What Do Henry Louis Gates and OJ Simpson Have In Common?

Not much at all, except for the same dreadful and superficial media coverage about race - then and now.

Henry Louis Gates was recently the center of a story when the renowned African-American Harvard professor was arrested trying to enter his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As he was trying to push open a sticky front door, he asked his cab driver (also African-American) to help.

A local woman saw two men she assumed were trying to break into the house. She called the police. Gates and a local officer exchanged words and the professor was arrested. Charges were later dropped, but President Obama observed that the police acted "stupidly."

After making that remark, based on a history of terrible relations between black people and police, the chattering classes pounced. Gates was accused of over-reacting. The police officer was accused of racial insensitivity and the President of playing racial politics by defending Gates without knowing all the facts.

I didn't read or see a lot of explanatory journalism that might have pointed to the racial history of Americans - black and white which could explain why Gates acted the way he did, or why Obama instinctively assumed that the police officer acted the way he did.

It reminded me of OJ Simpson, the African-American former football player and bit actor who was acquitted of the murder of his white wife and her white friend in 1995. The trial was broadcast live and had then - and still has all of the most compelling aspects of tabloid journalism in America: sports, murder, sex, race and celebrity.

It couldn't be beat for attracting eyeballs and selling newspapers. CNN in fact, earned much of its reputation by its continual and sensational coverage of the story.

At the time, opinion about Simpson's guilt seemed evenly divided on racial lines: many white people including white journalists and commentators were openly dismissive of the trial and Simpson's defense attorney, Johnnie Cochrane ("If the glove don't fit, you must acquit," were among his more memorable lines in the summation to the jury).

In the end it worked and Simpson walked out of court a free man. That evening on the nightly tv news programs, shots of cheering black people were contrasted with scenes of white people shaking their heads in astonishment.

The Gates arrest and Obama's subsequent comment have rekindled the same kind of divisive reactions among whites and African-Americans. Journalists still reflect that divide (with some exceptions), even in a supposedly post-racial Obamian America.

Although some media have tried a more sensitive approach, it's been drowned out as race in America (and many other places as well) remains a powerful signifier of the "two solitudes." One of the unintended consequences of the event is how President Obama has become involved, much to the delight of his political adversaries. His solid political instincts now appear to be less than sure, at least in the short term.

When I came to NPR in 1997, I was hired by Delano Lewis, the president of NPR, and an African-American. He told me that at NPR, as in the rest of America, "race is a burden that is hard to put down."

Del's words of warning came back to me as I watched the events in Cambridge and Washington unfold over the past week.

Will New Funding Models Hurt Public Broadcasting?

The recent musings by The New York Times' Assistant Managing Editor, Craig Whitney must have run a chill down the spines of public broadcasting fund raisers everywhere.

Whitney suggested that the venerable Times might look at setting up a foundation, "like NPR's" to assist the newspaper's core business - reporting.

While the Times hasn't officially endorsed this idea, it feels like a trial balloon to me, even if some in the not-for-profit world have pooh-poohed the idea. Some have suggested that the firewall between funders and Times journalists would a tempting target for lobbyists, politicians and corporations. The Times is already partnering with the foundation-funded ProPublica to do some of its investigative reporting and so far, to good effect.

There are some serious issues here, for both public broadcasting and commercial journalism.

First and the most serious is the effect on American journalism. Public radio in general and NPR in particular does a great job in giving its audience smart and contextual information, presented in a timely way and with a presentation that treats the audience as adults.

But public radio and television are not instinctively driven to pursue investigative reporting. There are some exceptions (Frontline, and NOW on PBS being the most obvious). It does happen, but not as often as it should. Part of that is a choice driven by economics. NPR's scope is broad, but not limitless and like other news organizations, it's tough to get an editor to give a reporter a lot of time to pursue a story that may, or may not get on the air. In my time at NPR, I saw a high level of reportorial productivity. But not a lot of original, "this just in" type journalism. And a disinclination (usually unspoken) to do the kind of journalism that might attract unwelcome attention from critics and potential funders. It wasn't self-censorship, but sometimes it felt like it.

The second and also important factor is competition. NPR does very well in attracting a large audience in part because no one else does what it does. NPR has succeeded in raising large sums from individual listeners ("like you") and from charitable foundations who believe citizens need reliable information to make democracy work. Mrs. Joan Kroc's extraordinary gift to NPR a few years ago of almost a quarter of a billion dollars was a demonstration of that idea.

But how well situated is NPR if it must compete for any future Mrs. Krocs against the New York Times? I'd guess that there are a lot of Times readers who are NPR listeners and with a limited amount of donation dollars around, foundations are going to have some tough choices to make.

What NPR has done well is raise an extraordinary amount of money to fund all of its reporting and special projects. But its the NPR Science Desk has been an astonishing magnet for philanthropies. In part - again - because there just aren't many outlets for science journalism in the US.

Editors and reporters on that desk are an impressive bunch. Many have Ph.D's from major universities. And the unit is led by an indefatigable senior editor, Anne Gudenkauf. For years, the Science Unit operated on a budgetary curiosity: the money for staff and for specific projects were not part of the base budget of NPR. Many on the Science Desk lived from grant to grant - a particularly precarious way to do journalism. Eventually, much, if not all of the Science Desk and its activities were integrated into the annual budget. That may have changed recently, but I haven't heard that has happened.

But one anomaly was that the science journalism appeared to be over represented in the overall NPR News landscape - precisely because there was so much money available for that purpose. It was always more difficult to raise money for covering Washington. Or the Middle East. Or any other subject that could be controversial. Science was safe. Or safe enough.

But philanthropic giving to journalism may have its limits, even in the US and especially in a recession. As media look at other models and see how effective NPR has been, more news organizations may opt to compete directly with NPR and PBS for those dollars. And the danger is that public broadcasting will once again be the poor(er) cousin of American media.

Under former NPR president Del Lewis, in the mid-1990s, NPR decided to wean itself from its dependence on government funding. With a concerted effort, NPR successfully reduced its intake of money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from around 30% of its budget to between 1% and 2%.

But pendulums have a tendency to swing. Might that trend have to be reversed if NPR finds itself less able to garner philanthropic support than it once did? Craig Whitney's musings should make public broadcasters very nervous.

One Woman's Anguish at Being Fired

I ran into a friend from my CBC days on a street corner in Toronto yesterday. Dave Anderson told me that he's had enough and rather than wait for the inevitable downsizing, he's taken a buy-out and is leaving the CBC, Toronto and journalism in general. His retirement takes effect on Friday after more than 30 years at the CBC.

It's a real loss for public broadcasting because Dave knows journalism and radio very well. He ran more election night broadcasts and news specials than anyone else. He did it with great professionalism and a lot of humor. There are not many more like him.

Dave will be fine, I'm sure. He's smart and assertive and can look after himself. But others I fear, will not.

I also recently heard about another ex-CBCer who lost her job in a round of cutbacks 12 years ago. Let's call her Ms. O. She is still hurt and angry at what she still believes was a deeply unfair "RIF" (reduction in force) at the CBC, and my role in that event.

I mention this because although I was Managing Editor at CBC Radio when this happened, the employee in question was not on my budget. She lost her job in another department. But as she told a mutual friend, when she came out of her boss' office after being given the news, the first person she saw was me. I was, she related, having a cup of coffee, chatting with someone and apparently blissfully unaware and unconcerned that her life had been completely changed and overturned. And twelve years later, she still remembers.

Now it would be easy to say that this particular ex-employee has some issues here. And that thousands, if not millions of people have lost their jobs since then and she should just suck it up and move her life along (which she has as far as I know).

But the trauma of job loss has stayed with her, as has her fixation on my lack of interest in her firing.

As media organizations continue to lose employees, how many other people like Ms. O will brood about what happened to them? What are the health consequences of firing? What impact will layoffs have on the people who survive this round of cuts, but wonder if they will be next on the block? And how can media organizations properly function when morale sinks?

I fear that there are a lot more like Ms. O waiting to emerge.

Remembering Walter Cronkite

As a student in London in the early 1970s, I worked part time at the CBS News bureau, then located on the Old Brompton Road, just opposite Harrod's department store.

Being there was a high-test introduction to professional journalism and the focus of the bureau's activities was always the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. "Walter," as he was known to his friends (and "Mister" Cronkite to the rest of us), defined everything we did in the bureau.

If a story had "legs" (i.e., it had enough potential to be considered for the Evening News), it had to be brought to the attention of the show's producers, who were known around the bureau as "Cronkiters."

In those pre-video, pre-digital days, the visual hallmark of the program (we didn't call it a "show") was film and lots of it. The London bureau had its own lab. Film was shipped in from all around the world including from Vietnam where the war was still raging in all its intensity.

I remember the first time I saw an edit, where the producer chose among four or five possible "standups" where the reporter delivered his closing message to the camera. In my innocence, I was astonished that it was done repeatedly until the right tone and cadence was captured on film. It seemed like a show-biz artifice to my naive eyes, when in fact, it was just a form of professionalism.

My job was as the Brits would say, "general dog's body," which meant answering phones, making sure that the teletypes machines didn't run out of paper, going out to Heathrow airport in my ancient Triumph Herald to send film to New York or pick up film from Jo'burg, waking up the irascible bureau chief Phil Lewis to tell him that the wire services were reporting a major mine disaster in Ukraine ("You idiot! You woke me up for that?") which taught me the difference between a general disaster and one that Mr. Cronkite might find important...

I spoke to Walter Cronkite only once. He called looking for the senior correspondent Charles Collingwood. I said he was out of the office and probably at his club. He asked me to find him and have him call New York right away.

After I took the message, Mr. Cronkite asked me who I was. I told him I was a Canadian grad student at the London School of Economics, working the overnight shift. He asked me what I was studying (European history). He mentioned that wouldn't be a bad way to get into journalism, if that's what I wanted. He wished me good luck. His voice had that timbre even over 3000 miles of undersea cable (those were the pre-satellite days).

What CBS News had in general and what the London bureau personified was that sense of civic mission and informational obligation. Walter Cronkite was the embodiment of that. I found those same qualities only a few times later in life - for a few years at CBC Radio and again at NPR (where Walter Cronkite produced some wonderful essays combining journalism and history).

Elitist? Yes. Of undoubted value? Absolutely? Did CBS, CBC Radio and NPR troll for ratings? They didn't have to. The audience sought them out because the news had a purpose beyond delivering dividends to shareholders.

In an Age of "Information Deflation" Do Journalists Deserve Low Pay?

According to Robert G. Picard, they certainly do.

Picard is a professor of media economics in Sweden and the author of innumerable books on how media organizations work, or these days, mostly don't work.

His thoughts on a variation of Marx's labor theory of surplus value, as applied to journalists came at the speech he recent gave in Oxford and republished in the Christian Science Monitor. (Thanks to friend and Ryerson colleague Peter McNelly for pointing it out).

Picard argues that since most journalists don't produce anything of real value for their organizations, they don't deserve their fabulous salaries they have been getting.

Picard has a strongly market-driven approach to media and in some of his work, he’s been very astute about obtaining more value from media organizations. His major contribution, as far as I know, is that he believes that we are in a period of
information oversupply. In order to make media more profitable, media organizations need to produce less content in order to boost the value of the product. But it's hard to imagine that happening in an environment where so much is being pushed to the Internet and away from old media forms.

A study done earlier this year by the French government confirms Picard’s assumptions. It showed that in the last ten years, the sheer volume of information has increased by 30% every year while the number of eyeballs has remained relatively the same and in an increasingly fragmented audience. Picard is right. We are in an age of “information deflation.”

What Picard doesn’t adequately address is the social value of media which he admits can’t be monetized and therefore, would be hard to quantify.

How well have journalists have created profit and value for their employers? Clearly not enough: mass media, in their desperate pursuit of ratings and circulation are leading us in a race to the bottom which only further reduces the social value of journalism. After all, how much Michael Jackson is enough and when is it too much? The fault, dear reader is, as Professor Picard says elsewhere, can be found in the poor business choices made by many media organizations who insist on thinking in non-journalistic ways.

Can we blame the workers at General Motors for the plight of the company? Nor can we blame journalists entirely for the sad state of media.

If news and information should indeed be monetized, then the value for media organizations will be found in returning to (dare I say it?) a more elite view of what citizens need, along with what they want.

There are other factors at play here, including the perilous state of democracy.

Journalism's May-September Marriage

Renay San Miguel is a former CNN host and now with ectnews.com and a tech blogger for TechNewsWorld, based in Seattle.

We chatted the other day about whether mainstream media have gone berserk over Michael Jackson's death (San Miguel calls it "smotherage"...a wonderful portmanteau of a word). My own sense was that the media did what the media does best - giving into the public's widespread fascination and obsessions with a larger than life figure. Was it over the top? Of course. But a few days hence, other obsessions will replace it.

Like OJ Simpson, Jackson had all of the attributes of a story that keeps on giving: sex, race, crime and popular culture. One's view of both personalities is determined more by where you come from and not from where you are right now.

Was Jackson's death more significant than the putative revolution in Iran? Yes and no.

San Miguel and I agreed that the new media - twitter, flickr, wikis, blogs and cellphone cameras are doing more to change the public's perception of the events than anything we've seen. And as the literary deconstructionists in the 1980s used to say about literature, the very act of reading a text, changes the text. What Dickens meant to say about 19th century London is changed when we read him in the present with our 21st century sensibilities.

In the same way, the very act of engaging in the news - by consuming it, by gathering it and by discussing it, powerfully changes the event itself. The ancient Greek philosophers understood this perfectly.

So too is the future of media to be found in the marriage of young media and old media. It will likely be a rocky relationship, but what choice do we have?

Renay San Miguel has some wonderful ideas and they can be found here.

A Future Without Journalism?

I was asked to represent the Ryerson University School of Journalism at an awards ceremony earlier this week. I hesitated to go (it was early on a Tuesday morning) but I was glad I did because it showed me how government money can be used properly.

The breakfast meeting brought together several hundred young men and women who had won something called the Canada Millenium Scholarship. It began in 2000 and will end next year. This federal government grant (supported by private donations)gives up to Cdn$25,000 (about US$22,000) scholarships to high school graduates across the country.

According to the website, the Canada Millenium Scholarship's goal are clear:

Its objectives are to improve access to post-secondary education for all Canadians, especially those facing economic or social barriers; to encourage a high level of student achievement and engagement in Canadian society; and to build a national alliance of organizations and individuals around a shared post-secondary agenda.

Since 2000, the Foundation has delivered more than half a million bursaries and scholarships worth more than $2.2 billion to students across Canada...

The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation is a private, independent organization created by an act of Parliament in 1998. It encourages Canadian students to strive for excellence and pursue their post-secondary studies. The Foundation distributes $325 million in the form of bursaries and scholarships each year throughout Canada.

My role at this breakfast was to engage the young men and women (and their parents) at my table and to talk a bit about journalism as a career. All the graduates at my table were immigrants or children of immigrants - Albania, Colombia, India and China. There were a few so-called "Anglos" in the room, but they were indeed in the minority in this gathering. Not only did every scholarship winner have high marks, but they were also very involved as volunteers, working with autistic children, the elderly, community groups, and so on. When do these kids sleep?

I was glad to be there, but my pitch for journalism as a career fell on polite, but deaf ears. These kids are going into engineering, science research, biology. One young woman hadn't decided on a career path yet, so she was going to enroll in the Arts & Science program at her local university.

They did not hold journalism in high regard, although they were too polite and well brought up to get into it. But if my table was any indication, they perceive journalism and journalists as irrelevant to their lives. "It's mostly about entertainment," said one. "I'm interested in what's going on in the world and I don't get that from newspapers or television," said another. "But I'm sure you are teaching your students how to do it properly," said one father.

I hope he's right.

But it's clear that these kids who are truly the best and the brightest are finding connections to community and to the world in other, non-journalistic ways.

I left the gathering optimistic about the future, but not quite so optimistic about my profession.