GLOBALVISION AT 20

As Jesse marches on Wall Street–and I will be there–I also continue to march down Memory lane, and as we try to figure out how to keep our company alive and relevant at age 20. I have been sharing some articles I have written in the past about the work we do or are trying to do

Here’s another one from the electronic version of my book NEWS DISSECTOR. It was written in l997 and never published until now. My daughter incidentally is alive and well and working for a Hollywood studio. I will resist the temptation to kvell about her.

A Call From My Daughter

My daughter Sarah is on the phone from college in Santa Cruz California. She’s reading Erik Barnouw’s excellent history of American broadcasting, puzzling over an unexpected fact.
“You always told me that Edward R. Murrow was one of your heroes,” she says, “so how come he joined the U.S. Information Agency and tried to stop his own expose about migrant workers from being seen in England?” Oddly, that very night Ed Murrow was in my living room as a sound bite in an endless parade of clips, in a collage put together by the TV Academy to glorify the industry and extol its Emmy Award which has always had an inferiority complex next to its more heavily hyped golden cousin, the Oscar. Once again, after all these years, there’s Murrow on TV blasting Joe McCarthy, but, of course, nothing about CBS years later easing Ed out the door.
“The instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire.” he would write in the sunset of his career. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it those ends.” By then, however heralded, he had outlived his usefulness. What he did was no longer valued. His partner Fred Friendly quit when CBS refused to interrupt I Love Lucy reruns to show important Senate hearings on the Vietnam War. CBS dumped their spiritual successor too, newscaster Walter Cronkite. He was forced out by an executive I later met, Van Gordon Sauter, who Cronkite says treated him like a “leper.”
“I felt like I had been driven from the temple where for 19 years, along with other believers, I had worshipped the great god News on a daily basis.”
So how come?
Well Sarah, it’s like this: like Icarus, you can be among the chosen and still lose your wings when you fly too close to the sun. When an institution decides you are “trending down,” or believes it can make more money using that other guy or gal, you’re gone. Also, some folks do get co-opted or just plain give up, burn up or burn out. Or they go for the gold. (“Show me the money!” is Hollywood’s hippest phrase of the year.) Remember, at the end of the day, they own the candy store. When I grew up, I read the muckraking accounts of how the big industrial magnates crushed the workers and shamed America. Your generation will be reading about today’s media moguls.
Murrow mattered because he did at times illuminate, and inspire, and there are still moments like that on the tube—for us it was when we watched men walk on the moon, for you and your friends, probably, it was when Ellen came out. For us it was when JFK was gunned down or the cops were televised breaking heads in Chicago; for your generation it may have been when Murphy Brown took on the Vice President or when Seinfeld first said Yadda Yadda or when you became addicted to watching Beverly Hills 90210. Reality was what focused us; fiction seems be what grabs you and your friends. Why is that?
The problem is: not that much in the media seems to matter at all. If that isn’t troubling enough, few even expect that it should. That’s what gets to me. How do we convey to the public that it is being cheated, that there is another way of seeing, that there are concrete alternatives and real options? How do we reach and inspire a public when oligopolies rule and ordinary people are, in effect electronically disenfranchised?
I am writing at a time when the president of the United States talks incessantly about “building bridges” to the next century, while my own stomach tightens at the thought that I may be burning what ever bridges there are left for me to cross in the final years of this century.
I am already a network refugee. Is the industry I identify with really receptive to criticism, debate and dissent? I guess I will find out. Many friends have counseled against “biting the tail of the tiger” or not having the maturity to understand what cannot be changed. “Are you trying to become a media martyr,” I’m asked, as if the very act of expressing dissent is a sign of mental imbalance. Back in the fifties, social criticism was taken seriously as subversion; today, all too often, it is ignored as the work of malcontents, or simply patronized with a heavy sigh of fatalism. “Yes, you are right, but . . . “
This is a lot to be up against. I know I can’t change it by myself which is why I am working with others to try to promote media reform and get other outlooks on the air. Back in my civil rights movement days, we sang “We will never turn back.” Maybe that legacy is my generation’s mandate—or curse. Decades later, I’m, still on that roller coaster ride of public engagement and private despair, of small victories and large defeats, through personal crises, family losses, and two painful divorces. I am still pushing on to find a media niche. Will it have been a quixotic crusade, a tilting at windmills, a life of expecting journalism to be something it isn’t? I may not “win” but I know they won’t either.
We all end up wondering about our impact and effectiveness. That’s for others to decide. In one of my 20/20 stories years ago, I asked Tina Turner, a personal heartthrob and musical inspiration for years, when was she going to start slowing down. She looked at me, smiled, and said, “I’m just getting started!”
These are the kind of “big” questions that have tormented me because there are so few really good answers. Having come of age in the ‘60s, fired by that “everything is possible” attitude, I still believed that people can make change happen. If wars can be ended or Presidents driven from office, the media networks can be reintroduced to the values of democracy.
And yes, Sarah, I know I am not in the ‘60s anymore. I know that the conditions and consciousness are different—in no small part because of the mass media. So the strategy of this fight is as hard to define as it is to wage. I cherish freedom of the press. I am part of a small media company which has survived but not thrived. I vacillate between wanting in and preferring to be out. Sure, I would like to be “commercially viable.” and why not? I spent years in commercial media. I want to reach people. I have shown I can do it. Yet that commercial world may no longer be an option. I may have crossed that Rubicon. In public television, some bureaucrats today call the tension between audience and mission “tired.” But for me it is still crucial because in the end it gets down not only to what the public gets exposed to, but what you want to do with your life, and what values you want to serve.
Late in his career, Ed Murrow was writing about what future generations will find when they pore through the real archive of what so many Americans have become addicted to watching over all these years. It’s not the glitzy exhibits on display in the front of the Museum of Broadcasting but the tons of trash and stuff buried in the basement and the closets. The public, he said, “will find there recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”
You are that “future generation.” It’s your job, metaphorically speaking, to help us change the channels. Here’s the baton. Your turn is coming. It will not be an easy or quick fight, and cannot be won before the next commercial break. The status quo will have you believe it’s the only quo. Fighting to democratize the media, or taking on the vast power of the well-financed global media machine, will be a protracted battle because we are up against cherished myths, embedded ideologies, subtle techniques and masterful moguls. There will be name-calling, evasive tactics, and resistance.
The fight for more freedom in the press will be falsely characterized as an attack on freedom of the press. Perhaps we can take strength from the words of a lead character (I forget which) in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest: “The thing he was fighting, you couldn’t whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it till you couldn’t come out any more, and somebody else has to take your place.”
And someone will, Sarah, someone will.

Unpublished, 1997

I am going to have to leave it here. You can read more about our 20th on Mediachannel tomorrow. Also just learned from Michael Albert that our colleagues at Z Magazine are also turning 20 so here’s to we survivors. May we find the means to stay in the race, or is it a marathon. I had more for today but somehow the email from the office never reached me so I will have try again tomorrow. I am proud to say We can.

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