When Jeff Greenfield wants to regale his son with tales of how hard things were when he was young, the Emmy Award-winning journalist describes what television sets were like back then. The screens were only 12 inches wide, he tells the youngster, everything was in black and white, there were only six channels, stations broadcast a limited number of hours each day "and you actually had to get out of your seat to change the channel."
The remote channel changer, said Greenfield, has not only "destroyed the attention span of most Americans," it has profoundly affected the way broadcast journalists approach their coverage of news events. Now that viewers can switch swiftly between scores of stations, "the people in the news business cannot count on your attention," he told the audience gathered for his Feb. 4 talk. For many viewers today "what's important is rarely interesting and what's interesting is rarely important," he said, so TV journalists have turned to sensationalism and sound bytes to keep their audiences tuned in.
Greenfield, who recently joined CNN as a correspondent, political analyst and anchor after 14 years as a media and political analyst at ABC News, came to campus as a guest of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. He presented his talk -- titled "The Media at the Millennium: How Did We Get Here?" -- in the Levinson Auditorium of the Law School, where he earned his LL.B. in 1967.
It wasn't always difficult for journalists to keep their audiences engaged, Greenfield explained. From the 1930s, when radio reported on the rise of Hitler, through television's coverage of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, Americans eagerly tuned in to news broadcasts -- in part, he noted, because these media were novelties and in part because the events being reported directly affected people's lives. "Then, there was no gap between what was important and what was riveting," he added.
The public's thirst for information "coincided with the steady growth of a media that loved to cover these events," he said. As news coverage of government and politics increased, however, politicians began to realize that "spontaneity" was a "threat," noted Greenfield. When the networks began televising the Democratic and Republican national conventions, for example, politicians discovered that when these gatherings were rife with infighting and demonstrations, their party lost the election. "As a result, conventions became more and more staged," Greenfield said, and people's interest in the events declined -- so much so that, in 1996, nine out of 10 Americans did not watch them at all. "Politics has become incredibly uninteresting. ... If the conventions were a sitcom, they would have been cancelled," quipped the journalist.
Even during the recent media frenzy sparked by allegations that President Bill Clinton had an affair with a White House intern, many correspondents seemed to revel most in the opportunity the story gave them to "talk about sex in ways we never could on TV before," said Greenfield, noting that the media's interest in such stories is also becoming short-lived. "We have been caught up in a fever where we go from alpha to omega and back again" within a matter of days, he noted.
Pointing out that the United States has "long been torn between individualism and socialism," Greenfield said that "one consequence of our nation's prosperity is that we don't have to come together any more. ... Television lets us enjoy our entertainment alone." The journalist predicted that "as politics becomes less vital, we have more of a chance to avoid it than ever before." He noted that years ago President Roosevelt could discuss important issues of the day with all Americans through his "fireside chats" and asked: "How does a politician talk to all of us any more? ... My fear is that if we assume that question no longer matters, by the time we realize it does matter, it will be too late."
Greenfield's talk marked the inauguration of the Gary Fryer Memorial Lectureship as part of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. The new lectureship honors the late director of the Office of Public Affairs and special assistant to the president, who died of cancer on Jan. 27, 1997. In her remarks preceding the speech, Vice President and University Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer recalled how Fryer helped expand the role of public relations at the University. "He showed us that public relations didn't have to be something unsavory," she said. "He taught us that public affairs is first and foremost about educating. ... After Gary, it's impossible to imagine public affairs being on the periphery of campus ever again."
-- By LuAnn Bishop