The Value of the Media

October 2008

I recently spoke at Medienforum 2008, organized by LfM and held in Cologne, Germany, answering the following question: “Do you think the value of the media has changed in American society, since the old times of William Randolph Hearst, and if so, how did it change?”

When I first heard the topic of this forum, I was reminded of the great Edward R. Murrow’s famous line: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

I would say that that was a great statement, and that the custodians of the television industry in the United States, in general, have done a fair job of making television everything that it can be. When you look at the history of the media in the United States, through much of our history, our newspapers were independent only in the sense that they weren’t controlled by the government. The fact is, they were established and run by the political parties, and therefore, very partisan toward the candidate of the party that had set them up. On the one hand, you had people like Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose newspapers were essentially the equivalent of contemporary sensationalistic television programs. If you go back and look at some of them, the similarities are amazing. On the other hand, there was a parallel trend with people like Adolph Ochs, who bought The New York Times and made it into what it is today, and the Meyers and the Grahams, who redeveloped The Washington Post. They created very serious newspapers, called at the time news-papers of record.

After television first came along, with people like Ed Murrow and all the others from the so-called Golden Age of Television in the ’50s, when they did wonderful programs, it got more broad-based and had to attract a bigger audience. Then, with cable television, we had very thoughtful, focused channels like National Geographic and Discovery. Now we have a new thing, the Internet.

The Internet is, in fact, going to offer opportunities for very thoughtful programming for smaller audiences. The equipment is increasingly there to do production at a very low cost. My own opinion is that we are all living through a time in the media as revolutionary as when Gutenberg invented movable type. Obviously, at the time, nobody could come to grips with what it meant. It took probably a couple of centuries for people to understand the effects it would have.

We are now today, perhaps for the first time since the Middle Ages, in that kind of era, and we don’t yet understand what the interplay of video and print and computers and the Internet is going to be. A lot of us, a lot of you, will shape what it will be, and you just know that the change is going to be profound.

For example, I’ve been carrying around my brand-new Kindle, the Amazon electronic book. Before I left on my trip, I loaded it up with ten books and I get The New York Times on it every day. I turn it on whenever I want to read, and there it is. This clearly isn’t the last version. I believe that it will get thinner and lighter, and that they will make the screen a little bit bigger, and eventually, a device like this will be what we use. We will get print, television, video and the Internet; we’ll get anything we want on our own customized personal device.

I am encouraged about the future of the media because the media has great value. It’s hard to imagine a modern society like ours without a wide range of media. What all of us in the business have to do is, in the broadest sense, figure out how we are moving toward devices like this and how we’re going to take advantage of them. We are all in the media because we believe in the value of the media to educate, to inform, and to entertain society. And what we have to do is stay abreast of all the changes, because we live in a time when, in terms of the value of the media, we can do more invention than I think anybody’s been able to do in several hundred years.

Bruce Paisner is the president and CEO of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.