always been people who have looked at the new technology and said the old stuff was better.
Having said that, it's really easy to tell when somebody has made a bad or even a mediocre digital recording. In the typical recording studio these days that's recording, say, rock or country or jazz, they're using a combination of both - so you can't necessarily tell what's what - some of it's analog, some of it's digital - because analog's better at some things, like recording a drum kit - a drummer playing full blast sounds great on this 2 inch analog tape; it's a little harder and a little more expensive to get all the gear that makes it sound good in the digital domain.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, in fairness to the Luddites, there are some storage issues in digital recordings, because the standards keep changing. Analog standard has never changed, so we - is that a reason to start hoarding audiotape, or will that soon take care of itself?
RICK KARR: Whether it'll take care of itself or not is still an open question, and, I mean, you're absolutely right - I mean, we don't know - we've been using analog recording tape for 60 years. We know that that stuff is stable. We know that it works. The digital stuff? Yeah, there are issues with that. DVD-Rs and CD-Rs decay over time.
The thing is that the price of the digital stuff is so much lower now, and so for a lot of production, it's much better to just have it all on a computer. You can save that money. So yeah, there is something to be said for those preservation issues in the analog domain, but, but I think that that doesn't really outweigh, for most people, the advantages of digital.
BOB GARFIELD: To the layman out there, or even the music enthusiast, does the death of magnetic tape mean anything? Will anyone even notice?
RICK KARR: It is the end of an era. I mean there's a story about an announcer on the Bing Crosby Show who pluralized a word that he shouldn't have pluralized, and one of the engineers said "Don't worry; I can take care of that." And he took the tape - this was the first taped radio show in the history of broadcasting in the US anyway - and he just took a razor blade, and he cut out the "S" - and he played back the tape and the announcer said "Oh, my god - this is a miracle. We don't have to go back and re-do that whole segment." And he carried around that little piece of tape in his pocket, because it was such a miracle to him.
So, we can't over-estimate how amazingly influential this was in the early days. That said, I don't think most people are going to hear it these days.
Final point here: Let's not necessarily assume that the analog tape is going away. Quantegy has filed for chapter 11; they've closed this plant in Opelika, Alabama. But chapter 11, as we know from what we've seen in the airline industry, doesn't mean the end. There is actually an investor who's trying to put together a group of investors to buy the Opelika plant. It's certainly fading. It's certainly a specialty product, but it's probably got another good 10, 20 years of life in it.
BOB GARFIELD: Oh, well, in that case-never mind. Rick, thanks.
RICK KARR: You're quite welcome, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Rick Karr is developing a book and documentary television series called Techno Pop: How Technology Makes and UnMakes Popular Music from Bach to Britney and Beyond.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: While we were watching the inauguration Thursday, we heard a sound effect in a commercial:
[MUSIC UNDER]
WOMAN: Pookie-Pie - do I look fat in these? Hm?
[RECORD SCRATCH]
MAN: Need a moment?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Actually, we're always hearing it in commercials. It seems that the public appetite for this sound effect-
[RECORD SCRATCH] does not in any way with the public's appetite for vinyl records. Vinyl, like tape, is nearly dead. Only the record scratch endures, a phenomenon Mike Pesca reported years ago (with different commercials.)
MIKE PESCA: In a Bud Lite commercial that's currently airing, a young couple walk into a jewelry store, and the woman falls in love with a diamond ring. Just as the guy starts to think about how much this'll set him back, he is distracted. What's this?
[ELECTRIC GUITAR MUSIC UNDER]
WOMAN: You're fantastic.
MIKE PESCA: Beckoning to him, through the window, is a beautiful woman holding a bottle of Bud Lite. "Do you mean me?!" his gestures say. The beautiful woman crooks a finger. The guy is drawn to her cold-filtered siren song. He can't believe it. This sort of stuff NEVER happens to--
MAN:
[SHOUTING] Guy-- [RECORD SCRATCH] Who's the guy?! Who's-a this guy?
ANNOUNCER: For the great taste that won't fill you up and never lets you down.
MIKE PESCA: Oh - No. The woman wasn't beckoning to him at all. The guy is now forced to buy his fiancee a bigger diamond, and the cue that his world was about to lose all color, cut and clarity?
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH] The sound effect which says, "Whoa! Wait a minute."
NBC's promo department seems particularly in thrall of the record scratch.
[ELECTRIC GUITAR MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: Tuesday on an all-new Frasier, Daphne's back, and Niles has big news!
NILES: We're going to consummate our relationship!
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH]
FRASIER: What?!
[LAUGHTER] Oh!
MIKE PESCA: And for Saturday Night Live--
[MELLOW MUSIC UNDER]
ANNOUNCER: And now something every mother wants to hear--
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH]
WOMAN: I was just getting acupuncture on my rwah!
[LAUGHTER]
ANNOUNCER: It's the new Saturday Night Live--
MIKE PESCA: Then there's this spot for AT&T where two teenage boys need a ride home after a Destiny's Child concert.
WOMAN: Hop on in, guys!
MIKE PESCA: And who pulls up in an abandoned parking lot, but the band itself?
[DESTINY'S CHILD SINGING]
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH]
MAN: File this under - Never. Need a ride?
MIKE PESCA: Come on, kids -- get real! Destiny's Child giving you a ride home in their limo, and, on top of that, their hit single's being played off of vinyl? According to Record Industry Association of America statistics, vinyl records account for less than one percent of all recorded music sold.
But according to Baker Smith, the director of the Destiny's Child ad, commercials use record screeches and scratches like they're going out of style, which of course they are.
BAKER SMITH: We always know, you know, at the end of the meeting - we haven't cracked it - someone goes well, we can always put a record scratch on it! Ah! Good job Bob! Way to go, Fred. Sort of congratulate ourselves and-- it's going to be funny now -- and move on.
MIKE PESCA: Even after he decides to use the record scratch, Smith still has choices.
BAKER SMITH: There's different ones. There's that Rrrrrrt. There's that Rrrrrrit! You know, there's Kkkrrrrrrk! (I feel very passionate about the record scratch.)
[RECORD SCRATCH]
JOHN ABOUD: I mean it's very rare that I'm writing anything that couldn't benefit from a vinyl record scratch.
MIKE PESCA: John Aboud is co-founder of modern humorists dot com. One place Aboud used the scratch - actually he admitted it was the only place - was on a project for Microsoft. To Aboud, the record scratch harkens to days gone by.
JOHN ABOUD: It wasn't uncommon at the turn of the century for a, a, a, pair of lovers to be dancing to a phonograph in their parlor, when the jilted suitor would burst into the room and, you know, rip the needle off the phonograph, and the lovers' reverie would be interrupted by this, you know, brutish thug, and that was a classic symbol that carried on into many of our cartoons, many of our commercials. It's part of our collective unconscious.
MIKE PESCA: Aboud's jilted suitor scenario supposes the record is a 78 being played on a Victrola; hardly a reference for the average Destiny's Child fan. I asked real live teenagers Niasia Hoskins and Charmayne Satler what they thought the sound effect was.
YOUNG WOMAN: A recording that just stopped, like-- Rrrrrp! [LAUGHS] You know.
MIKE PESCA: What is that sound?
YOUNG WOMAN: I have no idea. [LAUGHS]
MIKE PESCA: You don't know what that sound is?
YOUNG WOMAN: What? A recording stopping?
MIKE PESCA: Yeah.
YOUNG WOMAN: A recording stopping. [LAUGHS]
[LAUGHTER]
MIKE PESCA: So what would produce that rrrrrip?
YOUNG WOMAN: Oh - pausing the-- the, the tape or the recording? I don't -- I don't know.
MIKE PESCA: What about-- like a vinyl record?
YOUNG WOMAN: I know I saw it on TV - makes that noise.
MIKE PESCA: Have you ever seen that in real life?
YOUNG WOMAN: I don't think so.
MIKE PESCA: As media moves towards extinction, it leaves artifacts behind. We listen to a "dial tone" before we "dial" the phone even though almost all phones are made with buttons. The record scratch was once an annoying consequence of misusing the medium, but now -- it's genuine music.
[RECORD SCRATCH MUSIC]
[GROUP OF FANS CHEERING] When it comes to vinyl, it may be that the only thing that avoids the slag heap of history is the slag itself.
[ENERGETIC RECORD SCRATCHING] For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.
[FANS CHEERING]
[RECORD SCRATCH MUSIC]
[THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Anne Kosseff, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had editing help from Susanna Dilliplane. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcasts at onthemedia.org -- and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. The inauguration Thursday was a chance for Americans to experience life -- in a monarchy [MUSIC: GOD SAVE THE QUEEN] [RECORD SCRATCH] -- American style. [MUSIC: HAIL TO THE CHIEF] Though TV news producers appeared to be working off the same shot list they had used for President Reagan's funeral, the anchors were divided on the appropriate tone. Some treated it like the Oscars…
COMMENTATOR: She had on a beautiful white ensemble by Oscar de la Renta.
BOB GARFIELD: Still others, like NBC's Al Roker, a hometown Parade.
AL ROKER: [SHOUTING] How you feeling, Mr. President? You feeling good? [PEOPLE CHEERING, SHOUTING, WHISTLING] Yeah, the weather's good, sir.
BOB GARFIELD: It was easy to miss, but we did notice small pockets of journalism - not on the cable news channels, but in the coverage of Peter, Dan and Brian. Guests included former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who gave the rare critical commentary on the president's speech, and there was even a piece about the power of Washington lobbyists.
WOMAN: Inaugural week has become a celebration of both democracy and of deep corporate pockets.
BOB GARFIELD: But there was no real news. This was just our quadrennial American coronation. Still, at a real coronation, people do not organize to turn their backs on the queen. At a real coronation, people don't hold up signs saying, "Hitler was democratically elected, too." Despite TV's passion for pomp and ceremony, it was all a little untidy -- in the American style. BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, with the inauguration, an invigorated news media readies itself for a second term. May it be better than the coverage of the first term. Never has media behavior been more closely scrutinized than it has these past four years - sliced and diced by all and sundry like a frog in a high school biology class. But in this case, the frog was alive during the procedure, and even apologized when its less savory innards were exposed. Most unappetizing to many media critics: a press initially hamstrung by an aloof president with a questionable mandate; then by an aloof president with wars to wage. Just weeks after the 2001 inauguration, reporter Greg Palast was covering the disenfranchisement of thousands of African American voters in Florida for the liberal British paper The Guardian. "Where," he asked, "was the American press?"
GREG PALAST: What's missing in the US, frankly, is more courage. Once the governor of Florida says, "I did nothing. These allegations are baloney," to them, story closed. Good night. See you tomorrow. That's it. That's American news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Courage and caution - the yin and yang of good reporting - often fell out of balance in the coverage of the president's first term -- nudged towards caution by the September 11th attacks. Right after 9/11, polls showed public respect for journalists soaring to new heights, but then it plunged again, according to Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.
ANDREW KOHUT: On patriotism, and on a number of values -- professionalism, morality - the media has taken some very big hits.
BILL MAHER: We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away - that's cowardly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: After uttering those words on the now-defunct Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher lost his advertisers, and then his entire program. It's hard to quantify a chilling effect, but subsequent events suggest that mainstream media were growing fearful, not only of terrorists - remember the anthrax attacks at NBC? - but also of their own audiences and advertisers. During the Afghanistan war, then-chairman of CNN Walter Isaacson, ordered his staff to exercise caution in its images of civilian suffering, (quote) "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields, and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people." And then Phil Donahue's short-lived MSNBC talk show was killed, ostensibly because of low ratings, though they were the highest on the channel. Rick Ellis, who runs a website called All Your TV dot com, got hold of a revealing NBC internal report, though how influential it was, no one can say.
RICK ELLIS: I can quote a couple of sentences from it that "Donohue presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war," and that there was a fear that Donohue's show might become a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: War coverage provided the media's biggest breakthrough and their greatest controversy. Like every American military operation after Vietnam, the Afghanistan war was virtually unreported, because reporters were barred from the field of battle. Then the Pentagon proposed embedding reporters with the troops. Military historian Major Roger Bateman.
ROGER BATE
MAN: It's great to get reporters down there where they can't help but fall in love with our soldiers. These are 18, 19 year old kids from the Bronx, and from Nebraska, and you know, plucks at some heart strings.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Reporters would be assigned to units, but they would lose their places if they left to cover the war from the other side. Some embeds went native immediately, like CNN Reporter Walter Rodgers. Notice the personal pronoun.
WALTER RODGERS: So we pulled back for that, and as I say, when we were pulling back, we could see the area we had fought through two and a half days ago, and when we pulled back, there were lots of…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Others, like NPR's John Burnett, recognized that it was something of a Faustian bargain, but better than nothing, as long as there were reporters placed to tell the rest of the story. But there were only a handful of unembedded reporters, and they could not move freely in Iraq.
JOHN BURNETT: And I think that's been a mistake in the coverage of this war. The importance of going back to the places that the Marines charged through and find out what were behind the smiling faces, and the importance of finding out where the bombs hit was really driven home to me just by happenstance, really. I stopped in to a small village which had been bombed by the US Air Force - 30 men, women and children were killed in their beds, as they slept.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was some fine newspaper reporting from Iraqi towns and villages, but many Americans relied on cable for war news. If it was unbalanced, the fault lay not with the embeds, but with editors and producers who could have supplemented their coverage, but often chose not to. The reason suggested by Ken Auletta, media writer for the New Yorker, is that Fox News was setting the agenda.
KEN AULETTA: The American flag in the, in the left corner of the screen, and it became America's network. I had a fair number of stories about soldiers in Iraq, American soldiers, saying to people - "Are you with Fox News?" and saying, when they said, "No, we're with the Washington Post," they said, "Well, we're not going to talk to you. We would talk to you if you were Fox News." So Fox News has sold this message that they are the pro-American station. Now, that means that if you're a journalist, and you criticize or you raise questions about whether American military had planned for policing Iraq, and whether they had covered not just the oil ministry but whether they had covered the Museum of Baghdad to prevent looting, suddenly you're accused of being unpatriotic. That's not unpatriotic. That's, that's Reporting 101.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In an article in The Nation, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus quoted something that Senator Eugene McCarthy once told him - that the press is a bunch of blackbirds - all are on a wire, and one will go to another wire, and when that bird doesn't get electrocuted, all the birds will go to that other wire. With a White House so secretive, and a Congress largely silent, the media were obliged to fly to those wires all on their own, while dodging charges of media bias. And only a few, Pincus among them, did. Meanwhile, the press tended to embrace what little information was at hand without much investigation. For instance, the Washington Post had to correct its initial hook, line and sinker account of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from behind enemy lines, and the New York Times conceded that in reporting on Iraqi WMD, it relied far too much on, (quote) "a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change." Facts became even more elusive in the last quarter of the president's term, because then it was all about the campaign. Despite an avalanche of fact checking by both mainstream media and the blogs, some unsubstantiated charges enjoyed undue coverage because, in reporter's slang, they were "too good to check." It was far more entertaining to air the slanders and cover them with the fig leaf of he said/she said. [NEWS INTRO MUSIC]
MAN: We begin this hour with a display of political showmanship, gamesmanship, brinksmanship that's sure to keep the swift boat flap afloat for a few more days.
WOMAN: A lot of theater here - he said, she said and so forth. You've got some angry Vietnam veterans who are angry at John Kerry…
MAN: What his fellow Vietnam guys are saying, what they experienced with him, they contradict just about every story…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Equal time offered the appearance of objectivity without its substance, but with so much time to fill, this became cable news' operating principle - so blatant over the last four years, that the ongoing argument within the news media over what constitutes objectivity has become a matter of public debate and some pretty pointed ridicule.
JON STEWART: You've seen the records, haven't you? What's your opinion?
STEPHEN COLBERT: I'm sorry? My opinion? [LAUGHTER] No, I don't have o-pin-ee-ons. [LAUGHTER] I'm a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity. You might want to look it up some day. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was from Comedy Central's Daily Show, obviously. It's worth noting that the self-styled "fake news show" has become a force to reckon with in the president's first term - not because it's fair - because it's not. Just this week, it took a John Kerry comment viciously out of context. But because it has guts. A comedy show has the freedom to call a spade a spade. Of course, sometimes it calls a spade an octopus, but for now, it's probably the best media criticism available on TV. Maybe with time, we'll get some pungent analysis without the cover of comedy.
BROOKS JACKSON: I don't despair. I just think that we've been, as journalists, outclassed by those who would spin us.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Brooks Jackson is director of Fact Check dot org - a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
BROOKS JACKSON: Whether they're elected officials or, or people seeking elective office or special interest groups, the world's just gotten to be, every year that I've been alive, a more complicated and bewildering place, and I don't think journalists' skills and the dedication of their bosses has kept up with the need to explain this world to our audiences.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even Fox News stalwart Shepard Smith sometimes found it hard to reconcile upbeat statements from the White House with the daily carnage in Iraq.
SHEPARD SMITH: We keep hearing that the situation is, is safe enough in most areas that they'll now be able to have this election. We, you know, we get so many different stories - I mean somebody out there is telling some huge lies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The news media are in a quandary. The last four years offers many examples of courageous, significant reporting. But the profession has been tarred by its widely reported failures, ranging from weak reporting in the run up to war to the botched 60 Minutes story on President Bush's National Guard service. It's the easy error - the 60 Minutes piece - that seems to have hurt the public perception of news media the most. That story has allowed the people who don't recognize the role of a free press in a democracy (among them the president, who has been surprisingly explicit on this point) to disparage the whole enterprise.
GEORGE W. BUSH: In all due respect, I'm not sure it is credible to quote leading news organizations about… Never mind. [LAUGHS] Anyway…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So is the stage set for a media even more cautious and less courageous than during the first term? As Brooks Jackson suggests, no need to despair. Congress is showing signs of life, and so many eyes are bearing down on the media now, from the blogs, from the public, from within the media themselves, that even caution, taken too far, has a price. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Next week, we'll review the four year reign of FCC Chairman Michael Powell. On Friday he announced he'd be stepping down.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The White House changing of the guard is in full swing, marked by the confirmation hearings this week for secretary of state nominee Condoleezza Rice. Another promotion of particular interest to us is that of the newly appointed White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. She's not unknown, having run communications for Bush's re-election campaign and served as Jeb Bush's press secretary.
Initial reports suggest the change might make life a little easier for White House reporters, but Washingtonian magazine national Harry Jaffe thinks the primary beneficiary will be President Bush.
HARRY JAFFE: A very, very smart move on the part of the White House. From what I've heard about Nicole, she is a genuinely nice person. She's a young woman, she's attractive, who doesn't come from the Texas group of pugnacious, we-hate-the-press point of view.
You know, we journalists are actually human beings, and dealing with us in a straightforward, kind of warmhearted kind of way actually will get the proper response, or a better response. So, I think that she understands that. And the other thing is, is that her role in the White House heretofore was to deal with the regional press.
That means that if you're the Washington Post, you might not get an interview with the president. But if you come from a radio station in Dubuque, or you work for a newspaper in, I don't know, Kansas City, and you want to come in and have an audience with the president, you're quite likely to get one.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, that was always the Bush strategy - to go past the big-timers who knew a lot and go to the regional press where it was assumed they wouldn't have the facts necessarily at their fingertips about geopolitics.
HARRY JAFFE: Who ran that part of the press operation? Nicolle Devenish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. She's made nice so far with a, a bruised and battered press. The New York Times profile, Elisabeth Bumiller's profile of Devenish was described by CJR's Campaign Desk as about as hard-hitting as an US Weekly profile of Hilary Duff. Is she going to be getting this sort of hands-off treatment, or is this just what Bumiller does?
HARRY JAFFE: You know, look - this is a game we're playing here. Elisabeth Bumiller needs information from the White House. You know, the journalists really, in this town, really would rather not get totally frozen out. They'd like to have their questions answered. Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a very sweet profile of Nicolle Devenish. Well, why not? Nicole Devenish is not walking into the situation and saying, you know, you're a bunch of slime and you know, stay out of the White House, we're not going to talk to you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. I'll tell you why not, Harry. The reason why not is because of the phenomenon in Washington called the beat sweetener. You do a lot of pieces that the White House will like, and then you can assume that the White House will talk to you. Well, it hasn't worked much in the first term, because the Bush White House spoke to practically nobody. But if this means that there's an opening, then that means there'll also be a lot more beat sweetener stories, and those aren't necessarily going to inform the public.
HARRY JAFFE: Look - this is the beginning of the dance of the second term. You know, why not sweeten the beat a little bit? You know, in talking to Harry Jaffe, let's face it, you're talking to a member of the Washington press corps. That's how the game is played here. It didn't play well in the first term, because I think that the press did a terrible job at ferreting out information leading up to the war in Iraq, so that was a major, major series of missed opportunities by the Washington press corps.
I truly believe that this second term will be different on both sides. I think that the team that the Washington Post has in place is a very, very good team. They're not willing to play footsie with the White House, and I think the same is true of the New York Times.
You know, let's not also forget the fact that we reporters can only report what the Democrats do and what the Republicans do. I just think that there is going to be much more conflict within the Republican Party, and if the troops are not going to be lockstep with what Karl Rove wants them to do, that will make great reporting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Harry, thank you very much.
HARRY JAFFE: A pleasure to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Harry Jaffe is national editor at the Washingtonian magazine.
[MUSIC] BOB GARFIELD: One journalist with no bridges to build with the current administration is syndicated columnist and TV personality Robert Novak, the so-called "Prince of Darkness." Novak has built a mini-media empire by tapping highly-placed sources for news and gossip that have won him fame, fortune and, recently, a great deal of animus after he outed undercover CIA official Valerie Plame via a politically-motivated White House leak.
The search for the leaker is the subject of a federal investigation that has earned contempt of court convictions for two prominent journalists, but so far, Novak himself plies his trade with no apparent consequences. When Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan sat with Novak recently, she wasn't even permitted to raise the Plame matter on pain of having the interview instantly canceled. She joins us now. Amy, welcome to OTM.
AMY SULLIVAN: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: First, let's discuss the Plame issue. Is he getting a free ride from his colleagues in the Washington press corps?
AMY SULLIVAN:I think, on balance, you'd have to say that he is. Bob Novak has a pretty important reputation in Washington - much of it deserved. He is still, after 40-something years of writing this column, writing three columns a week and breaking news in every single one of them. It takes a lot of work and a lot of phone calling and a lot of shoe leather reporting to do that. So, he has a well-earned reputation as a reporter.
But he has been able to coast on that through quite a few ethical slips that would, I think, do in any other reporter.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, give me some examples.
AMY SULLIVAN:One of the incidents that came up earliest in Novak's career was a quote that he reported in one of his columns and attributed it to a senator, saying that George McGovern's politics could be characterized as all about acid, amnesty and abortion, which is kind of catchy and got around town pretty quickly and was repeated by a lot of people. Turns out that nobody actually ever said that.
Another example of that was in the late '80s when he helped promote a rumor that then-house speaker Tom Foley was gay, leading eventually to Foley going in front of a national press conference and declaring that he was not, in fact, a homosexual. It was kind of a measure of Novak's column that everybody had read it and everybody started to believe it.
BOB GARFIELD: And he was subsequently defeated in his own congressional district. In your piece you also mentioned suggestions that Novak has used his column to flog books from a Washington publishing house that he has I'd say less than an arm's length relationship with.
AMY SULLIVAN:Novak's son, Alex, is the head of marketing for Regnery Publishing, which among other things is the publisher of the book by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Only after he was really pushed, he disclosed the fact that his son works there, but he has also over the past I think five or six years continued to promote and positively review Regnery books without ever disclosing the fact that the guy who owns Regnery, Tom Phillips, publishes Novak's newsletter that goes out for a subscription of almost 300 dollars a year to many subscribers.
BOB GARFIELD: Maybe most interestingly in the list of sort of eyebrow-raising incidents was his use as a source an FBI counter-espionage agent who turned out to be a spy for the Soviets. Tell me that story.
AMY SULLIVAN:Well, among many of the anti-Clinton columns that Novak ran in the 1990s, one was about Janet Reno and some FBI agents who were quite upset with Reno. One of those happened to be Robert Hansen, who we know now was later discovered to be a spy and was convicted as a traitor. It's one of the most extreme examples of Novak not being terribly discerning in who he uses as his sources.
But I think it's illustrative of the fact that he will go for the best story, regardless of whether the information is necessarily accurate and regardless of who his source is.
BOB GARFIELD: Novak once was sued for libel, and the court found in his favor because it said in its words, a columnist is entitled to the use of "reckless hyperbole" in making a case. Now, Novak is mainly a reporter. Is this court opinion just the world's best get-out-of-jail-free for someone who does a column like his?
AMY SULLIVAN:It's not a bad deal. If he's pushed on whether he really has the facts to be able to report something, then he's a reporter, and people tend to back off, because everybody knows Bob Novak has the best sources in town. On the other hand, if he's being sued for libel, as in this case, he can put on his columnist hat and say, "Come on. Give me a little license here."
BOB GARFIELD: So Bob Novak is essentially answerable to nobody. He, he doesn't have an editor, because he's an independent syndicated columnist, and he - he's the executive producer of his own TV show. If Bob Novak is playing fast and loose with journalistic ethics, what's to be done about it?
AMY SULLIVAN:Well, as you point out, there's very little that can be done, because as a syndicated columnist, he really doesn't have much of an editor for his columns. If a newspaper doesn't like it, they could ask him to change some of the, the facts in the columns, but they don't, and so their really only option is to stop running his column, and given that he's one of the five most widely read columnists in the country, they're unlikely to want to annoy their readers by dropping his column.
CNN could, in theory, crack down when he says things on it that are not necessarily backed up by fact or sources, but he's one of the staples of their conservative programming particularly. He's been on CNN since the very first weekend it started, and they're proud of him.
BOB GARFIELD: Respond to my assertion. I believe that there are 360 newspaper editors who continue to run his column who have a lot to answer for. Do you agree?
AMY SULLIVAN:I think the fact that Novak continues to be run in 360 newspapers more than a year after this column ran printing Valerie Plame's name and that virtually no one has raised any questions about the propriety of what he did is surprising and quite disappointing. It's hard to think of another reporter or another columnist in American journalism who would be able to do something like this and then not be questioned on it.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Amy, thank you very much.
AMY SULLIVAN: Thank you. It's my pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: Amy Sullivan is an editor of the Washington Monthly. Her piece about Robert Novak was titled Bob in Paradise.
[MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Novak is just one, albeit very loud, voice in a media market now exploding with voices all talking to each other. That's a new development, but also a very old one, according to National Journal reporter William Powers. In the 19th Century, America was awash in biased newspapers, and that's what built our democracy. "Now," he writes in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, "newfangled niche marketing will pick up where those papers left off, after the long dry spell of consensus fueled by mainstream media." "It is," he says, "the oldest American paradox. Nothing unifies like individualism."
WILLIAM POWERS: Exactly. What happened in the 19th Century, Brooke, thanks in part to actually government policies, you had this amazing flowering of the newspaper culture in America. There were newspapers everywhere. There were hundreds and hundreds and thousands of them, and that continued right through that period, and my argument is that those newspapers, in a very real way, sort of taught us how to listen to each other and how to live with a diversity of opinions, and in a way, to be a stronger democracy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, technology, it seems, had the initial impact of bringing us all together in front of the little screen. Now, with cable TV and satellite radio and especially the internet, it's dividing us up again. So, is this all about technology in the end?
WILLIAM POWERS: No, it's not. The media tend to mirror broader things that are happening in the culture, so in the 19th Century, you had this incredible diverse flowering of political parties - the Whigs, the Know Nothing, the Free Soil, the Republican - they all arose in the 19th Century. And that was actually mirrored in the press, many of which were kind of wholly owned subsidiaries of parties, actually, and you had this media political sort of mirror image happening.
The same thing happened in the middle of the 20th Century, just as we got out of World War II and entered the Cold War period, and this broad sort of cultural establishment formed in the '50s. You had this real sort of one establishment voice that appeared in the form of those networks and became in a way a kind of pater familias for our culture, and finally, you know, took the shape of Walter Cronkite.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Right. Our universal uncle. I do buy the idea that the media mirror the political trends in the country, but you also had a limited resource - the broadcast frequencies - and so did regulation play a role?
WILLIAM POWERS: Regulation played a role. The networks were regulated in terms of content. I mean there was a real movement toward safer discourse and a more centralized kind of forum for argument. It was never specific - you know, we are a democracy, and you could go on the air and you were free to say a lot of things, but there was also kind of for business reasons and also for like regulatory reasons there was a kind of a weeding out of anything that felt sort of radical - you were trying to reach the broad middle - and that's how those networks became sort of the voice of the mainstream.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here's a bead that I thought you drew very interestingly in your piece, when you suggest that this business model that called for a centrist attitude and a political climate that seemed to demand it, was how we ended up with this cult of objectivity that you say was a short-lived phenomenon.
WILLIAM POWERS: Thanks to people like the Washington journalist Walter Lippmann, people began encouraging the idea of objectivity in journalism as an ideal that you could reach. That jibed very nicely with the rise of these powerful networks, because they had set themselves up as these authority figures, and now they were saying not only are we authority figures, but we can find some kind of objective truth. And this is how it appeared, and it became a very powerful force.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah, but where does it stand today? It seems that objectivity has taken quite a hit. In fact most of us, me included, don't believe it really can exist. The best you can be is fair.
WILLIAM POWERS: No, I agree, and that's what I think is one of the salutary effects of the niche media. The niche media offer you all these options - all kinds of variance on the truth - some of which are openly not even pretending to be objective, and many of which are actually seeking still to be objective, and all competing for attention.
And the idea is that, as in the 19th Century, it's an education about other points of view. The establishment media of the 20th Century gave us the illusion that we all agreed in these centrist points of view, when we didn't. I mean in a way, they were ironing out some of the most interesting differences in our society.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're right. We had a very narrow range of opinion then. But I wonder whether it isn't even narrower now and more extreme, because unlike the early days of our democracy, you can go through your whole life picking just one or two media outlets, and you don't hear what anybody else says. Back in the old days, we literally had public squares. Now, we all live in our individual bubbles.
And I know you spoke to scholars who told you that this is how it was back in the early days of revolutionary America. We spoke to a scholar, Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and he says that the echo chambers we live in today actually foster extremism, because people only talking to themselves echo back the most extreme views. We don't inform each other at all. We're able, because of technology, to ignore each other completely.
WILLIAM POWERS: I don't know if I agree with that, Brooke. I mean first of all, the jury is still out. I could be dead wrong. But I think that if you look back at that 19th Century period, I would argue that people had less access then to other people's views, because they were living in relative isolation from each other. There was no TV screen where you could switch back and forth, and if you were a Fox person, you could at least come across what was being said on CNN by using the clicker.
And there's no evidence that people are sticking on one channel and just staying there. In fact, what I think is that ideologues at this moment, people who do tend toward one side or the other, are in a moment of kind of elated fascination with the idea that there are media channels that look and feel just like them, because it's something we haven't had in our lifetimes. It's a brand new thing.
I do believe that the novelty of that is going to wear off, because everybody gets tired of themselves.
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, I wish that were true, Bill. That's not my experience. But we just don't know yet, do we?
WILLIAM POWERS: Well, could I add one more thought?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sure.
WILLIAM POWERS:I also think that, to believe that niche-driven media are going to fail, in my opinion, is not to have faith in human nature, because media channels are just a reflection of the people who start them up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Define failure.
WILLIAM POWERS: Failure would be the world that you limned - that we are all in our little pods and never hear each other. That would not be the kind of democracy I want to live in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Bill, thank you very much.
WILLIAM POWERS: Thank you, Brooke. Good to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Powers' story The Massless Media is in the current edition of the Atlantic Monthly.
[MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, analog audiotape passes from the scene, with some sorrow. So do rock critics over 50. Sorrow? Mmmm-not so much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In a recent piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, David Hiltbrand observed that U2, soon to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hasn't put out a decent album since Achtung Baby in 1991, even though the critics have propelled its latest release up the charts.
"I'll let you in on a little secret," he writes. "Under their cynical crusts, music critics are a remarkably nostalgic breed. Over and over you'll find them fulsomely praising the newest release from faded heroes such as REM, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Prince or Elvis Costello." "Their loyalty is a disservice to consumers," he goes on, "because, swayed by their enthusiasm, we go out and plunk down some serious coinage for yet another stale and dreary disappointment."
That's pretty brutal, but our reporter Brian Wise suggests that you save your pity for the aging critics, because they don't even have a hall of fame.
[MUSIC CLIP: "BROWN SUGAR"]
BRIAN WISE: Rock critic Larry Nager had just turned 50 last January when he was fired from his job at the Cincinnati Enquirer. The paper claimed that he wasn't being aggressive enough in his reporting, but Nager believes that his age was an expiration date in a business obsessed with youth.
LARRY NAGER: Turning 50 was not a problem, but being unemployed and turning 50 - terminated without a dime in severance pay - I mean, after 8 years and after - I mean, Best of the Enquirer for the entire year of 2000, and then I need to be escorted out of the building?
BRIAN WISE: Nager also contends that he was discriminated against not only for his age, but also for his gender.
LARRY NAGER: There were literal signs that the Enquirer was trying to attract a younger and more female readership. There were signs posted in the newsroom: Remember the Ladies - Think Women 18 to 34 - and we were instructed to write with women in mind - to get as many women in our stories as we could. And then it went further than that in the belief, apparently, that only young female writers could attract young female readers, which I feel is incredibly condescending and patronizing to young women.
[ROCK MUSIC CLIP]
BRIAN WISE: Nager is suing the Enquirer for age and gender discrimination. His lawsuit asks for his job back as well as compensatory and punitive damages. Enquirer editor Tom Callinan declined to comment for this story, citing the pending suit.
Nager's case is not unique. In 2002, San Francisco Chronicle senior music critic Joel Selvin was a 30 year veteran of the paper when he was re-assigned to a staff writer job and re-instated only after extensive negotiations with the paper. And in 2000, Richard Harrington, a 57 year old music critic for the Washington Post, was re-assigned to a part-time position, prompting an age discrimination suit that was eventually settled out of court.
RICHARD HARRINGTON: You know, if you've committed yourself to being a music journalist for a long period of time, there's nothing usually to suggest you're ready to call it quits.
JIM DeROGATIS: I think there are older critics at established papers who - it's almost as if, you know, their job has been given to them by divine right.
BRIAN WISE: Jim DeRogatis is the pop music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. He says that age matters less than one's enthusiasm.
JIM DeROGATIS: I've seen 22 year old reporters who are no longer doing their job, and I've seen 62 year old reporters who are no longer doing their job, and it comes down to a certain fire in the belly. I don't think you have to know who the Rolling Stones are. You could be completely clueless before you get the assignment to go see that concert, but you will go in as a prepared journalist, and you will find out who they are, and if you're a good listener, and I trust you as a writer and a critic and a listener, I know you're going to come back with something interesting.
[ROCK MUSIC CLIP - BRITNEY SPEARS]
BRIAN WISE: So what causes this divide between older male critics and younger music consumers, if not age?
[CLIP PLAYS] Some say it's the gender gap. Evelyn McDonnell is the pop music critic at the Miami Herald. She says the music industry, in promoting acts like Britney Spears and 'N Sync acknowledges the fact that young women have become the most influential music consumers.
EVELYN McDONNELL: Certainly the success of Britney Spears or of 'N Sync, which were the biggest records of the last several years, could never have happened without the female market, and you know, I think that was a wakeup call.
ASHLEE SIMPSON:
[SINGING] ON A MONDAY
I AM WAITING,
TUESDAY,
I AM WAITING…
BRIAN WISE: Others say the problem has to do with the biases that a critic forms during his or her younger years. Roger Catlin was the music critic of the Hartford Courant from 1988 to 2002. During his time on the music beat, he found himself frequently at odds with audiences when he criticized artists who would lip sync on stage.
[CLIP OF SIMPSON SINGING]
ROGER CATLIN: There was a period there where the music that was popular with young people was music that was not popular with critics, and that had to do with - they were pop stars, and they were cute, and you know, I'd write about lip-synching all the time, and the fans of the artists wouldn't really care about it, and…
BRIAN WISE: This divide between a critic and his subject can work both ways. Think about the younger critics who are increasingly forced to cover geriatric rockers like the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney or Simon and Garfunkel, all in an attempt to capture aging Baby Boomers. Still, it's up to every music critic to recognize his or her own personal moment of truth. Roger Catlin.
ROGER CATLIN: There were some, just some strange scenarios. I mean I remember one being at a, at a club where a band, a young band was playing, and they stopped and said - "Oh, our parents are here. We want to introduce them," And all the kids clapped, and I saw the parents and I saw, I saw that I was older than the parents, too. So there's these points where you find yourself in a room of rock and roll, and you suddenly feel very self-conscious that you're the oldest person in the building.
BRIAN WISE: Catlin now covers TV for the Courant, and he isn't planning a comeback tour as a music critic any time soon. For On the Media, I'm Brian Wise.
BOB GARFIELD: If you're older than 15, and you have ears, then analog tape has probably defined the way you've heard recorded sound. Your favorite albums, the dialogue and score in your favorite films, radio shows like this one - even data from your favorite space shuttle missions - all have been captured on analog magnetic tape. It's been the standard since World War II, but gradually it's been overtaken by cheaper digital technology.
And so, almost inevitably, on December 31st, the last tape manufacturer, Quantegy, filed for bankruptcy and abruptly closed its doors. As far as anyone knows, it represents the end of a medium. Musicians like the indy band Wilco felt the loss immediately. They continue to rely on analog tape for the warmth and richness they say it conveys, and they found unlikely company with NASA, which is stockpiling the same tape for use on the space shuttle.
Culture maven Rick Karr has been watching analog tape's slow demise. He joins us once again. Rick, welcome back.
RICK KARR: Bob, it's always a pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: Very briefly, tell me the entire history of magnetic tape.
[LAUGHTER] How did it come to be so much the standard?
RICK KARR:Well, it was way better than what came before it. The kind of analog magnetic tape that we've been using until recently really came about in the 1940s. It was the Germans during World War II who perfected it, and the reason that it was great was, number one, it sounded better than anything we had prior to that that could record sound. That would have been wax cylinders or shellacked discs. Number two, you could record for a long time. I mean you could just put reel after reel after reel up and keep going, so you could record an entire symphony in one go. And third, you could eliminate mistakes. You could just use a razor blade, and suddenly mistakes disappeared from musical recordings.
So for all these reasons, by the late 1940s, early 1950s, when these machines and this tape were available in the United States, the old ways of recording direct to discs were pretty much dead at that point.
BOB GARFIELD: So, not to belabor the obvious, but why is it going away? If it's so great, why has it been so universally replaced by digital technology?
RICK KARR: Well, because the digital stuff is in some ways greater. I mean I've seen 14 year olds with Apple ibooks making records in their bedrooms that sound better than the kinds of things that you could do on hundreds of dollars of analog equipment 15, 20 years ago.
Why spend money on a tape machine? If you run a facility that's making radio commercials, there's no reason for you to maintain a tape machine any more. You just give everybody a computer and let them do all the work right there on their desktop.
BOB GARFIELD: There's some audiophiles who believe, despite the ubiquity of digital, despite its ease of use, despite its low cost, despite all of its advantages, they can still tell the difference between an analog recording and a digital recording. Are they imagining that? Are they sentimentalizing old technology? Or is there some there, there?
RICK KARR: There are a couple of things going on there. I mean first of all, what you have to remember is that as recording technologies have evolved through history, there have always been people who have looked at the new technology and said the old stuff was better.
Having said that, it's really easy to tell when somebody has made a bad or even a mediocre digital recording. In the typical recording studio these days that's recording, say, rock or country or jazz, they're using a combination of both - so you can't necessarily tell what's what - some of it's analog, some of it's digital - because analog's better at some things, like recording a drum kit - a drummer playing full blast sounds great on this 2 inch analog tape; it's a little harder and a little more expensive to get all the gear that makes it sound good in the digital domain.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, in fairness to the Luddites, there are some storage issues in digital recordings, because the standards keep changing. Analog standard has never changed, so we - is that a reason to start hoarding audiotape, or will that soon take care of itself?
RICK KARR: Whether it'll take care of itself or not is still an open question, and, I mean, you're absolutely right - I mean, we don't know - we've been using analog recording tape for 60 years. We know that that stuff is stable. We know that it works. The digital stuff? Yeah, there are issues with that. DVD-Rs and CD-Rs decay over time.
The thing is that the price of the digital stuff is so much lower now, and so for a lot of production, it's much better to just have it all on a computer. You can save that money. So yeah, there is something to be said for those preservation issues in the analog domain, but, but I think that that doesn't really outweigh, for most people, the advantages of digital.
BOB GARFIELD: To the layman out there, or even the music enthusiast, does the death of magnetic tape mean anything? Will anyone even notice?
RICK KARR: It is the end of an era. I mean there's a story about an announcer on the Bing Crosby Show who pluralized a word that he shouldn't have pluralized, and one of the engineers said "Don't worry; I can take care of that." And he took the tape - this was the first taped radio show in the history of broadcasting in the US anyway - and he just took a razor blade, and he cut out the "S" - and he played back the tape and the announcer said "Oh, my god - this is a miracle. We don't have to go back and re-do that whole segment." And he carried around that little piece of tape in his pocket, because it was such a miracle to him.
So, we can't over-estimate how amazingly influential this was in the early days. That said, I don't think most people are going to hear it these days.
Final point here: Let's not necessarily assume that the analog tape is going away. Quantegy has filed for chapter 11; they've closed this plant in Opelika, Alabama. But chapter 11, as we know from what we've seen in the airline industry, doesn't mean the end. There is actually an investor who's trying to put together a group of investors to buy the Opelika plant. It's certainly fading. It's certainly a specialty product, but it's probably got another good 10, 20 years of life in it.
BOB GARFIELD: Oh, well, in that case-never mind. Rick, thanks.
RICK KARR: You're quite welcome, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Rick Karr is developing a book and documentary television series called Techno Pop: How Technology Makes and UnMakes Popular Music from Bach to Britney and Beyond.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: While we were watching the inauguration Thursday, we heard a sound effect in a commercial:
[MUSIC UNDER]
WOMAN: Pookie-Pie - do I look fat in these? Hm?
[RECORD SCRATCH]
MAN: Need a moment?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Actually, we're always hearing it in commercials. It seems that the public appetite for this sound effect-
[RECORD SCRATCH] does not in any way with the public's appetite for vinyl records. Vinyl, like tape, is nearly dead. Only the record scratch endures, a phenomenon Mike Pesca reported years ago (with different commercials.)
MIKE PESCA: In a Bud Lite commercial that's currently airing, a young couple walk into a jewelry store, and the woman falls in love with a diamond ring. Just as the guy starts to think about how much this'll set him back, he is distracted. What's this?
[ELECTRIC GUITAR MUSIC UNDER]
WOMAN: You're fantastic.
MIKE PESCA: Beckoning to him, through the window, is a beautiful woman holding a bottle of Bud Lite. "Do you mean me?!" his gestures say. The beautiful woman crooks a finger. The guy is drawn to her cold-filtered siren song. He can't believe it. This sort of stuff NEVER happens to--
MAN:
[SHOUTING] Guy-- [RECORD SCRATCH] Who's the guy?! Who's-a this guy?
ANNOUNCER: For the great taste that won't fill you up and never lets you down.
MIKE PESCA: Oh - No. The woman wasn't beckoning to him at all. The guy is now forced to buy his fiancee a bigger diamond, and the cue that his world was about to lose all color, cut and clarity?
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH] The sound effect which says, "Whoa! Wait a minute."
NBC's promo department seems particularly in thrall of the record scratch.
[ELECTRIC GUITAR MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: Tuesday on an all-new Frasier, Daphne's back, and Niles has big news!
NILES: We're going to consummate our relationship!
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH]
FRASIER: What?!
[LAUGHTER] Oh!
MIKE PESCA: And for Saturday Night Live--
[MELLOW MUSIC UNDER]
ANNOUNCER: And now something every mother wants to hear--
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH]
WOMAN: I was just getting acupuncture on my rwah!
[LAUGHTER]
ANNOUNCER: It's the new Saturday Night Live--
MIKE PESCA: Then there's this spot for AT&T where two teenage boys need a ride home after a Destiny's Child concert.
WOMAN: Hop on in, guys!
MIKE PESCA: And who pulls up in an abandoned parking lot, but the band itself?
[DESTINY'S CHILD SINGING]
[NEEDLE ON RECORD SCRATCH]
MAN: File this under - Never. Need a ride?
MIKE PESCA: Come on, kids -- get real! Destiny's Child giving you a ride home in their limo, and, on top of that, their hit single's being played off of vinyl? According to Record Industry Association of America statistics, vinyl records account for less than one percent of all recorded music sold.
But according to Baker Smith, the director of the Destiny's Child ad, commercials use record screeches and scratches like they're going out of style, which of course they are.
BAKER SMITH: We always know, you know, at the end of the meeting - we haven't cracked it - someone goes well, we can always put a record scratch on it! Ah! Good job Bob! Way to go, Fred. Sort of congratulate ourselves and-- it's going to be funny now -- and move on.
MIKE PESCA: Even after he decides to use the record scratch, Smith still has choices.
BAKER SMITH: There's different ones. There's that Rrrrrrt. There's that Rrrrrrit! You know, there's Kkkrrrrrrk! (I feel very passionate about the record scratch.)
[RECORD SCRATCH]
JOHN ABOUD: I mean it's very rare that I'm writing anything that couldn't benefit from a vinyl record scratch.
MIKE PESCA: John Aboud is co-founder of modern humorists dot com. One place Aboud used the scratch - actually he admitted it was the only place - was on a project for Microsoft. To Aboud, the record scratch harkens to days gone by.
JOHN ABOUD: It wasn't uncommon at the turn of the century for a, a, a, pair of lovers to be dancing to a phonograph in their parlor, when the jilted suitor would burst into the room and, you know, rip the needle off the phonograph, and the lovers' reverie would be interrupted by this, you know, brutish thug, and that was a classic symbol that carried on into many of our cartoons, many of our commercials. It's part of our collective unconscious.
MIKE PESCA: Aboud's jilted suitor scenario supposes the record is a 78 being played on a Victrola; hardly a reference for the average Destiny's Child fan. I asked real live teenagers Niasia Hoskins and Charmayne Satler what they thought the sound effect was.
YOUNG WOMAN: A recording that just stopped, like-- Rrrrrp! [LAUGHS] You know.
MIKE PESCA: What is that sound?
YOUNG WOMAN: I have no idea. [LAUGHS]
MIKE PESCA: You don't know what that sound is?
YOUNG WOMAN: What? A recording stopping?
MIKE PESCA: Yeah.
YOUNG WOMAN: A recording stopping. [LAUGHS]
[LAUGHTER]
MIKE PESCA: So what would produce that rrrrrip?
YOUNG WOMAN: Oh - pausing the-- the, the tape or the recording? I don't -- I don't know.
MIKE PESCA: What about-- like a vinyl record?
YOUNG WOMAN: I know I saw it on TV - makes that noise.
MIKE PESCA: Have you ever seen that in real life?
YOUNG WOMAN: I don't think so.
MIKE PESCA: As media moves towards extinction, it leaves artifacts behind. We listen to a "dial tone" before we "dial" the phone even though almost all phones are made with buttons. The record scratch was once an annoying consequence of misusing the medium, but now -- it's genuine music.
[RECORD SCRATCH MUSIC]
[GROUP OF FANS CHEERING] When it comes to vinyl, it may be that the only thing that avoids the slag heap of history is the slag itself.
[ENERGETIC RECORD SCRATCHING] For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.
[FANS CHEERING]
[RECORD SCRATCH MUSIC]
[THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Anne Kosseff, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had editing help from Susanna Dilliplane. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcasts at onthemedia.org -- and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
- Back to story:
- January 21, 2005
-
Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
-
An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
-
Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
-
OTM Staff Picks, Volume 52
-
Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
-
A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
-
A Source for Sources
-
The Totally Legal Subpoena
-
A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
