Daily Banter Exclusive: Meet the Man Trying To Change The Face of The American Media
By Ben Cohen
Head of ‘The Real News’ network Paul Jay is trying to save the news media, one viewer at a time. Horrified at the corporate media’s acquiescence to the White House during 9/11 and the run up to the war in Iraq, Jay decided to set up his own organization to provide the public with real, unadulterated journalism that would effectively challenge power regardless of the political environment.
‘The Real News’ produces daily thought provoking online video segments on current events, using a network of international journalists, academics and analysts to provide sober analysis without corporate spin. The Real News accepts no government funding, not corporate sponsorship, and no advertising. It is a subscriber-based model that strives for complete autonomy.
If you have not been affected by the recession, and you can spare a few dollars a month, The Real News is one of the worthiest causes around. It is a legitimate and serious force for real change, but can survive only if it is funded. Read the interview with Jay below, and if you agree with his vision, please donate – as their slogan says ‘The Future Depends On Knowing’.
The Daily Banter: The U.S media system is unique in that is has no national broadcast programming services. It is supposed to promote competition between media outlets, and cater to the demands of the public. Do you think this has failed as a system?
Paul Jay: I guess success or failure depends on what your objectives are. The objective of the American Media system was debated really in the early days of radio. And there was a rather serious debate as to whether to have a serious BBC style public broad caster, a debate that went on again during the early days of television to some extent. In fact there was a debate that was a little bit that was influenced by what was going on in Canada. The debate was very fierce in Canada that was whether to have again, a BBC model or a pure market driven model. The U.S system very early on from radio to television – the idea of public airways and airways being a public asset was never taken very seriously. It was always market driven, it was always simply for profit, and the line between advertising and news was always extremely blurred. So you could say the system is a success if your objective is that it should be a profit center for big corporate media companies, but if the objective is news information that gives people a real sense of what the world is about, then I guess you would have to call it a failure. But that never was the objective.
The Daily Banter: In what way do you think corporate conglomerates affected the art and role of journalism in the U.S in comparison to the European or the Canadian model?
Paul Jay: There has been a shift in the last 30-40 years which a lot of people have discussed, in the early days of television news, CBS, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, these sorts of people, there was a sense that the news department had a role of creating a sense of integrity or profile about the brand. There was some sense of social duty in television news, and in some of the situations like with Murrow or with Cronkite, their own influence as individuals was quite strong, to the extent that they had their own standards and they could fight for them. That has over the last decades, certainly waned, and the idea of the corporate media news as a profit center and as an entertainment center has become dominant. I think that it is not that new that this is happening, if you go back to the film ‘Network’, which I think must be about 30 years old by now, where television news as entertainment is thoroughly skewered by Patty Chayefsky (the writer), but go back even further to the speech by Edward R. Murrow that’s played in the film ‘Good Night And Good Luck’ with George Clooney, that was a vicious denunciation of what news had become, that speech must have been 40 or 50 years ago. So the decline and role of television news as being essentially an echo chamber for mythology, a way for the official version of things to be dispensed is not new. What you could say is new is that before 9/11 there was still some sense in television newsrooms and I guess in print too, but we’re focused more on TV, there was still some sense that television news had role of holding power accountable, there was some sense that there was still a place where journalism could dig out facts. I say some because it was still in the context of the corporate news that’s mostly profit driven, and not driven first and foremost by seeking facts, but there were some. But something significant happened after 9/11, and that was a return to an atmosphere that was akin to McCarthyism – outright use of fear in television newsrooms to the point where people like Tom Fenton, who was the foreign correspondent for CBS News for 25 years said that to criticize the White House in a newsroom after 9/11, one would fear of being called a traitor, and Dan Rather told the BBC in an interview that, and he didn’t say this to an American news source, that if you were to criticize Bush during 9/11 and during the early days of the Iraq war, he compared it to being a traitor in a township in South Africa, and he said you could have the flaming tire of patriotism put around our neck. A very important lesson was learned, and I think Tom Fenton is the one who talks about this, which is that newsrooms really can be outright intimidated.
The Daily Banter: Potentially how far can an organization like The Real News go in filling the void left by the corporate news?
Paul Jay: It all depends on how successful we are with our funding model. What we are trying to do is to fill this space, the space where a mass audience gets their news. The more sophisticated audience, or political news audience mostly read their news, and by in large now can find pretty good sources on the internet of news and opinion and analysis. And if you are savvy, and you got to a few, and there are about 8 or 9 different places you could go and you’ll get a pretty good sense of what is really going on, and you can get far, far deeper and get a more fresh and original take than anything you’ll get from television news and most mass circulation newspapers. What’s missing, is the majority, the mass audience, they like to watch their news, and they get their news from television, they get their news on video, and that’s the space we are trying to fill. So what we are going to do is, we don’t have to become completely a new original news gathering place, although we do plan to do some of that, what we want to do is take the best of what exists in print and in text, in the U.S and around the world, and then bring that to a mass audience through video, by turning them into pieces of TV and video journalism, and do that with an economic model that is completely different that is viewer supported and not dependent on corporations or government so that especially in times of great pressure, like after 9/11 or during a war, we don’t buckle and we can stand up and tell people what we think the truth is.
The Daily Banter: How can you increase readership and promote your brand? Are you not at a serious disadvantage when you refuse government funding or corporate sponsorship?
Paul Jay: We are, and we’re not, in the sense that if we do the kind of journalism that we want to do, there won’t be many governments or corporations that would want to sponsor us any way! Which is the point. If you want that kind of support, then you have to start self-censoring. It is yet to be proved. What we think is that if we improve the quality of what we are doing, and we put more money into marketing, then more people will know about us, we think we can get a pretty big audience. And with a big audience, we can find ways to monetize through financial support from donations or e commerce. We’re not against selling things to people who come to the site, and there are other ways too that we are planning to have additional revenue. But the reason we don’t want to have advertising is because the small amounts of advertising is maybe not a real threat to your editorial independence, but it’s also not very much money. If you want to make real money out of advertising, you have to go to big national brand advertisers, you have to have enough traffic to interest them, once you do that, then these national brand advertisers own you because if they don’t like what you’re doing, you could lose one of your big ad accounts, and now you are back in the same game that corporate television news is.
The Daily Banter: It sounds like there is no compromise, and you are willing to go out on your shield.
Paul Jay: Yes. The issue is that the financial model is at the heart of what it is. We’re not against finding various ways to finance it – we don’t mind having e-commerce, and we’ll sell different types of products to people who come, because if you are selling the products, then you own your own shelf space, we don’t think you’ll give up your own independence, because if someone doesn’t like what you do and says ‘well you can’t sell my product’, we’ll say ‘who cares’ and we’ll go and sell somebody else’s product. But advertising at the numbers that are significant, then they own you.
To Donate to The Real News, follow the link.
To subscribe to The Daily Banter email list for regular updates, exclusive interviews and feature articles, enter your address below!
address below!
By Ben Cohen
Head of ‘The Real News’ network Paul Jay is trying to save the news media, one viewer at a time. Horrified at the corporate media’s acquiescence to the White House during 9/11 and the run up to the war in Iraq, Jay decided to set up his own organization to provide the public with real, unadulterated journalism that would effectively challenge power regardless of the political environment.
‘The Real News’ produces daily thought provoking online video segments on current events, using a network of international journalists, academics and analysts to provide sober analysis without corporate spin. The Real News accepts no government funding, not corporate sponsorship, and no advertising. It is a subscriber-based model that strives for complete autonomy.
If you have not been affected by the recession, and you can spare a few dollars a month, The Real News is one of the worthiest causes around. It is a legitimate and serious force for real change, but can survive only if it is funded. Read the interview with Jay below, and if you agree with his vision, please donate – as their slogan says ‘The Future Depends On Knowing’.
The Daily Banter: The U.S media system is unique in that is has no national broadcast programming services. It is supposed to promote competition between media outlets, and cater to the demands of the public. Do you think this has failed as a system?
Paul Jay: I guess success or failure depends on what your objectives are. The objective of the American Media system was debated really in the early days of radio. And there was a rather serious debate as to whether to have a serious BBC style public broad caster, a debate that went on again during the early days of television to some extent. In fact there was a debate that was a little bit that was influenced by what was going on in Canada. The debate was very fierce in Canada that was whether to have again, a BBC model or a pure market driven model. The U.S system very early on from radio to television – the idea of public airways and airways being a public asset was never taken very seriously. It was always market driven, it was always simply for profit, and the line between advertising and news was always extremely blurred. So you could say the system is a success if your objective is that it should be a profit center for big corporate media companies, but if the objective is news information that gives people a real sense of what the world is about, then I guess you would have to call it a failure. But that never was the objective.
The Daily Banter: In what way do you think corporate conglomerates affected the art and role of journalism in the U.S in comparison to the European or the Canadian model?
Paul Jay: There has been a shift in the last 30-40 years which a lot of people have discussed, in the early days of television news, CBS, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, these sorts of people, there was a sense that the news department had a role of creating a sense of integrity or profile about the brand. There was some sense of social duty in television news, and in some of the situations like with Murrow or with Cronkite, their own influence as individuals was quite strong, to the extent that they had their own standards and they could fight for them. That has over the last decades, certainly waned, and the idea of the corporate media news as a profit center and as an entertainment center has become dominant. I think that it is not that new that this is happening, if you go back to the film ‘Network’, which I think must be about 30 years old by now, where television news as entertainment is thoroughly skewered by Patty Chayefsky (the writer), but go back even further to the speech by Edward R. Murrow that’s played in the film ‘Good Night And Good Luck’ with George Clooney, that was a vicious denunciation of what news had become, that speech must have been 40 or 50 years ago. So the decline and role of television news as being essentially an echo chamber for mythology, a way for the official version of things to be dispensed is not new. What you could say is new is that before 9/11 there was still some sense in television newsrooms and I guess in print too, but we’re focused more on TV, there was still some sense that television news had role of holding power accountable, there was some sense that there was still a place where journalism could dig out facts. I say some because it was still in the context of the corporate news that’s mostly profit driven, and not driven first and foremost by seeking facts, but there were some. But something significant happened after 9/11, and that was a return to an atmosphere that was akin to McCarthyism – outright use of fear in television newsrooms to the point where people like Tom Fenton, who was the foreign correspondent for CBS News for 25 years said that to criticize the White House in a newsroom after 9/11, one would fear of being called a traitor, and Dan Rather told the BBC in an interview that, and he didn’t say this to an American news source, that if you were to criticize Bush during 9/11 and during the early days of the Iraq war, he compared it to being a traitor in a township in South Africa, and he said you could have the flaming tire of patriotism put around our neck. A very important lesson was learned, and I think Tom Fenton is the one who talks about this, which is that newsrooms really can be outright intimidated.
The Daily Banter: Potentially how far can an organization like The Real News go in filling the void left by the corporate news?
Paul Jay: It all depends on how successful we are with our funding model. What we are trying to do is to fill this space, the space where a mass audience gets their news. The more sophisticated audience, or political news audience mostly read their news, and by in large now can find pretty good sources on the internet of news and opinion and analysis. And if you are savvy, and you got to a few, and there are about 8 or 9 different places you could go and you’ll get a pretty good sense of what is really going on, and you can get far, far deeper and get a more fresh and original take than anything you’ll get from television news and most mass circulation newspapers. What’s missing, is the majority, the mass audience, they like to watch their news, and they get their news from television, they get their news on video, and that’s the space we are trying to fill. So what we are going to do is, we don’t have to become completely a new original news gathering place, although we do plan to do some of that, what we want to do is take the best of what exists in print and in text, in the U.S and around the world, and then bring that to a mass audience through video, by turning them into pieces of TV and video journalism, and do that with an economic model that is completely different that is viewer supported and not dependent on corporations or government so that especially in times of great pressure, like after 9/11 or during a war, we don’t buckle and we can stand up and tell people what we think the truth is.
The Daily Banter: How can you increase readership and promote your brand? Are you not at a serious disadvantage when you refuse government funding or corporate sponsorship?
Paul Jay: We are, and we’re not, in the sense that if we do the kind of journalism that we want to do, there won’t be many governments or corporations that would want to sponsor us any way! Which is the point. If you want that kind of support, then you have to start self-censoring. It is yet to be proved. What we think is that if we improve the quality of what we are doing, and we put more money into marketing, then more people will know about us, we think we can get a pretty big audience. And with a big audience, we can find ways to monetize through financial support from donations or e commerce. We’re not against selling things to people who come to the site, and there are other ways too that we are planning to have additional revenue. But the reason we don’t want to have advertising is because the small amounts of advertising is maybe not a real threat to your editorial independence, but it’s also not very much money. If you want to make real money out of advertising, you have to go to big national brand advertisers, you have to have enough traffic to interest them, once you do that, then these national brand advertisers own you because if they don’t like what you’re doing, you could lose one of your big ad accounts, and now you are back in the same game that corporate television news is.
The Daily Banter: It sounds like there is no compromise, and you are willing to go out on your shield.
Paul Jay: Yes. The issue is that the financial model is at the heart of what it is. We’re not against finding various ways to finance it – we don’t mind having e-commerce, and we’ll sell different types of products to people who come, because if you are selling the products, then you own your own shelf space, we don’t think you’ll give up your own independence, because if someone doesn’t like what you do and says ‘well you can’t sell my product’, we’ll say ‘who cares’ and we’ll go and sell somebody else’s product. But advertising at the numbers that are significant, then they own you.
To Donate to The Real News, follow the link.
To subscribe to The Daily Banter email list for regular updates, exclusive interviews and feature articles, enter your address below!
address below!
I just found this news site the other day. Looks interesting. Shouldn’t they get some gov. grant money to get the REAL news to the people like some of the media who gets it that DOESN’T serve the interests of the people?