Is there a problem with how the media works today and is this connected to why our political system seems so blocked?

There is a problem at the heart of Journalism today. The News System is not designed to advance conversation.

Journalism instead feeds on “Conflict”. News is Conflict. And of course  Conflict is news.  But in many cases, the other side of the reported “Conflict” is phony.

Look at all the phony statements in the Immigration story that have been given credence by the media!

News as it is today is not designed to build knowledge but only to tell us what happened recently. Worse, Journalists position themselves as being above the conflict as the neutral arbiter between the poles. I call this “The View from Nowhere”. Of course good debates and worthwhile conversation demands moderation. Of course there is a role for a neutral broker. But the good moderator ensures that the quality of the questions is high.This is not what Journalism does today.

So it can be no surprise that our political system then feeds into this. If you want to be in the News, you play the poles. The “Real” is opposed often to the “Fake”. So in the case of climate change, the fake is still given legitimacy. In Immigration a legitimate question is “Do immigrants lower wages” but if there is an answer to that question that is true, the untrue answer may be given equal weight. No wonder people are emotionally aroused and unsure.

So this view of the world as being all about conflict, much of it illegitimate, and all about the extremes on either side of the conflict informs our political process. So our media and our politics tend toward entropy and ritualized conflict.

Journalists do not want to make helping the nation move to a solution part of their work. They see that as “politics” and avoid it. So we end up getting stuck and we lose trust in both our media and our political system.

So what would be a better way for us?

It will help if we can see that the “View from Nowhere” is a liability.

It is the Pontius Pilate position enabling the media to wash its hands from the ethical choice that confronts it.

The View from Nowhere was thought to build trust. In reality it destroys it.

To build trust, you have to tell us where you are coming from. Not who you voted for, or your personal ideology. But what brings you to this topic? What then are you trying to accomplish? What does success then look like to you? What is your goal?

Don’t be  God or a Martian looking down upon us mere mortals. Be part of what is going on. Articulate where you are coming from and be clear about what you desire as an outcome.

So then Jay what is your advice for us at KETC?

This is how Jay opens his interview at KETC's Homeland Site - Our site on Immigration. He and Doc Searls and Euan Semple have been advising us as to how best to improve our work to offer up an alternative to the polarization of conventional media.

His advice as to what to do is on the site - please follow the link

Hitler arrives at Nuremberg for rally 1933 – another very popular orator

Normally I don’t write about politics here.

But not today.

I recently posted a note to Hoda Kotb from the Today Show. She had an item on her Facebook page asking what she should cover in her show.

Most of the answers posted related to shoes or clothing or divorces.  I told her she should speak out about the growing trend to publicly accepted racism in our culture, with Muslims paying the role of the Jews this time.

So far, she is sticking to shoes. Kotb, by the way, is Arabic for book.

The Failings of Public Education

When I went to school in the 1960s, almost all of my teachers were women.

They were women because in those days, the only jobs women could get were teacher, nurse or secretary. And so the smartest went into teaching.

And they were good. Very good.

When new opportunities opened for women in the 70s, (and I am old enough to remember when a woman going to Harvard Business School was still a big story), the smartest flocked to careers as lawyers or MDs or CEOs.  They followed the money.

In the days when women had no choice, schools could get away with paying teachers $23,000 a year, or less for women, and no one said a word – and they were able to attract the best talent in the country.

When other opportunities became available, the schools should have responded by making teaching as competitive as law, and paying as much.  But they didn’t. Instead, we debased the public educational system in America.  Oh, there are still those who teach out of pure dedication, but that’s like asking people to go to medical school and then head off to work for Medcin sans Frontiers. There are those who do, but not many.

I taught for many years at both Columbia University and NYU, and over the course of time, I watched as the level of basic education that my students came in with dropped and dropped and dropped. They were not stupid. Far from it, they were just uneducated – increasingly so. And interestingly, they didn’t care.  Most did not know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, and if they had to find out, they could always go to the web and Google it.

What we eroded was a basic foundation of fundamental knowledge, which by now, I think, is pretty much gone.

And the price we pay is that we have created a society without the ability to process information through any kind of historical wisdom.

So when Glenn Beck goes to the Lincoln Memorial and proclaims that he is the true heir to the Civil Rights Movement; when he and his Tea Party follower proclaim that the President is the racist here; when he fundamentally rewrites the history of this country to suit his own ends, one would think that an educated nation would laugh him off the stage.

But they don’t.

They don’t because we no longer have an educated nation that can process what he says through a lens of intelligence.

We have a nation of people who get their information superficially, and lacking in any kind of grounding of basic education, can be easily swayed by demagoguery of the worst kind.

For two generations we have ignored the infrastructure of this country.

Our bridges rust out and collapse.

That makes news.

Well our schools are rusted out and collapsing. And when the education of our nation rots and collapses, its is a whole lot more serious than when a bridge collapses, or deciding which shoes to buy.

What is happening today at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s I Have A Dream Speech is nothing short of pornography. Public pornography based on a collection of lies.

But we have a public that has lost the ability to discern the truth for itself.

This is how it starts.

And if you know anything about history, you already know how it finishes.

But alas, most people don’t even know that.

But they will. Sadly.

 

I quote Michael Rosenblum in full today. For he touches on the peril that confronts America today.

Can America get its Mojo back?

In Jane Jacobs great book Dark Age Ahead - she makes the point that the signifier for a great states's decline is growing xenophobia. Leading to a retreat into a fortress culture. This is what happened to China and what happened to the Muslim world. Both were many steps ahead of Europe but bothy retreated into themselves.

In the "fortress" thinking is not allowed or welcome. As Michael notes - many do not care that they know nothing. There is a pride in ignorance.

Such a society will look to the simple and to demagogues. Such a society will set up the the preconditions of "Collapse" - a structural inability to respond to challenges.

Don't we see signs of this inability today? As I see it we do.

This is why I am passionate in my support for public TV and radio's efforts to expand their role from providing good content to providing a safe place where the community can have a discourse about issues that are important to them.

At KETC in St Louis this effort began with creating such a safe place to help each other cope with the mortgage crisis. Now we are trying to find a way of facilitating the kind of discourse that will enable America to have a better approach to Immigration - an issue that will surely determine America's future as much as any other.

WGTE in Toledo will be doing the same soon on local agriculture.

My hope is that such an approach - of having a local in depth discourse on challenging topics such as who is an American? How we get our food? Jobs and the economy? Health? Education? Is our only chance of breaking out of the polarization of our politices and the over influence of the corporate will.

I don't see any other opportunity? Do you?

This is a small video made by Selena Wilkinson at the KETC Nine Academy.

The Nine Academy is a new idea for Public TV - it is a Video school at the station for the Public - where people can learn how to be film makers. They do this for themselves and also for the station.

So what's new? Until now, Public TV was very much like regular TV in that while it looked to the public for funding, it made programs just like all the rest of TV - with professionals. The Public did not get on the air nor did the public make TV.

This is what is new at KETC. We are creating the space on our web for the public to have their own content and we are using our physical space to train them to become good at this.

This film on soccer is part of an entire series on Soccer in St Louis. St Louis is the home of native soccer in the US. We have made a professional/traditional documentary and we are surrounding this with content produced by our community.

Next week - we go further - we take one of the most challenging issues of our time - Immigration - and bring the wide voice of the community to the public. Please watch this space for more

Image courtesy of PMP Partners

NEW YORK — The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller appeared at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference Monday morning to announce the new Public Media Platform, a partnership between American Public Media, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Services (PBS), Public Radio International and the Public Radio Exchange distribution network.

Over the next six months, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will spend about $1 million to develop a working prototype of the platform, with NPR leading the charge

The Public Media Platform is “a series of platforms that will allow all of the content from all of those entities — whether news or cultural products — to flow freely among the partners and member stations, and ultimately, also to other publishers, other not-for-profits and software developers who will invent wonderful new products that we can’t even imagine,” said Schiller.

The Public Media Platform will cross-pollinate news across those five networks, and will provide data analysis to help reporters inside and outside those organizations present complex information more effectively. Both will be subject to various licensing rules, but the idea is to allow member stations and eventually third parties to distribute this information however they see fit.

“We’re going to spend the next six months figuring out exactly [the] rights [and metadata] issues, but the ultimate goal of this is to make this content available,” said Schiller. “Say there’s a blogger who is particularly focused on the BP crisis in the Gulf — they will be able to pull out still photographs, national and international reporting, reporting from local stations, video from PBS, data, and mash that all up together.

This is THE project I think. Many of us who participated in New Realities saw this move. We looked back to the common satellite platform and wondered if a common web platform would be the new common platform. Well here it comes.

Maybe I am naive about how time works. That was back in 2005/6. The level of trust was not high enough and the certainty that the web would be utterly dominant was not all there yet either.

I also applaud the inclusion of TV into this. After all it's all digital.

But the harder work is ahead - changing the culture from Broadcast to Participation. This is brutal work. Even when you know you have to go there.

It is like giving up smoking or carbs or even drink. It means leaving what you know for something that you don't.

This kind of work cannot be done alone either.

Just as the work to build the platform goes ahead, I urge stations to experiment as a group so that they can support each other with what a participatory POV would be like.

At KETC during the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project we found out the hard way what some good rules for this might be. I will repost these soon.

More on the space to come

“a source very close to Apple” suggest that Apple has been working on the next version of the Apple TV. The goods according to them: it will be a very small box (smaller than the current one) with perhaps only outputs for power and TV-out cables. It will run on Apple’s new A4 chip (the one found in the iPad and soon the new iPhone).. It will still do 1080p video, but may have as little as 16GB of flash memory. That’s because the thing will be based around streaming over the cloud (or from other computers in your home) rather than local storage. Most significantly, it will run the iPhone OS.

Basically, it’s an “iPhone without a screen,” is how Engadget hears it. Oh — and it will cost only $99, supposedly.

Looks likely that next week Apple will announce a new Apple TV - basically iPhone to drive our TV. War between Google and Apple will drive huge innovation.

So what then if your business is Conventional Appointment TV?

My bet is that within 2 years, Appointment TV will be over.

So what to do? Maybe first of all to understand this. For Public TV it means a Moon Shot Planning Process to get ready. Single stations cannot cope alone with this. Maybe it does not need all at the table but enough to build a new approach.

Content alone will not be enough either. Solving what truly is Public Service Media now becomes a compelling issue. How to be vital to your local community has to be more than being an online content supplier.

The crunch is in sight.

Going 2.0 as Lee Bryant says is not about hanging shiny new objects on your old form. It is in truth that hardest of all things to do – changing who we are. As Euan says – it is the hard work of giving up our institutional form and re-becoming human again. So how do you make these changes to the inside of ourselves and our organizations?

I have been forced to reflect on this as one of my projects comes to the very edge of success. Here is the story I told the CEO today.

You are a chief. Your tribe lives in a valley. Over tall mountains is a much larger valley that has a huge lake – larger than Lake Ontario. It is like a vast sea. But you have never been there. You have never seen a lake. You have never fished in a lake or seen a boat. This new valley is beyond what you have ever experienced and so beyond what you can imagine. For your valley is savannah. It is plain full of herd animals and game of all types. It is lush and there are many plants that you use as well. Your tribe has been there a long time hunting and gathering. You are good at this. The Tribe has organized to do this work well.

But over the last few years, there has been a shift in weather. The savannah is drying out – the drought is getting worse. The game is getting scarce. The plants are dying too. Your success over the last 100 years means that you have many mouths to fill too.

So you have heard stories about the lake on the other side of the mountains from traders who go everywhere. So you send out a small reconnaissance party over the mountain to explore this new land. A new land where the skills to get food and the processes are very different. For remember none of you have ever seen a lake, a boat, a weir, a net. None of you have built houses in such surroundings. You don’t know what a pier is. You have no idea what weather can do on a lake. All you know are stories. Stories that might be fables.

The small party does quite well and returns home to tell you what happened. Now the lake and all that is needed to live by a lake is more real to you. At least people that you trust – your own tribesmen have seen it. But you are not going to up sticks and take all your people there just on the evidence of one trip. The risk is too big. You don’t know if enough of your people could adapt. And anyway, maybe the drought will end soon.

The drought gets worse. Now you send a larger party for a longer time. You tell them to really test this new life. Their mission to to see if a move to the new place is feasible. They set up a base camp in the new valley and build some boats and make nets. After much trial and error, they start to learn how to do well in the very new place. They spend a whole year there. They make a of of mistakes. Some die. But they can now see what has to be done. They are not good at any of it but they know the basics. They return home. Everyone is both fascinated and fearful. For if it is possible to live in this new valley, then it will be possible to leave our ancestral home. Everyone hopes that they don’t have to do that. Who wants to give up all they know? Maybe the drought will end.

But the drought gets worse. It is clear that this is a trend. It is clear that if the Tribe does not leave the valley, that in 5 years all will die. So now you send a lead party back over the pass into the new valley. Their job is to set up a new home for the tribe. They are not coming home. They are the beach head.

But as the new team settle in the new valley, they go home all the time in their minds. For the only home they really know is the old valley. Even though the new is feeding them. Even though they are gradually getting the new skills. They long for what they know. They are torn. They are in the new valley but they still are organized as if they were back in the old.

Still part of the tribe is left in the old valley. This left behind part of the tribe feel bad too. They know that they have been left behind. They know that the future is in the next valley. Both sides feel separated. One from the old, the other from the new. But this separation had to stand until the Chief knew that his people could make it in the new.

You could not wait however until he was completely sure because you could feel that the disconnect between the two groups was starting to threaten the whole tribe. So you moved the rest of the tribe over the pass into the new place as well. Because they were in a new place that needed new skills and new ways of working, you also had to realign who did what and for whom. You had to ensure that the tribe was organized to live in the new way. Fortunately because of the tension of the separation, most were relieved to have their doubts settled and quickly settled down to the new. Also because they all knew that they could not go back, that longing for “home” faded. After a while the new home became “Home” for all.

As I told this story, I started to see what had in fact happened. I had missed it all even myself. What we had done only became clear today.

The institutional world is dying. But it is the only world we know. Our place in it is home. We cannot just jump to the new. We have to explore it.  This exploration needs to be organized as history tells us successful explorations are conducted – using larger and longer staying expeditions. At some point some people have to stay in the new world.

Even then history tells us that we at first long for the old. We even organize based on the old even when we live in the new. This tension is debilitating.

This is the story of America itself. Many expeditions lead in the end to the early colonies. The War of Independence is the re-org. This then opens up the west and the new culture and millions cross the sea for the dream.

Yes the tools are important, but it is the change in world view that is the key.

Soon I will have the data to prove this.

What do you think? Where are you on this journey?

Things are moving so fast! In a month the iPad will be here. The shift from traditional computers to Mobile will take off.

But Pub Media are still coming to terms with the web itself. There are still holdouts for Digital Radio. Many hope that Digital Stations for TV are the future. After all huge sums have been spent on them. Many still deny the web. We can see this in the resources applied to it – in most stations less than 20%.

But it is clear now. The Web is it. The web is where we will consume media.

The decisive shift will be 2011 after the iPad has taken hold.

And the part of the web that will be THE place will be Mobile and I include iPad in Mobile.

So is all lost? No!

The Public Radio Player is surely the place to use as a beach head? It has been very popular with 2.5 million downloads in the Apple Apps store (includes upgrades). It has great functionality. It ties nicely back to the stations.

Let’s get a project to build of this and to include TV!

The iPad is ideal for watching video – please please please – make it easy for me to watch the great content of the public system and to integrate it into radio too.

Here is my vision:

• Radio and TV content is integrated – I can search for say Jane Austen and find video and audio and text – I can find other Jane Austen fans in my city – we can get together – we can create a community around out topic
• I can do this for news and opinion – I can follow a topic and draw on all sources – AND from my local community
• I can do this for music, documentary, whatever

The key is to offer the place where the full resources of all the system comes together in one device and in one place and where the community is added too.