Nicholas Johnson interview on KCET-TV, November 11, 1968

Speaker 1: After [inaudible]- Speaker 2: Speculation number 164, multiple ownership of broadcast facilities. . Recorded 11 November, '68. Air date, 20 and 22, December '68. Speaker 1: [inaudible]. Amidst the general enthusiasm for the emergence of the knowledge industry, so-called, there's been a growing concern over the increasing concentration of the power for the dissemination of news, of knowledge in a relatively few hands, in the hands of conglomerate corporations. It's that subject we discuss this evening under the title The Multiple Ownership of Broadcast Facilities. My guests are, first, Mr. Nicholas Johnson, who is a member of the Federal Communications Commission and has been since 1966, and in that capacity has been an outspoken opponent or critic, I think I should really say, of this kind of concentration. Next, Mr. Clayton H. Brace who is a vice president of Time ife Broadcasting Incorporated, and general manager of KOGO AM FM and TV in San Diego, and I suppose it's fair to say you are an exemplar of this kind of concentration, is that fair Mr. Brace? C. Brace: That's very fair. Speaker 1: And finally Mr Ben. H. Bagdikian who is project director of the news media studies project at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. A journalist, author of books including In the Midst of Plenty: The Poor in America, and a long-standing student and critic of broadccasting in the United States. And I would like really to begin by asking what is the nature of the problem and I'd like to ask you that Mr Bagdikian since you are, I think, the most disinterested of the three of you in this matter. Not uninterested but disinterested. B. Bagdikian: Well I think the basic problem is one that is rooted in the whole problem of democratic life, that if you accept the fact that we ought to have as many voices and as many ideas as possible with which to fashion answers to a constantly changing set of problems, if that is valuable, and if it's necessary for the development of the individual, that he has many choices. Then you want as many ... you want as much access to your informational and news media as possible. Now that's mated with the economic facts of life, in which very large operators have genuine economies. They can do things that small operators can't. They can do them technically, that is. They can also do them politically and economically. And so there tend to be very large operators, a few which have a disproportionate control over the channels of information. It's not monolithic, but that's the tendency. In addition to that it seems to me that there's another problem that even if the large operators who have a disproportionate control over our channels of information, were the wisest in the world, and even if they were disinterested and they could treat news about themselves just as dispassionately as they treat news about others, this would still narrow the amount and kind of information that even the wisest man can produce. We've learned in history that we shouldn't depend on the wisdom of one person or very few people. But the fact is, of course, that it's very hard for them to be disinterested. If you're the only newspaper in town and you also own the biggest industry in town, and that industry has a strike which threatens the industry, it's a good question whether your newspaper handles that news as carefully and dispassionately as if you did not have that interest. And if, for example you're a large broadcaster and some very valuable properties are jeopardized by, let's say, some license proceedings before the FCC, or action before the anti-trust division, you have a very serious stake, and you're very hard put. And you have to be very professionally isolated in order to treat that as you would somebody else's problem. I think that's the kind of problem we're dealing with. Speaker 1: Well, of course implicit in what you say is one obvious aspect of the problem, which is and that is that when we're talking about broadcast facilities coupled with the other news media, and all of the components of the knowledge industry including textbook publishing and audio-visual aids and all the rest of it, we're talking about business. And so I would put the most rudimentary question here, is the public well-served by private agencies, that is by corporations, which are at the very least quasi-private and have the profit motive beneath them. This would seem to me to be basic. Or am I right in this, Commissioner Johnson? N. Johnson: Yes, but I certainly would not want to take the position that private individuals or corporations seeking profit are somehow, inherently dangerous or operating in ways other than those that serve the public interest. I would say, as Ben Bagdikian has said, that ... the reason why I appreciated your correcting yourself from characterizing me as one who opposes corporate ownership to one who has been critical of it, I'd like to think of that criticism in the classic sense. I would say, with Ben Bagdikian, simply that this is a terribly important problem. That we have built a nation that we're pretty proud of, that has it's troubles, but seems to find a way of working out of them. That has been terribly dependent upon the mass media system, the First Amendment, the access of all individuals to whatever information they want, the access of the individual to the marketplace of ideas for dissemination of his own views, that this is terribly important to the success of this country. And that therefore it is important that we be analytical, that we be critical, that we be sophisticated, that we be conscious about the process of information gathering and dissemination, of education of people in this country. And that requires that we think about ownership patterns for the reasons that Ben mentions, and others, that ownership does influence content, there is simply no question about that. Now that's not to say, therefore, that you don't want corporate ownership, it's to say that you ought to be conscious of this influence and that you ought to try to structure the system insofar as possible to minimize the adverse consequences, as Ben points out. You cannot have an associated press, a nation-wide news-gathering agency by definition without it being fairly large. Speaker 1: Of course, it can be large, and it is large. But at the same time it would seem to me that the Associated Press, and the United Press have a vested interest in relatively objective and conceivably bland presentation of the news, because they are selling in all kinds of markets in all parts of the country. So- C. Brace: I think that's a pretty well accepted theory. Let me ... I was going to say broaden, but let me narrow this down a little bit because of your three guests today, I think I am the most suspect of all in the minds of two of them- Speaker 1: Conceivably the most vulnerable, and that's where you're suspect. C. Brace: That's right. Being an employee of Time incorporated, a large publisher and operating a broadcast property in San Diego, I'd like to just set forth a theory that the business of stating about monopolies and the manipulation and so forth. Is as I think Nick has said and Ben has said in a broad concept, but I have to boil it down to the specifics of my day-to-day job with this major publisher. And I think, broad concepts notwithstanding, we must remember that the stations, and we're talking broadcasting properties here, the stations that are owned by these major group owners are local stations. Whether they be network O and Os or whether they be group-owned stations. And we don't have a big crew of professional experts from "headquarters" going to each of the five stations which Time Incorporated operates giving us the word from headquarters. We operate, as many group ownerships do, on a highly autonomous basis. And we live in these communities. We participate in their affairs, we study them carefully. We pay their taxes, our kids go to their schools, so it becomes a very personal thing with the individuals involved in the operation. And no group broadcaster, that I know of, cautions us not to get involved in this kind of way. I would suspect that group ownership stations probably embroil themselves in community affairs even more than single ownership stations, for a couple of reasons. Perhaps they have a little more risk capital behind them. They can afford to do a little more perhaps. And as I study these group operations around the country, and I have, I think they do an exceedingly effective job. Not to say that the others don't, but they are very, very active. And they are individually active, is my point. Speaker 1: Well, now Commissioner Johnson, I wonder if assuming that this is true of Time Life Broadcasting and its operations and it's true of a number of other group operations, would it be equally true of the situation in Jackson, Mississippi for example? N. Johnson: Well, before we get to Jackson, which is really another story that deserves an hour in and of itself, let me say, Clayton, that no one has ever suggested to my knowledge, that group owners are somehow less responsible in terms of the quantity of local service that they provide. C. Brace: Right. N. Johnson: But, to suggest that group owners have fine facilities and attend the rotary club meeting and so forth, doesn't really address the issue that we're talking about, which is the power, political and economic and power over ideas that increasingly few individuals possess in this country. You can go around the country and visit group-owned stations. As a matter of fact it is very difficult to find in any of the top 25 markets in the United States a local VHF television station that is not owned either by: a network, some other group owner, or the local newspaper. There are very few instances, that I can think of, of a local VHF station that is actually owned by individuals who live in that community and whose corporate base is in that community. And I think that tends to be undesirable. Now- C. Brace: But having a corporate base in a community I don't think makes you any more interested or less interested in what goes on in that community. N. Johnson: No, but it does mean in terms of national power. And, when we get down to it, let's just talk about that. This is the kind of thing that's measured in very subtle ways. It's a question of, when a reporter calls a Senator or the President is the phone call answered. Who gets in to see the people you're trying to see? Who gets invited to the White House for dinner? Who's voice is listened to in the formulation of national policy? And if you owned, I don't know where Time Life owns its properties, but there are multiple owners that have properties in say, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Philadelphia, and New York, and Chicago, and Washington D.C. Speaker 1: Think of Metro Media, for example. N. Johnson: Which happens to have stations in all of those centers. Now, that accumulation of media power is translated into, I think, a dangerous level of political power because today, increasingly, the elected official looks not to a constituency in the old sense of the word. He looks to the owners of the mass media in his state or district. They are the people who are going to sway public opinion, they are the people that are going to permit him to talk to- C. Brace: To exposing, right? I mean to- N. Johnson: To his citizenry. The only way he can really reach them effectively. They stand there at the gate and open it or close it to him, and chose how he is to be presented too. They are the people he has to look to. And if you ... in most major markets the three network-affiliated VHF stations have, say, 85% of the audience in prime-time evenings, and the independents split the rest. If you own a VHF station in the major city in a state, you are a tremendous political power in that state. Because in most states ... Los Angeles has tremendous impact on the vote in California, Chicago has a big impact on the vote in Illinois, and so forth. If you have access to the people of New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Detroit, or Philadelphia, you have a tremendous power in that state. And if you are a tremendous political power in that state, that means that you have access to a large member of congressman that serve that metropolitan area and to two senators. And if you combine that with a number of other states, this gives you a national political power that's pretty formidable. I mean, there are many multiple owners who have just about enough electoral votes to elect a president. We had trouble finding some presidential candidates who did. B. Bagdikian: In connection with that, I think it's not an abstraction at all. You may remember that there was an ITT ABC case, which International Telephone and Telegraph wanted to buy [crosstalk] ... wanted to buy the American Broadcasting Companies. And you issued one of the more thorough and provocative dissents, I think, in the history of the commission. And there were many other concerns with this. The Department of Justice was concerned, the other independent broadcasters were concerned. And ... the merger became questioned because, I suppose, the dissent of the minority and the FCC plus the Department of Justice's reservations about this- Speaker 1: But that was on an economic level[crosstalk] B. Bagdikian: It wasn't just economic, the point I want to make is this. That in the process, when this was still a matter of possibility, when there was some question about its working, ABC affiliates, ABC stations, each one sent a telegram to members of Congress in their area urging them to ... ask the Department of Justice and the FCC to permit the merger. Now as business entities they have a right do this. They have a right to protect their business interests. I went and talked to a number of members of the Senate and the House, and they said privately, and it's interesting that they insisted it be private and not public, that they knew very well, when that station owner sent that telegram, they had better pay it serious attention, because they've got to run. And if these major stations had a grudge to bear or the Congressman or Senator, thought they did, that was something he took extremely seriously. Now here's a case where the medium's power, not only in the exposure of public information, but its absolute necessity today in an election is something taken very seriously. This is not an abstract economic power, I think that is a problem, but it works out in very practical ways. And I think it's a tough question because, as I say, these stations, as business properties obviously had an interest to protect, and every business does that. But I think when you get big enough in the news and public affairs business, you begin to take on the qualities of public institution. And I think this puts constraints on what you ought to do. I think it was very unwise for example, ABC to send those telegrams. But the point I want to make is, of the senators and members of the Congress I talked to, there was no question in their mind that what was at stake was their access to the public at the next election. Speaker 1: And this isn't even to mention the phenomenon which is well documented and well-known, that members of Congress, political figures, tend to themselves have interest in broadcasting, do they not? N. Johnson: Well, I think this is exaggerated. I've heard many charges of this, but the only facts that I have seen indicate that there is far less ownership and ownership interest than one suspects. I think the problem is not that congressmen own stations, so much as stations own congressmen, and I use that in a short-hand way and in no sense derogatorily. I mean simply, that congressmen need the access to their constituencies, which the stations can provide. And this tends to lead to the kind of problem that Ben has suggested. Speaker 1: Well, then we've seen a reversal. Just as a historian I'm interested in the long-standing precedent that goes back to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson after all, in which the press was owned virtually body and soul by political factions, generally individual factions. B. Bagdikian: We've had some very damaging historical episodes in this country in which the concentrated power of the news media really played a very serious part. We all know about William Randolf Hearst and the Spanish American war. But the fact is that a number of papers that were building up mass circulations were involved with this, including Pulitzer in New York. But what's less known, I think for example take Hearst, who in 15 years after 1911, he owned I think the most powerful chain of newspapers in the United States. He owned later on broadcasting properties, he owned movie production facilities. And for about 15 years after that time all of these had very prominently on them programs, information, editorials and so forth urging hostile action against Mexico. There was no question he was trying to provoke a military intervention by the United States into Mexico. He produced a couple of movies whose result was this. Now the public had no way of knowing that he owned about 2500 square miles of very valuable land in Mexico, which he had acquired under a more generous regime in the past, which had been overthrown. And that he had an enormous stake in it. And they didn't know this, so that for 15 years you had what was probably the most powerful controller of public ... single controller of public information in the United States urging us to was in which a very large factor was he had huge property interests involved. And I think it's interesting when we talk about the fact that there are responsible large corporations in news, and there are, there's no question about that, there is a degree of separation. But I think it's very vulnerable. During this period when Hearst was trying to provoke hostile action against Mexico, that he ran a series of stories in all his papers that the Mexican government had tried to bribe six US Senators with a million dollars. And he had documents that seemed to prove it, and it created a sensation, and a very severe crisis between Mexico and the United States. These documents were later proved to be false, but most of the historians of Hearst say that they think he really believed they were genuine. The usual judgment is that he had an accepting mood towards them, he was not so critical of them because they did serve his interests. He was passionately involved in this, and the result was that we got quite false information. Not because he promoted a conscious lie, but because his critical faculties were down on something where he had a very deep interest. So I think this is the problem. One of the problems is as I've said, even the wisest large corporation makes mistakes and when it does, it makes very large mistakes. You don't get the marketplace, you get the domination of a great error. C. Brace: Now let me ask you this, do you think that Hearst could have pulled that sort of thing off today? The reason I ask is I don't think so, because of the- B. Bagdikian: I don't think Hearst could, but I think we have more pervasive and subtle things. For example, I was struck after the fire that killed the three astronauts, how immediately afterward I read stories and I saw television and radio commentary on how many errors there had been, how many mistakes. And there had been a report, which was available, which said that we were risking trouble on this because we are being careless about some of the facilities and plans. Not a word of this got out until that happened. And I couldn't help wondering whether or not, some of the larger broadcasting nets, who have very deep defense and space commitments simply were less sensitive to critical information about that. And I don't think any of them ever went to their broadcasters and said don't put a critical word in here. I think what has to happen is that the large corporation has to punish its professionals who ever take into account the corporate self-interest. And that's a very hard thing to ask. The large corporation has to say to the professional newsman, "If you give me anything other than even break in the news, I'm going to fire you". And really mean it, and you know that doesn't happen very often. And if he doesn't it's a fair assumption that a very large proportion of the whole news apparatus will assume that they ought not to be critical of their corporation's interests. And as a matter of fact realism tells him that that's probably the prudent thing to do, although that's not a professional thing to do. Speaker 1: Well, here we're talking about various mechanisms that there might be for achieving the public interest through private means, and yet there is a public ... body and it is the FCC primarily that is ostensibly charged with some measure of public control. And I's like to ask Mr. Brace whether he is satisfied as a broadcaster that the FCC is exercising its full powers and responsibilities successfully in the matter of relicensing and in other ways. I ... you see in the public prints I see very little satisfaction with the FCC in its present composition. I see dissent even within the FCC. C. Brace: Well let me answer it this way. All due credit to the commission, because the responsibilities that Nick and his cohorts have are monumental. And I have to put in a plug for budget and things like this because they are caught up in, as Ben has outlined, some extremely serious and far-reaching arguments. As a broadcaster, and as I hope as a responsible broadcaster, and I think I am in the majority in our industry. And I hope you both or all agree with me. I think we can be fair without the fairness doctrine, and would be. So we do disagree from time to time on these. But understanding the highly complicated job that these gentlemen have to do, I think by and large, the responsible broadcasters of this country understand their problems, and sympathize with them and by and large with some glaring exception agree generally that they are doing an amazingly good job under the conditions. B. Bagdikian: I don't doubt that the majority of the broadcasters take their responsibilities seriously. I doubt the ability of a very few people to be infinitely wise and infallible. But I also doubt another thing, whether the whole apparatus isn't subject to very baleful effects because not everybody is responsible and responsive. There are some very large operators who are not very responsible about fairness. Gallop tells us that never before in polling history have the news media, for example, been held in such low esteem. I think it's because ... there are a number of reasons, but one reason is there are some glaring examples, which I think are not just eccentric, we think they are eccentric in the way they behave sometimes but the fact that ... taken as a whole they're a substantial part of the industry. In their communities there is not a fair shake for everybody and there is nothing people can do about it. This is true of newspapers, this is true of broadcasters. And there are errors of omission and of commission. There are broadcasters who will never do anything more daring than editorialized against diptheria and who will not ... and sometimes they have very nice network programs. But then you look into the community and find that community is about to be torn apart by an issue which they would never touch, because it's not profitable to touch it, and this is not an insignificant incident. C. Brace: But I don't think it's substantial, Ben. I really, I just can't agree with that. N. Johnson: No, let me ... yes of course the fact that it's there bothers me. But let me say why the fact that it's there ought to bother you. I would tend to agree that probably on most scales of measurement on responsible broadcasting however much more I might wish that Time Life might do with its stations, it probably measures up pretty well compared with the others. In any event, it is likely that if one were to establish a percentile and let the top 90 percent of the broadcasters get their licenses renewed that you would probably be in that top 90 percent. I would say that. Now the question is, however, what do we do with this bottom ten percent. And where do your interests lie. Forget about the public interest, let's just talk about the greedy economic self-interest of Time Life broadcasting. I think your interests are better served by having a responsible and a tough FCC that establishes standards that permit you to do the best of which you are capable without suffering the unfair competition of competitors who are irresponsible. Who do not have the staff to do the local job, who do not have really experience in the broadcasting business, do not have the professional commitment to do it. I think your interests were hurt when the FCC of the United States renewed the license of WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi. I think your license that hangs on the wall of your transmitter studio, I think your license thereby became about a tenth the size that it used to be. C. Brace: We ought to boil down the Jackson situation so that we understand why that's- Speaker 1: Well I think we should and the article that I saw that struck me most was Lawrence [inaudible] right in the aftermath of that decision in which he invited the FCC to go out of business and thought that this was perhaps the one possible solution to the problem. But I've ... and I've seen the implication in some of your own utterances and writings, commissioner, that the FCC really can't do the kind of job that you're suggesting it should do. N. Johnson: Well, but I think it can do ever so much more than it's doing. And I think that the responsible broadcasters of this country, and however you rank them there's bound to be a top 50 percent or top 75 percent. I think those fellows are not well served by having a regulatory commission that is in fact weaker than the industry itself. Take, for example, the issue of regulating commercial content, the quantity of commercials. The FCC Was in the anomalous position, not just of adopting the industry standards and making that its own, which would subject it to the charge that it was the handmaiden of the industry and a captured agency and so forth. It actually had standards that were weaker than the industry. We would permit a radio station to operate with 20 minutes of commercials per hour, at a time when the industry's own standards said that if you wanted to be a member of the National Association of Broadcasters codes of good practice, you would only have 18 minutes of commercials. The FCC would let you have 20. C. Brace: But didn't the National Association attack the commission? N. Johnson: Yes! And so here we were in this incredible position, where the National Association of Broadcasters, the trade association coming in to the FCC and saying, "Won't you please raise your standards up to the industry's own level, because we are losing members, because they say we would rather belong to the FCC's code of good practice with 20 minutes per hour than belong to your code of good practice with 18". C. Brace: And why did the FCC do that? N. Johnson: Well, ultimately we did. But then we began eroding the standard again because we said that if were going to have more than 18 minutes you would have to tell us the reason why and so people began writing in and telling us the reason why and the reason why is their wife wanted to make code. Speaker 1: But this does underscore eloquently the point that you were making a little earlier, that it is in the best interest of Time Life broadcasting for example, or presumably Metro Media or any conglomerate to have a higher and more rigorous standard than the FCC? N. Johnson: I think so. And it seems to me that your interests are not served by our licensing and giving the imprimatur of the federal government- B. Bagdikian: A poor broadcast. N. Johnson: And saying that this broadcaster is serving the public interest when he says he's going to have one percent news and public affairs programing on his station, and we say that's serving the public interest. Or, when he says he's going to have five percent news and public affairs broadcasting, and then he only turns up having one, and we say, "Well, we'll excuse that because he promises to get better in the future". Or when he runs his operation without engineers, and you've got to pay union scale to a full staff of engineers and he gets by without any and he has a crummy operation. Or, when runs commercials of an unlimited quantity per hour and the FCC never does anything about it, and you've got a guy who is a salesman out in the market trying to maintain a price level on commercial spots by only running a few per hour and keeping the price for each one high enough that you can make a go of it and you've got a competitor out there whose undercutting you at a half the price you're selling for and running twice as many commercials. Speaker 1: Or at twice the decibel level, too. B. Bagdikian: Or if, for example, a good VHF station has 40 people on its news staff and another station has maybe two and really doesn't give any news, and all this talk of local interest in such stations really doesn't exist. And especially this is true of radio. There isn't any ... what they call local news is frequently taking the UPI ticker about every accident and murder of that region of the country. And that's for them local news, they don't originate any. And so now there are some broadcasters who have a very substantial news operation, this is quite noticeable in this area. But it gets very thin, very fast. Well I don't know what the FCC does- N. Johnson: By very thin very fast you mean after these few who are very good there become a large number- B. Bagdikian: I get the impression that on the whole the VHF broadcasting industry could support much more public service without going broke or failing to pay dividends. I think they're just making a lot of money without being required to do the minimal public service. And the ones who are producing it, it seems to me ... I agree. I think that it lowers the standards and penalizes those who are doing a good job. And yet, it seems to me that the basic response, not just for the broadcasting industry, this is true in printing publishing too, it's that if there are problems that's not our table. That's not our problem, we don't ... and I don't think you have to license. You don't have to silence editors. The broadcasters are a little different, they have the statutory requirement. But it seems to me that somebody ought to have a mechanism in which public complaints can be heard and processed professionally and fairly. And there isn't any such thing. Speaker 1: Well, I do think let's bring this to the Jackson case- C. Brace: Yes, but there are mechanics that Nick has in his organization that ... I've gotten a few letters from the Federal Communications asking what we did about a certain letter of complaint that's come in. Of course, I relish these things, I for that file often, to see what people are asking about what we're doing. What other mechanics would you need to provide this, your fellow commissioners, agreeing with you that a crackdown on this sort of thing should occur more so than they do? N. Johnson: Any so. Basically all you need to know to understand the functioning of the FCC is you need the capacity to count up to four. There are seven of us, and it takes four to make a majority. It seems to have been the fate of the FCC to have functioned for many, many years with a minority of three who shared the kind of sentiments that I am expressing, and a majority of four who for a variety of reasons, felt that that was not desirable. So that's a part of the answer, yes. I think one of the things we really do desperately need in this country is some mechanism, as Ben says, and I personally prefer that it not be in the government, I think I am probably as concerned, and perhaps more concerned as the other commissioners, about real infringement by the federal government on the First Amendment freedoms of the broadcaster. I feel that very strongly. And if you ever start a parade I'll be out there leading it if you let me. So I would prefer not to have this in government. But I do think that the mass media are so important in this country and so important to everything that we believe in this country that their full and fair and adequate functioning ... we must have some institution that gathers some information and does some processing, and does some analysis of what the mass media are doing. At the present time there is not even a record of the network news shows. You can get a hold of a copy of the schedule that the station puts out that's probably on file in dozens of libraries in Los Angeles, in the Library of Congress, other educational broadcasters. It's widely available. You try to get a copy of the evening newscast of any one of the three major networks in transcript form, and it's no where to be found. Unless you want to go and watch the tape, or you made your own audio tape. This is true of all the television [inaudible]. The first thing about it is that it's ephemeral, there is no way you can talk factually about what actually came out unless you go to a tremendous amount of trouble to do it. So I think we need to have library facilities, simply because this is the most important leisure time of Americans and if future anthropologists, let alone historians want to know what Americans were like in the 1960s there not going to be able to do it. WE know more about what the Greeks were like than they're going to know about what Americans were like in the 1960s because we spend more time on our television set than we do with anything else, and we have no record of what that was. Speaker 1: You're looking now for the resources of private foundations, as for example the Fund for the Republic in some beginning studies that Hutchins undertook for the study of democratic institutions. N. Johnson: Well, Hutchins headed this committee on the freedom of the press, you may recall, about 20 years ago. In which he urged that there be established a permanent institution in the United States that would not be government ... I don't mind some federal money in it if that seems to be useful or desirable, but I wouldn't want any government control over it, or federal officials manning it. Certainly not presidential appointees manning it. But some institution that maintains records of what newspapers and magazines as well as radio and television are putting out. That subjects it to some kind of analysis. What is the impact of all this television product upon us? Advertisers spend three billion dollars a year trying to get their message out over radio and television. Now why do they do that? Presumably because they think that radio and television has the power to change the attitudes of people and the mold the behavior of people. And it is so powerful that you can take all the ingrained attitudes that men have about masculinity and start a male cosmetics business in the United States that has now grown to about half a billion dollar a year proportions. Overcoming ingrained attitudes built up over centuries by advertising over television. Well, if you can do that, what can't you do? Are we to believe that the only part of radio and television that are influential are these few minutes in which the commercials come, of course not. We are intellectually, and psychologically and emotionally, we become what we see and what we hear. That's all we've got, what else could we have. And that is served largely, almost exclusively, by radio and television in our country today, and I think we ought to know what that's doing to our nation. We have a commission on violence, well that's good so far as it goes, looking at the relationship of mass media to violence. But what about the relationship of mass media to every other phenomenon in our society, the generation gap, the relationship between the races. Our clothing styles, the way we spend our leisure time. Our attitudes about government, the anti-intellectualism attitude in the United States. All these things are bred and fostered and continued by the mass media and I think we ought to know as a people more about it than we do. C. Brace: Well, I know a fellow that is engaged in not maybe as broad a study as you're talking about, but he is engaged in a study along this line, he's sitting to my left. Speaker 1: I was on the point of asking, Ben, whether your study, your project at the RAND corporation is in any sense and answer to what the commissioner is talking about? B. Bagdikian: I think it's not, because we're looking at what effect new technology will have on the content and form of news in the next 25 years. And of course, it's of fundamental concern to everybody involved in the business, what effect this has on society. And insofar as this project is going to look, not only at where the machines take us but if we can with any kind of usefulness, where it ought to take us in some economically viable real way. Meaning, what are the requirements of society, what does an individual need, what will he need in the next 25 years? What will the whole society need in the next 25 years? What will be possible with new technology that is not possible today? And if this is so and if it can be supported in a private enterprise way, maybe ... and if you have a choice of doing it one way or another, than simply say, "Look, if we want to do these functions, which are very useful socially, and you can make just as much money doing it, here it is". Now if we're lucky, that's what will happen but that's very spongy ground because it's hard enough to determine what's needed today, than what's needed in the future, but you don't have to do it completely blindly. No, I don't think that project is going to be directed particularly at that, although it's a background factor. But I think it is important that we really don't know much about either the output of our mass media, or the impact. And one reason we don't know the output, is it has so many different local outlets. 7000 broadcasters, and 1700 daily newspapers. And we generalize on the basis of a very small amount of information. Each of us when you're asked about- N. Johnson: Those you read, and those you see. That's a danger in itself B. Bagdikian: That's right. And we all have ... and that's a problem. It's not insoluble. There's social science techniques where you get some idea, but the thing that strikes me about the industries in both cases, print and broadcasting, are resistant to any kind of systematic study. They either don't think it's terribly important, or they feel threatened by it. And I'm afraid this is true frequently of the professionals, though it tends to be less true, that is the professional editors, the professional program directors and so forth. I think it's less true there, but even there obviously if they don't have the support of their industries they are on very shaky ground. So I don't think we can say with confidence that the people who are now operating the mass media have exhibited the kind of sensitivity to this problem that they should, and what strikes me is, that given the growing sophistication of the audience, who understand some of these social workings, who begin to understand how the mass media work. The kids are very savvy about this, and everybody is getting more sophisticated. Given the sense of growing uneasiness with it, I think if the industry and the professionals don't do it, somebody else will, not always wisely. So I think it's extremely short-sighted that the industry, beginning with the Hutchins committee, and maybe before that, has turned its back on all of these proposals. Hasn't said, "Well I think it's a good idea and I don't like this part, why don't we change it", it just says, "You have no business inquiring into how we run things because we can criticize ourselves". Now Henry Luce paid for most of that Hutchins commission, but that Hutchins commission report on the freedom of the press is still probably the easiest way, other than the postal subsidy, to get publishers angry. Because they regard it as an unjustified intrusion into their business. I don't think the mass media ought to be a private shrine that had the First Amendment inscribed on one side and 'Keep Out' on the other. For one thing, I don't think the public is going to accept it. N. Johnson: Isn't that terribly important? I think today in many facets of our business and enterprise that we used to think of as exclusively the private domain of an individual we are building up a sense of public right in it. Who would have thought we would be in the business of designing safety features into automobiles, and yet the American people simply got fed up with losing 50,000 lives a year on highways as a result of accidents that had been designed into the car in exchange for chrome that would sell more automobiles. Who would have thought that students would invade the office of a university president? I think that throughout our society, as witnessed by this presidential campaign, every man who ran for president at any time during 1968 had as a part of his platform something like participatory democracy, which was the phrase of the New Left. Jean McCarthy it was New Politics, President Nixon has talked about taking the government to the people and traveling around the country, and George Wallace was talking about turning the government back over to the people and what the southerners used to call states' rights. This has become a very important part of the fabric of America today, and I think the mass media is going to have to respond to it, in some way other than, as Ben says, First Amendment and Keep Out. Speaker 1: Of course there are darn few alleged critics or so-called critics of television who even consider this a part of their commission. Hal Humphrey locally in the Los Angeles Times has been very outspoken as you know, but very few are. I think we'd be extremely derelict in this context of channel 28 if we didn't talk about the potential impact, if any, on this set of problems, of public television, so called. Do you think that, in any sense at all, public television can or should exercise a countervailing social benefit, to use your own phrase acting as it has always been supposed to act, as a conscience on commercial broadcasting, or for it. For that minority audience or set of minority audiences that is not in the market for the prime time network television show. What about the role of public television? N. Johnson: What do you feel about it, because I'm interested in this C. Brace: I think it should broaden its audience it would be a very good conscience for the commercial broadcaster. This is a big problem. I've long contended in this business of educational television and I guess public television, I don't think the work showmanship is a dirty word, and I tend to think that educators, just by virtue of the way they operate are very reluctant to use some of the techniques that the commercial broadcaster has used very successfully, not just in entertainment programming but also in programming similar to what you do in this studio. And I think if that's injected I think it's going to gain more acceptance. It is gaining more acceptance. Of course, I think that part of educational television is misnamed, as I told you earlier. I think that ITV, instructional television. I've seen it working extremely well in San Diego and a lot of other places in the United States and I think that this is something, and I'm sure will take a part in your survey that's going to be a phenomenal change that's going to happen to this communications business we're in. Including ... it's going to change us to a degree Speaker 1: But darn it Clayton, as we were saying, and we were having a very interesting conversation before this program, a great deal of instructional television, and educational - now public television - looks like a massive, if unwitting conspiracy to bring the dullness of the classroom into one's living room or bedroom. C. Brace: And they're not going to watch that very much. Speaker 1: And part of the reason for this is that the resources are not there. That is, the physical resources, the monetary resources. There is not the kind of input of monies, and therefore the imagination one attaches to those to make this spritely. N. Johnson: Let me draw an analogy. I've just come back recently from a trip to Japan in an effort to study all facets of communication over there, telephone and mobile radio as well as broadcasting. And they have an institution that all of you are familiar with, but that some of the viewers may not, called NHK, which is their equivalent of our public broadcasting corporation. The striking difference is the one that you mentioned, the matter of resources. Because television is, within any nation, what the people of that nation want to make of it. This can be the most marvelous instrument handed to man for elevating his role in life, and his tastes, his education and his insights, and quality of life. Or it can be dribbled away on commercials and entertainment programing, which is essentially the way America has chosen to use it. NHK has a national television network that covers virtually all of Japan. Not just one television network, but two television networks, a radio network, and not just one radio network, but three radio networks. It is supported by a fee paid by each owner of a television set. It works out to be about as much as subscribers to this station pay in exchange for the programing and the program brochure for this channel. This raises revenue within the country of Japan that would be as a proportion of GNP in the United States two billion dollars a year. They have studio facilities in Tokyo that are far superior to anything that the major networks have in New York City. They have a computer system for program scheduling and management information that a major computer manufacturer here has seen and described the software as being five years ahead of anything in the United States. Now they recognize what television can mean to a people and to a country. And they've put the resources in it and they've got the benefits to show from it. At a time when we've got high school dropouts roaming the streets, they've got tens of thousands of Japanese young people receiving their high school education via television in their home in their own spare time. At a time when we're worrying about losing our American heritage and tradition and culture and so forth, they're programing it on NHK, NHK is the support for this. Speaker 1: Does this really amount to saying that we're getting what we deserve as a people? Or is it a good deal subtler than that? B. Bagdikian: I don't think we get what we deserve. We do historically in the long run, because one of the assumptions about democracy is that when we get problems eventually they percolate to the surface, that there are people who have complaints and grievances and they bring it to the attention of the public. In general ... not in general, basically no one has a better system. I think it does work, it has a kind of self-righting mechanism. But I think one of the problems here is that the mass media represent a new element that John Stuart Mill never thought of, that John Locke never thought of, that after all, when our constitution was ratified a man could talk to a significant part of his community if he wanted to stand outside the congregational church on Sunday morning or on the common Saturday afternoon. If he talked to 50 people, or 20 people, he had talked to an operative proportion of his community. Today you can't talk to a significant part of the community without an extremely elaborate system. A mechanical, technical system. You have to have access to the mass media. And I think maybe one reason people are burning down cities and burning up university president's correspondence in their office is trying to communicate. Because you can't get up on a soap box and reach your community anymore. How do you do it? You get into the newspapers and mostly you get on television. So I think this is a new element in the workings of society and I think it is unfair to say that once you have a highly technical and relatively elaborate and abstract system like a television system, or like a big publishing house, to say to the average guy in the street, "You know because you don't get your message out on that, it's your fault that people don't understand you". Now eventually people do get these skills, but I think this has happened so quickly. After all this is only the 20th year of mass television and these things happen so fast that people may not learn quickly enough to participate on their own, force their way into the system, or develop mechanisms in order to counterbalance what is probably the unthinking direction of the media all by itself. We spend 28,000 dollars a minute on a commercial. We're extremely persuasive. I don't know how much a minute you spend on this network, but I suspect it's less than 28,000 dollars a minute. We've allocated our resources in a lop-sided way. I think that we deserve it in a sense that eventually people will learn about it and make decisions. But eventually may be too late. Speaker 1: Of course the thing that's implicit in what you're saying is that the demagogue, the protestor, the rioter who wishes to inject himself into this system need only go out and start burning down gas stations and grocery stores and so on. Or disrupting university life to come to the full flush of public attention through all of the news media and this raises the question of responsibility again. C. Brace: And overnight become popular [crosstalk] or figures Speaker 1: We become almost collaborators in bringing them to public attention N. Johnson: Well, there is simply no question about. I think that the first hurdle that we have to get over is to agree and to recognize that our nation is in largest measure what television has made it. Let's start with that assumption, I think the media executives simply cannot back away from this and say, "Aww gee fellas we're just reflecting what's out there." Or, "This is just entertainment, don't charge us with responsibility for what happens as a result." That's not to suggest any particular kind of programing that's better than any other kind of programing. I'm not a programmer. I don't know what you ought to be putting on the television set. All I know is what happens is southern California is in large measure a function of what you do put on that set, and you do have to bear responsibility for it. I don't want to take responsibility for it. I don't want the FCC to tell you what you've got to put on that station, but I don't want you to tell me that you're not responsible for what you put on that station either. And I think that this requires all of us to become more intelligent about how the media does influence our society and about what kind of society we want to build. We can build essentially whatever kind of a country we want, whatever kind of a society we want. And in building it there's no instrumentality that's more important to it than television. Speaker 1: Well, now in the closing minutes of this show, and I'm astonished to find that we are in those closing minutes- C. Brace: We have another half hour to go. Speaker 1: I would like to have one of you speak in capsule form of the Jackson phenomenon, because I think it's relevant to everything that we've said it's a kind of microcosmic and at the same time classic expression of the problem. N. Johnson: Do you want to do this Ben, because the- B. Bagdikian: Why don't you do it Nick, because you know much more of this than I do. N. Johnson: Well, the case is at the time of recording here still at the court and I hesitate therefore to characterize it in any way. Suffice it to say that there's a television station in Jackson, Mississippi, without passing judgment on the truth of the allegations, let me just state the allegations. Negroes in the community, and the United Church of Christ as a party contested the license renewal of that on the grounds that it was not programming to the full interests of that community, the half of that community being black. The FCC's first response was to say that the citizens of that community and the church did not even have the right to appear as parties. This has been established law, it was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. The court reversed and said no they do have the right as parties, with some critical language of the FCC saying that so long as there is any scintilla of evidence that the FCC does represent the public interest we'll keep the people out, but when it becomes obvious that the FCC is not doing its job the public has to be permitted to come in to fend for itself. A hearing was then held, evidence was put upon a record taking many days. The case was taken before the full commission again and the full commission concluded by a split vote, and over some vigorous dissent that the station had been serving the public interest and would have its license renewed. The parties have again appealed to the United States Court of Appeal. Once again the court from which they came originally, and I say at the time we are recording that has not yet been decided. Speaker 1: Well see here, among the more compelling aspects of that problem is that you have one of the few examples in which there was an aroused citizenry with the United Church of Christ presenting evidence, and we can't rule on the validity of the evidence, but certainly there was a lot of it, of one kind and another, and great difficulty in having that evidence weighed, judged and made operative in the licensing procedure. B. Bagdikian: And it may be significant that it took the United Church of Christ, which after all is a national organization which has developed some degree of sophistication, to do this because they're contending with a very sophisticated system. And so that the unassisted citizen really has a tough time. He's got to get a lawyer, and he has to have briefs and he has to record, and this business of not having a record of what was done. He has to really be a combination social scientist and very good lawyer. So it's an unequal contest. It isn't as though the citizens of a town of a thousand people disliked what the local editor is saying and go to his office and yell at him. You have people who are relatively anonymous and powerless who feel terribly frustrated because there is no machinery. You get a dramatic case like this one in Jackson, it does get some attention. But there are many other cases which never get to this point and people just say, "Well, you can't believe what you see," and now they say, "You can't believe what you see in newspapers," which is unfair. And I think they are going to start saying, "You can't believe on television," which will also be unfair because it's a generalization that doesn't hold up as an overall judgment. But it'll have the basis of a significant portion of the output in which people can't have a voice or have any mechanism for complaint. Speaker 1: Ben you have had both the first and the last word. I for one have found this the most enlightened and enlightening discussion, and one that at the very least suggests that we're dealing with a compelling set of problems that goes far beyond what's obvious. Thank you so much all of you B. Bagdikian: Thank you.