I will begin by rubbing the head of my little Terp here. The terrapin is our school mascot. There's a huge terrapin outside of McKeldin Library. It's bronze or something and the students rub the head of this thing for good luck.
I do thank you for inviting me to keynote this event. It is a privilege and a pleasure. We are very much concerned about media's responsibility as conscience in today's world. It is a sign of our times that people refer to the media as if it were all one giant ungainly sort of entity. We know that in fact there is print media, there is electronic media, there is celluloid media. There is advertising media, marketing media, news media, digital age media, even music as media. They exist separately and together and all have found a home on the Internet. Our world is drenched in media in ways that no one, including some of us in this room, could have imagined.
And today we know that there is more to come. One intriguing theory is that within the next quarter century or so we'll carry around a flexible device on which we'll be receiving our print media, including our newspapers. And if you doubt it, who just a short time ago would have imagined the cell phone and its many capabilities?
The media are blamed for practically everything, but particularly in the case of the mainstream news media, of having a bias against whatever political party is in the White House or whatever political party is dominating the Congress. The once time-honored role of mainstream news media as watchdog, guardian of the people, exists in the minds and daily work of some journalist practitioners, but no longer, I don't think, in the collective mind of a public that respects and understands that role. It is a precarious position for mainstream news media.
Because it's not possible for me – perhaps it is for someone, but not for me – to talk about social responsibility and conscience of all of these mediums in 15 minutes or less, I'll limit my remarks. I want to address here the role of American journalism in particular, and electronic journalism in particular. It would be fascinating, I want to acknowledge, to discuss the responsibility of the US entertainment industry and what it purveys to the world. I'd love to talk about the issue of the impression the rest of the world has of our culture because of what the US entertainment industry distributes abroad. It would be most interesting to discuss the basis in fact for what people in some parts of the world see as a decadent and vulgar popular US culture, as evidenced by the products of that entertainment industry programming. That would be interesting to talk about, but I have only time for this brief acknowledgement of that important aspect of the question of American media and its social responsibility.
I said a moment ago that at University of Maryland we are very concerned about the issue of the social responsibility of American journalism. We have been concentrating for years on it. We were among the nation's first colleges of journalism to hire a professor strictly devoted to teaching ethics courses, required ethics courses. The hope is to send forth students who have, at the very least, an understanding of the great issues involved in the national debate over journalistic ethics. We hope we will be the small voices ever in the back of their minds – that is, we faculty members. With my own students I like to think of the early 1970s, when I was hired by CBS news. The great producer and conscience of CBS, Fred Friendly, was still occasionally in the building and his motto with regard to ethical practice was, who'll know? I'll know. I heard that over and over again in the CBS of that day.
We try to instill something similar in our students, to whom we tend to get pretty close because we're a very small college on a very large campus. Our hope is to send forth young journalists who are steeped in the methodology of journalistic decision-making, completely aware of the possible ramifications of their decisions, and more than a little bit aware of their role as guardians of the public trust. Are we succeeding? Ask me in 15 or 20 years when today's students are running the newsrooms. That's assuming there will still be traditional newsrooms and given the developments and demands of digital age journalism, there may not be traditional newsrooms.
To talk about the social responsibility of news media today, let's go back to the future for just a bit. Along with film, it was radio that qualified first as mass media. By the early 1930's newspapers and the wire services took note that a lot of people were listening to the radio, not only for music and drama and comedy but for news and information. This did not sit well with some powerful newspapers, who believed that by publishing radio programming schedules they were in effect giving free advertising to competitors.
So in 1934 the wire services and some major newspaper publishers got together and drew up a thing called the Biltmore agreement. That was because they met at the Biltmore Hotel in New York . They met with the men who headed NBC, red and blue radio networks, and with Bill Paley, William Paley, who had his fledgling Columbia Broadcasting System. These print moguls felt it was entirely fair to extract a promise from Bill Paley to disband his fledgling news service. NBC red and blue agreed not to continue to build one. There were a lot of rules set forth. For example, radio would never use more than 30 words of any report coming from the AP, UP, and INS news services. Radio was to have two five-minute daily newscasts, one in the morning at 9:30 a.m. or later, the other at 9:00 p.m. Radio was to confine itself to generalization and background, never to spot news. Announcers would never use material less than 12 hours old, and so forth. Outrageous but true.
It did not work of course. Thank God for the rebels. Station WOR and others banded together in the face of all this and began their own broadcast news services, and broadcast news rolled on. I can hear some of you old print journalists out there going, too bad!
A few years later a young man named Edward R. Murrow was hired as director of talks for the Columbia Broadcasting System. His editor was the great former Associated Press editor, Paul White. Paul White sent Murrow abroad because there were rumors of war. Murrow had no training as a journalist, but his sense was to hire an amazing group of men and one woman, people steeped in history and languages and literature and philosophy. And he positioned them to report as never before an event from overseas to the American public with a format of reports from here and there and there.
In 1938, with the premier of that program, the World News Roundup, March of 1938, we heard what became the model for what we do, the best conventions of broadcast news. When the war was over, of course, Murrow came home and brought his zeal for telling serious stories to television. For his stories about apartheid in South Africa, segregation in the American South, the plight of American soldiers in Korea, migrant workers in America, and many, many more, Americans gathered around the TV set just as they had gathered around the radio set. And it was of course on “See It Now” that Murrow took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in a way that no one, including print media in this country, had.
Why do I revisit this period in the history of our media? I do so because any informed discussion of social responsibility and mass media must acknowledge the high journalistic values of the mass mediums of radio and television, the good purposes to which those mediums were put in times past. And perhaps because it was a different time, we acknowledge that the message interested the public. Indeed, the public put its trust in the message.
Any reading of a history of the period reveals that those generations of newscasters gave the audience credit for being thoughtful, if not worldly, serious if not always well educated, and caring, not immune to developments that affected the world, the nation and themselves. Amid all the technology of today, the rapid-fire news and non-news delivery of messages today, the fast forward search for new techniques made the responsibility shown by the innovators of the past – indeed, the conscience shown by the innovators of the past – be always remembered.
In 1958, always prescient, Murrow told a convention of the Radio-Television News directors Association that what television was doing was falling apart, that it was a medium that could teach, could educate, could illuminate. But he said, as you are going, you're going to have nothing but lights and wires in a box. As in everything, he was ahead of his time. That didn't set well with Mr. Paley and the powers that were at CBS at the time, and it was the beginning of the end of Murrow's career.
He was a little bit ahead of his time, for there followed some great stories well told, the Kennedy assassinations, King assassination, the riots in the cities, the space shots. In the dissemination of course we saw abuses, but largely we saw a great sense of responsibility to the public trust. Sometime before Murrow's lament cable TV was born with the purpose of simply improving the broadcast signal in valleys and on mountains. But with the evolution of cable technology came 24-hour news delivery and with that and the evolution of satellite technology came new pressures to compete. These technologies made all the difference in reporting of the Iran hostage crisis, the war in the Persian Gulf, in the reporting of the crisis in China culminating in the showdown in Tiananmen Square, in the story of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. All of them stories reported with great conscience and a considerable sense of responsibility.
And then, because profits got in the way of social responsibility came tabloid TV. The network news divisions looked at the tabloids and saw the numbers of this new form of electronic reporting and how curious the audience seemed to be, and the question became, should people get what they want, or what they need? Where Murrow and past generations assured themselves that they were giving society what it needed, now the decision was blatantly to give them what they seemed to want. In fact, it became a mantra. That's what the public wants. And the line between social responsibility and conscience in news became blurred.
It all culminated, of course, in the summer of 1994, when in one event covered worldwide, the conflict between the old tradition of social responsibility in the news media and the new realities driven by the capabilities of satellite technology, crystallized in one story. That of OJ Simpson. Since that time, with rare exceptions such as the events of September 11th, 2001, little has changed by way of serious thought to a high level of responsibility.
Enter the Internet and proliferation of unfiltered information. If bloggers never pretended to any sense of social responsibility, the rise of hyper local journalism does, I think. It is called citizen media. And while some think of it as a fad, others think it well may be the future of news, a response to the need for conscience, for social responsibility to our nation's communities. It is not the newspaper posted on a web site. It is a form of bridge media, linking traditional forms of journalism with civic participation. If there is a new and socially responsible medium, this may be it.
Jan Schaeffer, who is executive director of J-Lab at the University of Maryland, writes that if 2004 was the year of the blog, 2005 and 2006 were the years of the hyper-local citizen media movement. It exploded in communities across the US. Schaeffer says that for the past two years tech-savvy individuals and journalism mavericks operating outside of corporate media created some of the earliest models for intensely local place sites that invite citizens to co-author online chronicles of life in their towns, particularly things that happen beyond the notice of the established press. These things have included not only written input but audio, video, eyewitness accounts, and photographs. Hyper-local media have grown out of towns such as Deerfield, New Hampshire, where citizens get little or no attention from any news organization, short of one of their residents being murdered. They are also rising in such places as Toledo, Ohio and Muncie, Indiana, where activists complain that local coverage is diminishing as news organizations cut costs.
The essence of hyper-local media is social responsibility. It may be the antidote to big media, but then again it may not. It is clearly a response to the fact that we may not have seen the bottom of socially irresponsible media.
We who are on the receiving end, we news and information consumers, often feel powerless, left as we are with a choice of the best of the worst. And that may be one reason hyper-local media may be with us for a while, and if it is, there will doubtless come other forms along with it.
I also believe there's another hope. At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna – and trust me, I'm not Pollyanna – I have to believe that those students I mentioned at the outset of this talk will have a thing or two to do with the direction of American journalism and American media in the future. For if they are grounded in ethical practice, if we are indeed doing the job that we as educators believe we are doing in our schools and colleges of journalism and communications, many of those young people will be part of a return to conscience.
We tell them this – you must decide who you are going to be. You must decide what will guide your decisions. We tell them that the time is long past when they can afford to shrug off this concern. The trust the public places in us has eroded and is in grave danger of disappearing. We tell our students that it would be nice not to have to think about this, but that time too is no longer with us. So our best hope, as with every generation everywhere, whatever the cause, is with our youth.