roundtable: No Mickey Mouse

roundtable: No Mickey Mouse

No Mickey Mouse

W. Curtiss Priest (BMSLIB@mitvma.mit.edu)
Thu, 03 Aug 95 09:40:51 EDT 

Message-Id: <9508031343.AA11482@a.cni.org>
Date:         Thu, 03 Aug 95 09:40:51 EDT
From: "W. Curtiss Priest" <BMSLIB@mitvma.mit.edu>
Subject:      No Mickey Mouse
To: Telecommunications Policy Roundtable <ROUNDTABLE@CNI.ORG>


Subject:  No Mickey Mouse
Network purchases stir fears over news values

August 3, 1995
CITS Observations on the attached article:
W. Curtiss Priest, Director

At the moment when the House is debating amendments to the
Telecom bill, including Ed Markey's thoughtful amendment to
restrict ownership, this article speaks powerfully to the
issues at stake.

What is this "synergy?"  "If they bring Hollywood values to the
much more curious culture of news, it'll be not only a sad
situation but financially ruinous as well."

Were we to believe that it WOULD be financially ruinous.  Given
our society's tendency toward a higher entertainment quotient
in the news they wish to view, we are certain that this marriage
will, indeed, produce 'Disney cartoons' of news events.

This seems plausible given the fact that the 'sensation factor' of
news has been a dominant value for the last five years.

A cure?  I am reminded of the slogan in fighting the war on drugs --
"just say no."  Actually, the right slogan at the right time is
powerful.  There was a safe driving slogan of fifteen years ago
that I hear in my head everytime I am tempted to prove I have
the right-of-way in driving -- "You could be dead, right."

At the Emerson "Health Communication" conference in April,
Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health described
a process of working with Hollywood to reduce gang violence
on the streets.  Gang violence relates to protecting property and
territory when appeal to the legal system would be impossible (see
_The Great Reckoning_, Davidson and Rees-Mogg, Simon & Shuster, 1994, p. 311).
Winsten invented a new visual signal to stop violence but still
'save face.'  It is a closed hand brought against the other open hand,
which is face up.  They introduced this signal in several series
made for television and the results was a reduction in violence.

My slogan for television ownership -- "no Mickey Mouse."

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Network purchases stir fears over news values
By Martin F. Nolan
GLOBE STAFF
August 3, 1995, p. 21

SAN FRANCISCO - Television news, which in its
45-year history has survived angry politicians and
changing technologies, now faces a corporate atmo-
sphere that critics find perilous

When the Walt Disney
Co. trumpeted its acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC
and Westinghouse announced its intent to buy CBS,
moguls mentioned market share, financial strength
and "synergy," but said little about news.

"Disney's reputation is that of control freaks,
which is why they're good at formula pictures that my
3-year-old adores, but a lot of the creative people in
Hollywood don't want to work for them," Tom Rosen-
stiel, former media critic of the Los Angeles Times
and now congressional correspondent for Newsweek,
said yesterday.

"If they bring Hollywood values to the much more
curious culture of news, it'll be not only a sad situation
but financially ruinous as well. People respond in the
long run to the newscasts they believe in. They go for
quality."

Rosenstiel wrote in "Strange Bedfellows" about
how ABC News covered the 1992 presidential cam-
paign. The free-wheeling, big-spending ways of news
division boss Roone Arledge initially shocked Capital
Cities executives Thomas Murphy and Daniel Burke
after they bought the network in 1986, he said.

"Cap Cities was intimately involved in news to the
extent that they tried to impose what they considered
rational cost controls over the news division," he said.
"But Murphy and Burke knew you made money in
news. They knew if you got too cheesy, it would be
your undoing. The values of news require you to take
financial compromises sometimes. It's easier to Dis-
that in a culture where news is important. In the Dis-
ney empire, ABC News is going to be such a small
fish, why should they worry about it?"

In 1969, then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew
called television networks "a tiny, enclosed fraternity
of privileged men ... answerable to no one." By the
mid-1980s, cable television, VCRs and stronger local
news weakened the networks. General Electric pur-
chased NBC, and CBS fell to the Loews hotel chain
headed by Laurence Tisch.

After downsizing and budget battles about the
"purity" of their divisions, news bosses adjusted. In
today's corporate world, they are worried not about
remaining Snow White but becoming the eighth
dwarf.

"The notion of news gets pushed further and fur-
ther down the corporate chain," said Thomas J. Gold-
stein, dean of the journalism school of the University
of California at Berkeley.

"It doesn't bode well for the respect news used to
have. I didn't see (Disney chairman) Michael Eisner
jump up and down and say, 'I've got Peter Jennings
and the best news division around.' Maybe I was be-
ing old-fashioned, but I thought news was the core of
ABC. Disney values may be wonderful, but they are
not journalistic values."

'In the Disney empire, ABC
News is going to be such a
small fish, why should they
worry about it?'

TOM ROSENSTIEL
Newsweek correspondent

In print media, news values also once dominated.
In 1934, when the smaller Washington Post bought
the larger Washington Times-Herald, columnist Wal-
ter Lippmann wired the Post's new owner, Eugene
Meyer: "Hooray for the canary that swallowed the
cat."

Today, when corporate cultures clash, corpora-
tions tend to win, and culture loses. The new chair-
man of Times Mirror Corp., which owns the Los An-
geles Times and other newspapers, is Mark Willes, a
former executive at General Mills, a cereal conglom-
erate. After he announced downsizing at the Times
and closed New York Newsday, reporters called him
"Cap'n Crunch."

While dozens of Disneyesque nicknames buzzed
around ABC News yesterday, it issued no formal
statement on its new bosses. Speaking for ABC
News, Terry Everett, said, "I can tell you that the
people at news are positive about it and we don't
think it's going to affect our operation."

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