Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. Ms. Magazine helped lead a revolution when it hit the newsstands in 1972. Is Ms. still needed today?

Gloria Steinem: Here's the reason we need Ms. Magazine. We once, not so long ago, did a collection of all the cover stories that declared the women's movement dead. The first one was in 1969.

Brian Lehrer: In this hour, Gloria Steinem, founding editor of Ms. on buying it back to save it from expanding extinction. Also, why President Clinton wants government's hands off the internet. Plus, Ira Glass on the inner life of This American Life.

Ira Glass: There's a spirit of wanting to surprise people, wanting to actually generate pleasure.

All that plus the first On the Media Elvis Index this hour. Stay tuned. [pause 00:00:52]

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Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. Ms. Magazine, to many women, it was once a lifeline, but now people are asking, is Ms. Obsolete? If it is, does that mean feminism is dead? After 26 years, Ms. Magazine ceased publication this fall, when it was bought by a new company, and readership continued to decline. Now feminist icon Gloria Steinem, a founder of the original Ms., has put together financing to buy it back and try to breathe new life into it. She joins me now. Gloria Steinem, do we need Ms. Magazine to know that feminism lives?

Gloria Steinem: Here's the reason we need Ms. Magazine. We once, not so long ago, did a collection of all the cover stories that declared the women's movement dead. The first one was in 1969. I think that this is just something to be expected, that the first stage of resistance to a social justice movement is to say it's not necessary, and the second stage is to say it used to be necessary, but it's not anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Women have many more voices and many more choices in the media than in the past. Does the world still need Ms. Magazine?

Gloria Steinem: I wish it didn't because if it didn't, then I could go back to writing books, which is perhaps what I should be doing. In fact, what's happened to women's magazines since we started is that the pressures of advertising have become greater for everybody, not just women's magazines, and so the need to write about product areas has become greater. If you look at women's magazines, you'll see much less fiction, almost no fiction, poetry, political reporting, investigative reporting. It's not the fault of the editors, and it's not to denigrate those magazines.

If you need clothes, you may go out and buy a copy, or there may be a particular article you want to buy. Our readers tend to buy other women's magazines single issues from time to time. As a regular companion, there isn't any other magazine like Ms..

Brian Lehrer: Katie Roiphe, author of The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, has said she thinks Ms. has passed its prime, old fashioned. That, "It has failed to move with time and to incorporate different and interesting opinions. It has remained this dogmatic, old-fashioned, humorless publication." Now, Ms. Roiphe is from a younger generation, part of a movement that is now being labeled post-feminism. Has Ms. failed to connect with young women coming of age in this society?

Gloria Steinem: No. That really should be responded to by young women who do not agree with her at all, and certainly, statistically, she doesn't represent her generation's views.

Brian Lehrer: What's your response?

Gloria Steinem: The response is that there are plenty of readers and every movement-- I suppose Clarence Thomas thinks the civil rights movement is old-fashioned, too. Every movement has a wide variety of opinions. I think the larger question is why the media would, which, I think you're getting this from The New York Times, which was where she was quoted, why they would turn to her. I think because they can be assured of a hostile quote.

Brian Lehrer: Does Ms. need to lighten up a little bit? We heard from one woman who's pretty supportive of Ms., but said, "Gloria is not humorless, but Ms. is humorless."

Gloria Steinem: I find a lot of funny things in Ms., but I hope she writes to us with suggestions of articles. We belong to her as well as to all the readers. We once ran a cover that's had on it a man in a cartoon is saying, "Have you heard the women's movement has no sense of humor?" The woman is saying, "No, but hum a few bars, and I'll fake it." We'd love to have ideas. We certainly do laugh a lot as individuals and on the staff. All right, I take that as an instruction for the future. We should get more humor into it. We will.

Brian Lehrer: Right. It's not just The New York Times. There's a larger context here. Your face was placed on a cover issue of Time Magazine this past June with Betty Friedan and Calista Flockhart, who plays Ally McBeal. The cover line asked, "Is feminism dead?" I guess because here's Calista Flockhart, too skinny for words, and a big hit with men, of course, and her character, Ally McBeal, a big hit with young women with the theme, I'm a good lawyer, but what I care about is getting married.

Gloria Steinem: Women are whole people. Calista Flockhart considers herself a feminist. The gender gap dictates elections, both the last presidential election and much of this midterm election. There's just been a huge new plan for another women's network. Women buy 80% or 70% of the books, I'm told. I'm not sure of that, you'd have to look it up. Anyway, the majority of the books dictate a lot of the marketplace. It depends where you look. More women consider themselves feminists in a self-identification way than consider themselves Republicans. That's not bad.

Brian Lehrer: How did the issues that young women in their 20s and 30s are coping with now, differ from the problems women were coping with when Ms. started out in 1971? What do you think?

Gloria Steinem: Yes, they differ a lot, and yet generically, they're sometimes not so different. One of the great things that Ms. can now do is be the forum for a dialogue between and among generations in the same way that we have been for women across race lines or class lines. For instance, here's a difference. In my day, when you got married, you lost a lot of your civil rights. A lot of inequality set in with marriage. Now you can make an equal marriage, an equal partnership. It may not be too easy, but you can definitely do it. The inequality comes when the first child is born and the father is not nearly, on the average, as much a caretaker as the woman is.

The woman tends to end up with two full time jobs. One in the home and one outside of the home. The next leap of consciousness, I would say that's going to be fun to see, to report on is, yes, we know now that women can do what men can do, but we need to figure out that men can do what women can do.

Brian Lehrer: Here's something that's going on at the same time. Geraldine Laybourne, former president of Disney ABC Cable Networks, recently announced the launch of a new cable internet venture which will strive to provide women and children with programming and information currently lacking in the media. I think you referred to this before. Joining her as partners in this venture are Oprah Winfrey and TV producer Marcy Carsey. We'll be talking on this program about that venture called Oxygen, next week. Is that competitive or complementary with Ms.?

Gloria Steinem: Oh, no, complementary. Absolutely complementary. No, I was very, very glad to see that. I bet they were glad to see that Ms. is under the control of women again, too. Lifetime, the other channel for women, has a great effort going forward on childcare. It's doing a big documentary. They've been putting together groups, testifying in Congress.

Brian Lehrer: I'll throw another one into the mix. The Fox network is planning two new cable channels. I think they're calling it the Boys Channel and the Girls Channel, but that's been greeted much more skeptically. What do you think the difference is?

Gloria Steinem: I think the difference is that Geraldine Laybourne and Oprah Winfrey can control one. Who owns Fox?

Brian Lehrer: Rupert Murdoch.

Gloria Steinem: I rest my case.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Ms. has been not dead but on hiatus, it turns out, since the September/October issue. When will we see it again?

Gloria Steinem: April/May. We're going full steam ahead and moving and hiring. We just hired a new editor who was born the year that Ms. started and who has already had experience running a small magazine of her own. It's so wonderful to see.

Brian Lehrer: Good luck with the next generation of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem.

Gloria Steinem: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Too much Monica has claimed at least one newsman. Commentator James Poniewozik is here now with some thoughts on the end of an era. The death of the sports guys news show.

James Poniewozik: America's funniest news parody went off the air this week. No, I don't mean Comedy Central's Daily Show. Yes, unfortunately, Saturday Night Live is still with us. I'm referring to MSNBC's The Big Show with Keith Olbermann. This Friday, Olbermann broadcast his last post-modern dispatch from the media encampment deep inside the president's underwear drawer. Olbermann had been the anchor of ESPN's SportsCenter, a slick broadcast that updated the cliched Bengay-soaked sports genre for a young, pop culture-savvy audience.

The show MSNBC put him in resembled nothing more than a sports cast complete with an opening segment of wacky news clips intercut with Olbermann's wisecracks, a political blooper reel. It's as though through some Freudian guilt, the network was satirizing its own journalistic approach. We cover the news like a Bull game anyway. Why not just turn our primetime newscast into a post-game show? The show was indeed funny and acerbic, but as the Lewinsky affair broke, then lingered and lingered, and the network drafted Olbermann to host a second nightly scandal show, the host began to direct his trademark sarcasm against the same scandal milking that was making him a star.

His shows were being compared to Nightline, which began during the Iran crisis in 1979, except that the only hostages here were the political process and the press's sense of proportion. Olbermann played the comparison for laughs, once referring to his second show, The White House in Crisis, as The White House Isn't in Crisis, But We'll Keep Calling it That Because There's a Graphic. His broadcasts became sly, self-deconstructing programs whose real topic was their own superfluousness. What made SportsCenter successful was its willingness to puncture the macho seriousness of sports culture.

Olbermann turned that sardonic eye on the heavy-breathing culture of cable news itself. By extension, he was satirizing his audience, those of us who could find nothing better to do in our too brief lifetimes than to watch Laura Ingraham mud wrestle Lanny Davis for the 20th time. There was no small bit of irony or hypocrisy, take your pick, in Olbermann's critique. Last spring, he gave a much-quoted speech at Cornell University, lacerating his colleagues for covering this story 28 hours out of every 24, and implying that he was this close to quitting.

However, Olbermann continued supplying 2 of those 28 hours every day for another half year. We who watched were implicated, too. His shtick was so appealing because it let us wallow in the scandal like everybody else while believing that we sophisticated media consumers knew that it was all just show business. During the Monica-fueled cable news riot of the past year, Olbermann's hour of breast-beating neurosis was at least better than another hour of chest-thumping psychosis. Olbermann returns to host another sportscast, this time on Fox, where he will comment on the embarrassing exploits of overpaid, self-indulgent egomaniacs. One wonders if he will notice the difference.

Brian Lehrer: James Poniewozik is a columnist for Salon Magazine. Coming up, this American interview, a talk with Ira Glass, and a different focus on Iran through filmmakers' eyes. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

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Brian Lehrer: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. Ira Glass, you may know, has got the biggest hit in public radio these days. His weekly program of surprising stories called This American Life is now on more than 250 stations. This guy whose show tells eclectic tales that are often stranger than fiction, is up there with the car guys and Garrison Keillor, as a superstar of the radio weekend, Ira's show is really alternative and creative. A little fringy some would say, but it's attracting a large audience. A really large audience. Oh, by the way, Ira Glass likes Howard Stern. Ira, what's up with you and Howard?

Ira Glass: I'm a fan. What can I say? Sometimes when the business report comes home, Morning Edition, a man has got to change the channel, and there's Howard talking away.

Brian Lehrer: At first blush, I'd say you have totally opposite sensibilities. Your show is mostly about unknown people and the ordinary or extraordinary experiences they have. His, I would say, is mostly about celebrities and underwear.

Ira Glass: Right. I'm not that interested in celebrities, and I guess I have just the normal interest in underwear. Howard Stern is great theater. It's great theater for radio. There's a reason why he's a success, and there's a reason why few succeed in the way that he does it, in terms of just being interesting. It's like The Jack Benny Show, a friend of mine says. It's, he's got this regular cast of characters who he's constantly putting into different situations, which they create a huge variety of each morning. Then we see all our regular characters react in their various ways.

It actually has dramatic tension and dynamic tension, and in a certain way, works the way a good documentary story does. Except that a good documentary story, what happens is you go out with your microphone and you hang around with people and you hang around and you hang around, and you keep waiting for something that you could not have predicted to happen and something that just grabs your heart to happen. Howard, God bless him, does that in his own way in the studio every day. He creates the situations so that something can happen that'll be new.

Brian Lehrer: The Chicago Tribune said you have, "The hippest show on mainstream public radio, a distinction Glass would admit is akin to being the funkiest Osmond brother." Is that what public radio, or too much of public radio has become to your ears, as unhip as the Osmond brothers?

Ira Glass: No. I'm a public radio listener. I get my news from Morning Edition when I'm not switching away for the occasional Howard Stern segment, and I get my news from All Things Considered. I was an All Things Considered staffer for years and years and years, and an NPR reporter for years. Having said that, I do think that what I'm interested in on the radio are people's stories, and there's not that much of that on the radio, even on public radio. There's a spirit of wanting to surprise people, wanting to actually generate pleasure, be amusing, that is part of the tradition of public radio in America and certainly, part of the tradition at All Things Considered and Morning Edition, that I feel like I always want more. I always want more than I'm getting. I want more surprising fun stuff in with the nation's most informative and analytical news programs.

Brian Lehrer: You didn't drop from the sky two years ago. You've been doing surprising stories for years, one might say, masquerading as NPR news reports. You have some of those with you, right?

Ira Glass: Yes. I brought little clips that I sometimes play when I'm asked to explain what it is that we're trying to do on This American Life. Yes, I started in public radio when I was 19, and I'm 39 now and spent all of that time working for NPR in Washington. Sometimes as a reporter out in the field, but mostly for the first 10 years, just as a producer. I could play you a little clip.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that would be great.

Ira Glass: Yes. NPR would send me out doing these documentary stories, and I did one at Taft High School. They sent me there for a year, and every week or so I would do another story about the school reform that was going on there. Some of the stories were rather serious stories about policy, but even in those, my editor's idea, and my idea was that we would have scenes and characters. We'd be following these people over time and that the stories wouldn't just be hardcore policy, but there'd be humor and emotion and all the things that's in a nicely produced piece of work.

Anyway, this clip I'm going to play you, I got the chance to go to the prom, which I've done three times as a reporter as an adult. I absolutely do not recommend it to anybody. It's just a very odd experience to be an adult at the prom. This is this clip in this story that it comes at the point in the story right after this really radiant couple walks up to me. They're 17 years old, and they're just radiant, and they're so happy. The girl tells me how that night before she came out to the prom, how her mom warned her that her boyfriend was going to try to bust some moves, pull some sex acts. She's like, "A little late for that." Then comes this moment.

[video playing]

Ira Glass: On the dance floor, there was a certain amount of copping feels and kissing, but the sexual tension at the prom hit a kind of surreal zenith when the DJ told the boys to bring chairs down to the dance floor. Girls were seated in the chairs, and the garter ceremony began.

DJ: We going to count down from 10.

Ira Glass: Over 100 teenage girls presented bare legs with garters.

DJ: All men have to put your hands behind your back.

Ira Glass: Meaning, grab the garter with your teeth.

DJ: All right, you want to count backwards from 10. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4,-

Ira Glass: This is the kind of activity that separates the just-friends prom dates from the real dates. Dozens of just-friends stood around the edges of the hall in various states of discomfort.

DJ: -3, 2, 1

Ira Glass: 100 kneeling teenage boys bring their faces up against the slightly sweaty thighs of their dates, grip multicolored garters with their teeth, and drag them off the leg. It's a shocking and amazing sight, but when I ask teachers about it later, they all say, "Where have you been? They've done this for years." At homecoming, apparently, things get even more explicit.

DJ: All right. Okay, let's move to chairs, and we'll have a slow dance.

[video ends]

Ira Glass: Brian, I play that just to illustrate, that was in that story A, because it was completely surprising to me, and I figured it would be surprising to listeners around the country.

Brian Lehrer: that's what you have in common with Howard Stern. Garter stories.

Ira Glass: [laughs] That's right. It's the secret underbelly. Yes, but seriously, it was surprising. the rarest thing, I feel like, when you turn on the radio is to be surprised. It's just the most unusual thing. Then secondly, it's just like it was there for my pleasure. It was funny. It was just funny and interesting in a way that was self-apparent, and I wanted to put it in. Then finally, I felt like it was actually documenting something that's real, that exists in the world.

Brian Lehrer: These are big ideas for you. Surprise and pleasure. We've been speaking for a few minutes, and I don't know how many times you've already used the word surprise.

Ira Glass: Yes. That's the key to so much of trying to do what we do in This American Life. I feel like that's one of the ways in which we're different from a lot of what's happening on public radio now is that there are many, many wonderful shows and very competent shows, but they're not trying to stake out new territory, and they're not trying to surprise. You don't get that feeling of discovery.

Brian Lehrer: How do you get surprise? How do you achieve it? Is there a way? Is there a format? Is there a structure?

Ira Glass: Yes, of course. It's a weekly radio show. There's a machinery to produce surprise. What we have is this huge story selection process where, for the three or four stories that we put in the air, we go through 15 or 20 story ideas, fully put in production, 7 or 8 stories. Then just wait until stuff happens that is mesmerizing and unexpected, and then we drop everything else.

Brian Lehrer: You wait?

Ira Glass: Wait is not quite as active as what happens. Again, it's like when you go out doing a documentary story, there's a lot of, you try this, you try that, you try this, you try that until just something hits where it takes on a momentum of its own. That can be as simple as you're talking to somebody and you just hit the thing that they are most engaged with, and they just start to speak in actual narratives with images and real story. You just hit this. You can just hit this thing where suddenly you will find that you are surprised at what they're saying.

Brian Lehrer: We had documentary maker David Isay on recently.

Ira Glass: He rocks.

Brian Lehrer: Another creative force in public radio today. The two of you are in a category, I think, of creating new kinds of radio documentaries. They're serious, they're long, they think big thoughts, but they're not broccoli. They are surprising. They are filled with pleasure. Do you see it as a form of new documentary? Is something emerging here out of the two of you?

Ira Glass: Do I think it's a new form? Oh, boy. I don't even know the answer to that. I don't think it's a new form, but I feel like it hasn't gotten a tremendous amount of attention.

Brian Lehrer: Were you influenced by the great old documentaries? Harvest of Shame, CBS 1961, [unintelligible 00:25:17]

Ira Glass: No. I know nothing about that. No. I know nothing about anything. I know nothing about any of that. Everything I know, I learned on the job.

Brian Lehrer: Is this show about all those people who you find and tell their stories, or is it about you?

Ira Glass: I am not that interested in it being about me. I'm more interested in other people's stories than my own. I think that through my selection of stories with my staff, I do this with other people, with three other producers and a bunch of other contributing editors, a certain sensibility comes across, which is my taste. I feel like you get that.

Brian Lehrer: You take all these bits of tape, and you make them sound exactly the way you want them to sound. The 45-second rhythm, the element of surprise, and everything else that you talked about as you were playing those clips, they are your medium, but you're the artist.

Ira Glass: I suppose that you could say that about any reporter or radio program host, that they're pulling the strings. I think any kind of nonfiction work or fiction work which deals in any way with anything serious, reveals the unconscious of the person who's creating it. The things that I and my staff find ourselves interested in are the things we put on the show. I think that that's unavoidable. If work is going to be good, it has to proceed from your desire, from your unconscious, from what gives you pleasure, from what you find pulling you.

We're a show that's driven by that. We're not driven by, unlike most things in the media, it's not about other media. It's not about the news cycle. It's not about celebrities. It's really not about anything that anybody else is talking about. It has to be about what we find pulls us and what we think will pull an audience in.

Brian Lehrer: Ira Glass, host of This American Life, thanks for coming on On the Media.

Ira Glass: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: When you think of Iran, what images come to mind? If you get most of your ideas from news reports, you might be surprised by the images Iranian filmmakers are depicting. Curtis Fox has more.

Curtis Fox: Last January, Iranian President Khatami and President Clinton exchanged invitations for a cultural dialogue between Iran and the United States. Even before this official thaw in Iranian American relations, the movie industry in Tehran was attracting attention here. Godfrey Cheshire, the chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, is passionate about recent Iranian cinema.

Godfrey Cheshire: We have had such a narrow, reductive image of Iran for the last 20 years. We basically have had just TV news images of people shaking their fists and burning United States flags. Whereas when you see these films, you realize what a rich culture it is and what a very human culture it is.

[clip from Golnar]

Curtis Fox: That's from a popular children's movie called Golnar, which is based on a Russian fairy tale about a girl who cleverly escapes from two bears and is reunited with her grandparents. The film's director, Fereshteh Taerpour, and a group of Iranian filmmakers visited Chicago and New York in mid-November. They screened their movies, chatted with audiences, and talked to the press. Malek Jahan Khazai is a leading art director and production designer for Iranian films.

Malek Jahan Khazai: I believe that films don't have frontiers. They have languages, but they don't have frontiers.

Curtis Fox: Iranian cinema is crossing many frontiers these days, with Iranian films winning top prizes at glitzy film festivals around the world. The White Balloon by Jafar Panahi won the coveted Camera d'Or for first best film at Cannes in 1995 and was a breakthrough film for American art house audiences. As in many Iranian films, the story is simple. The camera follows a little girl in Tehran as she tries to buy a goldfish for her New Year's celebration.

[clip from The White Balloon]

Curtis Fox: Despite the international success of Iranian filmmakers, the revolutionary government at home continues to keep a close watch over the content of films. Iranian filmmakers are not allowed to depict those standbys of American movies, sex, and violence, and they must work around restrictive, state-imposed obstacles. Again, film critic Godfrey Cheshire.

Godfrey Cheshire: You cannot depict intimate relations between adults, even as far as kissing or holding hands if the couple on screen is not married in real life. All sorts of things. Women's hair cannot be depicted. Women have to be shown wearing the full hijab of the scarf and the loose-fitting coat.

Curtis Fox: Niki Karimi's cherubic face and flashing eyes have made her one of Iran's most popular actresses. She says she doesn't feel overly constrained by government restrictions.

Niki Karimi: The things that I'm using as an actress is my face. The expression of the face and the eyes. I think that is the most important thing for actress, and the body also. It's

the way that your body move, not the way your body is, you know. [chuckles] The audiences see it without clothes or something.

Dariush Mehrjui: No artist would like to be restricted. You like to make all the choices yourself and be responsible for your choices. You don't want to be told what to do or what not to do.

Curtis Fox: Dariush Mehrjui, who is considered by Iranians to be their greatest director. Mehrjui vehemently opposes government censorship, but he may be biting the hand that feeds him. Like all Iranian films, his movies are heavily subsidized by the government, and in spite of censorship and a budget of less than $200,000 per film, Mehrjui has managed to make many movies that have impressed international audiences, including Sara, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's feminist play The Dollhouse. Niki Karimi plays Sara, the wife of a bank executive who is more concerned about his reputation than Sara's extraordinary devotion to their marriage. In the movie's final scene, she lets him have it.

[clip from Sara]

Godfrey Cheshire: In some of the films, you really realize what a modern, sophisticated culture it is.

Curtis Fox: Godfrey Cheshire.

Godfrey Cheshire: It's almost like a Western European culture. That's fascinating for people to see, too, because the image that our media gives us is of a country that's almost medieval.

Curtis Fox: The status of women in Iran does seem medieval to Western eyes. Although restrictions are not as severe as in some other Islamic countries, women in Iran must obey a number of edicts imposed by the Islamic revolutionary government. They have to wear a veil in public, for example, and may be fined or arrested if they don't. With that kind of repression, it may come as a surprise that since the revolution, women have actually thrived in the Iranian film industry. Fereshteh Taerpour produces movies for children.

Fereshteh Taerpour: Before revolution, we had only actresses, except only a few people who were working the art, designing, or directing. Now we have nearby 10% of our directors among the women. We have many actresses, art directors, sound recorder, photographers.

Curtis Fox: Iran produces between 50 and 70 movies a year, most for internal consumption, while about 10 or 12 are serious art movies aimed at international audiences. Few of these films make it to American theaters, but moviegoers who have had a chance to see them have received an eye-opening view of the complexities of modern Iran. Richard Peña is the head of the film society at New York's Lincoln Center.

Richard Peña: Everything in my experience, and certainly from my experience of the films is that it's an enormously complex place. It's people trying to deal with the demands of religion, of modernity, of their own desires, of tradition, of so many different things that are going on at the same time. What's wonderful about Iranian films is they've found a way of dramatizing, of giving dramatic shape and weight to these everyday struggles that people have. It's a very complex society. We can't say one thing about it. People aren't just one way or all believe one thing. If you see enough Iranian films, you'll realize that, in fact, they're struggling to make sense of it all as much as we are.

Curtis Fox: For On the Media and Common Ground Productions, I'm Curtis Fox in New York.

Brian Lehrer: Coming up, is the NBC Peacock losing its feathers, and media maven, Brooke Gladstone. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

[pause 00:34:02]

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Brian Lehrer: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. Look who else is back. NPR's media maven, Brooke Gladstone. Missed you the last few weeks.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks. I missed you, too.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I hear you've got an interesting study there in your bag, to fill up your study quota of one per show.

Brooke Gladstone: That's right. I'm only allowed one per show, but this is really, really a good one. TV violence, we know from previous studies, but I won't go into those, can be harmful to you and your children's mental health. What we found out from this recent study, if the methodology holds up, is that it can also be hazardous to advertisers.

Brian Lehrer: Advertisers? How?

Brooke Gladstone: This test, which was conducted by Brad Bushman, a psychology teacher at Iowa State University, had hundreds of people viewing clips from movies. The two operative clips in this case was one from Gorillas in the Mist and one from Karate Kid 3. He found through testing their heart rate and pulse rate that they were equally exciting, which can sometimes impair memory. That got corrected out of the equation. Then he played those clips with the commercial breaks at the natural intervals where they would appear. What did he find out?

Brian Lehrer: What did he find out?

Brooke Gladstone: People couldn't remember the brand names as well if they watched the violent clips.

Brian Lehrer: Violent television shows might impair memory for the products that are being advertised? Do I sense a sudden burst of conscience coming on on the part of advertisers all over America against violent television?

Brooke Gladstone: Business execs usually take a rather skeptical view of studies like these. If this study holds up and if the results are duplicated, they may have a solid business reason for toning down the violence.

Brian Lehrer: Speaking of television, CBS is doing pretty well this year in the ratings, Number 1.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, that's right. They won the last sweeps, but I'm afraid it's a somewhat dimmed victory.

Brian Lehrer: Why is that?

Brooke Gladstone: Because its viewers are old. That is to say, they didn't win in the 18 to 49 age group, which is the one that's most coveted by advertisers. In fact, it came in last among the big four; ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, in those prized advertisers, but they did win in numbers.

Brian Lehrer: Why does it matter what age the viewers are? Old eyeballs are still eyeballs.

Brooke Gladstone: Advertisers believe that older people are set in their buying ways and are not accessible to their advertising messages. If you started using Krest when you were 19, they assume you're going to be using it forever. We have to convince them that old people can be manipulated just as easily as young one.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we want to be disrespected just like anybody else. Is that why we see sitcom after sitcom and soap opera after soap opera, where all the characters seem to be young, single people?

Brooke Gladstone: I think that is exactly why. In fact, although virtually all the networks lost viewers in gross numbers from last year, the only one that won was the WB, otherwise known as the Clearasil Network, which has viewers 12 to 18, and they're raking it in.

Brian Lehrer: In a few minutes in our next segment, we'll be hearing about viewership problems at NBC. Once again, we are discovering that old media don't necessarily understand new media.

Brooke Gladstone: That's right. Even as August an old media publication as The New York Times can be fooled, I'm talking about a story in the Sunday Week in Review, which talked about American movie titles playing in Hong Kong, with the titles translated in ways that were particularly hilariously funny. For instance, Leaving Las Vegas was rendered as I'm Drunk, and You're A Prostitute. Field of Dreams was redubbed. Imaginary Dead Baseball Players Live in my Cornfield.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Did this really happen?

Brooke Gladstone: No, it didn't. It was taken off a parody site, and then attached to a story about movie translations that was in The Wall Street Journal and circulated around the internet, and some way somehow found its way into The New York Times. You have to check anything that's on the internet. Now, I should say in the interest of full disclosure, that I fell for the story hook, line, and sinker. I was at a dinner with five other journalists who also fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Brian Lehrer: You're a very honest woman to say that on national radio, Brooke Gladstone.

Brooke Gladstone: I have to say that I have a reason for it. My sister, Stacey, a few months ago told me that a friend of hers who was in Germany saw Psycho translated as The Man Who Thought He Was His Mother. She thought, "Boy, is this a way to ruin the suspense. What's next? Instead of Citizen Kane, Rosebud is a Sled?"

Brian Lehrer: A Lovely Day in the Shower by Alfred Hitchcock. There are some virtual squatters out there, too, and they might get very rich.

Brooke Gladstone: Virtual squatters or web squatters have hit upon a brilliant new way to make a killing on the net. Take a website name, register it, and then sell it to somebody who really, really wants it. SH Moon, who is described in The Washington Post as an obscure Korean entrepreneur, was watching the negotiations between Exxon and Mobil. While they were looking the other way, or way too busy working out the details, registered exxonmobil.com and exxon-mobile.com as his website names. Now they don't have them. They either have to sue him, which takes a long time, or buy them from Mr. Moon. I think that he'll probably get paid a pretty penny for his fast reflexes.

Brian Lehrer: NPR's Brooke-Gladstone.org, thanks a lot.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you.

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Brian Lehrer: The mighty Big Three networks that once dominated American television are undergoing enormous changes in this era of internet, cable, and splinter demographics. Commentator Todd Gitlin says the NBC peacock is an endangered species.

Todd Gitlin: The buzz at NBC these days is more about early buyouts than late-night hits, so employees were not completely astounded when this memo recently hit their desks. "There will be a moratorium on the purchase of all office supplies." Crueler still, "No departmental divisional holiday parties with the exception of children related events," and, quoting again, "All employee luncheons, retirement, new job require prior approval." There probably weren't going to be too many new job luncheons anyway. No more bottled water is being ordered either.

There won't be enough personnel left to congregate around the cooler in the age of the parched peacock. NBC is the network most likely to lumber off toward oblivion first. There's a famine of hits this fall, and most network numbers in prime time are way down. NBC by 15.5% from a year ago, ABC by 6.6%, CBS by 5.2%. The no longer so Big Three account for less than half of evening viewers among them. Suddenly Seinfeld-less NBC, as the reigning champ, had the furthest to fall fast. All the networks are slavering after the young, and there aren't enough to go around.

Slavish devotion to lucrative demographics at the networks is as old as sliced bread jokes. That's what you get when you have no devotion to excellence. Not that there's so much to be nostalgic about. TV hits were few and far between, even in the network glory days, when the Big Three could score more than 90% of the homes watching TV in prime time. Even then, most network shows that went on the air did too poorly in the ratings to warrant being renewed. What made the network's cash machines was a combination of two low things. Low costs and limited choice.

Now the choice is greater, the cable audience fractures. Exit network dominance. As for costs, they ratcheted up even though licenses are free. Talk about welfare chiselers. Enter among other things, magazine shows, wet and wild, cheap and network-owned. The night The New York Times front-paged a piece about shrinking network audiences, 60 Minutes aired its Kevorkian voluntary snuff movie. As the networks gasp for air, one after another will glide down the slope towards World's Wildest Police Videos. I'm not kidding. NBC is close to a deal to order 13 episodes of a new series to be called World's Scariest Home Videos as a February backup in case NBA basketball falls through.

A deal with the producer of Fox's special, When Good Pets Go Bad. I'm still not kidding. Imagine the possibilities for the networks of the near future. America's most hilarious vehicle crashes tag team with Jesse Ventura and Hulk Hogan up against Ken Starr and Henry Hyde. This is the way the network world ends, not with a clang, but a simper.

Brian Lehrer: Todd Gitlin is Professor of Culture, Journalism, and Sociology at New York University.

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Brian Lehrer: Can internet companies regulate themselves? President Clinton wants to let them try. In a major report on internet policy released this week, the White House sticks by its contention that the corporations that are coming to control the web can also control themselves when it comes to things like privacy and consumer protection, and, read Clinton's lips, no new taxes on the web either. With us to talk about e-commerce and e-policy is Andrew Shapiro, director of the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project. A fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, and a founder of the school of online thought called techno realism. Andrew Shapiro, what are the big concerns here for average internet users? What's at stake?

Andrew Shapiro: Basically, what's at stake in this report, which we should say is really a progress report, it's a follow-up on an initiative or basically an agenda that was put forth in July of '97. This is really a follow-up. It's an opportunity for Ira Magaziner, who has been spearheading the Clinton administration's efforts on internet policy, to wrap up what he's been doing because he's leaving the government now. The relevant things, I think, for average consumers out there, and folks, are issues like privacy. The Internet Tax Freedom Act, which is a bill that was just passed by Congress that basically puts a moratorium on new or discriminatory taxes on online purchases.

Brian Lehrer: What's the Clinton administration's position on privacy?

Andrew Shapiro: The Clinton administration basically thinks that companies can provide privacy for consumers via self-regulation. One might call this the market for privacy approach. Instead of having government pass laws and develop regulations to protect privacy, the administration thinks that we can do privacy protection basically in the private sector. Now, this is a very different approach from, for example, the approach taken in Europe. The EU has just issued a directive which took effect as of October, which has very strict protections for personal information privacy online. In fact, there was a real chance that we were going to have a trade war between the United States and the EU because the United States was found to be non-compliant when it came to having the threshold standard of privacy protection that the EU wanted.

Brian Lehrer: Meaning what, for example? What are they doing in Europe?

Andrew Shapiro: In Europe, basically, if a company wants to take your information and use it, they have to really give you notice. They have to get your consent, they have to give you access to that information so that you can check to make sure it's accurate. There has to be some kind of remedy and recourse if they basically violate your privacy.

Brian Lehrer: Ira Magaziner doesn't want that for the United States because?

Andrew Shapiro: I think the concern is that it would be too costly to do. It might not be that easy to enforce, and it might be more efficient to do it through self-regulation. Now, one big caveat here, the administration has changed its tune when it comes to kids' privacy online. There was a bill that was passed by the Congress right before the election recess with the support of the administration, which is called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. It says that websites, commercial websites, cannot collect information from children, I think it's under the age of 12, without the consent of their parents.

Now, clearly, there are some difficult things here because, how are you going to know how old a kid is? Furthermore, how are you going to know when you've really gotten consent from a parent? Because online it's like the old joke, no one knows you're a dog, no one knows whether you're the kid or the parent. There are some things to work out there. What we should notice there is that the administration is changing its tune a little bit, tinkering in places, moving off of the so-called hands-off, no-government-involvement approach, which I think is probably a good thing.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious, will the US and Europe, and the rest of the world for that matter, have to adopt a universal system at some point, given the international nature of the web?

Andrew Shapiro: This is actually a very insightful question because indeed what's happening is that folks who I meet in the internet policy arena are increasingly realizing that everything they do, whether it has to do with privacy or content control, questions of indecency, the domain name system, all of these things are global in nature. Even things like copyright that have been traditionally questions of federal or state law, intellectual property law, increasingly have to be seen in a global context. More and more you're getting involvement from international organizations like the World Trade Organizations, the European Union on a regional level, and other international bodies.

Brian Lehrer: Where do taxes come in?

Andrew Shapiro: The tax question is, I guess, particularly relevant during the holiday season. We're all looking where we're going to buy certain gifts and things, and people have started to notice that you can buy books and other things online and not pay taxes. Now, this is something that internet boosters and aficionados like because why should the internet commerce be taxed?

Brian Lehrer: Retail store owners must hate.

Andrew Shapiro: Not only do retail stores hate it, but frankly, local and municipal and state governments are very concerned because they see, the National Governors Association, for example, a situation where in a decade from now, much of our commerce will move online, and they may have a real shortfall in terms of the funds they need for education, infrastructure, health care, basic public goods.

Brian Lehrer: This is like the federal government repealing state sales taxes?

Andrew Shapiro: This is the federal government saying, and here's one of these areas where you really need to distinguish the rhetoric of the bill from the reality, it's President Clinton saying, no taxes on the internet. The truth of the matter is, what it says is no new taxes that would be discriminatory. If a state applies taxes to a regular purchase, they can try to apply it to the internet, but frankly, in practice, they're not going to be able to.

Brian Lehrer: No matter what browser we use, I think we're all becoming internet explorers as the 21st century dawns. Andrew Shapiro, thanks a lot.

Andrew Shapiro: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, what is your ER? We live in a world of celebrity. It permeates the media and drives the media. The aristocracy of our time are celebrities, but like any aristocracy, it's important to be able to make fine distinctions between levels of fame, to put people in their proper place in the pantheon of the well-known. A very concerned citizen of cyberspace decided to measure everyone's fame numerically using a special benchmark, a common reference point. If you think about it, it's obvious that the common point of reference for fame, the icon of icons, is Elvis the King.

Elvis has found a new place to dwell on the web. The measure of your celebrity is an Elvis rating, or ER, which is based on the Elvis Index. Here's what you do. Simply count the number of web pages that Elvis appears on. Call that number 100, and then count how many pages someone else appears on. Then compare. For example, On the Media chose a few people on the news this week. Tom Hanks, who made a splash bashing Clinton, has an Elvis rating of a little over 4%. That's just below Janet Reno with a 4.83% Elvis, after deciding not to have an independent counsel investigate Vice President Gore's campaign practices.

Exxon with an 8.92% Elvis, just merged with mobile, which has double its former competitor's ER, a 19.7 Elvis Index. No word yet on the Mobil Exxon ER. Oh, and just to put Elvis in perspective, God has an Elvis Index of 280,010, but Microsoft has an almost 4,000 Elvis. Two of our guests this week did make a showing on the Elvis Index. Gloria Steinem has a 0.97% Elvis. Ira Glass, one of the more famous people in public radio, has scored only a 0.69% Elvis, so we decided to give him a little more exposure.

Ira Glass: That's it for this week's On the Media. Apparently, they're running short on time, so they've asked me to read the credits. The senior producer of On the Media is Judith Hepburn Blank. The producer is JJ Sutherland. Assistant producers Signy Peck and Mike Pesca. Technical director George Edwards. Executive producer, Dean Capello.

Brian Lehrer: I'm Brian Lehrer.

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[MUSIC- Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel]

Female Speaker: Funding for On the Media is provided by the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Deer Creek Foundation, and the Edith and Henry Everett Foundation. Funding is also provided by the listeners of WNYC. On the Media is a production of WNYC New York Public Radio. This is NPR, National Public Radio.

 

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