Murrow, and the End of Generalism

        For the last few months, I've been living with legendary CBS News reporter and anchor Edward R. Murrow. Well, living with his words and his legacy.

        Earlier this year, I was asked by the Radio and TV News Directors Association to write a piece for their magazine, The Communicator, on  the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of Murrow's "Wires and Lights in a Box" speech. In that seminal speech Murrow took the networks to task for not scheduling more serious news and information documentaries in prime time. My take mixed the personal--growing up during the reign of Murrow in the 1950s and 60s, when he had no peer in broadcast journalism--with my experience running a digital media company today.

        Shortly after my article came out, I was asked to participate in a panel discussion at the RTNDA Conference in Las Vegas on the same subject. One  purpose of the panel was to debate whether Murrow's warnings still had relevance in a world where content is readily available on multiple platforms. I argued that in contrast to Murrow's era, where there were three networks and a couple of local stations per market, we now live in a time where it's never been easier for smart consumers of news and information to stay informed. There's a world of documentaries, blogs, cable channels, news sites and opinion destinations--too many to keep track of.

        Now, I'm getting ready for my third Murrow event this year. This week I participate in a Radio and TV News Director's Foundation Summit in Chicago.  The event is called "Wires and Lights in a Box: Murrow's Legacy and the Future of Electronic News," sponsored by the McCormick Foundation. It will include panels on: the balance between entertainment and news; the importance of an impartial press; business pressures facing the industry; and (the panel I'm on) ideology/partisanship in the press versus an impartial press.

        As I've started to prepare for the summit, I've had some additional thoughts--second thoughts would be too strong--around the whole topic of how easy it is to stay informed in this get-it-now world.  While there is no question that more news and information is instantly and readily available to the average citizen than at any time in history, it's also true that the digital age has allowed us to burrow only into what interests us--and to remain ignorant of everything else. That's a big change from how it used to be.

        In the analog era, a few editors, mostly white men in the media capital of New York City, decided what we would read in the daily paper and what stories would be on the network evening newscasts. People read broad-based magazines like Life and Time and Reader's Digest. Even local and regional papers were largely informed by the same wire stories from the Associated Press and United Press International. Most people were generalists in what they took in. Other than trade publications (far fewer than these days), most people were pretty much exposed to the same media.

        Today, it's easy to create an environment where all that you are digesting--news, video, blogs, etc.--is only about basket-weaving, or comic books, or hip-hop, or domestic politics. As established news sites make it easier to grab content and customize it on your MySpace or Facebook page or your own blog with its own URL, it becomes even easier to create these hermetically-sealed worlds based around those things that you are very interested in.

        Most of that is great. My son is a committed environmentalist, two years out of college. Through his online world of environmental networking, news and job sites, he discovered a research project on chimps in Uganda that was affiliated with the Jane Goodall Institute. He actively pursued it, and after a series of online and phone interviews, late last year, he spent four months in Africa tracking chimps and how their behavior and stress levels were affected by encroaching development. The only way he found out about such a specialized project was because he was digitally plugged into that world.

        Now, in my son's case, his interests extend beyond his main passion. He follows politics and sports and indie music. But, for everyone like my son, there are, I suspect, many more who use the online ramp to focus mainly on one guilty pleasure: Hollywood celebrity misdeeds, for example. When that happens--when the internet facilitates people dropping out of society and citizenship at large, when it makes it easy not to be a generalist with a general sense of what's going on in the world, the fabric of a well-informed democracy frays just a little more.

        The gadget that you read this on is really just an updated version of Murrow's characterization of television as "wires and lights in a box." Technology allows us the platform; what we do with it, and what we make of it, is still up to us.