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Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. Did the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan come as a surprise to you? If so, maybe someone wasn't paying attention, and maybe that someone is the press. We'll look at nuclear complacency in the post-Cold War world this hour. Also, we all know that there is hate speech on the Internet.

Elizabeth Coleman: It's glitzy hate. It's fabulous graphics. It's graphics that kids can relate to.

Brian Lehrer: Did you know that there is also some of the country's most constructive racial dialogue?

Jesse Kornbluth: What you really want is a kind of cultural exchange program that takes place first in cyberspace and then, please God, in real life.

Brian Lehrer: We'll look at the Internet in black and white. Plus, is local TV health reporting hazardous to your mind and coping with your online habit? One click at a time. That's all right after this news, so stay tuned.

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The end of the Cold War lulled most of us into a belief that there was no more real threat from nuclear weapons. Then, as if from nowhere, came India's detonation of five nuclear bombs. Those tests, of course, were followed by Pakistan's nuclear tests, and a nuclear arms race is threatening world peace. Again, I'm Brian Lehrer, and this is On the Media.

Of course, nuclear weapons and the threat of their use did not simply disappear in the years since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the media seemed to follow the path of least resistance. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. After all, what's there to report on? No nukes is no news, right? Well, one critic says the press is now playing a game of catch up, trying to understand and explain the new nuclear threat. He's Rob Leavitt, associate director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media, and he joins me from Boston. Rob Leavitt, what do you mean by playing catch up?

Rob Leavitt: Well, there are two huge problems here, Brian. One is the nuclear issue and one is simply South Asia, and both have been largely ignored since the end of the Cold War.

Brian Lehrer: If you're saying that the media could have known what was about to happen, how is that possible? The CIA apparently didn't even know.

Rob Leavitt: Most of the experts, again, both the nuclear proliferation and the South Asian people have been talking about this for years. India and Pakistan certainly have had nuclear capability for a couple of decades, and over the last year or so, there have been more and more warning signs that they were moving towards testing and real weapons capability.

Brian Lehrer: What kinds of stories could have been done that would have indicated that?

Rob Leavitt: There should have been more coverage of the politics, the political debates in both countries. Certainly, the BJP, the party that's now in power in India, has made no secret of its intention to go nuclear in this way. Any specialist on the region will be able to tell you that once India did that, there was no way that Pakistan was not going to follow suit.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, you've said in a critical way, that press coverage of nuclear weapons tends to be political.

Rob Leavitt: Well, it's political in a Washington way, and like so many stories about international issues, the press very quickly gets more comfortable talking about the squabbling and the infighting in Washington and turning away from some of the policy questions and more substantive questions, in this case in South Asia.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think the media explain international laws and regulations well?

Rob Leavitt: What's happened right now is that they are playing catch up. The bigger newspapers and the networks are throwing a lot of resources at this story, and they're doing a half decent job of trying to cover the bases, but there's just no context, and that's really the problem, and so for the viewers and the listeners and the readers to all of a sudden be faced with this as if out of nowhere. It's very hard to understand. There's almost no news organization that has anybody paying attention to nuclear weapons questions in a serious way. There's a couple of exceptions, and these stories are just too important for that kind of avoidance.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that earlier massive media coverage in the United States could have affected the outcome? Even the US Government seems rather powerless.

Rob Leavitt: I don't, really. What better media coverage could have done is help all of us understand and prepare for these events, and so we'd have a much better sense of what some of the alternatives are now. In fact, I think a lot of the coverage presents a picture that suggests that the US has more influence than it really does. I don't think the media could have stopped this, although were there more coverage, perhaps there would have been more attention paid in Washington, and perhaps there could have been a better dialogue between the various capitals here.

Brian Lehrer: You said an interesting thing there about the media overstating the influence of Washington generally, is that because being in the United States, it's kind of Washington-centric. Do you think that was at play in the coverage of India and Pakistan?

Rob Leavitt: Absolutely. We often act as if the only question in a crisis like this is what do we in the United States think is right and what do we think should happen? Well, the reality is that India has its own interests and its own concerns, and as does Pakistan, and there's not a huge amount of influence that can be brought to bear from Washington right now. I think the media tends to follow the flag here, and so politicians in Washington argue about what kind of sanctions or punishments to throw on, as if that will solve the problem, and the press often follows suit.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to see covered now that the nuclear tests are presumably over? There aren't going to be any more explosions to cover, we hope.

Rob Leavitt: Well, I'm not sure about that. I think it's quite likely, in fact, that we will have more "surprises." There may be missile tests any day now, and there will probably be some skirmishes between India and Pakistan.

Brian Lehrer: You don't mean nuclear skirmishes?

Rob Leavitt: No, no, no, I don't think so. I'm somewhat optimistic, actually, that the two countries are far too intelligent and rational to actually go to that. I think there are a couple of things that the press needs to be focusing on now. One is to get deeper inside of India and Pakistan, and also the neighbors, China, first and foremost, to try and better understand what the political dynamics are and what the military situations are. Two, is we need to look more seriously at some of the other nuclear proliferation concerns around the world. In the Middle East, in Korea, I don't think that the door is now wide open, as some people have commented. This is a particular situation in South Asia, and yet there are other areas of concern that we do need to pay a lot more attention to.

Brian Lehrer: Rob Leavitt, associate director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media, thanks very much for being with us.

Rob Leavitt: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Well, animosity is hardly confined to distant countries. As NPR's Brooke Gladstone reports, there's a study that finds hate groups have sprung up in your home or office through the Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: According to that report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, the number of Internet hate sites has grown from 1 to 163 in less than three years. Their presence is public knowledge now, as shown by a recent episode on the Fox cartoon show King of the Hill. Young Bobby is looking for jokes for a comedy routine, so he logs onto the net.

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Joseph: We can enter in keywords and then find material for your act.

Bobby: This is a great idea. What words should we use?

Joseph: "White", "roots", "funny."

Bobby: Wow.

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Brooke Gladstone: Up comes the White Nationalist Brotherhood homepage and humor ensues. Of course, it's not quite so funny in real life.

David Duke: This is the David Duke International Internet Radio broadcast. Liberals often tell us of the great benefits of America becoming a truly multiracial society, but they don't tell us the cost. It is true that since this very inception, America has had other races present, but at that time, there was no mistaking that America was a white man's country.

Brooke Gladstone: David Duke operates one of many racist sites, some of which are alive with color, music and hatred.

Elizabeth Coleman: When you have hate on the Internet, it's not hate in a brown paperback.

Brooke Gladstone: Elizabeth Coleman is the Director of Civil Rights for the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that monitors hate.

Elizabeth Coleman: It's glitzy hate. It's fabulous graphics. It's graphics that kids can relate to. It is a terrific tool to recruit people into a culture of hate.

Brooke Gladstone: Teenagers may be especially vulnerable, and so are other alienated souls who pass their private hours in the glow of cathode ray tubes. Mark Potok edited the report on hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Mark Potok: Very typically in this movement you see kind of lone haters, locked up in their houses, kind of shaking their fist at the sky. The net has allowed a real community to form. People feel that they are not isolated haters. They feel that they're part of a heroic movement dedicated to the Second American Revolution.

Brooke Gladstone: Though hate speech may be in the broadest sense obscene, there are no laws against it. Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana hopes to shield children from Internet porn through a legal standard called harmful to minors that he believes would not violate the First Amendment, but his legislative assistant, David Crane, says regulating hate speech would be a much trickier business.

David Crane: There are laws on the books and have been laws on the books since the 1800s that regulated sexual content and its accessibility to adults, in some cases in minors and others, but as it relates to hate speech, there is no precedent. The difficulty becomes in this category deciding what is harmful to a minor in terms of their development and what isn't.

Representative Rick White: I just think Congress has the sense to recognize that since we can't solve this problem, no matter what we do, maybe we're better letting other solutions arise.

Brooke Gladstone: Representative Rick White, a Republican congressman from Washington State, is a founder of the House Internet Caucus. He says that the Internet has made real what was once only constitutional conjecture, free speech for everyone, a printing press in every home.

Representative Rick White: It really creates, for the first time, exactly the marketplace that the Founders of our Constitution were talking about, and it kind of puts us to the test of deciding, is that what we really wanted or not?

Brooke Gladstone: Once again, technology is called upon to solve the problems it created. Most web filter packages that try to block pornography try to block hate, too, but hate is more insidious and less obvious than sex.

Ali Solomon: When we were designing patterns for what to block with the SurfWatch filters for the hate speech and violence category, we did sit down and rack our brains and said, what is really a word that is considered hate speech? Nigger was the first one that topped the list, so that's actually a search that SurfWatch blocks altogether.

Brooke Gladstone: Ali Solomon is the content manager for the web filter called SurfWatch. SurfWatch uses word pattern matching and human beings as monitors. Some phrases are blocked automatically. The Anti-Defamation League teamed up with another filter package, CyberPatrol, to create the first customized filter. It's monitored entirely by people, and it blocks access to specific Internet addresses. When the ADL blocker is activated and a child hits a hate site--

Elizabeth Coleman: An ADL hate patrol logo will flash on the screen, and they will be blocked from that site. They will then have the opportunity to be redirected to a number of educational sites where they can learn about different forms of hate speech.

Brooke Gladstone: Context is everything, says ADL's Elizabeth Coleman. Even the most offensive words may have legitimate uses. A person must judge.

Elizabeth Coleman: We are experts at finding hate speech, whether it's hidden or not.

Brooke Gladstone: Sites that direct hated Asians or Latinos, as well as Blacks, and what about hate directed at Arabs? There's just so much of it.

Elizabeth Coleman: There's so much hate. It has always been, for 85 years, the belief of the Anti-Defamation League, that if one group is hated by a group, probably all other groups are, too.

Brooke Gladstone: Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn't think web filters can do the job.

Mark Potok: No, I really don't. I don't think that a real technical answer is going to be found. There are always going to be ways to get around those filters. There are ways of forwarding people from site to site so that they avoid the filters, certainly avoiding the use of certain keywords that could get people around these filters. I think clearly the technology is moving too quickly for anyone to keep up with.

Brooke Gladstone: Politicians and public interest groups across the spectrum agree that no technological solution is foolproof. Children need their parents protection, and yet, says Potok, hate can be as hard a subject to tackle as sex ever was.

Mark Potok: You really need to be able to communicate to your children what democracy is about and what tolerance is about, what diversity really means. I don't disagree that these are hard issues to make understood, especially to one's younger children, but I think the effort clearly has to be made. The price is just too high otherwise.

Brooke Gladstone: Because of the Internet, the impact is global. Hate speech flows like free speech across borders, heedless of local laws. It's a byproduct of democracy, a price that America has always said it was willing to pay.

Brian Lehrer: NPR media correspondent, Brooke Gladstone. That piece originally aired on NPR's Morning Edition.

Now here's the good news. Hate sites aren't the only places to talk about race on the Internet. In fact, some of the most constructive racial dialogue in America may also be taking place online. More on that when we come back. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

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We're back with On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. President Clinton, by most accounts, is trying to do something very positive with his town hall meetings on race, but the results so far have been stilted and contrived. Maybe the President needs to take his ideas online. Some of the most open and constructive racial dialogues in America are said to be taking place on the Internet now. Are they?

Joining me now are Stacy Horn, founder of Echo, the virtual salon of New York City. She also has a book about her site called Cyberville: Clicks, Culture and the Creation of an Online Town. McLean Greaves, CEO and Executive Producer of Café Los Negros, which bills itself as New York's Black and Latino virtual hangout, and Jesse Kornbluth, editorial director of America Online. Welcome to all of you.

McLean Greaves, I was checking out your website this week, and I saw your posting that was meant to entice people into the chat rooms. It said, overheard in the cafe this week, "I've been called racist and sexist because I'm a Republican, and because I'm white, but what you don't know is this, my best man was Black in 1968. Racism is not the problem, friends. Crime and paranoia are the real problems. There's racists all over the world. Let them be idiots. You be your own man or woman." I thought, wow, that'll really get a conversation started. Did it?

McLean Greaves: It got a little bit of a conversation going, but I mean, I thought that quote was exactly what the Internet's all about because life has gotten so complicated now that it's not simply an issue of just Black and white anymore. There's a lot of pluralism online, and we try to capture that with our website by having those kind of posts online, letting people know that our site is not only frequented by African Americans and Latinos, but also white people and all types of people who want to tap into the intelligentsia, the Black intelligentsia.

Brian Lehrer: Can you follow that thread for us a little bit? You got me curious. Where did it go?

McLean Greaves: There was a response by some of the people online. We do have a certain segment of people who are sort of militant, but for the most part, most of the people on our site are like educated African American, Latino people, so people thought that it was kind of interesting. There were a couple people who thought that it was a little bit of a liberal intrusion on our site, because at times, we do get a lot of people who come on our site who are sort of conveying a sense of white liberal guilt, which doesn't bother me, because we make money and revenue off our website being Black. If it was just a regular website without any sort of niche content angle, it'd be a lot harder to get media attention and a lot harder to draw traffic, so we have no qualms.

Brian Lehrer: That didn't look to me like white liberal guilt. It looked like Republican in your face. Racism is not the problem, but did a frank dialogue get going between him and some other people? Did it go anywhere?

McLean Greaves: There were people who actually posted comments in some of our chat salons regarding that, but because of the fact that that quote is sort of like indicative of what we have every day on our site, it didn't exactly create a huge bunch of hype. Right now, the main bulk of the dialogue involving racial issues right now is that there's a person on our site, this white girl from New York City, who is confessing to everyone online that she dates mainly Black men, which usually creates a big uproar among the Black community, particularly among Black women, because of some of the demographic problems that we have in our community. That's what the Internet is all about. It's about people being honest.

Brian Lehrer: Do you even know for sure if she is white?

McLean Greaves: [laughs] Exactly. We don't know for sure. We're not even sure if she's not an animal. She might be a very intelligent chimpanzee. I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Stacy Horn, I'll take the bait from the subtitle of your book, is there really such a thing as an online town?

Stacy Horn: [chuckles] Yes, Echo is an online town, and most virtual communities evolve into something very similar to what we call towns. People are people. They don't change when they get online, and neither do the relationships they have with each other.

Brian Lehrer: Is your town integrated?

Stacy Horn: No. Echo is mostly smart white people with a lot of time on their hands.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, as I was looking at the list of people who are in Echo, I saw some names of African American writers who I recognize. Rosemary Bray?

Stacy Horn: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Brian Lehrer: And some others.

Stacy Horn: We're not all white, just mostly white.

Brian Lehrer: Have you had any good racial dialogues at Echo lately?

Stacy Horn: Well, I was just sitting here and thinking frank and constructive arguments about race. If they're happening online, I'd like to know where, because they're not happening on Echo or anywhere else I've been. It's not that we're not discussing race, but it's mostly preaching to the choir, people who view themselves as not being racist. Some interesting experiences I've had.

I teach a class at NYU called virtual culture, and every semester, I ask my students to try to contact a hate group online, and so far, in three semesters, no one's been successful. It seems that hate groups are very much excited about being able to put information online, but they're not interested in engaging in a dialogue. I think what's happening in cyberspace is hate groups are talking to other hate groups, and people who don't are talking to each other, but the two groups are not mingling.

Brian Lehrer: The theory of some of the things that I've read, at least, is that it's sites other than the hate group sites where some of the constructive racial dialogue is taken. Jesse Kornbluth from America Online, do you see that?

Jesse Kornbluth: Oh, enormously. Usually, in February, we do Black History Month, and this year we felt, been there, done that, and we started this race relations conversation, and it was enormously positive. AOL, like Echo, and almost every place else in cyberspace is largely white, but this is a conversation that isn't really taking place elsewhere in our culture, and there was an immense hunger for it. A lot of passion and a lot of really good stuff, and a very, very small amount of the idiotic stuff that you hate to see but expect to see.

Stacy Horn: That's my point. Who's talking to David Duke?

McLean Greaves: Although if you go to the news groups, it's a little different because there are some hate news groups where there is a dialogue going on between different hate groups. It's pretty easy to find those people and actually get their phone numbers and contact them if you want to join a group.

Stacy Horn: Absolutely. It's not really a discussion. Clay Shirky did an interesting piece on Word Magazine where he spent a year trying to have a discussion with people in news groups, and he didn't get anywhere.

Jesse Kornbluth: It's not my impression that people who are going to blow up abortion clinics or the Southern Poverty Law Center have modems and like to really communicate with people of different opinions. I think we need to start closer to ground zero, which is the fact that this is a very balkanized culture, and that we all work incredibly hard and have very little time to have the conversations that we used to have in college and thought were so important. We don't really have communities outside of our work communities. This is a real chance to meet anybody on any topic is a real luxury at this point, that people are taking that valuable time and giving it to race. It's really very impressive.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like it's not really taking place at Café Los Negros. It sounds like it's not really taking place on Echo.

Stacy Horn: No.

Brian Lehrer: Can you follow one of the threads for us that you found so exciting on AOL, Jesse?

Jesse Kornbluth: Yes, absolutely. There were people who really were delving through the issue of what is racism, and trying to get past that to very, very personal things. I'm sure, as both of my fellow guests have seen, once these threads start happening, we lose track of the conversation. People have email addresses. They start to know one another. It's not at all different from the chat rooms in which strangers meet strangers and suddenly divorce their husbands of 20 years and go off and be together.

Brian Lehrer: What happened? Can you give me an example of where somebody got a new insight into people of a different race?

Stacy Horn: I can give you an example, and I think it's an example, a more realistic example of the kind of change that goes on, because I think real change is subtle and slow, and it actually involved Rosemary Bray. Just before she gave birth to her first son, and she expressed to me online disappointment that she was giving birth to a boy. I was kind of horrified that she said that, and she said, "Why?" I said, "Why are you so upset about giving birth to a boy?" She said, "Because of the way society treats Black men in these days. He's going to start out with everyone against him and none on his side." I went, "That's not true. That's not true, because I'm going by my experiences."

She said, "I want you to spend the next few days looking into the eyes of Black teenage boys," and so I did. One of the first things I realized is that I never looked into the eyes of Black teenage boys. When I'm on the subway and a group of kids, Black boys, in that age group, gets onto the subway, the first thing I do is look down. I started looking into their eyes, and I realized for the first time in my life that they were just kids. Here I am, this person who thinks of herself as so enlightened and educated changed my life.

Brian Lehrer: But you can't look into anybody's eyes online.

Jesse Kornbluth: Much better, and that's an enormous advantage. The fact is the absence of corporeality is the big strength of this conversation in cyberspace. You're looking into the window of someone's soul, and that's far more intimate and far more powerful. You are losing nothing by being in another room far away.

McLean Greaves: You're also looking into their IP address as well, too, so I mentioned that.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take a break and continue in just a minute to talk about racial dialogue online. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

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We're back with On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. Coming up later this hour, is TV health reporting hazardous to your brain? Right now we're looking at racial dialogue online with Stacey Horn, founder of Echo, the virtual salon of New York City, McLean Greaves, CEO and Executive Producer of Café Los Negros, and Jesse Kornbluth, editorial director of America Online. Earlier in the show, McLean, we heard Brooke Gladstone's piece about hate on the Internet. What's your policy with respect to overtly racist messages?

McLean Greaves: If we have a really blatantly racist message on our website, chances are that we will remove it. If it's something that's not extremely hardcore, if it's not involving a lot of coarse language or some extremely offensive material, then we'll leave it there because we do believe in free speech. At the same time, we're not going to encourage someone to pass a message of hate message to our constituents on our site. That said, we do actually feature a lot of hateful websites as our stank websites. Every week we show a website that we regard as a lousy website. We show a lot of the racial websites as well.

You mentioned earlier that there's not a lot of dialogue on race on the Internet, but there actually is a lot if you actually dig deeper. One of the sites that I discovered when featuring one of these stank sites was a site called the race gallery, which is, I think, done out of the UK. It's basically a bunch of racial scientists who go around and exchange information with each other, and they're basically trying to prove that Black people are less intelligent than white people, and white people are less intelligent than Chinese people, that sort of thing. There is a lot of discussion going on. You just have to sort of dig deep for some of it. Some of the sites are blatant, hateful websites, some of the Klan sites, for example, which don't really have a lot of online dialogue, but behind the scenes, a lot of these guys are doing things like publishing magazines for distribution, as well as records and other things, using the Internet as sort of like a front end for ordering this stuff, so there is a dialogue.

Brian Lehrer: You're telling me that even a site that begins by generating hateful messages can lead to constructive dialogue.

McLean Greaves: I think that any opportunity to get into the mindset of a warped racist is actually a good thing because in order to solve the problem, we need to find out where it's coming from in the first place. If we have someone on our site who's coming in there who's being racist, my first instinct is not to trash the person or to kill their IP address or anything. We want to find out exactly what the mindset is. I believe that the Internet is really about accessing all the superficial stuff and getting to the thought part of it, and that's one of the things you can do in cyberspace that you can't do in television.

Brian Lehrer: Jesse Kornbluth, what's your policy with respect to racist messages at AOL?

Jesse Kornbluth: Well, we have a very well-defined terms of service which makes it clear that certain things need to be removed, but in this particular case, we were as free as we could be because this is an adult conversation and should be. The other thing about it is it's really therapy. You talk about online as being anonymous, and people can hide behind screen names. It's very much like the Twelve-Step Movement. In any therapeutic situation that's like that, people have anonymity, I'm Bill W. and I'm an alcoholic, and racism is a disease, and race is the crisis of our society and has been since forever. If you view it that way, it gives you the freedom to allow people to really express themselves and to really get it out, and so what happens is at the end of a conversational thread on our message boards, you see people saying, often you'll hear and see this, "No, you're not racist. You're just wrong." That is a slam dunk for us and for them. It's just terrific when that happens.

Brian Lehrer: Stacy Horn, what about at Echo?

Stacy Horn: Well, first, Echo isn't anonymous. Everyone goes by their real name, and we don't have censorship on Echo. Probably the biggest problem we had along these lines is that recently we had a Nazi on Echo, and he had been on Echo for a few years before this even came out. One day in politics, he made some comment about Jews, and someone said, "I don't think you meant to say it just like that." They thought he just misspoke. He said, "No, that's exactly what I meant," and it came out he was a neo-Nazi.

The host of that conference where that conversation had taken place had wanted to remove it, and I said, "No, but what we can do is start a separate thread," so for people who don't want to read this, they don't have to, but of course, it was the most interesting thread of all at the time. He went on and on for a while about Jewish sickness and all this, and then finally one of our users said, "I want this guy off the board. It isn't just enough to tell him to be quiet. I want him gone. This is my small town, and I don't want an anti-Semite in it." We argued for about a year about what to do.

What I eventually decided to do was similar to another rule we have on Echo. We have a rule, no personal attacks. You are allowed to attack what someone says but not the person. I can say something that you've said is particularly idiotic, but I can't call you an idiot. I said, we're going to apply that same rule to you. You're allowed to attack specific things about Jews, but you can't just say Jews suck. You have to say what you mean by that, and give points that back up what you're saying. Of course, this effectively shut him up because he couldn't be specific about what it was about Jews he disliked.

Brian Lehrer: That in itself is much more restrictive than at a lot of other places online, right? Your policy.

Stacy Horn: I don't think so. It's one thing to say, for instance, to someone, you suck. It takes a lot more thought to say what you mean by that, but you can still make that same point.

Jesse Kornbluth: I do think we're talking somewhat to the wrong emphasis. It seems to me that people are not looking to express hate. What I see on our boards is people are looking to know and ultimately to love one another, and they're really trying to cut the distance. I think it's much better to frame this in terms of the positive that can be achieved--

Brian Lehrer: Can you give me an example?

Jesse Kornbluth: --and what happens than to talk about hate groups which are by nature extremist.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give me an example of someone who came looking to love and understand?

Jesse Kornbluth: Well, you see, post after post, which sounds like Rodney King, why can't we get along? Once you get a sufficient number of those posts, you've got a little community of people who are looking for a solution rather than carping about a problem. Although there's nothing that you can quite put your finger on and say something comes out of it, you just never know when you start these conversations where it'll end.

McLean Greaves: The one thing I'll say interesting about AOL is that when I was doing some research on some racist newsgroups online, I noticed that there were a number of people who actually would meet in chat rooms to continue their dialogue in real time. There is some dialogue going on in AOL that's sort of behind the scenes on the down low.

Stacy Horn: If you want to put a positive spin on it, this is how communities are formed through struggle and conflict. When that Nazi came online, and we argued and agonized over what to do about it, there was the bond that was formed at the end of that struggle, not for our Nazi, but for the rest of us.

Brian Lehrer: David Halberstam was quoted skeptically in a New York Times article about racial dialogue online, asking, "If you are speaking constantly, anonymously, are you really speaking?"

McLean Greaves: See, the problem with that quote is that it completely discounts the millions of people out there who post online every day, and I think that a lot of people are speaking honestly because of the fact that they have a certain level of anonymity, so I don't think it's fair to discount those people simply because of the fact that there's no face attached to the quote. I think that if anything, that the quote's probably a little bit more accurate than, say, if they were speaking publicly, like how we are right now.

Jesse Kornbluth: Look at who said it. David Halberstam is a wonderful writer, but he writes sentences of 3 to 500 words. The last thing he's interested in is somebody interrupting with another opinion.

Stacy Horn: People can't help being themselves. Over time, they cannot help being themselves.

Brian Lehrer: I'll let you fantasize a little bit before our time is over. What kinds of racial dialogues would you each like to see take place on the net that aren't taking place now, McLean?

McLean Greaves: I would love to be able to see an environment where a young Black kid from the inner city or a young Latino kid can go into a room full of white middle class online participants and be able to convey exactly how they feel and find out exactly why people don't look them in the eye and things like that, because that's really what we need more of. Conversely, at the same time, the white middle class are not going to come down to the inner city where we're located, do or die Bed-Stuy, but online, I love to see people from the suburbs come down to our inner city crowd and actually find out what's really going on as opposed to relying on television. That's really, to me is [crosstalk]

Jesse Kornbluth: Exactly. Like those two kids in Chicago who did that series for NPR a few years ago, that then became the book Our America. What you really want is a kind of cultural exchange program that takes place first in cyberspace and then, please God, in real life.

Brian Lehrer: Stacy Horn?

Stacy Horn: Well, what they said, and also I actually would like to talk to David Duke and the like. McLean already said it, the anonymity and the distance that cyberspace allow us a perfect opportunity to safely try to get inside the minds of the people that you hate, fear, don't understand.

Jesse Kornbluth: Maybe we should ask David Duke to be a guest on AOL Live, and we'll book them and see what happens.

Brian Lehrer: Are you ready for that, Jesse?

Jesse Kornbluth: I'm ready. Is he?

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Can we all get along? Can we all get online? I thank Stacy Horn, founder of Echo, the virtual salon of New York City, and the author of Cyberville: Clicks, Culture and the Creation of an Online Town, McLean Greaves, CEO and Executive Producer of Café Los Negros, and Jesse Kornbluth, editorial director of America Online. Thanks to all of you.

McLean Greaves: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Honest expression of racial viewpoints may be welcome at these new websites, but the State of California has taken a hard line with a young artist who is expressing himself through rap music. Writer and reviewer Kevin Powell has been asking himself why.

Kevin Powell: Once again, a rap artist is under the microscope for his lyrics. Add the name of 26-year-old Shawn Thomas to the list, 2 Live Crew, Ice-T, Sister Souljah, and the late Tupac Shakur. Known as C-Bo, Thomas, a rapper and gang member from Sacramento was banned as a condition of his parole from Soledad prison from promoting gang lifestyle or anti-law enforcement sentiments. Then law enforcement officials got wind of C-Bo's new album, Til My Casket Drops, with its lyrics, "So when they try to pull you over, shoot him in his face, y'all," an obvious reference to local police. Those lyrics were enough to convince officials to arrest C-Bo for violating his parole.

Although California prison officials dropped the most serious violation charge against C-Bo, he will remain behind bars until next Wednesday for lesser parole violations. The questions linger, were C-Bo's First Amendment rights violated? Did AWOL Records have the best interests of their artists in mind when they release the C-Bo album? Why do the media continue to use controversial rappers as poster children for free speech while blaming them for all that is wrong and decadent in American society?

Several things trouble me here. C-Bo does have the right to rap about his environment, to tell stories familiar to him in the same way blues singers, rock stars, and American poets did before him, but C-Bo and his label should have thought long and hard about the consequences of releasing certain songs so close to his release from prison. These are reactionary times in America, and C-Bo has simply become the latest in a string of artists who have gone against conventional thinking.

Finally, we in the media have an obligation to weigh in on the C-Bos of the world, not after they've been arrested, not when their lyrics disturb or frighten us, but when those same ideas and images are being developed in America's inner cities. There is a context for every story told, and in C-Bo's case, it is one of poverty, unemployment, drugs, police brutality. C-Bo, other rappers and social commentators who've come before and who will come after will continue to speak their minds until the conditions in their communities improve. Record labels will continue to make money off this misery and rage until there's no longer money to be had. People, like C-Bo, remain sadly a pawn in the big game.

Brian Lehrer: Kevin Powell is author of Keepin' It Real: Post-MTV Reflections on Race, Sex, and Politics. His work has appeared in Vibe Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times.

On a previous program, we heard from a journalist who said that crime stories should be reported more like health stories on the local TV news, but, uh oh, a new report says health reporting isn't that great either. Is local health reporting hazardous to your well being? We'll ask Ed Fooey, executive director of a think tank called the State's Policy News Project, and Rhonda Mann, the medical news producer at WCVB-TV in Boston. Thanks for being with us. Ed Fooey, what newscasts did they look at, and what did they find?

Ed Fooey: Well, the researchers looked at hundreds of newscasts and a total of 17,000 news stories over a three-month period in 1996. They found, as other researchers have in the past, that about 20% of all of the news stories that appear on local television have to do with crime, mostly violent crime.

Brian Lehrer: What kind of health reporting?

Ed Fooey: Well, health reporting tended to be, first of all, it was a much lower percentage, about 7%, but it tended to have to do with diseases and nostrums and various things, leaving out of the equation the debate that's been going on in this country about how our health care system is administered.

Brian Lehrer: Rhonda Mann, does that sound true for your station?

Rhonda Mann: Yes, I would say that it does, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing at the local level. What this report did is compared local news operations with national ones. I think in terms of local TV, what local TV can do well in terms of health reporting is look at what the news of the day is and give viewers a real sense of what is new in health, what are some of the new drugs that are approved, what are the new surgeries or techniques, and leave the viewer coming away with a sense of, I've learned something from this broadcast, that is, again, very locally based.

Brian Lehrer: How was network news found to be different in this study?

Rhonda Mann: Network news and local news actually covered the same types of stories, although network news, I believe, covered quite a bit more health and less crime. Again, I don't think that's that surprising because locally, certainly if a crime happens in Baltimore, and you're in Boston, you're really not going to care as much as if it happens in your own backyard. That's why I think you see more crime news on the local level, and that leaves less time for things like health news.

Brian Lehrer: Is that so bad, Ed Fooey, if most local health news is consumer news, people want to know how to take care of themselves.

Ed Fooey: Well, first of all, you have to understand that Rhonda works for one of the best local television stations in the country, and it is located in a center of medical research and medical thinkers. I think her experience is hardly typical of the kinds of local television news that we see around the country. This survey, as a matter of fact, did not touch on Boston. It looked at 13 of the top 23 cities in the country, but Boston was not one of them.

I think where I would take issue would be that the fact of the debate over how our medical care system is going to work has been pretty much left out. Part of that is because of the fact that there's not much time devoted on local news broadcast to this kind of reporting. It's pretty simple to cover crime. Crime is an easy story to cover, and that's why I think we see so much of it. On the contrary, health care policy requires a specialist, and there aren't very many specialists who have the credentials that Ms. Mann has.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we always hear these studies that find deficiencies in local TV news. Here's another one, but is there anything to do besides lament?

Ed Fooey: I think lamenting in public is part of the debate that ought to be engaged. If the news is going to have the protection of the constitution, then it needs to have the public approving it, because the public, after all, can or cannot withhold its approval of the constitutional protections that the news has. I think it's a very healthy thing in our democracy for us to debate about these things. The fact that the media is so pervasive that people spend, what is it, six or seven hours a day in the average household with the television set on means that this is a very, very powerful force in our society, and it's something that we ought to debate about.

Brian Lehrer: Rhonda Mann, I'm curious. Do you want to do different kinds of health coverage than you actually do at WCVB? More policy stories, for example, which Ed says are so missing. Are you roped in by the competitive pressures you're under at a local TV station?

Rhonda Mann: Yes. Well, it's not just the competitive pressures. We are fortunate at CVB because we do actually do policy-type reporting, although it's usually not covered within the health reporting unit. It's a special unit because of the amount of resources it takes and the amount of time, as Ed had said. It's not an easy thing to turn around in a day. Yes, we would like to do more of that, but the bottom line is that it's hard to do. It takes a lot of time. It's not overly visual all the time. For a local TV station, they have the resources to go to Washington or to go to wherever the major policymakers and deciders are to do a story well like that, it's very difficult.

Brian Lehrer: Ed Fooey, Rhonda Mann, thank you very much for being with us.

Ed Fooey: Nice to be with you, Brian.

Rhonda Mann: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Coming up next, a new health hazard in America, being addicted to the Internet. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

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We're back with On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer.

Monica Brady: How much time do you spend online per week?

Internet user 1: Too much. Probably about 2 or 3 hours a day, but I don't have a TV.

Internet user 2: When I first figured out what the online world was, I had been laid off from one job, and I was still job hunting. I used the Internet a lot. I would find myself on 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day without realizing it.

Internet user 3: I just use it for the chat rooms mostly, just like talking. That's the only thing I use it for, and looking at my email. Right now, I am in a chat room devoted solely to wrestling. I like wrestling, and then just general topics.

Internet user 4: I've limited a lot actually. I actually had a job where I could be wired my entire time at work, and then I would go home and log in. Now I've really cut back, maybe about two hours a day.

Monica Brady: Has anybody ever complained to you about the amount of time you spent online?

Internet user 4: Only my bosses. What really bothered them was actually, I could claim it was legitimate business stuff most of the time, because I would just pull up Yahoo, and say, "Well, what about the other company's websites? Don't you want me looking at them?"

Brian Lehrer: Those users interviewed by WBUR's Monica Brady at the Cybersmith Cafe in Cambridge aren't alone in using the net so much. In fact, according to a new book called Caught in the Net, Internet addiction is a growing problem in America. The author is a psychologist named Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Online Addiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Young, do you mean addiction in an informal way or real addiction like to drugs or alcohol?

Dr. Kimberly Young: Well, when I first started studying this, which is probably about four years ago now, I looked at criteria that one would talk about for things like substance dependence or pathological gambling listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Handbook, and applied those same criteria to Internet users. I think one of the problems is addiction really isn't a clinical term as much as a layperson's term used to represent that sort of compulsive behavior. That is how I'm using it as sort of an umbrella term one would talk about drugs, alcohol, sex addictions, gambling addictions, television addiction, and so forth. I think, yes, I am saying it's just as serious. However, obviously there's not the same correlation with physical problems as one would see with obvious alcoholism.

Brian Lehrer: Well, did you hear any of the warning signs of net addiction, and any of those folks from Boston?

Dr. Kimberly Young: Yes, actually, what was interesting, the idea of time loss is a big issue. We all get online and lose track of time, but when that gets into something like 10 or 12 hours a day, that seems to really be a problem. I know one woman I worked with had 100 hours a week, every week logged in.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Dr. Kimberly Young: When you talk about numbers like that, obviously, it's a problem because you're not getting anything else done in your real life. You're devoted to an online life, people that might have problems in the workplace, as another gentleman commented on, or even with relationships in their real life. They spend too much time in chat rooms and letting marriages or their attention to their children.

I've talked to mothers that ignore their husbands and forget to pick up their kids at school because they're chatting all day. It is a serious problem in the sense that people aren't able to self-regulate their time, and they get very absorbed in the online fantasy world. The more addictive the application, or excuse me, the more interactive the application is, the more inclined people seem to be seeking gratification.

Brian Lehrer: What's the nature of the high?

Dr. Kimberly Young: Well, in many ways, just like any other addiction, there is this high. It's kind of like the binge behavior, maybe with somebody that has an eating disorder. When they're feeling stressed, when they can't cope with something, they just start eating, and it makes them feel good. With the Internet, there's a lot of direct reinforcement because I can go online, and again, the Internet is a term used to denote a multitude of functions.

When you're looking at that, I try to identify what's more addictive and other applications, so the chat rooms or interactive games, some things that allow multiple users to talk in real time. They start forming relationships and a community online. That, in and of itself, isn't bad. The point at which you cross over and you say, well, all of a sudden, I'm spending 100 hours a week in chat rooms, and I don't talk to my friends, my mother, my husband, then that's where you see the problem.

Brian Lehrer: What about potential effects on your life? Because if you're addicted to cocaine, you can't be a responsible parent. Your marriage might fall apart, you lose your job. Do these things happen with Internet addicts, too?

Dr. Kimberly Young: Yes, very much so. As I mentioned, the physical effects obviously aren't there, and the physical dependence. We're not talking about dependence. We're talking more about a compulsive behavior, that is, with a lot of gratification online, people get that high from building these relationships, and the whole concept of cyber affairs is another issue to really talk about, because I've talked to men and women abandoning marriages of 20 years just to run off with somebody they met online only in two months, of talking, chatting and things like that, and phone conversations.

People start losing control, and that seems to be the issue. Then they let it interfere with their marriages. I've even talked to divorce lawyers who are talking a lot about, geez, I have this client here and he wants to sue his wife for being addicted to the Internet. They're trying to look at this is how this really is impacting marriages and families as a whole.

Brian Lehrer: How about that? You’ll find yourself an expert witness in divorce cases soon, huh? Do men and women get hooked on the net differently?

Dr. Kimberly Young: I think, yes and no. There are definite gender differences in the types of activities people do. Women tend to gravitate more towards the chat rooms, more towards the building relationships and finding, I think, a lot of social acceptance. There's more pressure, I think, on women for body image, to have thin, beautiful bodies and things like that, and to look a certain way. The fact that they can be anonymous and meet individuals, men and women, online, allows them that sort of comfort level.

Men tend to look at, yes, they can get just as involved in online chatroom relationships, but they're more inclined to engage in, say, like interactive games, where they can take on a character and in a make believe virtual sort of game. They can take on different roles, and some of those roles allow them to be leaders and troops, and do very combative things online. They're more drawn to that area of the Internet as well as information addiction, if you will, where they're more, I got to check the latest sports scores and I got to check the latest news headlines, and so they're more interested in the knowledge and the gaming than our women who are more interested in chatting.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a twelve-step recovery program? My name is Mike, and I'm a netaholic.

Dr. Kimberly Young: No, not really. I don't see it quite as akin to, say the traditional twelve steps which prescribe abstinence. I think the treatment really needs to focus more on moderation and proper use because I think there are legitimate, practical applications for the Internet in home and business. I know myself, I've often been asked the question, well, do you think we should ban the Internet? No, I think there are some legitimate and great purposes for it, but I think what's happened is we've blindly accepted the Internet into our homes and our businesses and our schools without realizing the potential effects of it. There are certain side effects, and there's a lot of unintended consequences that are happening out there, and that's really all I'm doing is trying to sort of point the spotlight to that.

Brian Lehrer: I'm almost afraid to ask, but do you have a website for Internet addicts?

Dr. Kimberly Young: [chuckles] Actually, I do. It's in part informational because one of the issues is that I'm constantly getting phone calls or emails from people wanting this information. The website address is www.netaddiction.com.

Brian Lehrer: Kimberly Young, author of Caught in the Net. Thanks for being with us.

Dr. Kimberly Young: Well, thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: That's it for this edition of On the Media. For information about past programs, visit us on the web at www.poynter.org. That's P-O-Y-N-T-E-R.org. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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NPR Announcer: Funding for On the Media is provided by the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation, the Edith and Henry Everett Foundation, and the listeners of WNYC. This program is a production of WNYC Radio New York in association with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies at St. Petersburg, Florida, a school for professional journalists from across the country and around the world. This is NPR, National Public Radio.

 

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