BRIAN WILLIAMS: Holding back the tide

by Doug Spero

The Brian Williams episode is another example why NBC stands for "Nothing But Confusion." After a week of filling the sandbags to hold off a man-made media crisis, the network finally decided to admit (indirectly) to the guilt of its lead anchor, and punish him in front of millions of confused and troubled viewers.  As a former NBC news employee and a former news director of two ABC affiliated stations, I believe this was a very bad management move.

NBC is basically saying "our guy did wrong....we will punish him.....and then all will be OK."  Really?  In six months, the general viewing public will largely forget who Mr. Williams is.  And if his replacement does a good job, then what does the network do at that point? 

Do they put a tainted anchor back on the air, after someone else has restored credibility and perhaps built a new following?  There must be applause in the halls of CBS and ABC, and David Muir especially must feel as though he has died and gone to news heaven.  Talk about hitting "triple sevens" in the course of just a few months after taking over from Diane Sawyer.

Or is this simply an exit strategy by the network executives, to wait and see if anything else washes ashore on the streets of New Orleans?  If there are any more dead bodies floating around in Wiliams' closet of war stories, he may never be back. 

In the meantime, execs at the network, who must have been camping out in boardrooms for days (like Brian was camped-out at the Ritz Carlton), must be dizzy with overnight research, consultants, and senior managers - whose opinions, as insiders know, change like the tide going in and out of the Mississippi Delta.

How many bad decisions will be made during the next six months?  At least one has already been made - by taking the middle ground.  NBC either should have gotten Williams back on the air with a fresh apology, with teeth, sometime this week - or, they should have shown him the door. 

Hey, Celebrity Apprentice is down to only two.  Perhaps Williams will be available next season?  That may be a good place to build on his skills?

This was not just a sad two weeks for NBC, but for broadcast journalism.  It should teach all students of this trusted art a lesson.   It should also be a reminder for those now in the profession to think before they speak, because the reputation they save may be their own.

Surely, the alleged sins of Mr. Williams have been committed by others over the years.  After all, who can conclusively prove or disprove some of these far-fetched stories?  The primary difference is that Williams got caught at his own game. 

I remember one of NBC's great news directors paraphrasing Shakespeare:  "You live by the sword, you die by the sword," he said.  In this case, Brian Williams fell on the sword. 

What a sad commentary for a once proud industry.  I hope Murrow, Cronkite, Brinkley, Huntley, Newman, and the other founding fathers aren't looking down at this mess from that big newsroom in the sky.   If they are, they are shaking their heads in disgust.

JOE FRANKLIN - The Inventor I Knew

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

We lost a great American inventor last week.  Just as we credit Eli Whitney with the cotton gin, Thomas Edison with the lightbulb, and Steve Jobs with the iPhone, Joe Franklin deserves top billing for inventing a staple of modern media: the television talk show.  

Name any giant of that genre - Stewart, Fallon, Ferguson, Carson, Letterman, Paar or even the great Steve Allen.  They are all derivative.   All owe their platform to The Joe Franklin Show, which started on New York's WJZ-TV (now WABC-TV) back in 1950, before almost all of today's hosts were even born.  Franklin was still recording interviews for Bloomberg Radio until just a few days before he died.

Joe Franklin on WWOR in 1989, from a video posted on YouTube. 

I worked in two newsrooms down the hall from Joe - the first at WOR Radio, and later at WOR-TV (now WWOR).   He was a short man, maybe 5’3”.   A smiling ball of energy and a peripatetic fast talker.  

There was a blissfully detached happiness about him, as though he was living inside a postwar musical that was playing in his head.  

And perhaps he was.  Joe actually got his start as a writer for the singer and radio show host Kate Smith, best known to audiences today for her timeless rendition of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" (the version played at every Yankees home game).

And even before he ventured into early television, Joe had parlayed an abiding love of nostalgia - and a childhood collection of thousands of 78 rpm records - into a career as a young and, at the time, quite well compensated ($1000 a week) radio disc jockey. 

"These rare old records can bounce you into the heavy money class," wrote Billboard Magazine in October 1948.  "Joe Franklin, 23-year old disk jockey on WMCA, local indie, has already become cognizant of this happy state of affairs." 

It was the same routine whenever I bumped into Joe in the long, mocha-wallpapered corridors of WOR.  Knowing it was his favorite subject, I would ask how his radio show was doing.  With a broad, satisfied smile and a dramatic wave of his right hand, he would proclaim, "FANNN–tastic.  You know we're heard in 38 states at night?"  Same answer, same statistic, every single time.  

“Blissfully detached... as though he was living inside a postwar musical that was playing in his head.”

Franklin's broadcasts, nicknamed Memory Lane, focused originally on nostalgia.  On the radio side, that meant conversations ranging from contemporary Hollywood all the way back to the silent film era. 

"Joe reinforced for me the right to love those old fashioned vaudevillians, crooners, big bands, silent films, early talkies, old sheet music and records," said Vince Giordano, leader of the New York-based Nighthawks Orchestra and a Big Band era historian.  "In my youth I was always attacked for those likes." 

But TV was different.  Like Steve Jobs, Joe Franklin had the inventor's instinct to do things with his creation that his imitators had either not thought of, or did not dare to try.  While the studio sofas of The Tonight Show and The Late Show became populated almost exclusively with the famous and near-famous, Joe stayed unabashedly egalitarian. 

"He brooked no distinction in caste or strata," my friend Steve Friedman, veteran photographer for Walter Cronkite, Regis and Kathie Lee, and Phil Donahue, told me.  "Robert Mitchum would be on the same panel and couch as a singer appearing in Lodi, Bing Crosby with a Borscht Belt comedian, and a lady cab driver with a talking dog.

"Yet they each were treated the same - democratically, really. 'Miss Cab Driver, what do you think of what Robert Mitchum just said?' he would ask, as Mitchum sat there."

My favorite high camp moment came when Franklin hosted a 1980's era rock group, the J. Geils Band.  The members were all "huge fans," and brought a trophy with them to thank Joe for "so many years of allowing people to get a break right here on national television."  (WOR-TV was a New York station, but was carried nationally on cable at the time.) 

Franklin receiving a tribute from musician J. Geils and two Playboy bunnies after singing his band's hit record, Centerfold, on the Joe Franklin Show in 1982.   Image from a video posted on YouTube.

The Joe Franklin/J. Geils love fest struck me as one of the unlikeliest pairings I’d ever seen on television - but then again, Joe specialized in unlikely pairings. 

In Joe's later years, Friedman recalled, everybody wanted to be photographed with him.  "At these conventions, I had the honor to walk him around - he kind of counted on me - to meet everyone including his former guests.  He almost skipped Betsy Palmer once, so I refreshed him, directing him that-a-way, and that was so good for both of them. They hugged and so appreciated each other."

Joe Franklin's final recorded broadcast aired the day he died.  It was an interview with Joe Coffey, a New York City detective turned author.   Given that Franklin claimed to have hosted some 300-thousand guests over his long career - Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Dustin Hoffman, Liza Minnelli, and so many others - it might seem a bit of an anticlimax.

But Joe Franklin invented the talk show realm.  He could get away with it. 

EBOLA PANIC ECHOES EARLY DAYS OF AIDS

It took society a while to realize you can't acquire HIV by being in the same room with a patient.   When will we recognize the factual, not imaginary, risks of Ebola? 

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Our newsroom was doubling down on the impending epidemic.   Here was a disease that had already rampaged through Africa, and was now threatening to wipe out large chunks of Western civilization.  Large cities like New York were becoming hotbeds of fear.  

When the opportunity arose to interview someone who had contracted the mysterious illness, we wondered how much personal risk was necessary to get the story.  The camera crew thought about refusing the assignment.   They donned protective gear.   They wore surgical masks and covered their microphones with gauze.  They made it a point to stand far away from the patient at all times.   

in New Jersey, parents held panicked meetings in school cafeterias.   Why should we allow our children to share drinking fountains or get sneezed on by someone who may have been exposed to one of these patients, they asked?

I reported on this calamitous scene.  But please don’t be afraid to shake hands with me.  The year was 1983, and the disease was AIDS.  

I have been struck over the last couple of days by how closely the news cycle on Ebola is tracking that of the early days of the AIDS epidemic.   And I’m not alone.  

“This is panic,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, chief of the infectious diseases division and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The New York Times.  Offit recalls that in the early days of AIDS, “people were afraid to walk into a grocery store and pick up a piece of fruit because they didn’t know who’d touched it.”   

Panic, says Dr. Offit, “doesn’t follow the epidemiology of the disease.   This isn’t flu or smallpox.  It’s not spread by droplet transmission.  As long as nobody kissed the person on the plane, they’re safe.”  

Washington Post health reporter Lenny Bernstein was in Liberia for 12 days covering the epidemic.   He took common-sense precautions while there, and he has been home now, Ebola-free, since late last month.   

“The virus is not airborne, like SARS,” Bernstein says. “You have to come in contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids — blood, vomit, feces, urine, sweat, saliva — to get it and that has to occur when he or she is showing the symptoms of infection: high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bright red eyes. This is why Liberians and health workers, not journalists, have been the virus’s victims.”

None of this is meant to downplay the very real risks of this deadly virus.   But the lessons from AIDS 30 years ago should remind us that in the US, at least, Ebola’s most virulent component - and the least controllable - is the panic that results when fear displaces facts.

POST NOW, REGRET LATER: Ethical guidelines needed for online news

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

In today’s online environment, it’s been said that everyone is a journalist.  If that’s really true, then everyone ought to read this.  

It’s the Code of Ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists, an organization I’ve been a proud member of for many years.  It has just been updated to bring it more in line with the ethical challenges of the digital age.  It should be required reading for anyone with a Twitter account, a blog, a Web site or a smartphone.  

I was reminded once again of our desperate need for guideposts when unidentified hackers worked their way into the online accounts of a number of celebrities.   They located private nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, among others, pirated them, and posted them online for the world to see.   

Celebrity journalist Perez Hilton quickly re-posted them to his site - then scrambled to take them down when it dawned on him the awful line he had just crossed.  

My thoughts on what happened with Jennifer Lawrence's nude photos. What I learned from this all. And what I will do differently going forward! My feelings. My heart. Sincerely.

“I didn’t even stop to think about my actions,” Hilton said in a remorseful online video that reminds me of the old adage that you should never make big decisions when you’re distracted.   “I was on vacation with my son and my mom in Vegas, trying to have a good time, and I’m like, oh my god, this huge story is happening, let me get this out there, let me do this as soon as possible.  And I made the wrong decision.”  

Wrong indeed.  That should be obvious to any second grader.  (Why aren't we learning this at home anymore?   Maybe that's another column.)

Granted, on one level, this is nothing new.  Major journalists have always had the power to make or break reputations, careers, and lives.  And a big part of reporting is to get new information first.   The competition to be first with news is what drives real journalists, and when they succeed, it pays the bills.    

Look at this newsstand photo I snapped on August 29, the morning the story broke about the hospitalization of Joan Rivers.   The empty slot on the upper left was for the New York Daily News.  It was alone in putting the story on the cover.  Predictably, the paper sold out.  

But there’s an important distinction in the Rivers story.  In the drive to get it first, the Daily News also got it right.  And just as important, it did right, by both its readers and by its subject.  It crossed no ethical lines in its reporting, because although the Joan Rivers story is a private tragedy for her family, it is also a very public tragedy for her many fans, and it has raised legitimate questions about her medical treatment.  

Could there be any similar justification for what was done to Jennifer Lawrence?  

“Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect,” says the SPJ Code.  “Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity - even if others do.”

And while the Code notes that “private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention,” it does so under the exhortation - in bold face font - to minimize harm.  "Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness," the Code says. 

SPJ’s Ethics Code is voluntary.  And it’s no substitute for a well informed conscience.  But in today’s nonstop communications world, where too many consider the Golden Rule quaint, and where, as my colleague Charles Feldman has often pointed out, we literally have “no time to think,” the Code of Ethics is worth bookmarking on your browser.  That’s true whether or not you consider yourself a journalist.   

I AM NOT A CROOK and other media miscues

The power of negative answers over positive ones is well demonstrated. Why do politicians and public speakers so often forget it?

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Forty years ago this week, Richard Nixon was on TV ending his career.  I was on the radio starting mine.

I was still in my teens, a full time student and a part time newscaster at a popular AM radio station on Long Island, New York, trying hard to sound older and more experienced than I really was.  But I still count my 755 pm roundup on the evening of August 8, 1974 as among the most memorable of my career.

Richard Nixon "preserved head" on the TV cartoon series "Futurama." 

Most Americans today did not live through the Watergate scandal that brought President Nixon down.  Their impressions are formed by history books, or more likely, through lingering popular culture references.  (Fans of the TV cartoon series Futurama, for instance, know Nixon as a crochety preserved head.)  

And then there's the five word phrase that for all of Nixon's multitude of accomplishments and his legion of sins, we most closely associate with him to this day:  "I am not a crook."  For public speakers of all stripes, those words hold an important lesson about how not to respond to a challenge from the audience.  

Nixon uttered those words at a press conference in November, 1973.  He was addressing a convention of newspaper editors in Orlando, Florida.  His infamous answer came in response to a question about Watergate - a question whose intent Nixon saw as malevolent.  (It's well documented that Nixon was no fan of newspaper editors.)

"People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook," Nixon intoned.  "Well, I'm not a crook.   I've earned everything I've got."  

Put politics aside for a moment and focus on language.  The positive - "I've earned everything I've got" - got lost in the negative "I am not a crook."  Unwittingly, Nixon demonstrated the established principle that negative responses to negative questions acquire a life of their own.  If the issue is big enough, those responses can follow you to the grave, and beyond.   

Researchers have long known that human beings have something known as a "negativity bias" - in short, we have greater recall of, and give greater weight to, negative experiences over positive ones.   "Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good," wrote Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, in co-authoring a 2001 paper entitled, "Bad is Stronger than Good".

You would think that politicians, who have long accepted the premise that attack ads work because of their inherent negativity, would absorb that lesson and avoid negativity in statements about themselves.  But they don't.    

Earlier this year, New Jersey governor Chris Christie hoped to put questions about the so-called "Bridge-gate" arm-twisting scandal to rest by holding a 2-hour news conference and answering every conceivable question from reporters.    "I am not a focus-group tested, blow-dried candidate or governor, " Christie said.  "I am not a bully."  No wonder that USA Today's front page carried that very quote the following day.  

The antidote, of course, is to remember always to try to answer a negative question positively.  The problem is, doing the opposite is our first reaction.  We fool ourselves into thinking we are effectively swatting down the negative when we all we do is reinforce it.  "I am not, I was not, I did not."  All  we do is make it bigger.  

"When I was in high school, I used to play basketball," a recent trainee told me.  "And when I'd get to throw a foul shot, my coach would yell at me from the sidelines.   'Whatever you do,' he said, DON'T MISS!'   

"I never remembered don't," my trainee concluded.  "All I remembered was miss."  

Unfortunately, I don't think he was old enough to remember Richard Nixon.