Inside ABC and NBC, at Harvard and MIT
Wed Mar 07, 2007 at 05:27:13 PM PST
I live halfway between Harvard and MIT and have the leisure to go to many of their public events, stealing as much intellectual property as possible. Tuesday, March 6, 2007 I went to both institutions and heard Chris Isham, chief of investigative projects at ABC News, at Harvard at noon and John Hockenberry, former NBC News and NPR correspondent, at MIT at four. Both were educational, in different ways.
Warning: One expletive undeleted and at least one other rude phrase.
Isham is head of the unit for which Brian Ross reports. It is independent within ABC News, meaning it can produce content for the Nightly News, Good Morning, America, 20/20, and anything else in between. Isham says that they have to tailor their stories for all those different audiences, shortening or lengthening stories to fit the respective news holes in each show and reworking the topics to appeal to the different markets of each show. That's how the business works and Isham doesn't question it.
ABC News has a reputation for being ahead on the terrorism story because they were tracking Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and even interviewed him in the late 1990s. Isham and his unit have followed the terrorism story but have been rather circumspect with the US counterterrorism side or so I gather from what he said. He talked about a story they did on the different levels of CIA interrogation and said that waterboarding was the highest level of interrogation. Khalid Sheik Mohammed "broke" after 15 seconds of that treatment he said with a little too much admiration and glee for my taste. He also said that they held back some of their information at the request of the government.
Isham was worried about the effect the Libby trial might have on the relationship between the press and their confidential sources. He did admit that there could be a problem with confidential sources as spinners as opposed to whistle-blowers but didn't see how the media could do its job to the best of its abilities without the cultivation and maintenance of confidential sources. He didn't seem to be overly concerned with how far down the garden path this reliance on unnamed secret tattlers has taken us. He expressed doubt as to the wisdom of publishing stories on the illegal wiretaps of international phone calls between people in the USA and suspected terrorists abroad. His inside people told him that Al Qaeda contacts were using phones fairly casually and that good intelligence had been gathered that way. He also questioned the advisability of revealing that the US was monitoring SWIFT, the electronic money trail, for terrorist activity.
All in all, Isham came across as a serious fellow with an air of having many secrets and a diligent regard for his job. Obviously, a very intelligent guy. However, I was reminded of a description Tom Wolfe once used to describe the TV writers of cop shows who overly identify with the police. He called them "jock sniffers." It's an impolite term but apt. I believe Isham identifies with the interrogators more than he does the interrogatees. At least, when the US is doing the interrogation.
(Tom Wolfe had a couple of other descriptions that I think apply directly to Ann Coulter. One is "social x-ray" meaning those women who can not be too thin or too rich, the skeletal ladies who lunch in Bonfire of the Vanities. Another is "boys with breasts" which he used, as I recall, to describe trophy wives in A Man in Full.)
When I got my chance to ask a question, I told him that I have been answering my phone, "NSA is listening and so am I." Isham then asked me if I was a terrorist. I replied that I'd taken enough suspicious books out of the library so that somebody could make that mistake. Later in the afternoon, I wished I'd said, "Do you mean am I now or have I ever been...?" After 24 hours, I wish I'd said, "Fuck you." [Please pardon my Anglo-Saxon.]
John Hockenberry is going to be at the MIT Media Lab as a special fellow for the next two years. He will be working on human adaptability and our relationship to tools. I met him as he was rolling into the Bartos Theater in the basement of the Media Lab. His wheelchair's guide wheels are outfitted with flashing LED lights and I asked him, "Dude, where's your spinners?" He's a very approachable and intuitive guy.
There were technical difficulties (the one firm lesson I learned from my years of going to MIT events is that technology never works) but eventually things were sorted out, Hockenberry's laptop was synched to the screen behind him, and he began. The first thing he did was to say that he came to MIT because he was looking for an upgrade. He asked if there was anybody in the room who could help him. No hands went up. It was a little awkward, the big chested man in the wheelchair and the serious geeks in the audience looking at each other.
Hockenberry worked at NBC when the Iraq War began and silently wondered about the direct conflict of interest in a defense contractor covering the war. He evidently never brought it up but it bothered him and still does. He said that GE had a contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority to rebuild the Iraqi electric infrastructure which was larger than the total budget for NBC News. How could they cover the war ethically?
He was told off the record by a big name (academic?) pollster that a poll had been taken throughout the Islamic world before the Iraq War and the findings were "incredible" relative to the US invasion. The negative opinion of the US if it continued to rattle its sabre and throw its weight around were devastating. This pollster was called to the White House to present his findings and did so. There was some grumbling and few questions among those who were there, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Card, and Rove but not Powell. Finally Karl Rove said, "They're just not used to having the US throw its weight around." The pollster was shocked at the cognitive dissonance. The negatives were going through the roof BECAUSE the US was perceived as throwing its weight around. Of course, then we really got into seriously throwing our throw weight around.
He also told the story of a news meeting while "shock and awe" was in progress. It was a report on the "stills," those Westerners who were still in Iraq. It was an affecting report and after watching it the room remained silent until one of the Standards and Practices people said. "Seemed to be a little bit of a point of view there." Hockenberry had one of those moments where you can change your life. He could say something right and maybe lose his job or say something wrong and lose his soul. Nobody else was speaking up as they mulled the "bit of point of view." Finally, Hockenberry said, "You mean, like war is bad?" The room relaxed and the story stayed in.
Hockenberry says it wasn't about politics. It was about eyeballs. Would they lose any eyeballs because of the emotion in the reporter's voice, her "point of view"? When reminded that it is the general opinion that war sucks, that consideration of lost eyeballs, lost audience share, lost revenue was answered. Oh yeah, we probably won't lose an add buy because our correspondent sounded sad and scared under bombing.
Hockenberry showed a short home video he did on his world. He took us into a NYC subway elevator, an amenity he has to use most every day. He related the story of how NYC spent $30 million on chemical and material solutions to the problem of the urine smell in elevators. (This is a common problem. I traveled with a friend in a wheelchair around the Boston subways years ago and he told me that he could recognize different stations by the different odors of the urine in the elevators.) Nothing really worked. Then a Transit Authority employee solved the problem for zero dollars. He suggested that they change the default setting of the doors from closed to open. The lack of privacy reduced the urine problem immediately. Hockenberry says we focus on things not relationships. We treat the world as objects not as process.
Then he told a story about his first set of twins (he has two sets of twins). One little girl baby, Olivia, was happily learning how to stand by pulling herself up on her Daddy's wheelchair wheels. She'd stand there and flex her knees and smile but the other little girl baby, Zooey, wasn't even crawling. She was laying on her stomach flailing her arms like a sea turtle or some bird trying to catch a thermal. She wouldn't stand let alone walk and Hockenberry and his wife were beginning to get a little nervous. One morning, Hockenberry was dressing for work. He got out of the chair and onto the couch in order to put on his shoes. Seeing Zooey do her sea turtle impression on the floor, he reached over and picked her up to plop her down on his chair. Zooey promptly began to roll the chair out of the living room and down the hall. There are lots of different ways of doing things. Zooey achieved mobility that morning by not walking but wheeling just like Daddy did.
Hockenberry said we don't do shows about process. We do shows like ER where the heroic doctors save the dying patient and everybody's happy and the credits come up. We don't do shows about rehab, the long and tedious process of rehabilitation, because it's just not as dramatic for the "eye aggregating media." As acute health care improves the long term rehabilitation costs expand astronomically. Those grievously wounded returning from Iraq who have been saved by miraculous medical techniques will require help and rehabilitation for the rest of their lives and we can see already how quickly their needs have been forgotten. Hockenberry also dislikes, for obvious reasons, the portrayal of the disabled as heroes overcoming great odds. It objectifies them and makes it easy to forget that they are each individuals with individual needs and wants who have to deal with a world that doesn't work for them every day. By making them heroes, we make it easier for ourselves to forget that the world fits our lives so much better than theirs and harder to remember that we can do something to change the world for all of us.
Hockenberry also said that the media world has shifted places with the real world. The media world is all about itself. FDR's fireside chats got fantastic numbers because everybody was involved in their daily lives with the Depression. Today, we don't have that same commonality. We watch the media in order to have something to share, to be involved with something together as a community. Celebrities become the avatars of media itself. We watch Anna Nicole Smith's body rotting in the Bahamas or Britney Spears cutting off her hair in order to have something in common.
I guess that means that Anna Nicole Smith died for our sins but I would venture to say she got the implants for herself.
Incidentally, there is another take on the Britney Spears obsession. Craig Ferguson of The Late, Late Show announced that he is no longer going to do Britney Spears jokes. He explained it to his audience in a long monologue one night recently that related his decision to his own alcoholism (15 years sober). It is a fine and funny piece of work, essential viewing for those who believe that addiction and addictive thinking are the fundamental problem in the US today and the primary characteristic of late stage capitalism. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/...
Now I've mentioned CBS too.
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