Television
stations and networks, by contrast, are almost
completely inaccessible to individual citizens and
almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by
individual
citizens.
Mercury
News Thursday, October 6, 2005 Associated
Press Text of
Gore speech at media conference Al Gore decries
media power, heralds the freedom
of the internet NEW
YORK - Here is the text of former Vice President
Al Gore's remarks at the We Media conference on
Wednesday in New York: I CAME here today because I believe that
American democracy is in grave danger. It is no
longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our
public discourse . I know that I am not the only
one who feels that something has gone basically and
badly wrong in the way America's fabled
"marketplace of ideas" now functions. How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend
or a family member in the last few years remark
that it's almost as if America has entered "an
alternate universe"? I thought maybe it was an aberration when
three-quarters of Americans said they believed that
Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking
us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years
later, between a third and a half still believe
Saddam was personally responsible for planning and
supporting the attack. At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop
coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate
excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the
normal good sense and judgment of our television
news media. But now we know that it was merely an
early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions
that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks
at a time. Are we still routinely torturing helpless
prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as
American citizens are not outraged by the practice?
And does it feel right to have no ongoing
discussion of whether or not this abhorrent,
medieval behavior is being carried out in the name
of the American people? If the gap between rich and
poor is widening steadily and economic stress is
mounting for low-income families, why do we seem
increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as
citizens? On the eve of the nation's decision to invade
Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert
Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate
floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are
these halls silent?" The decision that was then being considered by
the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate
turned out to be a fateful one. A
few days ago, the former head of the National
Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William
Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq,
I believe, will turn out to be the greatest
strategic disaster in U.S. history." [Website note:
The
story with that quote was originally carried by The
Lowell Sun (published in Lowell, Massachusetts).
Only a few other news outlets carried that
story. So
much for the once-great American
media] But whether you agree with his assessment or
not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others
that I have just posed here: he was saying, in
effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we
supposed to have full and vigorous debates about
questions as important as the choice between war
and peace? THOSE of us who have served in the Senate and
watched it change over time, could volunteer an
answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate
was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't
feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate
really matters that much any more. And the chamber
was empty because the Senators were somewhere else:
they were in fundraisers collecting money from
special interests in order to buy 30-second
TVcommercials for their next re-election
campaign. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was
- at least for a short time - a quality of
vividness and clarity of focus in our public
discourse that reminded some Americans - including
some journalists - that vividness and clarity used
to be more common in the way we talk with one
another about the problems and choices that we
face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the
moment faded. In fact there was a time when America's public
discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused
and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate
generation in all of history, used words with
astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of
Reason. Their faith in the viability of Representative
Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a
well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular
emphasis on insuring that the public could be
well-informed. And they took great care to protect
the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order
to ensure the free-flow of knowledge. The values that Americans had brought from
Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden
explosion of literacy and knowledge after
Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the
stagnant medieval information monopoly and
triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the
Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the
"Rule of Reason." Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the
audacity to establish was later named by the
historian Henry Steele Commager as "the
Empire of Reason." Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and
the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood
quite well that in America, our public forum would
be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which
individual citizens would participate not only by
speaking directly in the presence of others -- but
more commonly by communicating with their fellow
citizens over great distances by means of the
printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom
of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special
point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the
freedom of the printing press. Their world was dominated by the printed word.
Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives
in water, the United States in its first half
century knew nothing but the world of print: the
Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to
revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our
Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record,
newspapers and books. Though they feared that a government might try
to censor the printing press - as King
George had done - they could not imagine that
America's public discourse would ever consist
mainly of something other than words in print. And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than
40 years have passed since the majority of
Americans received their news and information from
the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging
readers and, for the most part, resisting the
temptation to inflate their circulation numbers.
Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our
country but in most of the world. The Republic of
Letters has been invaded and occupied by
television. Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and
other media all now vie for our attention - but it
is television that still completely dominates the
flow of information in modern America. In fact,
according to an authoritative global study,
Americans now watch television an average of four
hours and 28 minutes every day -- 90 minutes more
than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six
to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to
bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost
three-quarters of all the discretionary time that
the average American has. And for younger
Americans, the average is even higher. The internet is a formidable new medium of
communication, but it is important to note that it
still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed,
studies show that the majority of Internet users
are actually simultaneously watching television
while they are online. There is an important reason
why television maintains such a hold on its viewers
in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get
to that in a few minutes. Television first overtook newsprint to become
the dominant source of information in America in
1963. But for the next two decades, the television
networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers
by faithfully following the standards of the
journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward
R. Murrow led the profession in raising the
bar. But all the while, television's share of the
total audience for news and information continued
to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to
expand. And then one day, a smart young political
consultant turned to an older elected official and
succinctly described a new reality in America's
public discourse: "If it's not on television, it
doesn't exist." But some extremely important elements of
American Democracy have been pushed to the
sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has
been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved
and so carefully protected by our Founders. It
effectively no longer exists. It is not that we no longer share ideas with one
another about public matters; of course we do. But
the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched
for general agreement and applied the Rule of
Reason has been grossly distorted and
"restructured" beyond all recognition. And here is my point: it is the destruction of
that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the
"strangeness" that now continually haunts our
efforts to reason together about the choices we
must make as a nation. WHETHER it is called a Public Forum, or a
"Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the
reality of open and free public discussion and
debate was considered central to the operation of
our democracy in America's earliest decades. In fact, our first self-expression as a nation -
"We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate
source of authority lay. It was universally
understood that the ultimate check and balance for
American government was its accountability to the
people. And the public forum was the place where
the people held the government accountable. That is
why it was so important that the marketplace of
ideas operated independent from and beyond the
authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this
marketplace of ideas were: - It was open to every individual, with no
barriers to entry, save the necessity of
literacy. This access, it is crucial to add,
applied not only to the receipt of information
but also to the ability to contribute
information directly into the flow of ideas that
was available to all;
- The fate of ideas contributed by individuals
depended, for the most part, on an emergent
Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market
to be good rose to the top, regardless of the
wealth or class of the individual responsible
for them;
- The accepted rules of discourse presumed
that the participants were all governed by an
unspoken duty to search for general agreement.
That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is
all about.
What resulted from this shared democratic
enterprise was a startling new development in human
history: for the first time, knowledge regularly
mediated between wealth and power. The liberating force of this new American
reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas
Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the
alter of God eternal hostility against every form
of tyranny over the mind of man." It ennobled the
individual and unleashed the creativity of the
human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to
dream of what they could yet become. And it
emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther
frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for
women, and eventually, we still dream, for all. And just as knowledge now mediated between
wealth and power, self-government was understood to
be the instrument with which the people embodied
their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of
Reason under-girded and strengthened the rule of
law. But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this
- including especially the ability of the American
people to exercise the reasoned collective
judgments presumed in our Founders' design --
depended on the particular characteristics of the
marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age
of Print. Consider the rules by which our present "public
forum" now operates, and how different they are
from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the
easy and free access individuals had to participate
in the national conversation by means of the
printed word, the world of television makes it
virtually impossible for individuals to take part
in what passes for a national conversation
today. Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost
everywhere in America. They were easily accessible
and operated by printers eager to typeset essays,
pamphlets, books or flyers. Television stations and
networks, by contrast, are almost completely
inaccessible to individual citizens and almost
always uninterested in ideas contributed by
individual citizens. Ironically, television programming is actually
more accessible to more people than any source of
information has ever been in all of history. But
here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible
in only one direction; there is no true
interactivity, and certainly no conversation. The number of cables connecting to homes is
limited in each community and usually forms a
natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite
spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource
controlled by a few. The production of programming
has been centralized and has usually required a
massive capital investment. So for these and other
reasons, an ever-smaller number of large
corporations control virtually all of the
television programming in America. Soon after television established its dominance
over print, young people who realized they were
being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up
with a new form of expression in an effort to join
the national conversation: the "demonstration."
This new form of expression, which began in the
1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical
production designed to capture the attention of the
television cameras long enough to hold up a sign
with a few printed words to convey, however
plaintively, a message to the American people. Even
this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression
on national television. So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged
in the wake of the printing press, there is
virtually no exchange of ideas at all in
television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt
and I are trying to change that - at least where
Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not
coincidentally, we are the only independently owned
news and information network in all of American
television. It is important to note that the absence of a
two-way conversation in American television also
means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on
television. To the extent that there is a
"marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television,
it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing
barriers to entry that exclude the average
citizen. The German philosopher, Jürgen
Habermas, describes what has happened as "the
refeudalization of the public sphere." That may
sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that
packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which
thrived before the printing press democratized
knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable,
was a system in which wealth and power were
intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played
no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the
people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was
born of their ignorance. It did not come as a surprise that the
concentration of control over this powerful one-way
medium carries with it the potential for damaging
the operations of our democracy. As early as the
1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio,
first debuted in the United States, there was
immediate apprehension about its potential impact
on democracy. One early American student of the
medium wrote that if control of radio were
concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can
be free." As a result of these fears, safeguards were
enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public
Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and
the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century
later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And
then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and
other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves. And radio is not the only place where big
changes have taken place. Television news has
undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie
"Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in
1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a
prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into
the news business, which became the media industry
and is now completely owned by conglomerates. The news divisions - which used to be seen as
serving a public interest and were subsidized by
the rest of the network - are now seen as profit
centers designed to generate revenue and, more
importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the
corporation of which they are a small part. They
have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller
budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less
independent judgment, more vulnerability to
influence by management, and more dependence on
government sources and canned public relations
hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic
fact that this generation of journalists is the
best trained and most highly skilled in the history
of their profession. But they are usually not
allowed to do the job they have been trained to
do. THE present executive branch has made it a
practice to try and control and intimidate news
organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. - They placed a former male escort in the
White House press pool to pose as a reporter -
and then called upon him to give the president a
hand at crucial moments.
- They paid actors to make make phony video
press releases and paid cash to some reporters
who were willing to take it in return for
positive stories.
- And every day they unleash squadrons of
digital Brownshirts to harass and hector any
journalist who is critical of the
President.
For these and other reasons, The US Press was
recently found in a comprehensive international
study to be only the 27th freest press in the
world. And that too seems strange to me. Among the other factors damaging our public
discourse in the media, the imposition by
management of entertainment values on the
journalism profession has resulted in scandals,
fabricated sources, fictional events and the
tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently
stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course,
forced out of his anchor job after angering the
White House - television news has been "dumbed down
and tarted up." The coverage of political campaigns focuses on
the "horse race" and little else. And the
well-known axiom that guides most local television
news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some
disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it
stinks.") In fact, one of the few things that Red state
and Blue state America agree on is that they don't
trust the news media anymore. Clearly, the purpose of television news is no
longer to inform the American people or serve the
public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the
screen" in order to build ratings and sell
advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at
what's on: - The Robert Blake trial.
- The Laci Peterson tragedy.
- The Michael Jackson trial.
- The Runaway Bride.
- The search in Aruba.
The latest twist in various celebrity couplings,
and on and on and on. And more importantly, notice what is not on: the
global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal
catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's
industrial base, and a long list of other serious
public questions that need to be addressed by the
American people. ONE morning not long ago, I flipped on one of
the news programs in hopes of seeing information
about an important world event that had happened
earlier that day. But the lead story was about a
young man who had been hiccupping for three years.
And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble
getting dates. But what I didn't see was news. This was the point made by Jon Stewart,
the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he
visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a
distinction between news and entertainment. And it really matters because the subjugation of
news by entertainment seriously harms our
democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism
that fails to inform the people. And when the
people are not informed, they cannot hold
government accountable when it is incompetent,
corrupt, or both. One of the only avenues left for the expression
of public or political ideas on television is
through the purchase of advertising, usually in
30-second chunks. These short commercials are now
the principal form of communication between
candidates and voters. As a result, our elected
officials now spend all of their time raising money
to purchase these ads. That is why the House and Senate campaign
committees now search for candidates who are
multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their
own personal resources. As one consequence, the
halls of Congress are now filling up with the
wealthy. Campaign finance reform, however well it is
drafted, often misses the main point: so long as
the only means of engaging in political dialogue is
through purchasing expensive television
advertising, money will continue by one means or
another to dominate American politic s. And ideas
will no longer mediate between wealth and
power. And what if an individual citizen, or a group of
citizens wants to enter the public debate by
expressing their views on television? Since they
cannot simply join the conversation, some of them
have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30
seconds in which to express their opinion. But they
are not even allowed to do that. Moveon.org
tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to
Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being
debated by Congress. They were told "issue
advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the
networks that had refused the Moveon ad began
running advertisements by the White House in favor
of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon
complained and the White House ad was temporarily
removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until
the White House complained and the network
immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused
to present the Moveon ad. THE advertising of products, of course, is the
real purpose of television. And it is difficult to
overstate the extent to which modern pervasive
electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In
the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first
described the way in which advertising has altered
the classical relationship by which supply and
demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand
of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern
advertising campaigns were beginning to create high
levels of demand for products that consumers never
knew they wanted, much less needed. The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the
commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of
life in what used to be America's marketplace for
ideas. The inherent value or validity of political
propositions put forward by candidates for office
is now largely irrelevant compared to the
advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of
voters. Our democracy has been hallowed out. The
opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased,
just as demand for new products is artificially
created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote,
"the manufacture of consent...was supposed to have
died out with the appearance of democracy...but it
has not died out. It has, in fact, improved
enormously in technique...under the impact of
propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in
the original dogma of democracy." Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical
dismissal of America's gift to human history. But
in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans
must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the
public forum and create new ways to engage in a
genuine and not manipulative conversation about our
future. Americans in both parties should insist on
the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of
Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the
rejection and distortion of science. We must insist
on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies
known to be false for the purpose of intentionally
clouding the public's ability to discern the
truth. I don't know all the answers, but along with my
partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the
medium of television to recreate a multi-way
conversation that includes individuals and operates
according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would
like to know more, we are having a press conference
on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel. We are learning some fascinating lessons about
the way decisions are made in the television
industry, and it may well be that the public would
be well served by some changes in law and policy to
stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher
regard for the public interest. But we are
succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out
to individuals and asking them to co-create our
network. The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a
vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is
the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video
streaming over the Internet as the means by which
individuals send us what we call viewer-created
content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet
for the two-way conversation that we have every day
with our viewers enabling them to participate in
the decisions on programming our network. I know that many of you attending this
conference are also working on creative ways to use
the Internet as a means for bringing more voices
into America's ongoing conversation. I salute you
as kindred spirits and wish you every success. I want to close with the two things I've learned
about the Internet that are most directly relevant
to the conference that you are having here
today. First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still
lacks the single most powerful characteristic of
the television medium; because of its
packet-switching architecture, and its continued
reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections
(including the so-called "last mile" to the home),
it does not support the real-time mass distribution
of full-motion video. Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes
television such a powerful medium. Our brains -
like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired
to immediately notice sudden movement in our field
of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to
look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered
on the African savanna a million years ago and the
leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look
are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed
on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists
call "the establishing reflex." And that is the
brain syndrome activated by television continuously
- sometimes as frequently as once per second. That
is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue
eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a
glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the
reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average
of four and a half hours a day. It is true that video streaming is becoming more
common over the Internet, and true as well that
cheap storage of streamed video is making it
possible for many young television viewers to
engage in what the industry calls "time shifting"
and personalize their television watching habits.
Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue
to replace smaller information pipelines, the
Internet's capacity for carrying television will
continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of
these developments, it is television delivered over
cable and satellite that will continue for the
remainder of this decade and probably the next to
be the dominant medium of communication in
America's democracy. And so long as that is the
case, I truly believe that America's democracy is
at grave risk. The final point I want to make is this:
We must ensure that the
Internet remains open and accessible to all
citizens without any limitation on the ability of
individuals to choose the content they wish
regardless of the Internet service provider they
use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We
cannot take this future for granted. We must be
prepared to fight for it because some of the same
forces of corporate consolidation and control that
have distorted the television marketplace have an
interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as
well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that
to happen. We must ensure by all means possible that this
medium of democracy's future develops in the mold
of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our
Founders knew was essential to the health and
survival of freedom.
Taped
conversation between US President Richard Nixon
and Billy Graham about the 'Jewish stranglehold'
on the American media
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