[music]

Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer. This hour, Steven Brill on standard in reporting the Monica Lewinsky story. Steven Brill: We've just witnessed CNN go through an agonizing process of retracting a story and admitting a mistake. What they said was, "We really didn't have the kind of proof we should have had." Now suppose that standard were applied to all the reporting in the Monica Lewinsky case.

Brian Lehrer: Also, Saving Private Ryan, how are vets reacting, and is the film anti-war?

Jeanine Basinger: I consider any combat film an anti-war movie.

Brian Lehrer: Do the media emphasize the dark side of being single?

Candace Bushnell: Hey, if this guy isn't treating me the way I want to be treated, I'm not going to put up with it.

Brian Lehrer: That's all coming up, so stay tuned.

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Brian Lehrer: When the news broke this week of testimony, immunity, and a presidential subpoena in the Monica Lewinsky case, the press returned to the story with a vengeance.

Bob Woodruff: On World News Tonight, key evidence in the Monica Lewinsky case.

Elizabeth Vargas: Sources tell ABC News that the dress Monica Lewinsky turned over to prosecutors yesterday will be tested at the FBI lab for potential forensic evidence.

Dan Rather: Monica Lewinsky delivers a dress to the FBI and reportedly prepares to take on the president in sworn testimony.

Brian Lehrer: After almost eight months of front-page news, leaks, scoops, high and low drama, Monica Lewinsky is still headline news. With an immunity deal in her pocket, Lewinsky, the media says, quoting lawyers close to the case, has turned over the infamous, possibly stained dress that got so much unsubstantiated play when the story first broke. President Clinton has agreed to testify, albeit on videotape, and it seems as if this saga might be finally drawing to a close. To give us a consumer's guide to the current press coverage of Zipper Gate is Stephen Brill, the founder and editor of Brill's Content, who wrote a lengthy piece on the press coverage of the story that made news itself in the magazine's first issue.

Steve, thanks for coming on with us. In your story, you revealed that Kenneth Starr had been leaking to the press, and you thought the press was handling leakers and other sources irresponsibly. Is it doing any better in this new round of stories?

Steven Brill: I think some in the press are doing better, moderately better. Some doing a lot better than moderately better, some not. It depends, but I do think there's a little less frenzy this time around, a little more care. It remains to be seen how long that'll last.

Brian Lehrer: We still have sources identified in ways such as lawyers familiar with the case or even sources, as you heard in that clip from ABC News.

Steven Brill: Yes, in fact, one thing that mystifies me-- and no one's ever been able to answer this to me- is how can there ever be an excuse for using simply the term 'sources,' or 'sources say,' at a minimum. Can't you at least say how many sources? Is it two or 200? Can't you say something about the source? Is the source your cab driver? Is the source a lawyer working on the case? Is the source someone sympathetic to the president or someone sympathetic to the prosecution? Why can't you at least characterize your sources and say how many? Now, one reason I think is I happen to think that for many reporters, the term 'sources' is basically a term of speech that actually means one source.

Brian Lehrer: Who's doing a really good job on this story?

Steven Brill: I think a lot of people are doing a really good job. I think generally the New York Times does a good job. I think NPR generally is doing a good job. One of the problems is that there's so much stuff out there that the consumers generally think that the press as a whole is doing a terrible job, when, in fact, the real frustration that the really professional journalists have is that they're tarred with the brush of everybody else.

Brian Lehrer: If I'm an average news consumer, what should I be looking for in stories about this case?

Steven Brill: You're looking for people who are willing to label the information that they're giving you as precisely and as carefully as they can, who are willing to tell you their sense of how credible the information is, what potential axes to grind people may have who are sources. One of the really interesting things is that we've just witnessed CNN go through an agonizing process of retracting a story and admitting a mistake. This is with the Operation Tailwind story, as you know. In that case, what they said was after they did an independent investigation, they said, "We broadcast a report that said that nerve gas was being used and it turns out we really can't substantiate that.

We really can't prove it, and we shouldn't have said it if we couldn't prove it and our use of sources was unfair. Our use of the way we quoted people was unfair, and we really didn't have the kind of proof we should have had." Now suppose that standard were applied to all the reporting in the Monica Lewinsky case. That simple standard, that kind of obvious standard, in fact. How much of the stuff that we're hearing and seeing on television and reading would ever be reported?

Brian Lehrer: Stephen Brill, publisher of Brill's Content, thanks a lot.

Steven Brill: Sure enough, happy to help.

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Brian Lehrer: Steven Spielberg has said that with Saving Private Ryan, he was trying to achieve a reality that had never been seen in a World War II movie.

[explosion]

Captain John Miller: I'll see you on the beach.

[explosion]

Brian Lehrer: In the sequence where American soldiers storm the beach at Normandy, we see and almost feel the carnage as soldiers are torn in half by gunfire, left to lie screaming in a pathetic agony, a stark difference from the poetic, often bloodless deaths we're used to seeing on screen. Critics and viewers have responded with raves, but what about veterans? Dr. Kenneth Reinhard is director of the Anxiety Disorder Clinic at the Hudson Valley VA Medical Center in Montrose, New York. Dr. Reinhard, thanks very much for joining us. Now, you actually went to see Saving Private Ryan with a group of World War II vets. How'd they react?

Dr. Kenneth Reinhard: I was there with a few people that I brought in there with other veterans who happened to be there. The reaction was what I thought would happen and that is men, especially the men who were in Europe and those that were on Normandy, it was a very emotional and traumatic time just being in the movie. It was revisiting a very traumatic place.

Brian Lehrer: Did they say it was realistic?

Dr. Kenneth Reinhard: In between the tears, they did. One man that I specifically remember, I walked outside with a couple of people that I went with, and I saw him in the corner. He had a cane. He was standing there and he was crying. I walked up to him and said, "You're a WW II vet?" and he said, "Yes." I said, "Were you there?" and he said yes. I said, "What brought you here?" and he said, "I just had to see if he really did it as well as he said he would." I said, "Did he?" and he said, "Yes, but he did honor to all the guys." He again, with the tears, again, he just said he had to be there and he felt so guilty and then mostly survivor guilt stuff after that.

Brian Lehrer: Have you noticed this kind of reaction, this powerful, visceral reaction with any World War II film in the past?

Dr. Kenneth Reinhard: Not to my recollection. The only time we saw that we saw it, and I specifically saw it, is four years ago when they had a lot of the CBS footage and all the TV stuff on the 50th anniversary of Normandy and to the realistic documentary films. We were getting many people after that having PTSD symptoms, having seen the real footage again when they haven't seen it for 50 years.

Brian Lehrer: Post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, as a psychologist, what made this film so powerful?

Dr. Kenneth Reinhard: The most powerful thing is the sights and sounds that Martin Spielberg brought the person right into the film. With PTSD, the trigger is if you get something close to where you were before, it could bring you back. Here, the sights and sounds are so accurate, they're so authentic that it gets you there and you start to lose perspective of where you are at that time.

Brian Lehrer: What would you say to a vet who came to you and asked if you thought he should see the film?

Dr. Kenneth Reinhard: They ask me all the time. I leave it up to the vet. I first let him know that if you want this emotional experience, it'll be your choice, but know going in that there's no way you're not going to experience this emotionally when it starts.

Brian Lehrer: The VA has expanded hours right now for its national toll-free telephone line because of the vet's reactions to the movie. The number is 1-800-827-1000. That's 1-800-827-1000. If you're a World War II veteran, we would like to hear your reaction to Saving Private Ryan. We'll give you a toll-free number and an email address in just a minute. Did you go to see the movie? Would you go? If you saw it, was it traumatic for you? Was it different for you than seeing any other World War II movie? If you're a World War II veteran, we want to hear your reactions to Saving Private Ryan. Our email address is OntheMedia@wnyc.org. That's OntheMedia, one word,@wnyc.org or call us toll-free at 1-800-343-3342,1-800-343-3342.

Saving Private Ryan is being hailed as a new kind of war movie, especially a new kind of World War II film. It's rare, for example, to see a World War II soldier on screen questioning his mission, as this soldier from Brooklyn does when he sets out to find Ryan.

Private Reiben: Do you want to explain the math of this to me? I mean, where's the sense of risking the lives of the eight of us to save one guy?

Brian Lehrer; Not exactly your typical stoic John Wayne scene in all its unconflicted glory. Saving Private Ryan is also being hailed as the most accurate and realistic depiction of the conflict and as one that might forever change our cinematic images of war. Here to talk about where Spielberg's new epic fits in the history of war films is Jeanine Basinger, professor of film and American studies at Wesleyan University, author of The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Jeanine Basinger, you've seen over 1000 combat films.

Jeanine Basinger: Well, I've seen a lot. Believe me, if it's a combat film, I've seen it. I feel that I did a pretty thorough job of looking at them, did thorough research not only looking at combat films based in World War II, but the prior ones from World War I, etcetera.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you were already a little shell-shocked going into Private Ryan, but-

Jeanine Basinger: No doubt.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think this movie is as revolutionary as much of the media is playing it out to be?

Jeanine Basinger: Well, yes, I do in many ways. I mean, first of all, obviously, I can only comment on combat movies. I'm a veteran of combat movies, not combat, so I don't want to presume in any way to comment on the experience of combat or whether it's depicted accurately. You have to leave that to the veterans, but in terms of the World War II combat movie, there are really only two others that do the same kind of level of intensity. One would be Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, which depicts also landing at D-Day. The other is a 1967 movie called Beach Red. Beach Red also begins with half an hour of intense combat, with a great deal of blood and violence being depicted.

One of the reasons they wanted to do the film was the new rules of censorship did allow them to show limbs being torn off of bodies, blood spurting out, people vomiting, so it is a pretty intense depiction. I think that Spielberg's film does break new ground in this regard.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's compare this to some other classic World War II films. Back in 1962, The Longest Day was another three-hour Normandy epic that was described as realistic then, but listen to this.

[explosion]

Soldier: Step onto the beach. Let's go.

[explosion]

[cheering]

[mortar fire]

Brian Lehrer: Hear that cheering? We didn't hear much cheering in Saving Private Ryan as they stormed the beach.

Jeanine Basinger: It's astonishing, really, but of course, the purpose of The Longest Day was celebratory. It was to go back and recreate the event in an allegedly historical, accurate manner, but to celebrate the event of the winning of the war now that we had enough distance on it in 1962 to see it. They did use all foreign languages, were accurate. They showed history going event by event as you progress forward, but the attitude taken toward it was definitely celebratory.

Brian Lehrer: Is that to say that each World War II film, as it came out, had some kind of social or political purpose to serve something other than a cinematic purpose?

Jeanine Basinger: Yes. Generally speaking, the combat film, because it is about war and grounded in history, is linked in some way to what is going on in the minds and hearts and daily lives of the audience. Obviously, the first bunch of them was to make people understand the war, to accept it, to get behind it, propagandistic purpose, absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Where does Ryan fit in?

Jeanine Basinger: Well, Ryan, that's the interesting question for everyone to ask, is why now? Not only Saving Private Ryan, but a large group of new combat films coming out, but the thing that I found interesting about Saving Private Ryan was at the very, very end when Tom Hanks says, "Earn it," and then the older Matt Damon character asks himself and his family, "Have I earned it? Have I been a good man?" It's a kind of question that's put to the audience about America, in a sense, of now that here we are, we're approaching the millennium, where are we as a nation? Have we earned it? Have we earned the sacrifice these people made? Was it worth it in any way? Have we lived up to what they really did for the country?

It's an amazing question to be asking in our cynical times, I think. I thought it was really the very most interesting thing about the film.

Brian Lehrer: More on Private Ryan, including a clip from another World War II film coming up. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: We're back with On the Media, I'm Brian Lehrer. We're talking about the movie Saving Private Ryan with Janine Basinger, author of The World War II Combat Film Anatomy of a Genre. Are there many cinematic cliches that you could find in the dozens or hundreds of World War II films that have been made and does Steven Spielberg stand some of them on their heads?

Jeanine Basinger: Actually, it's interesting that the definition of genre really is that you are going to have repeated conventions, which you can call cliches or conventions. If you like the type, you can say conventions. If you hate them, you can call them cliches. It works perfectly either way, but yes, there is always a hero. There's always an objective. There's always a group of mixed type. Usually a sharpshooter from the mountains. Always a guy from Brooklyn who's a troublemaker. There are always internal conflicts in the group, and the questioning of authority within the group is common to the old combat film.

What I think Steven Spielberg has done is very effectively use the conventions of the genre, things that we've seen before, but he's using them in an updated variation. I mean, making them more honest, more real, and playing down some of the guts and glory aspect.

Brian Lehrer: If he's using some of those same cliches and some of those same characters and anybody who has seen the movie will recognize everyone you just said as appearing in the Spielberg film, then what's he trying to accomplish?

Jeanine Basinger: I think when you set out to tell a story about World War II to a bunch of people for whom the experience is largely the World War II combat movie, of course there are veterans in the audience, and they understand the experience in a way that Steven Spielberg doesn't understand it either. He can't. It's not possible for those of us who weren't there to ever really understand it, but you have to tell the story in the terms that the audience accepts and understands. After all, if you think about it, there were democratic groups in these patrols. People did come from everywhere. There was a leader. There was bound to be conflict, and there was always an objective.

Brian Lehrer: If he's going to go further, then first, he's establishing the fact that he speaks their language.

Jeanine Basinger: Exactly right.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a scene from another World War II movie-- you referred to it before- called The Big Red One from 1980, and as in Saving Private Ryan, there's a German soldier captured who they have to decide whether to save.

[music]

Lee Marvin: You're gonna live, you son of a bitch. You're gonna live if I have to blow your brains out.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Is that another convention or cliche from the genre, saving a German soldier?

Jeanine Basinger: If you go all the way back to Sahara, which was made in the '40s with Humphrey Bogart plays a-

Brian Lehrer: During the war.

Jeanine Basinger: -yes, an Italian soldier. There's generally the question of what to do about the enemy. If the enemy is an Italian or a German, he has a face and often is a person, and you have to deal with this 'shall we kill them or not?' issue because you're dealing with a country in America where there were a great many Italians and German immigrants living. It was a different attitude toward the war in the Pacific. You generally had a faceless enemy, more a large Asian horde, a much more racist depiction was given. Frequently, that issue wasn't as big in the movies set in the Pacific.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, do you consider Saving Private Ryan an anti-war movie?

Jeanine Basinger: I consider any combat film an anti-war movie. It's always been my opinion that the greatest anti-war movie was the war movie. I never found it in any way uplifting. I never found this something to endorse. When you see people being killed, when you see the chaos of battle, to me, that's like, "Let's keep out of this." Sam Fuller said, "The only way to make a good war movie for an audience would be to have troops come in the theater and shoot everybody in the audience. Then they would get it." I think that I somehow always feel that when I'm watching a war movie. Thank God it's up there and not down here, and let's keep it out of here if we possibly can.

Brian Lehrer: Jeanine Basinger, author of The World War II Combat Film Anatomy of a Genre. Thank you so much.

Jeanine Basinger: You're welcome.

Brian Lehrer: A hit film like Saving Private Ryan is just one way to draw people to the movies. Many theater owners say customer service is important, too, especially when movie tickets in some markets can cost as much as $10. Some theaters are now sporting wider seats, better sight lines, larger screens, even cappuccino. In New York City, four theaters offer reserved seating as a customer convenience, but as On the Media's Amy Eddings reports, some customers don't see it that way.

Amy Eddings: It's a half hour before the seven o'clock screening of Saving Private Ryan at the historic Cineplex Odeon Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan. Yes, the follies were once held here. Paraphernalia from those bygone days are displayed in the lobby. Perhaps an old general admission ticket stub will soon be framed and mounted on the wall, too. In November, the Ziegfeld became one of the first theaters in the country to switch to reserved seats.

Customer 1: Two seats, please, in the seven to nine hub.

Box Office Clerk: Seat?

Customer 1: Seven?

Amy Eddings: His hesitation is understandable. People aren't used to telling a box office clerk what section they'd like to sit in, and that makes for long lines in this small lobby. Some people have ordered their seats over the telephone or on the Internet for an extra fee, but they're waiting in line, too. Half of Ziegfeld's automatic ticket dispensers are down. The system is meant to be convenient, but that wasn't the experience for some folks tonight.

Customer 2: This is absolutely outrageous and insulting. Why can't I pick where I'm sitting? This is why I'm paying $10 a ticket to come in.

Customer 1: I know, it's stupid. You get someone tall in front of you, you can't move.

Customer 3: It's a nightmare because last time I came here to see this film, last Friday, the film already started. It takes so long to do this. I'm in row KKK, seat 11. I have no idea where that is.

Customer 4: There's obviously great confusion going on here and it would be nice if someone pointed us in the right direction so I didn't have to wait for no reason.

Customer 5: Oh, is this what this is, reserved seating? No, I'm more of an anarchist.

Amy Eddings: People see going to the movies as the last democratic entertainment experience. You don't have to pay top price for a good seat. You just have to get to it first. The Oklahoma land rush was inspired by this noble principle, but that isn't what that most undemocratic of institutions, the focus group, told Richard O'Connell, senior vice president at Moviefone, the company behind reserved seating.

Richard O'Connell: People talked about getting a seat was such a hassle. Either having to get there early, if they had purchased their tickets over the phone, they still had to wait in a line. Moviegoers, especially in New York, talked about the crowds and the fact that they had to save seats. It really was the one thing that they said, "Gee, is there something we can do to kind of make that better?" so that got us thinking about how we might want to implement reserved seating over Moviefone as an added convenience.

Amy Eddings: O'Connell says, "Sure, glitches can happen," but most of the grousing at the Ziegfeld was due to unfamiliarity with the system and a fear of change. In time, he believes, people will grow to love reserved seating. It stops the use of bookbags, coats and hats as seat savers. Lets people linger outside for a cigarette or ideally, by the concession stand where the real money is made and ends that annoying question, can you move down one so I can sit with my friend? Mark Pescucci, a vice president at Lowe's Cineplex entertainment, which owns the Ziegfeld, says the key to getting people through the door more often is to make going to the movies easy and enjoyable.

Mark Pescucci: Do you realize that-- I don't know- the average moviegoer in this country only goes four times a year? If we can get that person to go one more time a year or two more times a year, my God, that's a huge increase if we can get that average up.

Amy Eddings: But will reserved seating play in Peoria? Moviefone's Richard O'Connell think so and the company will launch reserved seating in Chicago and LA this fall, but Mark Piscucci of Lowe's Cineplex isn't so sure. He thinks reserved seating may work best in New York and only at special engagement houses like the Ziegfeld, which has one screen. He's more excited about another seating option in the works, luxury boxes. For On the Media, this is Amy Eddings in New York.

Brian Lehrer: This is On the Media from National Public Radio.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer, and once again we're joined by NPR's media maven, Brooke Gladstone, for a look at some of this week's media happenings. Welcome, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brooke, one thing that's been all over the news this past week is the history of the gun mission who shot two Capitol police officers last week when it was found out that he was schizophrenic. The press had an interesting reaction, didn't it?

Brooke Gladstone: It had a slightly different reaction from usual. There's a natural tendency for reporters, and even ordinary regular people, to make assumptions about a person who committed a crime based on the crime they've committed. That's happened in some of the reporting, but here, we've seen something different. There's been an effort to distinguish between political extremism of the posse comitatus style and schizophrenia of the paranormal type. That's the case here with the Capitol shooter, Mr. Weston. Frank Rich, in his New York Times column talked about Mr. Weston's history of undertreatment for his condition.

Most schizophrenics, of course, are not violent. Most, though, can be helped by treatment, and treatment is often not administered because of the stigma. The Washington Post this week also drew that link between Weston, the Capitol shooter, and Ted Kaczynski and other bombers. They talked about the strains on families and the possibility of treatment and this is a somewhat new kind of reporting for us, I think.

Brian Lehrer: A sign of progress, perhaps, but another sign of madness, perhaps. Well, the Powerball drawing was all over the media. The quarter billion dollar prize, which drew people from all over the country to buy tickets. It was also played up as a news story. Do you think that the news media were just playing into the gambling frenzy or covering it?

Brooke Gladstone: Aw, come on. Where's your sense of humor? [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: There was an editor who once said that there is no better story than a good weather story, and to me, Powerball is like a really good weather story. It's a random event that could strike anybody, right? I mean, even people who don't play, imagine that. Well, maybe if they had, the New York lotto slogan, "You never know. It could happen." It's like a great flood story, only it's so much better because you can get this mental image of a random individual's fortune just rising on a tide of money.

Brian Lehrer: Now we're seeing lots of stories about those 13 people who won. None, interestingly, about the people who spent thousands of dollars for nothing.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Well, a lot of people aren't benefited by floods of money. That's not news.

Brian Lehrer: Word in computer land, Brooke, is that a loophole in the most common email programs can let viruses be spread by simple everyday mail messages. Is anyone safe from this?

Brooke Gladstone: Don't you wish, given all of this high technology that we had one of those robots that Will Robinson had on Lost in Space just could wave its arms and say, danger. "Danger, Will Robinson. Don't open your mail." On Monday, both Netscape and Microsoft found that they had these bugs in their programs. These were viruses that could lock up your mail or steal it or load illegal codes instead. Now, Java apparently has better safeguards. That's another computer language, but it's slower, and nobody likes to have a break on their headlong rush to progress here. The problem here, as everybody knows, is that the competition is so intense and the improvements are so fast and they're not tested, the only people who do the quality control are the customers. That's us and this is just still risky technology.

Brian Lehrer: Just so we know who's really running things in the new media age, the government of Jamaica has hired a 13-year-old boy to consult on computer technology. Now, that's a sign of the times.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Absolutely and don't you love that? Obviously, that's the only solution in this day and age. Not Will Robinson's robot, but Will Robinson himself. Now, Jamaica seems to understand this. His name is-- I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right- it's Makonnen David Blake Hanna. His grandfather had a very interesting background. He was a journalist who broke the Jamaican color barrier when he jumped into a whites-only hotel pool in Kingston. That was an act of considerable courage. While his grandson is breaking an age barrier, obviously, it's not as courageous, but it's just as suggestive as you say of what the future can hold.

He's only 13, but his mother says he's already been involved in computers for ten years, so he's way ahead of the rest of us.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe I can get him to tell me how to carefully open my email messages.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Brooke Gladstone, thank you very much.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Two days after AT&T announced it was merging its overseas operations with British Telecomm, GTE, and Bell Atlantic stepped into the fray and announced their own coupling. You remember Bell Atlantic? They're the ones who ate up 9X in what then seemed like big news. We asked the experts to tell us what's behind the recent merger mania. What does it mean to the little guy on the other end of the line and could it be that we're actually heading back to the monolithic days of Ma Bell?

Art Brodsky: That's an interesting question and one that several people on Capitol Hill are starting to ask. Art Brodsky, senior editor at Communications Daily in Washington, DC. There were some hearings not too long ago in the Senate antitrust subcommittee where senators from the Ameritech region were talking to the chairman of Southwestern Bell, and that was that identical question. "Are we going back to Ma Bell all over again?" As much as the telephone companies want to say no, there are some big differences. Primarily that the Bell companies, at this point anyway, can't offer long-distance service. A lot of the policymakers are getting really scared.

Michael Noll: I think it's going to one, but when I said this a few years ago, I said, "The old Bell system is going to come back together again because it's really a natural monopoly." Everybody said, "You're crazy." Michael Noll, I'm a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The only logic, if you want to call it logic, that I can find in it is a flaw philosophy and a belief by these top executives that bigger equals better.

Jim Freese: They absolutely think that size matters. Jim Freese, senior analyst, Forrester Research. It's a deal designed to maintain a status quo. Does nothing for competition, and it certainly is not the kind of deal that Congress envisioned when they passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That act was designed to encourage competition, especially in the local markets, and it hasn't happened. Instead, what we've seen is that the Aurbachs are digging their heels in and fighting to hold on to the monopolies they have in the local markets.

Nancy Kimmelman: Wall Street is nervous. Stock prices have advanced very fast, very far in the last few years. 1998 is generally a year of consolidation for the stock market. My name is Nancy Kimmelman. I am the chief economist for Thompson Global Markets. We are a Boston-based financial advisory firm. The stock price of a company is an integral factor in any merger or acquisition decision. That stock prices are not down, I think is an indication that it's receiving the news of these big mergers very well and so it's each series of these mergers is really help the market hold its own this year.

I think the stock market is responding positively to the Bell Atlantic-GTE merger. I think it's responding positively to the whole series of mergers we've seen in the high tech industries. As a whole, though the market, I think, is at risk. It feels like maybe the profit outlook isn't as sanguine as what's been priced in already and I think stock investors are nervous about sending prices up much higher without some greater confidence that the economy itself is going to justify these lofty levels.

Brian Lehrer: Can Marc Weiss do for the Internet what he did for TV? Weiss is the creator of the PBS series POV, which developed independent nonfiction films with a point of view. His new project, called Weblab, aspires to carve out a new niche in cyberspace. Covering topics from living with suicide to the working stiff, Weblab will, he says, promote discussion and understanding among the disparate parts of our society. Marc Weiss joins us now. Mark, what kinds of websites are you trying to create?

Marc Weiss: Actually, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get web developers thinking about how to develop the potential of the medium of the web, which is this very exciting new medium and there's all kinds of rhetoric about how it can be a democratizing force, and how it can encourage communication between people. What we're trying to do is put our money where our mouths are and say we want to provide financial support to people who have good ideas about how to do that in practice.

Brian Lehrer: You did a project for POV Interactive, a venture that inspired Weblab on Vietnam. Can you tell us a little about that?

Marc Weiss: Sure. Yes. I mean, that was inspiring in many ways. We showed a film on POV in 1996 called Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision about the woman who designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. We struggled for a couple of months to figure out what we wanted to do on the web that would relate to the broadcast, but not be a conventional, just kind of promotional thing for the broadcast. What we came up with was to invite people to tell us their personal stories about the ways in which their lives were shaped by the Vietnam years, and also to create a dialogue, which we hoped would be a dialogue across differences.

Where we had this incredibly divisive moment in our history, polarized the society in ways that we still haven't come to grips with, come to terms with. The idea was the Internet, as a lot of people remarked, that the Internet is a great place for people to find each other with common interests. What we wanted to do was try and bring people together who had very different ways of looking at the world and see whether they could bridge their differences and, in fact, the dialogues were quite extraordinary. They went on over a period of more than a year.

Brian Lehrer: What kinds of interactions took place?

Marc Weiss: The most dramatic and the most transforming discussions were between Vietnam vets and former anti-war activists. It wasn't a utopia. I mean, it wasn't like people always were sitting back and listening to each other. People got angry. People got worked up, but what ended up happening over and over again was that eventually people listened to each other and understood something about the perspectives of the other, of people who had very different experiences from theirs. Actually, in February, we shut the site down. I mean, it's still up there for reading purposes, but you can't post to it anymore.

There were kind of a flurry of tributes posted there by people who had been on the site for various periods of time, who had been part of those discussions in which they really talked about how they changed the way they thought about their own lives and how they thought about the war and its impact on America.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious. Did you need to have someone mediate those online interactions for that kind of listening and growing to take place?

Marc Weiss: No, it was utopian in the sense that it was very much self-run. We had no active moderator or facilitator and the people, what happened was, if people got really exercised and worked up, others would kind of step in and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not what this site is for. This site is for people to listen and talk to each other."

Brian Lehrer: People got the tone of it, first and foremost, and that generated content that fit that tone.

Marc Weiss: I don't even know. I'm not even sure what we did, other than to try and create a context with the stories and we selected the stories fairly carefully to be very personal and in many cases, emotional and to make sure that they were very diverse. They represented a pretty broad range of perspectives.

Brian Lehrer: Now you hope to recreate that safe space on other topics. One of your new sites will be called Working Stiffs. Now that sounds interesting. What will that be?

Marc Weiss: That will be a mix of elements. First, at its core, will be diaries from working people from very different walks of life. Their accounts of their day-to-day lives on the job. In addition, there will be, we hope, very active dialogue areas where people can talk about things that they're grappling with and exchange ideas and gripe about the boss. There'll be a stressometer, which people can fill out this form and find out how stressed they are as if they don't already know, but it'll give them some kind of a number.

There'll be an advice column. We're hoping Studs Terkel will give it some frame and some context.

Brian Lehrer: He wrote that wonderful book Working.

Marc Weiss: Yes, and Studs is the oracle of working America. Altogether, it's an opportunity for much deeper discussion about things that are happening in people's everyday lives that, as far as we can tell, doesn't exist anywhere else on the web right now.

Brian Lehrer: How similar is your goal with Weblab to your goal with POV, all the documentaries that you fostered there?

Marc Weiss: It's similar, but different, if that makes any sense. Let me explain. POV actually was a showcase for work that was already finished. It was work that was produced by independent filmmakers. We did an open call for submissions. We'd get anywhere from 500 to 600 films, and then we would do a selection of maybe ten or eleven of those to put on each year. My own background, I was an independent filmmaker in the '70s. The people who I knew who made documentaries always meant that they were going to be shown to a live audience and there was going to be a discussion afterward.

The films were meant to be discussion starters and when I started POV, I actually was excited that I had this distribution mechanism that allowed these films to be seen by millions of people, but I lost the possibility of that discussion. When I started experimenting with the Internet in '94, '95, it was to recapture those opportunities for viewers, first of all, to talk back to the filmmakers, but second of all, to talk to each other.

Brian Lehrer: For taking that next step, really.

Marc Weiss: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Do you expect Weblab to have a different kind of impact than the POV films because of the nature of the web?

Marc Weiss: I hope so. I think what we can do on the web that we never really could do in broadcasting is that we can help people inform each other, and we can help people give each other ideas and insights about themselves and about where they fit into the world.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, is the web doing that a lot, in your opinion?

Marc Weiss: Not enough. I think it's scattered and fragmented and what we hope Weblab will do is be kind of a catalyst for more of that kind of work.

Brian Lehrer: Marc Weiss, the founder of Weblab, thanks for joining us.

Marc Weiss: Thanks, I'm glad to be here.

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Brian Lehrer: Special interest groups routinely use advertising campaigns to influence both public opinion and public policy. Case in point, the landmark tobacco bill that Arizona's John McCain steered through the Senate Commerce Committee last spring, only to watch it die on the Senate floor in June, a defeat many attributed to the tobacco industry's $40 million ad campaign. Commentator John Carroll says just because the industry won, doesn't mean the ads are over.

John Carroll: Almost all special interest advertising draws on the same bag of tricks to influence public policy-- demonize your opposition, exaggerate the potential consequences involved, and employ more anecdotes than Garrison Keillor. Oh, yes, and do it all under the auspices of some vaguely named front group like Americans For a More Democratic Future, which could be anyone from the NRA to the NBA. The recent tobacco industry campaign, however, was different from standard issue issue advertising. For one thing, five tobacco companies listed their own names in the ads, a burst of honesty so unprecedented it was downright disarming.

While the industry's TV spots attacked the usual suspects, big government, big taxes, Big Brother, at least one of the ads featured a surprise ending.

Narrator: Two years ago, Washington said it would cut youth tobacco use in half without a penny in new taxes. Now Washington is voting to raise half a trillion dollars in new tobacco taxes, paid mostly by Americans earning under $30,000 a year. Washington says it's about kids, but a leading tobacco opponent admits the thing that's driving this now is the hunger for money.

John Carroll: That was rich. Tobacco companies calling someone else money grubbers, but it worked and the McCain bill went down like the Hindenburg. That led to another unusual aspect of this campaign. It refused to take yes for an answer. Tax hikes, according to the tobacco barons, are a lot like Madonna. They keep coming back in different forms. Consequently, so have the tobacco industry ads. One of them that's currently on the air opens with a regular Joe walking into a diner and sitting at the counter.

Citizen: This tobacco tax, some in Congress are talking about doesn't make any sense. How is more than half a trillion dollar tax increase on working people going to stop kids from smoking? It's just more taxes for more big government. I'm going to remember this fall what the politicians do this summer.

John Carroll: At the same time, the tobacco industry issues veiled threats to politicians, cigarette ads have become more blatant than ever in their appeal to young people. The current Camel campaign, for example, features ironic viewer discretion warnings that openly mock the mandatory surgeon general's warning. Just the kind of thing teenagers find hip, irreverent, and attractive. Politicians, though, are too busy counting votes to tally the damage the tobacco companies are causing and that may be the greatest triumph of the industry's campaign. It freed them not only from higher taxes, but from accountability as well.

Brian Lehrer: John Carroll is a reporter and media critic for WGBH TV in Boston. Coming up, how the media emphasize the dark side of being single. 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. Can't live with them, can't live without them, the old tale of men and women, how they do or don't understand each other, how they treat each other good, bad, or indifferent. Authors and playwrights from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to David Mamet have all mined the fertile ground of the constant to and fro between men and women. Last year's movie In the Company of Men by Neil LaBute played out some of the worst-case scenarios of men's predation of women. His new film, Friends and Neighbors-- opening soon- doesn't give us much more hope.

Barry: This girl tried to dump me once, [clears throat] so I got my hands in some hospital stationary and I sent her this letter informing her that she had appeared on a list of previous partners of a patient of mine who had just tested HIV positive.

Cary: You did not do that.

Barry: Oh, yeah.

Cary: Come on.

Barry: So you decide. The bitch deserved it? She never understood me and it was a good joke.

Brian Lehrer: Some joke. Joining me now to talk about on screen singles and real ones are Candice Bushnell, author of Sex and the City on which the current HBO series is based, and Terrence Rafferty, who writes the column culture clash for GQ magazine. Welcome to both of you. Candace, is it just Neil LaBute or does all this darkness represent something?

Candace Bushnell: Unfortunately, I think it does represent something, and I think that there does seem to be, to me, a sort of increased animosity between men and women in terms of dating now, but I think in terms of being friends and that sort of thing, I think that men and women are doing pretty well at that. I think that when it comes to relationships, for some reason, there seem to be expectations on both sides that just aren't being met and it does lead to this kind of hostility that you hear in that clip.

Brian Lehrer: Terrence, you were going to add something.

Terrence Rafferty: I don't know. Yes, I'm just wary about generalizing about the actual state of relations between the sexes on the basis of any pop culture product, especially when exhibit a is the work of Neil LaBute.

Candace Bushnell: [laughs]

Terrence Rafferty: I mean, I haven't seen the new movie, but it strikes me that In the Company of Men had virtually nothing to do with the lives of ordinary men and women. The main character, his behavior is so extreme, so utterly sociopathic, that it doesn't really have very much more than clinical interest.

Brian Lehrer: Is it something about trends in film? Is it something about trends in relationship or is it just Neil LaBute?

Terrence Rafferty: I think it's more trends in film, actually, and in the culture in general. I mean, everything has become tabloidized and this, to me, is tabloid social criticism. It's something that gets everybody's attention. It jolts us and you're morbidly fascinated. It's like rubbernecking a big accident on the LIE.

Brian Lehrer: Candice Bushnell, your columns address the love affairs of 30-somethings, mostly, in the 1990s in New York City. We picked a passage from one of your columns, My Unsentimental Education, Love in Manhattan? I don't think so, which, in a way, sums up many of the themes found in your columns. This is also represented on the HBO series.

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Carrie: Welcome to the age of uninnocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead, we have breakfast at 7:00 AM and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op.

Brian Lehrer: That's Sarah Jessica Parker, as you.

Candace Bushnell: Yes, she's fabulous. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Is some of this a product of what they tend to call post-feminism? That's post-feminism, as in the TV character Ally McBeal, for example.

Candace Bushnell: I hate that show. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Well, she treats badly, and she gets treated badly on a regular basis. Is that why?

Candace Bushnell: It's like, I actually even hate that word, post-feminist, but I think what I see is what happens when women all of a sudden are in a position where they don't need to be married. Women in the last 20 years have really grown up with the idea that you're going to have a career, and it does make women feel a bit more independent. It certainly makes them feel much more equal to men, and it does make them feel like, "Hey, if this guy isn't treating me the way I want to be treated, I'm not going to put up with that." It does make for conflict.

Brian Lehrer: Terrence Rafferty, does the fact that women have more power than they did 20 or 30 years ago get reflected in the media in some of the ways we've been talking about? Terrence Rafferty: Well, I think that's possible and I think that the whole question of power is an important one here anyway. I mean, take the view that all relationships are power relationships. I think if there is a real world increase in bad behavior between the sexes, it may, in fact, have something to do with the business culture, the very aggressive business culture that we've been in for the past couple of decades, which has rewarded more arrogant and more ruthless behavior, borderline sociopathic [crosstalk] really.

Candace Bushnell: Exactly.

Terrence Rafferty: It may well be true that people in a certain economic class have carried these values over into their personal.

Candace Bushnell: I'd actually like to ask Terence a question, and this seems to be true to me, but I might be off here and you're the expert, so you know. When I watch movies from the '30s and the '40s, I've noticed that, first of all, women were really the lead characters in a lot of these movies and they were more like real women. I mean, they had more interesting lives and it seems to me that women were allowed to have a wider range of personalities. There seemed to be a wider range of women who were types, who worked and this and that. It wasn't just that you were a housewife or a prostitute. Am I right about that?

Terrence Rafferty: no, I think that's exactly right, particularly when you're talking about the '30s.

Candace Bushnell: Right.

Terrence Rafferty: I mean, the screwball comedies of the '30s were perhaps the pinnacle of the representation of women, of strong, intelligent, funny women in the history of the movies.

Candace Bushnell: We don't have that so much.

Terrence Rafferty: In the '40s, there were all this film noir, femme fatale.

Candace Bushnell: Right.

Terrence Rafferty: Actually, talk about bad behavior.

Candace Bushnell: [laughs]

Terrence Rafferty: The relations between the sexes in movies like Double Indemnity and Out of the Past and things like that are really exceptionally poisonous. Even Neil LaBute would blush.

Brian Lehrer: All that was pre-feminism, before women were supposed to be able to be so independent.

Candace Bushnell: Right, so now why do you think it is that it seems to me that women have smaller roles. It's like you rarely see the smart, funny, strong woman without her being-- and this is an old example- Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.

Terrence Rafferty: Right.

Candace Bushnell: Who everyone hated.

Terrence Rafferty: [laughs] Well, then again, there's Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

Candace Bushnell: Right, that's true.

Terrence Rafferty: Which is pretty strong. I think, to me, it just has to do with the decline in the skill level of the people who write and direct movies in Hollywood. No one knows how to make a screwball romantic comedy anymore because the genre has fallen into decline. That was really the area in which really independent women could shine in the movies.

Candace Bushnell: Right.

Terrence Rafferty: Now that genre is represented by There's Something About Mary.

Brian Lehrer: Well, guess what? We're not going to solve everything between the sexes today, but we've come close, so Candace Bushnell and Terrence Rafferty, thank you both very much.

Candace Bushnell: Thank you.

Terrence Rafferty: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: That's it for this edition of On the Media. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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Announcer: Funding for On the Media is provided by the Florence & John Schumann Foundation, the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation, the Edith & 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.

[00:53:56] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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