4 minutes now past 12 programming on NPR is supported by carousel automobiles The Oddities store introducing the audio Avant European sport wagons available in front track and Quattro models. And good afternoon. Welcome back to midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gerry Ellington. The news media are supposed to report on what's going on reflect reality if you will but Ray Suarez suggests that too often the media distort reality and US adversely affect the way we think about the world around us Ray Suarez, of course is the host of national public radio's Talk of the Nation program heard each weekday afternoon at one year on Minnesota Public Radio prior to joining NPR he work for virtually all the major commercial networks both here and overseas Ray Suarez was in the Twin Cities last week to speak at a conference sponsored by the Twin Cities chapter of the association for women in Communications. He had some tips for the group on how to deal with the media both in their role as public relations professionals and in their role as news consumers. Is Ray Suarez? It's always a pleasure to. To be allowed out of Washington. Not a place. I'm particularly fond of and now it's considered something of a security risk to let me out because I'm the only person who actually knows the whereabouts of the secret service agent who walked in on Bill Clinton the one you heard so much about earlier this year and I have also been sworn to secrecy on the whereabouts of a certain dress. So if you approach me afterwards, I'm afraid I have to keep my lips sealed. This has been a year where too many members of my profession have been talking an awful lot about things that they have not seen with their own eyes information that they have not gotten with their own ears events that they have not witnessed themselves. The business is unmoored from its traditional safe Anchorage in the known and the real But that may be appropriate for the kind of age that we're living in because how do you know what you know about the world when you think about it? I mean your communicators, you know what you know, but how much time do you really spend wondering how you know what you know? If I ask you who's the president of the United States, you'll tell me Bill Clinton with some Assurance still. And I might ask you. Well, you know, how do you know that where you at the inauguration? Did you see him take the oath of office? Have you ever gotten a letter from this man called Bill Clinton, and if you have can you really be sure that he signed it? One of the single largest changes in human life in the last thousand years has been the move from an almost entirely empirical worldview one based on the actual lived experience of people who knew very little about what happened in the world outside their field of vision. to a world of totally mediated knowledge knowledge that you got from other people who may have seen the actual events that you say, you know about And now we're moving even another step further down the food chain getting your information from people who also have not seen the event they're talkin about but have talked to somebody who talked to somebody who actually saw the event that they talkin about. So this world of mediated knowledge is a very odd place. It's a world where a tribesmen in remote Indonesian islands where Michael Jordan t-shirts and Cairo moviegoers shriek as Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up a bad guy and late at night people tap on a keyboard their faces bathed in the blue light of a monitor to get the latest news about black helicopters in Idaho and German Air Force jets in Texas and the murder of Vince Foster. You need to know Vince Foster was murdered. How does the president figure in that massive International drug cartel that works out of a remote airstrip in Arkansas? In a world that grows more complex every moment in a world where you're asked to take more and more on trust. We've got a problem. The impossible task of keeping up with everything is colliding with a backlash against media generated images. At a time when we need the news business more than ever to be a credible Observer of the world beyond our own field of vision the world that starts at out front door steps. Annual surveys show that the average person's faith in the truth of what they see in newspapers here on radio see on television is plummeting. So instead of being seen as Watchdogs of the common good news professionals are dismissed more and more as remote Elite agenda-driven enemies of common sense, not purveyors of it. And since I've made my living in this business my entire life, I find this disturbing. I mean, I'll always have a job I guess but it's one where I would like to be able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning anyone wants to live in this country and hopes to see it build a decent life for its citizens should be just as Disturbed as I am. and those of you who work in Communications join me with part of that wider Alliance of knowledge workers whose very working lives depends on people being willing to accept the things we say, This is serious stuff. And the signs in the culture or not particularly encouraging for me or for you? But I should point out that this gradual erosion of the Public's faith in the news is not a result of some odd quirk in the American character or some bad Gene that's victimizing and otherwise blameless news establishment chanting. It's daily Mantra. Oh, we're only giving the public what it wants. The business is not simply lost those Moorings I talked about but chop them up tossed away the ropes. And when you're Gliding Over a glass CC that's no problem doesn't show that much you can say that you're not drifting all I meant to go in this direction across the Uncharted ocean know when the seas are heavy that absence of a moral compass the absence of a strong sense of purpose Beyond titillation and ratings shines through there must be time. Will you pick up a newspaper or watch something on television where you can't imagine for the life of you? Why somebody thought this was a good idea to put on to prevent to readers to present to viewers who decided that I should see this or read this The gradual slide of the news business to become what it is today. I kind of freak Show a co-conspirator in the dumbing-down of America gives us breathless daily updates or what did of the recent in the continuing Saga of one family in Colorado and there as yet unsolved family tragedy now on Boulder TV, the story of JonBenet Ramsey is an appropriate part of the daily lineup. but on Miami television or Minnesota television, you got to ask yourself why the killing of an eight-year-old pin-up girl is more important than what's happening right here where you live? Television in particular they they are only the most guilty not the soul offender in this regard. has made the single largest contribution in the transformation of the American landscape into a sort of eerie nightmarish place where danger lurks just around the next turn think of how many times The common events of Life the common things that you need to do to get through a day you find when you turn on your evening news is fraught with danger that you would never recognized before and then you got to hang on till 10 to find out exactly what it is. Television should say crimes like these are isolated freaky departures from the norm. Show the killing of an admittedly bizarre little girl is a terrible tragedy, but really nothing for you to change the way you live your life in reaction to. Boston U people in San Diego you people in Saint Paul instead when giving the choice of Truth or Panic mongering the news business clearly makes its Choice splashing JonBenet and all her sanctifying whiteness across the cover of dozens of magazines in Whispering if this girl is killed then no one is safe. Four years now and BC appear to be flirting with becoming a JVC devoting 3 Nightly News program 3 nightly programs onto of a cable networks to the continuing legal Saga of a minor celebrity in Los Angeles who appears to have murdered his wife should have been covered. Absolutely. No doubt. Not even a question. It should have been covered. Should the network have sanctioned thousands of hours of OJ coverage literally thousands of hours of OJ coverage. Well, I don't think so. What do you think? As the OJ trials moved toward their twin conclusions. They turned out to be fraternal not identical twins. A lot of other things were happening in the world. Giant Zaire was moving toward collapse. The Republican Revolution was according to some of its revolutionaries stalling. The president was Raising four digit sums of money from places that later turned out to be a problem Russia stumbled and drifted as its president lay sick and isolated in a private Clinic far from the capitol Israelis and Palestinians stuck with each other on the same piece of land found that fine words on pieces of paper signed in Oslo and Washington didn't necessarily or immediately translate into a willingness to live together peace unraveled and then we reveled in Northern Ireland and in the rest of the country men conspicuously without Football Hall of Fame Rings killed their wives. And a smaller number of wives killed their husbands. And America continued to be distracted by the pointless Carnival in Los Angeles. All the while the news business fends off its critics with the Lazy Man's defense with just giving the public what it wants. But to what end to what end to the end that for all the complaining about Congress a stunning percentage of Americans can't tell you who their Congress member is can't name their two United States senators to the end that the Americans who believe themselves to be in danger from crime are often the Americans least likely to be Crime Victims. To the end that a murder has no real effect murder that has no real effect beyond the grief of one traumatized family in one saddened community. Trump's the killing of children all over America killings that really may tell us something about ourselves as a country and should function is a call to action. But instead what do we get People magazine and JonBenet Ramsey? To the end that the death of a princess in a car accident in France still manages to make the evening news from time to time. I mean, it's been awhile now. It's been awhile now. If the American Press covered Health Care reform the way it covered Princess Diana's accident investigation. We would have licked out Healthcare problems years ago, but don't hold your breath. Because even without a story on that I can tell you that's bad for your health. We as a people want a great many things. We want all kinds of things our wish-list. It's out of our American Birthright that have a wish list that is as long as our long lives. We want to smoke without dying of cancer. We want to eat enormous steaks without clogging are arteries. We want to drink and drive. We want to consume eight times the resources of an average European 60 times. The resorts has of an average Indian. We want all the things that taxes by but we don't want to pay the taxes that buy them we want to go to war in the defense of national interest, but we don't want anybody to die. We want to be able to opt out as individuals from the national Social Security System, but we want the government to take care of our own parents. It's a peculiarly American tendency to equate Desire with need. We make our desires into our Necessities in a way that will most people on the globe couldn't dream of but even the wealthier people on the globe couldn't imagine. So in a news business that's almost entirely driven by bottom-line consideration the role of being the bad guy who tells you that you can't have all the things you want sometimes. Is a role that the news business is particularly loath to play. News business as a rule is far more interested in furthering your life as a consumer then your life as a citizen and that's perfectly fine with a lot of people that's a condition they find they can happily live with on most days. With millions of us a deep credit card debt working to support out stuff habit skillful consuming advised by Katie and Matt and what's this woman the new woman on Good Morning America. Lisa Theresa, whatever these these people advising us from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas and from the auto show in Detroit. What we should be driving what we should be buying all these stories on high-definition television because you all die in your old chomping at the bit to get out there and spend $2,000 on a television set. I know you are all of this goes to a sort of meta narrative. What is the world about the world is about having and acquiring What I can have and what I can acquire. Sorry, but that's an end. I feel like I'm continually coming back to this refrain and that's okay. As long as that's not all that it's about that's really the problem if you give me Russia, so I know that the place that we spent down cells into the Grand Canyon size hole defending ourselves from if I can still hear about that country because I'm in the hole because of it if I can still hear about and Iraq, but not goofy. Saddam is Hitler stuff, but about what's really going on in a rock. So I know that wanting in my national name people are going there why and what they're going to do and what we want to accomplish if I can know those things and know that there's a neat little Gizmo that plays CDs in Your Shower I'm willing to take that bargain. It's just when one chases the other totally out of the landscape that we got a problem. In the early eighties when I was a producer ABC I was working with a newscaster and we were going over the wire service dispatches and talkin about what we were going to leave the upcoming newscast with in Morning Drive. That particular morning to interesting bits of news cross. The wires gas was going to be very cheap that particular summer after years of very high gas prices and the Commerce Department announced one of the largest ever trade deficits in history. Now, these two stories juxtaposed very nicely because in those days the largest single component of the American trade deficit was oil which went into that cheap gas. so I handed the newscaster the two pieces of copy I said will lead with this right these together. And he looked at me like I had just come in from behind the Hale Bopp comet. He said it was the wave the copy at me said you mean to tell me you want me to go on the air and say there might be something wrong with cheap gas. Are you crazy? He was interested in giving the public what it wants. I was interested in making them pick up their ears. Who knows maybe they even might have missed their exit and their morning commute. He and I were both in the news business, but it appeared that we were in it for very different reasons. In the years when the United States was insinuating itself into the domestic military and political conflicts in Nicaragua. El Salvador Guatemala a CBS News, New York Times poll came out that said two-thirds of American adults had no idea whose side we were on in these conflicts. That years into the coverage of these places in our national news people were still confused about whether we were Pro Contra or contract contra. And what the difference was between Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador? So we had a lot of arguments in The Newsroom over what lesson we were supposed to take away from those poll results. Should we conclude that for all the coverage? We give it Americans just weren't interested or should we have concluded that we weren't telling the story in an interesting compelling diverting meaningful way. That would make them remember. I lost that fight. These stories illustrate the tension between what's entertaining and what's informative what's necessary? And what's merely desirable? We haven't done a good job mediating those tensions the news business always seems to take the path of least resistance in the struggle deciding that the only alternative to the business as it is is this dreary kind of eat your peas News high in folic acid and iron but very low in in Enlightenment or diversion or fun cuz we all know the news is supposed to be fun. The idea that there's a way to do this that is entertaining and informative and provocative and responsible. Gets this annoying response whenever you bring it up. Yeah, I think we tried that once and it didn't work. So instead the American way of coverage gives us Richard Jewell harassed in stock 24 hours a day with by guys with cameras and reporters shouting questions. And then just a short time later Richard Jewell newly-minted News murder sits down on the Today Show for an intimate, LOL session with a wrapped Katie Couric. We get phenomenally detailed coverage of Heaven's Gate and precious little coverage of the way. We might save Social Security in the 21st century. The cost of an uninformed citizenry is not something that slapping Us in the face day after day after day went out of where the house is on fire. So we don't have to send out the bucket brigades start coaxing people to jump out of up a story Windows. We've load ourselves into this feeling that the news is only important at those critical moments when suddenly there is a national crisis and being for real and talkin about life in a for real America really matters. In the absence of real information in and taking hold of the American mind a fat inexpensive, un which does nothing for anybody anywhere and expects the US to pay its bills instead of the real you in which is spending fewer dollars in real terms than it did 10 years ago and is doing the bidding of the United States in foreign policy around the world as the us at the same time refuses to pay its billion-dollar arrears. we get this mythical world instead of the real America where 70% of Public School parent say the quality of their children's education is good or better but we find out news. Only massive systems of mediocrity where do nothing Union member teachers walk in a fog of feel good self esteem programs with overcrowded classrooms. Were they handing out condoms and guns? I didn't go to any of those schools. I don't know about you. What do you come away from that covered with a feeling that we would getting from our news media? What was supposed to be getting a vision of the world that helps us make decisions as Citizens helps us guide our own choices about how we're going to behave once we cross the threshold amount on family in a sentence and also how we're going to behave in the public sphere. I'm not yet. I'm not getting. Government did acts with the consent of the governed was a basic goal of the American Enterprise. And what we have right now is a government that acts with the dismay of the governed and I don't think that that is really good for democracy good for us as a people and it certainly hasn't done government much good One recent case of textbook level Distortion welfare reform now. I don't know if you would say by the time the debate and the vote in the bill-signing had run. Its course that you really had a good fix on who's on welfare how it works what portion of the American budget afdc really represented if you watch the coverage written and broadcast Well, maybe in this part of the country. You may have known that most people on welfare are white, but if you read the New York Post in the Boston Globe, you might not have that teen mothers represent only a small fraction of the caseload that most people are only on welfare for between two and three years that Aid to families with dependent children constituted one and a half percent of the federal budget for welfare reform that long-term cases people on the programs for more than 10 years and only 12% of the welfare population. I mean, stop me if you know all this stuff and every you feel like everybody knew it or that those receiving benefits hat live lives. We're just arranging their benefits and keeping the checks coming and getting their kids to clinics and those kinds of thing spent almost as much time as a full-time worker spends arranging their life. What I'm suggesting is that the kind of fixed we got might have been different. We were going to get welfare reform in some way shape or form, but the fix might have been different if it was driven by a desire to fix a real social problem rather than punish the lazy. You know, you got plenty of roads to walk down with this stuff, but the news business creates the landscape on which we walk and on which we individually and collectively the stage on which we individually and collectively make these decisions public needs good information to form opinions. The opinions Drive public debate public debate drives the political process. And right now the information isn't so good not in Mass audience broadcasting where most Americans say, they get their news people are forming their opinions based on preconception Voodoo to hysteria with a very toxic cocktail of input and that gives us the kind of politics. We've got these days Some people have decided simply to withdraw themselves from the equation. So they stopped reading newspapers. They stopped watching television. But what I'm afraid of is that a lot of these people when they stop reading a newspaper, they don't make an affirmative choice and say this newspaper is doing a better job for me than this one is so I'm going to read this other one what they're doing is not reading the newspaper at all, and thus sending very little input to a business desperately in need of public in foot about how to fix and set its own house in order. The lack of trust of the business is now so prodigious that hundreds of thousands of people are watching C-SPAN. And if you ask them why they watch C-SPAN, they'll say because I don't trust my local newspaper when it comes to printing a story on that hearing so I'm going to watch the whole hearing myself. Now, what is this? This is this is nothing less than a complete. Demolition of the structure of what journalism is the reason journalism exist in the first place is because you don't have the time to watch that hearing in affect your giving consent to a broker of information to go send somebody to that hearing to sit there for the 5 hours and watch it then put out a thousand words 20 column inches or 2 minutes on television or couple of minutes on all things considered and tell you what happened on that hearing and now they're actually Americans who is short-circuiting the process and because a new technology has cut out that information middleman that reporter with a a pad and a pencil they're watching the whole hearing themselves and then calling Brian Lamb afterwards to talk about the black helicopters in the murder of Vince Foster. So We got trouble we got trouble folks. The hardest core American Media Bashers & Body in amusing Paradox. They believe on one hand really really believe that the government cannot do anything. And at the same time they believe that every mysterious thing that happens in an American life is done by the government. Think about that for a minute. Government unable to educate American children unable to regulator plan but fully capable of engineering worldwide criminal conspiracy to allow the UN take over the United States the importation of drugs the eventual Assumption of ownership of all productive capital in the country by Jewish bankers. And worst of all, see, this is what makes the pot. Boil, the media is in on it. So when Brave truth-tellers try to warn us their information is suppressed by the media government conspiracy. You heard it here first folks. So through the whole thing. You may be wondering if this is the way it is. What should I be doing about it? Not an easy question to answer since a lot of you a PR people and thus interview with reporters by definition part of the problem not part of the solution. Let's be honest. But in that other part of your life when you're a consumer of news rather than a shaper of it and it's something we can talk about you can refuse to watch junk and refuse to read junk and when you stop let people know why you refused to be a consumer of junk tell other people, you know to do the same newsrooms regard each phone call or letter as representing 50 other unhappy people. That's the rule of thumb that they use in newsrooms. 50 people who didn't have the energy to call or write so your voice is magnified if your local television news is stressing Mayhem and fluff over a real picture of what happened in your metropolitan area and Minneapolis-Saint Paul is ahead of the country in and having absorbed that message and understanding just how important it is to call the media to account. If you get the idea that your local media is real desire is to wind up the public and not informant. There are things you can do. We are not in the midst of an information shortage. As a matter of fact, we are standing underneath the most wide-open information spigot in the history of humankind and the question is not now. How do I get information? Is there enough can I find it? The question is now how to tell the good from the bad how to tell the absorbable from the in absorbable how to navigate? A supermarket aisle with endless choices and not end up with an information diet. That's too high in sugar and empty calories. So if you turning on the television and seeing too much about the making of the movie Titanic on your local news. If you turn on Good Morning America and just coincidentally disney-owned ABC is giving you a loving Low by blow rendition of gosh. How did they get all those wonderful animals to the new Disney Animal Kingdom in Central, Florida? You know PR people arrange that too. Okay, so I'm doing this mayor Copa deal. I hope that you are also in your own private heart of hearts understanding your own truths your own unhappy truth. Violent crime has been dropping Like a Rock Cross the country in New York murder rate dropped 50% in 5 years. In Dallas 25% in one year two out of every three respondents to a recent public opinion poll said the country was going in the wrong direction when it came to crime. You got to wonder on what information they based that response Pew a good bunch of people these in that goofballs with a with a you know, with black marbles that the dropping in a bag if people give give different answers. These are smart public opinion researchers and social scientists and they went out and asked the unvarnished questioned you feel the country's going in the right direction when it comes to crime. Who are the three people said? No, you got to wonder what they want. But you don't have to look any further than their own local television to see how they get that idea because during those same years when murder was dropping this way during the 90s the presence of Murder in the local and network news was growing by 30% Why is that? Why is that? What? If we want to really have a smart National conversation in this country, we have to talk back to our media you who have your fingers in these pies have to help reporters instead of assume that there are a bunch of dunderheads and we all have to think better of the public because the assumption that the public is stupid and gullible and driven like an exposed nerve ending to just be cranked up by the next set of shrieking we can put on television hasn't gotten us to any place where we want to be. so Think about some of these recent stories public relations professionals deeply implicated in them. I might add How often in the current coverage of airbags do you read that virtually everyone killed by an airbag wasn't wearing a seat belt now, it's a better story if you leave that fact out because it gives that lingering impression that he there's a hidden killer waiting in your car a piece of safety equipment get it safety equipment that's going to kill you. What could be a better teas for the 10:00 news during Primetime safety experts say that if you start making on-off switches for airbag fewer people will use them and more people will die. So if the solution to the so-called airbag crisis ends up killing more people than the original crisis that the solution was crafted to respond to you following me. Shouldn't that be in the stories? We write shouldn't that be in the briefings that the company all the companies involved give Killer airbags definitely has more impact. Recently, I was watching The Today Show when I was on the road, which is usually the only time I see it cuz I'm alone in the hotel room and I watch it between my feet. Much of one entire hour. They teased a story about dangerous sleepwear. Urging you to stay tuned to find out if your own child might be at risk. Now it turns out virtually All American children were not at risk in any discernible way. Improperly treated fleece style kids pajamas from an Asian producer had been sent to one retailer granted a big one. JCPenney's Penney's had already immediately taken virtually all of those pajamas off the shelf shortly after they went on sale. A valid story. Yes, because there are some people out there with dangerous sleepwear. What did the very responsible Statesman like Today Show? little baby dummies with their pajamas on fire Did they say well it's most likely that this is impossible to happen to you because we got almost all of these pajamas already and Curry looking very grave. Reminding us that she too is a mother because I as a father would not I wouldn't give a rap about this. Look dolorously at the JCPenney spokesman. And had him asherah's. That yes these pajamas could catch on fire A and B almost nobody had them. Were they telling the truth in some loose definition of the truth with a telling the truth? Yes in literal terms. They were telling the truth. But let's be honest with each other. They were kind of lying for the other 45 minutes of the hour when we were being told about dangerous sleepwear. Video games that give you seizures I had to go out as a reporter on this a family was was suing a video maker and my assignment editor was like jumping out of her skin because they were the hot Christmas item that week that year and oh, she can almost see the teases that we be running now, you know showing kids playing video games if we were lucky maybe one getting one with his tongue lolling out of the corner of his mouth. So I went I went to both sides. I went to the parents lawyer. I went to the company's lawyer. I talked to them for a long time trying to understand the real parameters of this story and it turns out that one in 60000 children because of the frequency with which the images are projected. By the cathode rays against the screen one in 60,000 people. might get anything from Queasiness to a full-blown seizure and the numbers that actually got a seizure infinitesimal. Did we go on television that night and say almost no danger from video games study finds. We did not. Instead we implied that if you are blessed car go with their Atari or their PlayStation or whatever there is. Was spending a lot of time at the game they could get a seizure and then way way down in the story over my virtually dead body cuz I wanted to put it in the lead. I wanted to get one in 60,000 somewhere in the lead and I couldn't we did toward the end say that oh, yeah 50 9999 kids. Don't have any problems at all. This is a descent into triviality and because of what you do for a living and because of what I do for a living we can be partners in putting on the brakes at least attenuating the speed of our descent into the abyss. We owe it to ourselves I think and we certainly owe it to the people who get the information that we work so hard to bring it's been my pleasure to talk to you today. And is it time for Q&A? Yes. Right now we've got a media landscape. where The big players used to go into the arena trying to get everybody to watch them. If you ask the program and what the optimal result for his or her program the project was it would be to get everybody to watch a wide swathe of the population retirees and adolescents and middle-aged homeowners and double income. No kids couples. The idea was to to make a mass product that would at least appeal two parts of every demographic group that structure the structure that drove the creation of Life magazine and time and the Ed Sullivan Show the sort of cultural markers that work Mass products meant to be enjoyed in different ways by different people that age is dead. It's like the dinosaurs. I don't know if it could ever be brought back again what we have now. Is someone who sets out with a very specific public already in mind for what they're about to do anybody who writes for a broadsheet newspaper in this country can pretty much guarantee to him or herself that only a certain kind of person is going to see that story that they write for the paper. When I talk into the microphone at NPR even though my audience is pretty Broad and NPR terms. I know that there's certain things that I can say on the are certain cultural references. I can make certain level of vocabulary I can use because I already know that certain people will not listen and do not listen don't want to listen don't have any interest in what I'm doing. I can't make them listen. The internet is siphoning off people with pinhead-sized. Red's of Interest they want that to go to that web page for left-handed Eskimo bisexuals. It gets 40 hits a day and you know the left-handed Eskimo bisexual Community being not very diverse, but very broadly situated can't have its own magazine. So the internet creates a delivery vehicle for news of particular interest to Eskimos who write with their left hand and have broad sexual taste. In a way in an economy of scale that a television program can't do you couldn't even make a program for television just for left-handed people even that's kind of too narrow since we are just 10% of the population. So the structure is right now in in breathtaking flux because the networks dinosaurs juggernauts built to be the Life Magazine of Television are now having to wrestle with this new world that's creating miniature audiences that coalesce around very narrowly defined interest. So what to do about how to do this right do this business right is something that everybody has an idea on and none of them has the good idea so was flailing the business is flailing newspapers are going belly-up or it bought by chains, which is disappearing everybody who says all the internet internet those goofball techno-utopian who who seem to talk as if it's not 85% of the public that doesn't have a modem equipped computer instead. You think they talk like it's 85% of the population that does have a modem equipped computer and it is surfing and is on these different going to be all Network to look at whatever they go there to look at I mean This world is such soft clay that anything I say today about how it's going to be in 5 years is going to be wrong in 5 weeks even in general terms. The economics the structure that you held in your head in order to design what it was you were doing is even outdated as broadcasters who have these big institutions called television stations and radio stations find that they can no longer talk to a broad enough public to pay the bills because there is no broad public anymore. It's just an endless series of American public's that refer to themselves as communities. Communities of people who never see each other never talk to each other. It's an it's a landscape that that the people who made look magazine and Colliers in the Saturday evening post wouldn't know what to do with they wouldn't know what to put between the pages of the magazine. We used to have a concede in the society that we all knew roughly the same things. You realize there's not even top 40 radio anymore because there's not a top 40 anymore is like 15 top 40s. There's an urban contemporary and a country and a an adult listening and all these different Publix all these communities of interest. You can even program a pop radio station anymore. I admit what I first got into radio is a teenager there something called m o r radio radio that went on the air thinking we can talk to everybody between this morning and tonight and I work for one of the great independent radio stations in the country wnew. Wnew was bought out by Bloomberg business news and that station because it can no longer exist. Is a twenty-four-hour-a-day business station in a country. We're really only about six to 10% of the population owns enough stock to matter. So they're going into the marketplace already knowing that only 10% of the people are going to listen to us. That's one radio station. That one went from a everybody should listen to We already know mostly nobody's going to listen radio station. Look at what happened to go to a newsstand. I mean, you may all live in suburbs where it's impossible to go to Windows 10, but think about a newsstand. How about that or drive-by one? How about that? Or if if you're not old enough to have somebody who is tell you about new stance. Like I try very hard and on most days I'm reasonably successful in keeping my own opinions out of there. I think there are programs on issues of great public contention, which you can get to the hour end of the hour and not really be sure what I think about it. I want people to take strong and outspoken Stand All Along the Spectrum during the course of the our people say they don't trust the media. You ask the excuse me, you asked them why and they give you a for instance of a story that the media never covers and then you say well if they never cover it and how come you know about it? And they rarely have a good answer to that question. People say how come the meeting and never covers Whitewater? What what people say it's seriously because what they're looking for is a reflection of their their own personal take on Whitewater. And if they're waiting for CBS News War of the Chicago Tribune 2 To put above the fold on the front page Clinton a slug see page 10 for details and it's just not going to happen. So what do they conclude? They conclude the media never really covers white water when in fact it was the New York Times that broke white water in the first place. Just the other morning. I was riding the subway in to work with the reporter that broke who lives in my neighborhood Jeff girl. How do you feel about like ruining the Clinton presidency? How you know that I'm surprised that you don't get a limo from like, you know from the MacArthur Foundation is the Rutherford Rutherford foundation and they might just cut out in a little extra that pull the money and get you a limo to go into work, but that we were on the subway this unassuming nice man, who writes for the New York Times the New York Times that never covers white water and in fact Brooke white water and then the media Feeding Frenzy ensued from their people. Who are now increasingly members of these individual Publix increasingly want news that confirms their own prejudices about the world rather than news the challenges their prejudices about the world. This is a very very dangerous Trend. It makes my job much much harder to do and makes people like me much harder to work with four people. Like you are most reporters even handed the good ones are and having worked in big markets all of my life and worked overseas and I've been lucky enough to have a pretty good career. Most of the reporters that I've worked with over the years have been even handed. It's a fantasy that it's this crazy liberal cabal every morning that gets its orders from Hillary Clinton in the marches marches into the newsroom's of America to to rail against School. prayer and make abortion not only legal but mandatory and and all these things this is this is just a How cool is this doing? This work? The people that I've worked with over the years come from tenements and farms and suburbs and Elite public schools and crappy slummy schools and they are convinced committed Christians and atheists and Jews and Hindus and nutcases and people who are as level as Well as a tabletop and this idea that we're all kind of the same. It's just it's a myth and it's a myth. It's like Dracula no matter how many states you drive into its heart. Will it's even better than Dracula Dracula. When you do these things you keep him up past son kill him again and they keep roaring back to life the next day. I can't say it enough the newsroom's of this country off. Actually less diverse than they used to be in some ways because media Professionals of being drawn from a narrower and narrower class used to be a working-class job for the precocious sons and Sons of the struggling class because they were very few daughters allowed in the door, but now increasingly journalists are coming from more privileged backgrounds and going to better schools and getting more years of education and come into the work-life expecting a better standard of living than they did when I got involved the 22 years ago. So journalism is changing the profession is changing and who does it is changing but one thing that's not changing it is the people who do this job a pretty much like a lot of everybody. And it's a terrible Distortion and a Canard that we have to fight over and over and over again that there's somehow removed from the American life that's lived by most of us the average starting salary for a TV reporter in this country's $14,000. I guarantee you that somebody working in Bemidji or Fort Smith Arkansas making $14,000 a year doesn't consider themselves a member of a detached media Elite. I guarantee you that somebody working in Bemidji or Fort Smith Arkansas making $14,000 a year doesn't consider themselves a member of a detached media Elite. Ray Suarez the host of national public radio's Talk of the Nation speaking last week at a conference sponsored by the Twin Cities chapter of the association for women in Communications. Well that does it for our mid-day program today Gary I can hear so glad you could join us and reminder special broadcast at 9 tonight during the midday rebroadcast time 9 to 11 is a matter of fact Arne Fogel will be back. John. Raby will be hosting a special 2-hour broadcast on Frank Sinatra The Late Frank Sinatra died last night programming on NPR is supported by Kare 11 News the recipient of the Edward R Murrow award for overall excellence in television. Sara Meyers the producer of our midday program Mike McCaul Tanger our associate producer. We had help this week from Danny Jansen Harry Dwyer Cliff Bentley and Perry Carter news headlines are coming up next 2 minutes off the Salt Lake City Ira Flatow hosting the today is edition of Talk of the Nation Science Friday. I'm learning Benson on the next all things.