Media Nation

I’m hardly the first person of my generation (I’m 49) to make the observation that I almost never watch the three major networks’ nightly newscasts. Lifestyles have changed dramatically over the past 20 to 30 years. It’s far more convenient to tune in National Public Radio while I’m commuting than to sit down and try to watch a 6:30 p.m. headline service. If there’s big news, I’ll watch CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown” at 10 p.m.

Still, Peter Jennings’s death matters, just as Tom Brokaw’s retirement mattered and – yes – just as Dan Rather’s “did he jump or was he pushed?” departure mattered. My sightings of all three tended to take place during big news events, election nights and the like. Jennings and Brokaw were very good at what they did, and I’d give Jennings the edge for a somewhat more intelligent approach. Even Rather, an unsettling presence, stood for real news values. Yet the Jennings/Brokaw/Rather troika embodied not the golden age of television news but its decline.

Network news audiences are half the size they used to be. Unlike the true giants of an earlier era, like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the Big Three of recent decades represented an early attempt by network news executives to put telegenic faces in front of the camera. Jennings flopped as a twentysomething, pretty-boy anchor, then turned himself into a real journalist. Brokaw was a veteran of “Today,” hardly a paradigm of hard-news excellence. Rather, though hardly unskilled, was best at calling attention to himself, as when he memorably snarked at Richard Nixon during a televised news conference.

What you did sense with all three of them, though, was that they had standards, and that, ultimately, they would not be a part of the more perfidious schemes their profit-obsessed corporate bosses might come up with. (Not to be overly nostalgic; they all stood by while foreign coverage was gutted, didn’t they?) Brian Williams and whoever ultimately replaces Jennings and Rather (Charlie Gibson seems to be the early favorite for Jennings’s chair) may become equally skilled journalists. But will they have the clout to resist further news cutbacks?

With NBC News in the best position of the post-troika era, having made an astoundingly smooth transition to Williams, it will be interesting to see whether the other two networks decide to move away from the nightly news model and come up with other ways to appeal to a shrinking audience. Obviously Jennings will be missed; and he’ll be missed even more if Disney decides this is the perfect opportunity to lighten up.

This will be my last post for a while. Tomorrow, I leave for a five-day, 50-mile backpacking trip with my son’s Boy Scout troop along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. My goal: sheer survival.

Dick Gordon is going out with a bang. Gordon, the host of “The Connection,” on WBUR Radio (90.9), was canned recently amid reports that station management believed ratings were “flat.” Yesterday, he fought back in the pages of the Boston Phoenix, telling Mark Jurkowitz, “I’m left wondering what possibly could have motivated them.” Today, Gordon has an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe. Among other things, Gordon writes:

GORDON: I’m still bewildered as to why the program was canceled. At a time when WBUR is clearly anxious about maintaining financial support from the public, they have taken down what they called their flagship program. “The Connection” was carried on more stations across the country than any other news show produced at WBUR.

They’ve talked about “flat ratings,” but “The Connection” has consistently had one of the top measures of listener loyalty at WBUR and some of the best such ratings among all NPR talk shows. Just over a year ago the station was boasting that ratings for “The Connection” were up 22 percent.

So what happened? As someone who followed WBUR for years, I think I can provide some perspective. After longtime general manager Jane Christo left the station last fall amid charges of mismanagement (and worse), the fear I heard voiced most often – even among Christo’s detractors – was that Boston University, which holds the station’s license, would start slashing the budget to get the operation’s massive debt under control.

Dick Gordon did an excellent job of hosting “The Connection.” His ability to broadcast from war-torn Iraq brought a dimension to ‘BUR that it hadn’t had with its other program hosts. He was also a gentleman, and I thoroughly enjoyed my one appearance on his show. But, as he acknowledges to Jurkowitz, he came in under a cloud, replacing the wildly popular Christopher Lydon, who was fired in early 2001 after he and his executive producer, Mary McGrath, demanded an ownership share of the program.

Following Christo’s departure, a WBUR source who would occasionally update me on internal discussions at the station told me that though management was believed not to want to start cutting too deeply, if things got bad enough, Gordon might go. This source assumed that managers saw Tom Ashbrook, the host of “On Point” – which will move to the 10 a.m. slot now occupied by “The Connection” – as a greater asset than Gordon.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened. And though Gordon and Ashbrook each bring considerable strengths to the microphone, Ashbrook comes across as having a more lively personality. If WBUR really couldn’t afford to keep both of them (and let’s not forget that the station’s signature hosts earn well into the six figures), then interim general manager Peter Fiedler probably made the right decision. (In another cost-cutting move, the station ended its relationship with award-winning documentarian Michael Goldfarb, who’s based in London.)

But what of the high ratings to which Gordon refers? Here’s where the economics of public radio enter in. Public radio these days is almost entirely privatized; a station such as ‘BUR exists primarily on listener contributions and advertising – that is, corporate underwriting. But though public stations have to be responsive to their audiences, they are responsive in a different way from commercial stations. Obviously ‘BUR is betting that it can nix “The Connection” without any falloff in contributions or underwriting, because people and companies give to the station as a whole rather than to any particular show.

If Fiedler and company are right, then ‘BUR will save itself a whole lot of money. A side benefit, as Jurkowitz notes, is that Ashbrook won’t have to compete with Lydon, whose new show, “Open Source,” emanates from WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) Monday through Thursday from 7 to 8 p.m.

What happened to Gordon was lousy. He will definitely be missed. But there’s no mystery to what happened. Jane Christo built a station that was more expensive than the community was willing to support, especially after the dot-com bust and the Lydon fiasco. Retrenchment was inevitable. As a frequent listener, I just hope this is the last of it.

Among the prevailing civic religions currently animating American political life, perhaps none is as long-lived as that of unfettered capitalism. A bit long in the tooth compared to its heyday during the Reagan years, the notion that government is the enemy of both individual liberty and economic freedom nevertheless remains a firmly established part of our mythology.

So it was with some surprise and pleasure that I read Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications,” his 2004 book on why American media have, for better or worse, come to dominate the world. Because Starr – a Princeton University scholar who is co-editor of the American Prospect – argues persuasively that the US culture industry is such a success story not because of unfettered capitalism, but because of traditional liberalism.

By traditional liberalism, I mean not the laissez-faire liberalism of the 19th century, nor the pseudo-socialism with which liberalism is too often confused today. Rather, I’m talking about the political philosophy that prevailed for much of the 20th century, and especially between the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – that is, the belief in a mixed economy of capitalism and regulation, enhanced with some intelligent government policies about how best to improve society.

The phrase that Starr uses over and over again is “constitutive choices” – decisions made at an early point that have had far-reaching consequences over time. For instance, Starr explains the rise of the American newspaper industry, and its eventual dominance over the British, Canadian and European press, as the result of a number of conscious and semi-conscious decisions. To wit:

– In other Western societies, government has taxed the press. By contrast, from the time of the rebellion against the Stamp Act of 1765, the US government has not only not taxed the press, but it has also provided various tax incentives.

– A cheap, professional and reliable US Post Office, with special rates for newspapers, led to an inexpensive, extensive distribution network.

– Universal education, for the masses as well as for the elite, created an involved citizenry eager for the news provided by the early media.

– Government-subsidized roads and canals created additional distribution channels.

Starr offers example after example to bolster his thesis. For instance, magazines, which became the principal organ for investigative reporting in the last quarter of the 19th century, only took off after postal policies were changed to make the business more lucrative. In the early 20th century, the Supreme Court for the first time started putting some teeth into the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment, thus establishing the Constitution as a countervailing force at a time of rising business and governmental giantism. In the 1920s, then-secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover’s policies paved the way for a privately owned, publicly regulated radio industry, a regime that was later extended to television.

Starr seems troubled by this last development. Although he notes that the US had at least managed to avoid the government monopoly that prevailed in Europe, broadcast regulations – promulgated on the theory that the airwaves are a finite, privately owned resource – have prevented radio and television stations from enjoying the same First Amendment protections as their print counterparts. At the same time, the early bias toward commercial broadcasting (Starr notes that government regulations actually referred to nonprofit stations run by universities, religious groups and the like as “propaganda” stations) prevented the creation of modern public radio until the late 1960s.

In his summing-up, Starr writes:

STARR: The market, even when its products are distasteful, is a continual stimulus to innovation outside the market and in reaction to it. In a dynamic sense, markets in liberal societies enrich the public sphere far more than they impoverish it. If, however, all were left to the market – if government had not promoted communications networks, the press, education, and innovation while attempting to check tendencies toward excessive concentrations of power – the public sphere would be poor indeed. Our public life is a hybrid of capitalism and democracy, and we are better off for it, as long as the democratic side is able to keep the balance.

If that isn’t a good working definition of traditional liberalism, I don’t know what is.

Here, by the way, is an insightful review of “The Creation of the Media” written by James Fallows for the New York Times Book Review.

One obvious question raised by Starr’s book is this: What constitutive choices do we face today that might have long-range effects on the media that will be used by our children and beyond? Certainly the deregulatory stance taken by the FCC in recent years is worth examining, although that’s mainly about managing the death of Old Media.

My candidate for a constitutive choice we’ve got to get right is making sure that the broadband Internet – and its faster and more robust successors – remain wide open. Powerful business interests would love nothing better than to privatize these networks, banning rivals from using or charging them exorbitant rates, and favoring their own content over those of independents.

The organization that’s doing the most to ensure an open Internet is the Center for Digital Democracy, headed by the indefatigable Jeff Chester. Paul Starr has shown how crucial it was in the past to get it right. It’s just as important that we get it right in the future.

I’m slogging through Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media,” and was reading the other night about how, during the early days of telephones, competing networks were incompatible with one another. You couldn’t call your friend on the other side of town if she was using one type of phone and you were using another. Well, here we are a good decade into the Internet revolution, and Bill Gates is still operating under the ancient paradigm.

Go to most sites that offer multimedia – NYTimes.com or iFilm.com, for instance – and you’re given choices: RealPlayer or Windows Media (yes, there’s a Mac version), sometimes with a QuickTime option thrown in, too. It is rare that it matters what browser you’re using. Thus, even though Starr’s telephone analogy is alive and well, you can work around it.

Go to MSNBC.com, though, and it’s a different story. Even though Microsoft is perpetually rumored to be looking to get out of its partnership with NBC, the Bill’s-way-or-the-highway ethos still holds. Oh, the site renders fine on the Mac version of Firefox. But when you try to play a video clip, you are informed that you must be using the most recent version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows, along with Windows Media Player. Even the Mac versions of IE and Windows Media Player won’t do.

Here is the Word from Bill:

MSN Video incorporates the latest Internet technology to bring videos to your computer. To use this technology, MSN Video requires the following software:

– Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
– Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 or later
– Macromedia Flash Player 7 or later

I own some shares of Microsoft stock, but I’m not sure why. When I bought them, my theory was that Apple had better technology but Microsoft had a superior business strategy. As it turns out, I’m being punished financially for my cynicism, which I suppose serves me right. At least I have no regrets about my choice of technology.

By the way, it’s not as though Microsoft makes no money from the Apple crowd. The Mac version of MS Office is a huge bestseller. So come on, Bill. Show us a little love.

Latecomers to the work of Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw, who died yesterday, may know him for little more than an ill-considered screed against bloggers that he wrote this past spring.

Among media critics, though, Shaw was a legend – the only one of us, to the best of my knowledge, ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. That’s sort of like a second baseman winning the home-run title.

Shaw was not as celebrated as he should have been because he worked well outside the East Coast media orbit. Today’s LA Times obituary sets the record straight. So does this appreciation, by National Journal’s William Powers.

Today’s New York Times further cements Governor Mitt Romney’s status as 2005’s “It” boy in the 2008 Republican presidential sweepstakes. In a front-page piece headlined “Massachusetts Governor Tries to Accentuate the Conservative,” Pam Belluck essentially describes Romney’s strategy as positioning himself approximately a half-inch to the left of George W. Bush.

The Times article is just the latest evidence that Romney is having considerable success in the media pre-primary that will determine who’s serious and who isn’t. The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a long, effusively positive profile of the governor by former New York Observer media columnist Sridhar Pappu. In June, National Review put Romney on its cover, with writer John Miller exploring whether the governor was conservative enough for Republican primary voters. (The article – available online by subscription only – created a minor sensation because of a quote from Romney political adviser Michael Murphy, who referred to his client as “a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly.” Well, at least Romney is no longer faking it.) Just weeks before that, the Weekly Standard published a cover story by Terry Eastland that explored whether Romney’s Mormon religion would be a help or a hindrance were he to run for president.

Of the three magazine articles, Eastland’s is the most useful, because it explores in some depth the relationship between Mormonism and evangelical Christianity. Eastland dares to say out loud that Mormonism deviates so significantly from traditional Christianity that many observers do not consider Mormons to be Christians – potentially a real drawback among the conservative religious voters who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process. Indeed, Eastland begins by observing that, as recently as 1999, a poll showed that 17 percent of Americans would not vote for a Mormon for president. (Of course, Romney’s Mormonism carries with it certain advantages, too, as this Adam Reilly piece in the Boston Phoenix demonstrates.)

By contrast, Miller’s National Review piece is a once-over-lightly, and Pappu’s borders on hagiography – although it does have the virtue of letting the reader see Romney the way he sees himself, always a useful service and one the media rarely perform.

The Romney rush is unusual for two reasons: it’s at least a year too early, and these media lovefests usually involve Democrats rather than Republicans. Inevitably, some months before everyone gets serious, the press falls in love with a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, straight-talking Democrat with little or no chance of winning – Mo Udall, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, even Howard Dean before his weird, mid-2003 rise miscast him as some sort of a left-wing rabble-rouser. The only Republican I can think of who got this sort of treatment was John McCain in late 1999 and early 2000. (Media Nation’s 2008 Democratic candidate for the early media massage: Iowa governor Tom Vilsack. Just watch.)

Far from straight talk, Romney’s public pronouncements tend toward bland marketing-speak. Indeed, Romney suggests to Pappu that his substance-free rhetoric is a direct result of what happened to his father, George, whose 1968 presidential campaign went into freefall after he described himself as having undergone a “brainwashing” administered by American military officials during a visit to Vietnam. “It did tell me you have to be very, very careful in your choice of words,” Mitt Romney told Pappu. “The careful selection of words is something I’m more attuned to because Dad fell into that quagmire.”

The early rush of media attention Romney has received is the result of several factors. For one thing, the 2008 presidential campaign is wide open – as wide open as it’s been in many decades. For another, most of the attention on the Democratic side is going to the celebrity pseudo-candidacy of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may or may not run. Then, too, Romney, as a social conservative in liberal Massachusetts and as a Mormon, is exotic, something the media always like. Finally, the Republican field at this point is so fractured that Romney seems plausible.

Romney had better enjoy all the attention while he can. Should he find himself to be a legitimate frontrunner in, say, mid-2007, he’ll be getting far more attention than he is today. Chances are, though, that it won’t be the kind that he’ll frame and put on the wall.

Slate’s Jack Shafer has the takedown I wanted to write about Richard Posner, whose nearly 5,000-word typing exercise on the state of the media appears in the current New York Times Book Review.

Since Shafer beat me to it, let me instead whine a bit about the Sam Tanenhaus-edited NYTBR. I had thought it was settling down into something resembling its old self – that is, the slightly boring but indispensable guide to Books I’ll Never Read That I Need to Know Something About. I mean, according to this, there have only been three Christopher Hitchens bylines in the Review all year. That’s something to be grateful for, and it’s more than can be said of, um, Slate.

Posner’s poorly researched, clumsily written opus suggests that Tanenhaus still hasn’t quite figured out that his job is to provide a service, not to create a sensation – let alone an embarrassing one like this.

Mark Jurkowitz has an entertaining item on the past week’s contretemps over Manny being Manny. But something doesn’t set right with me over this. As Mark observes, Ramírez’s annual freakout “is tiresome and relatively inconsequential.”

Which is why part of me feels as though the local sports media were complicit in a fairly transparent attempt by ownership to run the oddball slugger out of town. Fortunately, the owners themselves pulled back when they realized they’d have had to give up too much.

Yesterday morning I fired up iTunes to check on my podcasts. (Currently I’m subscribed to just two – “On the Media” and Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source.”) Lo and behold, I saw that, on Monday, Lydon had done an hour on Miles Davis, marking the 50th anniversary of a memorable Miles appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. I downloaded it to my iPod and listened through my car stereo via iTrip. It was a terrific program, though it would have been better if there had been less talk and more music.

I saw Miles twice. The first time was in 1974, when my friend Jim and I caught him at the old Paul’s Mall, in the Back Bay. Within a year, Miles would begin his infamous drug-induced retirement, and the show was a strange one. A loud, largely anonymous electric band cranked away with no discernible breaks between pieces. Miles, meanwhile, came and went as he pleased, occasionally sitting on a stool to blow straight down into a microphone that was emanating from a six-inch stand on the floor. He’d leave the stage – for all we knew, he’d left the building – only to return occasionally for a few more staccato stabs. What was most memorable was that Jim and I got to shake his hand briefly during one of his forays down the aisle.

Then, in 1981, my wife, Barbara, and I were on hand for his comeback performance at Kix Disco, near Kenmore Square. Miles was in a good mood that night, interacting with the audience in what almost might be described as an expansive mood; for him, at least, it certainly was. The performance was marred only by the fact that we were hard up against a sound tower, which nearly shattered our eardrums.

Anecdotes aside, it’s Miles’s records that have meant the most to me – “Kind of Blue,” of course, but also “In a Silent Way” and his flat-out rock albums, most notably “Bitches Brew” but also such underrated discs as “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It.” The best part of the Lydon program was that he didn’t stint on Miles’s later work, even his much-maligned albums from the 1980s. Indeed, I’m now tempted to check out “Tutu,” the best-known of those albums.

“Open Source” is an example of how rapidly podcasts are going mainstream. When I wrote about podcasting in the Phoenix last December, the technology – which greatly simplifies the process of finding and downloading audio programs from the Internet – was still in its infancy, though it was taking off. Lydon’s embrace of blogging and podcasting for his new radio program recently attracted the attention of the New York Times. And, as David Pogue observed yesterday, Apple Computer’s decision to embrace podcasting in its latest version of iTunes has given it an enormous boost. I can attest that iTunes’s podcasting module is far easier to use than the software I had been using, iPodderX – although, according to this chart, the latter has way more geeky features.

What podcasting promises is a theoretically limitless source of audio on demand, with producers ranging from professionals like Lydon to foul-mouthed amateurs like Dawn and Drew. We’re still several technological breakthroughs away from podcasting (or its successor) overtaking traditional radio. But I never would have heard Chris Lydon and his guests talking about Miles Davis without podcasting. That’s a pretty good start.