Ted Koppel on "ideologically driven news" & how we need to be smarter

Former Nightline news anchor Ted Koppel was -- to use his cliche -- preaching to the converted in his "conversation" tonight at Ball State's Pruis Hall. Although his comb-over is now more white that gray and he just turned 70 this month, Koppel seemed pretty energetic on stage and intense in his discussion of critical issues facing the country and its journalism. Leaning more than sitting on a wooden stool, Koppel held court form more than an hour with an overflow crowd of journalism, T-Comm, and a few errant English composition faculty and students.

Koppel's overarching concern was "ideologically driven news" and the American public's danger of getting the kind of news it wants rather than the kind of news it needs. But he lead into that discussion by talking about a couple of elephants in America's living room that are not being explored enough. The first is the trillion-dollar deficit that the United States is funding primarily by borrowing from China. His analogy to a business that loses $1 million per day, seven days a week for 3,000 years was sobering. The second elephant is the war in Afghanistan, which Koppel insists is more about preventing its neighbor Pakistan from allowing a few of the nuclear weapons it's stockpiled fall into the hands of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, who might try to use them for another 9-11-type attack.

While the issues are closely related, since the war is helping wrack up the deficit, Koppel's real point in raising both issues is that the American people don't know enough about either issue. And they don't know enough because a consumer-driven marketplace has put too much emphasis on "what happened in the last five minutes, while the really important news might be something that happened six weeks ago that we are just learning more about." As a former print journalist, I can relate Koppel's worry that the search for the "scoop" -- who can get the latest news out the fastest -- means too much focus on speed and not enough on getting the whole story. As Koppel said tonight, "Just being first with the obvious is not enough. It's content that matters." And content takes time (for broadcast) and space (for print and Internet). We cannot get it in sound bites and 160 characters.

It used to be that to get a national audience for your thoughts, you had to work your way into an anchor position on the 6 p.m. network news. Koppel talked about how the entire nation used to gather around its evening television news "campfires" to find out what happened in the world that day. Now, anyone with a laptop can publish their version of the news at any time. And because contemporary news audiences think that the really important news is stuff that just happened, they get mostly headlines, soundbites, and sensationalism.

This type of news draws viewers, which, in turn, draws advertisers.  Koppel said news media are businesses, so we can't fault them for following a good business model of giving the public what it wants. Right now, partisan media like Fox News and MS-NBC are among the few turning a profit. The problem is that people get used to reading, viewing, or listening only to news that fits with their preconceived prejudices. Consuming media that only agrees with your world-view has a tendency to narrow your perspective even further. It deepens divides in the country. Rather than providing us with all the information and perspective we need to really understand important issues, ideologically driven media make it easy to blame "the other side." This seems easier than working toward compromise and finding solutions. In the end, however, this we-versus-them strategy solves nothing.

One of the solutions that Koppel supports is the New Literacy Project, which brings journalists into middle and high school classrooms to talk about how to be critical consumers of news. It sounds very much like the type of critical reading we do in class, in which you learn to critique the sources as well as the information. Koppel said several times that journalism needs to be "vetted," meaning that sources are examined to see if they have a bias and are accurate. It's similar to the concept of credibility that we talk about in class.

Lastly, I thought it was fortuitous that one of the questions posed to Koppel was about the satirical news coverage of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. He's a big fan of both shows and says they serve the public interest, although they cannot take the place of professional journalism. Stewart was one of the speakers in 2008 when Koppel was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the News & Documentary Emmys.