continued: Corporatization of the Media: A discussion from News World 2000 conference in Barcelona
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Schechter: One issue that Bob mentioned has been the fusion of newsbiz and showbiz--how showbiz and entertainment values are infiltrating into news selection as well as presentation. Like all the Monica news all the time in the United States. All the OJ all the time--every network was devoting an inordinate amount of time to the coverage of one story and creating in a sense a dramatic presentation of that story to conform to all the Hollywood formats: strong characters, narrative arc, undecided outcome, so there was a mystery to what was going to happen.

Gowing: But would you say that is to conform to a boardroom imperative?

Schechter: Yes, which is to get more of an audience.

Gowing: Chris, CNN gave enormous amounts of coverage to these stories.

Cramer: Monica, yes, I defend that. People simply can't stop watching it. I can't stop watching it. This has nothing to do with corporate agenda, this is to due to what makes good journalism. Would CNN devote weeks of coverage overseas to O.J. now? No. But that was a long time ago.

Gowing: Rex Granum from ABC, are you in the audience? Do you think your corporation will be shaking in its boots from what it's heard this afternoon?

Rex Granum: Hardly, and I certainly do not always agree with my friend Chris Cramer, but I absolutely must agree with him in terms of this situation being set up as some massive conspiracy on the part of the networks. I would point out to you that if there is such a conspiracy then we have been oddly inept in carrying it out. If you go back a mere twenty years--a very brief period of time in the broadcasting business--ABC, CBS, and NBC were seen by 99 percent of the audience in the States. Today, collectively, they are seen by 55 percent. If there is a conspiracy out there, it's an incredibly inefficient one.

Nick Gowing: Can I ask Rex and also Chris Hanson, who is here from NBC: do you ever have your morning conferences feeling that there is any type of corporate boardroom pressure on your news agenda, as opposed to editorial pressure from New York?

Chris Hampson: From NBC's point of view, absolutely not. In fact quite the opposite. I think because we are related to GE, the pressures on us to maintain our integrity are enormous. We have guidelines which say to every employee who comes through the door that the most important assets we have as journalists is our integrity. I don't think we can forget that we're dealing with individual journalists here, and that's one of the most important points. I've been a journalist like a lot of people in this room for many years. I've worked for many different organizations. I can tell you that I had pressures from the very first day that I walked in the door from one source or another. It's my job to resist those as a journalist. I find it interesting that the one case we are talking about here, the tobacco case, was made into a movie because it was so extraordinary. Let's not lose sight of that. There is no conspiracy. There are commercial pressures, but there are commercial pressures everywhere.

Julian Sher: Julian Sher of JournalismNet. Is not a much bigger problem to look at the underlying assumptions that we as lazy journalists--and I'm saying that of all of us-make? In other words, in the 1920s most media considered it normal that women didn't vote, suffragettes were considered crazy radicals and treated as such, and it would take a brave journalist to go out and cover the suffragette movement in a bold way. In the 1890s the major London papers thought it was a tremendously radical idea that children should work less than 18 hours a day. It seems to me that our task in these kinds of conferences is to push ourselves to question our assumptions. The problem with CNN and ABC and NBC is that they are big companies, which like the rest of the big establishments are kind of slow to pick up what is new, what is out in the frontier. Our task as journalists and corporate executives is not to be afraid to challenge some of the main assumptions in society. It's not a question of conspiracy, it's that we don't pose the embarrassing questions that we should be asking.

Cramer: I think this is really good territory. I think we should absolutely be challenging ourselves. Of course we are lazy, yes we arrogant, we think we can do it better than most people can. Of course we are dissatisfied on a daily basis about CNN's coverage and try to do something about it. I want to provide more coverage of Africa, I want to provide more coverage of Asia. I'm not happy having 36 bureaus, I want 360 bureaus. So, yes we should test ourselves on a daily basis.

Gowing: To bring this to a conclusion, or a least a close, because I don't think we will get a conclusion: Bob, did you get the answers you were seeking?

McChesney: I think there are fundamental differences that really can't be resolved. Even if the facts are out there, there are going to be different values and interpretations. But it's good to lay it all out on the table.

Gowing: Ian Hargreaves, did you get the answers and the clarifications that you were seeking?

Hargreaves: I think the debate shifted to where it really matters, which is the economic forces that shape journalism. I think that is absolutely right, but I resist the conspiracy theory of corporate power mainly because I think it contributes to journalist laziness. The reality is as a journalist that every single day you're up against this kind of difficulty, and it's your job as a journalist to overcome it. That's not to say that you should be blind to the institutional and cultural forces at play, because they are very large. But at the end it's a matter of individual professional integrity, and that is the only sustainable form of resistance to all these undesirable effects. TBS