Transcripts For CSPAN2 Media Smackdown 20170402

The book is the brainchild of a commodore, he was a reporter for the indianapolis hartford 25 years, hes a prolific author in retirement and aid had continued the manuscript and brought in jim kuyper and me toward the end of things to bring adifferent perspective. But the book is kind of the brush of the history of journalism, theres a nice chapter on the history of journalism but the basic idea is you have these factors that transformed journalism in the past 65 years so we had the rise of corporate ownership in about 1946, we had the rise of the internet, we had the rise of the world wide web. That takes almost everything and allowed individuals to participate and then we had Global Economic collapse during 2007 and along with that we had our smart phone apps and social media. Youve got the perfect storm where you havecorporate ownership of the media , declining returns because of competition and economic issues. And you have a result, a flood of information and bad Economic Times which really crippled Corporate Media and took a lot of journalists out of the industry whether willingly or not. So media smacked down really traces the evolution of newspapers in particular from a Partisan Press to a nominally objective press, in fact thats part of arguably becoming a Partisan Press. So the book in the introduction we talk about if there is a far left press, and a near left press, theres a far right press, there is a conservative right press but the book points out theres a huge loss in the middle of people who are not being reached by any of those things and thats lost is the problem, people who are drawn to political ideology tend to gravitate toward those particular outlets. But you have a bunch of people in the middle who need something from both sides, and want something from either so gravitating toward one or the other because of political ideology heavily. And so you end up with at this point in time we had a nation where people can tune into things they already believe, things that interest them, things that have already interested them that they need to hear and things they need to know about both sides you get polarization and thats the nature of part of the press. So the Partisan Press is a funny thing because the Partisan Press existed until the 1880s at which point frank get at and others said you know, we cant make as much money if you got Partisan Press and yet you can sell two advertises on the side, you can sell to advertisers from this side and if you have an objective press, you can sell advertising on both sides so the real goal was to make money. So i think its kind of funny norm that reporters say they believe in objectivity but its impossibly objective so the norm of objectivity is this sunny thing thats been replaced by advocacy journalism on one side. Its been replaced by you know, neoconservatives on the side so you have more of an opinion either press then an objective press. I had people i knew who i gave them the read and they were working for corporate groups, and they were very offended by the book because the corporate perspective is we are saving journalism, not hurting it. And i think its you can look at two different ways, one of the things that Corporate Media tried to do for journalism is tries to systematize, room and isaac, making a product to be duplicated from place to place. Thats really a foundation that agency, that is a product to be marketed and its not like milk that has an Expiration Date but news is more like milk, it has an Expiration Date and its also anchored to one flight before pasteurization, milk had to be made in the community where it was going to be distributed because you couldnt spread out so the corporatization of the media was sort of like pasteurization, we just make it homogenous and spread it out and Community Journalism on the flip side is more about purpose. Its really about being a community of record, its about covering a Community Better than anyone else. And making a difference so two conflicting kind of ideas for corporate journalism is advancing, just how its executing and how its difficult to homogenize media. There are two ways of looking at the trust issue and the public. One is that we had more trust because people trusted the institution. They understood that there was a process, that there was a reporter who would do the interview and write the story and then there would be an editor who would look at it, and there would be a multiple touch process so that what came out was this fixed form, thing that had been carefully researched but part of the historical record. We are now in a point where weve got a 24 seven news cycle. Weve gone from a two day, 38 cycle to a 24 hour news cycle at cnn to a 24 second news cycle with twitter. 24 seconds is a long time if youre talking about twitter. Peoples Attention Spans have gotten very short so they tend to one thing and move on to the next. Though theres just a lot of information and its hard to, its hard for people to process everything in a headline or a tweet and all this reading headlines in our newsfeed so the process is, the trust is based on im not sure what. We just have a flood of information and when youre given so much information and so little time to digest it, you dont trust any of it. And you onething here and one thing here , you stop thinking about, you stop thinking of it as being trustworthy. How do i trust the New York Times when im hearing the opposite thing to seconds later from someone else. In the book we do talk about Public Perception of what constitutes liberal press, what constitutes a conservative press. A great example is npr and cnn have taken over the more liberal press in the publics mind, even though they tried to fight that perception most of the time and then fox has cheerfully embraced the conservative role and today fox has shifted toward the middle of a obit and there are other organizations that have stepped in to the farther right, they are self identifying and i do think we are at a point in history where strangely enough, we are having a self identifying part of the press. As hard as the New York Times and Washington Post try to hang in the middle, they are being identified as part of a liberal problem by our conservative administration, among other things so the choices are being made by our politicians, they are being made by individuals, these systems. There are being made by what shows up in your feed like what to follow so individuals are identifying what they see as politically conservative, politically liberal. I think journalism is still working well and its still working best in small communities, in communities and the flyover states where no one else is covering whats happening in those communities. Journalists are critical in those communities, their critical to the life of those communities journalism is so hard to survive as a journalist given the fact that advertising has declined. If you have a small town and local advertisers you can still do okay but journalism is still being done very well injured newspapers across the country. Its the big dailies, its the big corporate newspapers that are part of the problem, big websites. News is not a finished, fixed, finite project. You have skin when a story is published, this is the media that function for a long time in the united states. The public has to be involved in the conversation, thats the way you save journalists and journalism. The location of an article used to be the end of the process for the reporter, the reporter would write the story, and it in, move on and now its the beginning. Its where the conversation starts and the public has to be involved but we have to be a trusted filter, we have to be listeners and as i was a journalist for 12 years, i was raised in the business so its hard not to think of it that way. I think that its okay that journalists are branding themselves, i think its okay journalists are building their own credibility and that they are building followers and that people find them and say i trust this person, thats very much Walter Cronkite model. This is something someone i found we seem to give me good information on a routine basis and gives me hope. Thats not a bad thing. I would say that would be a good thing. Quite this book approaches journalism predominately as being something thats practiced by newspaper reporters and in broadcasting. That journalists are reporters and one of the things that we do in this program is we emphasize this very vital , relevant skill set of doing research, interviewing, writing, publishing across multiple platforms that basically what youre doing is being a multiplatform storyteller and the story is going to dictate was going to be told whether its 140 character to, the blog entry, a facebook post, 1000 word story, a photo essay, a video or some combination including some platform that does not yet exist. We are teaching our students that this story dictates how its going to be told and told in multiple forms so we are using the skill set, the same skill set, the classic skill set and our students are getting great jobs. Theyre not all working for newspapers but theyre doing really interesting things with that skill set. The other thing we do is focus on a set of values that includes ethics, diversity, professionalism and free speech. Again, values that are official across the board and for us to do going to journalism, staying journalism, become journalists, we have people who are adding content out there that is critical and trustworthy and necessary for a functional democracy. A functional democracy needs a free press. Facebook, google, twitter need a free press. They need a democracy and journalism will survive because they very much need journalism to survive. While in chico we caught upwith darren hurley, author of the book lost causes in which he claims a system of blended sentencing in texas and its effect on juvenile crimeoffenders. The name of our book is lost causes and blended sentencing , Second Chances in the Texas Youth Commission that we wanted to take basically 3300 offenders from 1987 to 2011 that have received suchsentences