The Media Report

The Lure of Quality - 5th August 2004
(Credit: ABC Radio)

Just as local commercial TV current affairs programs again open their cheque books to attract viewers, the opposite trend is evident overseas. In the US National Public Radio has seen a five-fold growth in its audience by resolutely insisting on quality, not sensation.

NPR's President Kevin Klose explains all on the Media Report.

Program Transcript

Mick O’Regan: Hello and welcome to the program.

This week I want to talk about why quality journalism is increasingly attractive to audiences, and in a moment I’ll speak with the Chief Executive of National Public Radio in the United States about exactly that.

But first to the sound of flapping cheque books, or maybe they’re just closing.

The New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery QC, had some blunt information for the media yesterday: paying for interviews with people who may have committed criminal offences is not on.

In New South Wales, the Proceeds of Crime Act is very clear: any fee or other benefit provided by a broadcaster for an interview could be included in confiscation proceedings.

So it appears that Karen Brown, the woman at the centre of the Seven Network’s Today Tonight report on the shooting of a man in Sydney, won’t get the money.

In my opinion the whole episode revealed a fundamental failure of commercial current affairs, that it’s a tired format, broadcasting to a diminishing audience, and no-one really knows how to replace it. Sensation still wins out. Ideas aren’t interrogated, but alleged perpetrators are.

And for what? Well, ratings, of course.

But does the idea that winning the ‘news and current affairs hour’ really mean that you win the evening’s ratings fight?

One person keeping a keen eye on these issues is Professor Graeme Turner, from the University of Queensland Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. He’s researching whether there’s a future for TV current affairs.

I asked him if he thought that spending big to get an interview resulted in significant ratings gains for the network writing the cheques.

Graeme Turner: Sometimes you see a peak that attaches to a particular story, and you’d probably see a little bit of a peak from this one. But what you don’t find is a continuing interest that will, say, move people from watching A Current Affair to watching Today Tonight. That won’t come out of chequebook journalism, unless it’s something that’s just done over and over and over again. And so the idea that you can actually buy listeners or viewers or readers simply by high profile promotions, everyone knows that you’ll do it for that promotion, but it won’t necessarily keep them there.

Mick O’Regan: We’re closing in on 40 years of television current affairs; there’s been all sorts of changes within contemporary television, with new points of focus, new styles of programs. Yet current affairs seems to be this reliable old format, that irrespective of other changes, network producers don’t want to mess with it.

Graeme Turner: It probably goes back to the ‘80s when the networks went national, and they moved away from a kind of local format for current affairs to a national format for current affairs, and that was quite difficult because they also thought at that time that politics wouldn’t rate, and so they had to find something else that did. And I think the idea of using the current affairs programming and the news as the flagship programming to set up the identity of the network, that was something that was established at the end of the ‘80s and it’s pretty much stayed, even though it’s lost viewers dramatically. The numbers watching these programs now have shifted dramatically in the last 10, 15 years.

Mick O’Regan: So that notion that in order to win the viewing night, to win the ratings, the commercial networks particularly Seven and Nine, Ten seems to not follow this formula so strictly, but they’re obviously of the opinion at Seven and Nine that if you win the news, and then the half hour current affairs program that follows the news, you’ve won the night. Is that borne out in your understanding of the figures?

Graeme Turner: Not any more I don’t think. I think once upon a time the ratings would tell you that story, and it wasn’t just that the flagship programming pulled people in, but they had a strong list of programs coming afterwards, and there was continuity in terms of the presenters and the personalities, on Nine in particular. But really to look at the programming now, it’s actually much more volatile, you’re competing in different ways, you’ve got Pay television starting to get a reasonable chunk of the audience, you know sometimes they’re getting as much as the ABC gets.

So you’re actually looking at an audience that’s been sliced much thinner and has much more to choose from and will make those choices. So the idea that you can actually hold someone to the network through that flagship programming is getting harder and harder to justify.

Mick O’Regan: Is it generational as well? Is it the people who basically grew up with television current affairs resolutely sticking to it as new generations, generation X and the people that are following them, actually have other sources of information and don’t rely on commercial current affairs for finding out about politics or society.

Graeme Turner: Current affairs audiences, certainly prime time current affairs audiences are definitely skewing old, and that’s not just happening in Australia, that’s something that a study in the UK found as well, that the audiences are getting up to the 50s, and the worry is, what happens when they die off? Is there a next generation? And the answer would probably be No, there isn’t a next generation. And there are a lot of reasons for that, too. The way in which current affairs television treats youth is not actually going to attract people who are of that demographic, because they get treated as objects of prurient interest a lot of the time, or kind of moral panics about what they’re up to. So it does seem that as a format, unless it changes, it’s going to be attracting decreasing audiences.

A simple figure that this week Today Tonight and A Current Affair were probably pulling in about 1.3-million each. OK, now TDT in 1978 at the end of its run was attracting 1.7-million. And that’s in a total audience of 14-million, whereas now we’ve got 20-million. So in terms of the appeal to an audience in terms of numbers, not ratings, there’s been a dramatic decline in the pull of this material.

Mick O’Regan: But what’s the next option? In the various studies that you’re familiar with, is anything posited as to what might follow the traditional six, the half-hour evening current affairs program following the news?

Graeme Turner: No, there isn’t much. I think that that’s one of the problems, that’s, I think one of the reasons they do what they do at the moment, because it’s hard for anybody to come up with a better idea. But certainly what’s coming out of the British study into the decline of news and current affairs there, was the suggestion there needed to be programs where the voice of the people was given more emphasis, that you have more town meeting type programming.

Now it seems to me the underpinning part of that is, no longer is the journalist going to be invested with the power to represent the public, to investigate current issues. The public want to have a crack at that themselves. And if the program can come up with a format that will do that, then I’d suspect they’d do quite well.

Mick O’Regan: Professor Graeme Turner, Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland.

So if the number of people watching commercial TV current affairs is declining, is the conclusion that people aren’t interested in serious news analysis? One argument suggests what they want is more reality programs. More people renovating backyards, and trying to become pop stars. Less serious discussion of complex political and social ideas.

But is it a question of what people want or what they’re offered?

In the United States, where much of the media focus is on the rise and rise of the Fox News Channel, another distinct media trend is becoming clear: people want quality information, especially in the current international political context.

One of the key beneficiaries is National Public Radio, which has seen its audience grow by 64% in the past five years, from 13-million to 22-million.

The network’s flagship programs, Morning Edition, and All Things Considered, are now the second and third most listened-to national radio programs in the United States.

Now it should be noted that the most listened-to program is Rush Limbaugh’s, a conservative commentator who is unrelenting in his criticism of liberal, that is, left-wing, views. And while it’s safe to assume that Mr Limbaugh has not parted with any of his hard earned to support public radio, increasing numbers of Americans are.

The National President and Chief Executive of NPR is Kevin Klose, who spoke to me from a studio in the organisation’s Washington headquarters.

Kevin Klose first of all, welcome to The Media Report on ABC Radio National in Australia.

Kevin Klose: Mick, I’m delighted to be here, thank you.

Mick O’Regan: Kevin, tell me about National Public Radio: how is it set up and how does it work?

Kevin Klose: National Public Radio, or NPR as it’s familiarly known, is a private non-profit, corporation incorporated in Washington D.C. in 1970 to provide national programming stream to independent, autonomous community-based, community-supported radio stations around the United States. Most of those stations, the licences were granted to them by the Federal Communications Commission and the licences were held by colleges, universities and Boards of Education, some private colleges, mostly land grant or public colleges and universities.

Mick O’Regan: But just to clarify that, National Public Radio itself doesn’t own stations?

Kevin Klose: That’s correct. We own no stations, we have no transmitters, no call signs, no frequencies. So we’re very different from the commercial paradigm that’s typical in the United States and other countries.

Mick O’Regan: But yet you employ staff. You have program-makers who are providing material that the affiliated stations can play if they wish, or not play if they wish?

Kevin Klose: That’s correct. These stations are, as I said, autonomous and independent. We are essentially a program provider for them, and they are completely autonomous as to what they put on the air, how they format their 24 hours or however long they’re on the air per day. And we have a staff of about 700-plus employees, most of them here in Washington, D.C., but we have more than 20 bureaux around the Untied States and 14 foreign bureaux. We actually have more foreign correspondent staff, more foreign bureaux than, say CBS News, which used to be the “Tiffany” of American broadcast journalism.

Mick O’Regan: The nature of the programs you make, are they likely to be public interest programs, documentaries, or are they a range of programs?

Kevin Klose: It’s a range of programs but the centrepiece of this operation and next year our budget will be close to $120-million, the centrepiece of this are some powerful news magazines which we produce with our news staff and our production staff here in Washington and around the world, from our bureaux and so forth, but the production staff is principally here and in Los Angeles. These news shows are called Morning Edition in the morning, a 2-hour news magazine which has in effect 3-1/2 editions: a first edition for the East Coast, a mid-continent edition which goes up two hours later; an edition for the West Coast, plus another hour after that. And this program is the second most listened-to radio program in America, commercial or non-commercial.

Mick O’Regan: Now in the past five years, National Public Radio’s audience has grown from 13-million to nearly 22-million weekly listeners, which is a gain of 64%. What are the reasons that you attribute that extraordinary audience growth to?

Kevin Klose: There are three basic reasons. One, the broadest assertion to be made is that you can make a market, you can make a success in this country, in the United States, with high quality journalism and cultural presentation period in broadcast. You can do that. We’ve proven that. That’s one thing. People are looking for high quality, contextual form and national reporting that will tell them about what is happening in this complex world of ours, and radio can do that in an extraordinarily powerful way.

Also people are eager for genuine, authentic cultural presentation which is not related to necessarily, mass taste or to mass culture or to pop culture, but has to do with an exploration of who we are as people, or who we are a society, or who we are as a multicultural society. So that’s a powerful force in it. Secondly, as you may have noticed if you look at American cable off satellites, a lot of American broadcast journalism or electronic media journalism has turned away from the harder, more expensive route of doing fact-based reporting.

There’s less fact-based reporting going on I believe on US electronic media than probably at any time since the 1940s, since before World War II. There’s a lot of opinion, there’s a lot of what we call two-ways, go interview somebody on the street where something happened, or go and interview a reporter where something happened, but don’t do fact-based reporting around the event to tell the context of it, just report the event itself. That’s one way to do reporting but it’s not what is helpful to citizens if they’re trying to figure out where they should be on a particular public issue.

The third piece of it is, this is kind of a negative thing that I don’t like to say, but it’s the truth: ever since the attacks of 9/11 as they’re popularly known here, Americans have turned increasingly for serious presentation of fact-based reporting so they can try and understand what it is we confront and what confronts us. And we do that kind of reporting.

Mick O’Regan: Indeed. But it’s interesting, because this is at the same time where it would seem to me in broad terms, there’s been a marked rise in cheap, obviously formatted television programs and radio programs, quiz shows that give away handfuls of cash to people for relatively easy quiz questions, reality TV shows like Big Brother or Survivor or the spin-offs from them.

So on the one hand there seems to have been, as you say, a move away from fact-based reportage programs that present complex issues to a relatively sophisticated audience, and a movement to these very low-budget formatted programs. How do you see that dichotomy?

Kevin Klose: Well I think that part of what you’ve described there is exactly accurate. The other piece of that dynamic, that is to say reality shows, highly-formatted other kinds of television and radio programming on the commercial side is that there is an enormous amount of commercialisation in this country. Everything has been commoditised. If you come to public radio a minute-and-a-half an hour on public radio is devoted to very minimal, 10-second credit lines for foundations, or individuals or corporations that support public radio. That’s a very different place to come when you’re trying to understand the world, you’re not having blast advertising smashed at you through a microphone and through your speakers.

That’s one piece of it. The other piece of it is that we have a very authentic collection of community-based, community-supported individual local public radio stations. They have their own hosts, their own voices, their own musicologists, their own news teams and they deal in such things as reporting from the Governor’s office or the State Legislature, very serious issues in a country of 300-million people, 50 different States, billions of dollars in public funds being voted up or down virtually around the clock in this country one way or another. There’s a lot of serious information that passes. It isn’t typical ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ kind of information. We’re not going to cover the O.J. Simpson trial here at NPR, it simply won’t happen.

Mick O’Regan: Now what about issues like the Iraq war, and of course the aftermath of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan? Has there been a polarising of opinion in the United States that in one way has driven the audience to, if you like, either end of the spectrum? So on the one hand it might be the more liberal oriented end of National Public Radio and its factual programmings, and to the other end, networks like Fox News. So what we’re seeing here is a polarisation and the two beneficiaries are the programs at either end of the spectrum?

Kevin Klose: Well what we know from independent surveys of our listeners is that they identify themselves, the most recent survey was in fact supported by two charitable trusts, they self-identify in the following way: 31% call themselves conservatives; 30% call themselves democrat or liberal, and about 32% call themselves independent or moderate. So that’s the audience. We think it’s a very wide spectrum.

Irregardless of what Fox or any other cable net or anybody else puts on the air, we know what we’re doing, we’re doing very high quality fact-based journalism, with journalistic standards that are the duplicate, the same journalistic standards of the highest quality broadsheet English-language dailies you can find in the world: The New York Times, The Financial Times, think of your best and leading Australian, not necessarily mass-market, downmarket papers, but high quality broadsheet journalism papers. That’s the company we keep and people are looking for that, and people of all sorts and all stripes are interested in intellectual engagement. We provide that.

Mick O’Regan: So that general critique that I’ve often read in the American media and heard when I’ve visited the US, that National Public Radio is, if you like, the torch-carrier for the liberal (which in our terms means left) cohort of the audience. How do you respond to that general critique? Obviously you’ve just indicated that you feel that there’s a range of audience, so is that criticism of liberal bias unsubstantiated?

Kevin Klose: I call it here an urban myth. If you were to ask Secretary Rumsfeld or Vice-President Cheney, or National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice right through the Republican Administration, have they been interviewed and thoroughly on National Public Radio, they’ll tell you Yes. If you go to the Congress of the United States you’ll find in both Houses in both parties, there’s wide support National Public Radio and for public radio, because I’ll tell you why: Because we don’t treat our listeners as consumers, as the end point of some transactional relationship that we must sell them something in order to put the show on the air.

We treat them as partners in an exploration of the values of the democracy. If that’s liberal, if that’s soft and left-wing, I’m missing something here. I think that’s what democracy is about. It’s about respect, it’s about democratic civil dialogue, it’s about exchange of ideas, and it’s about also putting ideas in front of us that we might not agree with, but we’ve got to have them to nurture our thinking.

Mick O’Regan: Kevin, right now of course, Americans are getting to the heart of their Presidential election campaign. Is the issue of the media and the quality of information that American citizens are receiving, is that likely to become a political issue, do you think?

Kevin Klose: You know I used to work at The Washington Post. The great editor, the legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, used to say ‘You know, we don’t report the facts, we report what people tell us’. And there is a difference there. We know that political parties have a great interest in sort of spinning things their way. The question for us is do we have rugged and serious editorial management of what we’re putting on the air?

Do we have high production values that look for diversity of point of view and for authenticity of point of view instead of name-calling, finger-pointing, blaming, denunciation and a kind of polemic that you can hear on talk radio often in this country. We’re not going for that stuff and people are coming to this because it’s a place where they can reflect, engage and think about what it is without being bored by it, by being intrigued by it, because we take them around the world and around the nation in a very authentic way.

Mick O’Regan: Now I’d like to talk Kevin, about some of the specific issues that have arisen with audiences, and one of the issues here is basically people leaving money, bequests, to National Public Radio and of course many people would be aware that one of the most notable in recent years actually came from the widow of Ray Kroc.

Ray Kroc being the man who began the McDonald’s franchise, which of course is now a multi-million international corporation. Joan Kroc left a very large amount of money to National Public Radio. Can you talk about that specific event as far as audience funding is concerned?

Kevin Klose: Yes. Mrs Kroc who had a great history as a philanthropist, while her husband was alive and after his death, was very interested in humanitarian issues. She was interested in diversity of voices, she was interested in helping people whose voices might not be heard in a tumultuous crowd, and she was very interested in those public service organisations which would help to expand our thinking inside this complex society. And she made a gift to us in her will. She died in October of last year. She made a gift to us in the range of about $225-million from an estate that was in the range of above $2-billion.

The gifts, there were two of them to us, were the largest gifts ever made to an American cultural institution, gifts of cash. What that will do for us is to help us build a keel in this non-profit public service corporation. It will give us an endowment. We had raised about $35-million of our own as an endowment. The money will be preserved, the corpus will be preserved and income will flow out of investments, and that will help offset some of our costs in doing the kind of programming we do.

Mick O’Regan: And in terms of projected audience, Kevin, is the trend going to be that you can see this audience growth into the future? Or do you think it’s more related to specific events, the current concern over international security, the need Americans now have perhaps more than in previous times, to understand what’s happening in other parts of the world. Is it event-based growth in audience, or do you think it’s a general trend towards the type of programming you’re putting out?

Kevin Klose: Mick, typically in this country on the commercial side, when there is an event, there is a spike, i.e. it goes up, listenership or readership goes way up and then it goes way back down. At National Public Radio and in public radio in general, it doesn’t spike. Once it goes up, it stays up. Here’s an example: On 10th September, 2001, our national weekly listenership had risen from a few years earlier from 13.9 had risen to 16.9 on the eve of the attacks of 9/11. Virtually 24 hours later on 12th September, 2001, the audience nationally was 20-million. And today it’s 22-million. So when it goes up, it stays up. Why? Because they find something they cannot get anywhere else. Engagement at the level of individual engagement with ideas, with expression, with exploration of ideas.

Mick O’Regan: Kevin Klose, thank you so much for speaking to The Media Report, it’s been fascinating to learn something about National Public Radio in the States.

Kevin Klose: Mick, thank you very much, a pleasure to be with you.

Mick O’Regan: Kevin Klose, President and Chief Executive of US National Public Radio.

And for another discussion of contemporary journalism, and one in which you can have your say, make sure you listen to Australia Talks Back this evening on Radio National, where the topic of chequebook journalism is up for discussion.

Finally to the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US.

The Labor party has made its decision to support the FTA, conditional on two amendments concerning the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and guarantees to protect local content rules for TV.

According to a report released yesterday by the Australian Film Commission, spending on local TV drama production is at a 10-year low.

And in the industry, people are worried.

Geoffrey Atherden is one of this country’s most respected screenwriters, whose credits include the iconic series, Mother and Son, and Grass Roots.

I asked him to comment on what seems to me a basic problem: that for the US government, film making and television is a fundamental part of the economic landscape, whereas we’re talking about issues like national identity. That basically there’s no fit between commerce and culture.

Geoffrey Atherden: No, they certainly don’t fit. And this is the first time the Australian government has entered, or looked at entering into a Free Trade Agreement with culture as part of the equation. We’ve done trade deals with other countries like Singapore and we’ve taken it off the agenda. When the Canadians went into NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Canadians kept culture off the table, and that was the model that we understood our government was going to follow. We understood, through quite categorical statements made by the Trade Minister and others, talking a couple of years ago now, right back in the beginning of these discussions, that culture would not be part of a trade deal with America.

Mick O’Regan: Now on a personal basis, you’re one of Australia’s leading writers for television; what does the Free Trade Agreement mean to you as far as the conduct of your profession?

Geoffrey Atherden: It won’t make much difference, or any difference at all to me. I think my career will go on as it would. I think the concern is really a cultural concern, not a kind of job or professional concern like that. It’s the kind of world that our grandchildren and our grandchildren’s children will grow up in, where the domination by American cultural product will be all but total. Already something like 70% of dramas on Australian television are American, and they already take 82% of our box office.

What this agreement allows them to do is to expand from that and take even more. And this is not being anti-American, I’m someone who loves American television and I love American films, but I don’t want that to be all we’ve got. And without some sort of support, some sort of protection, I don’t think we’ll have an industry in Australia.

Mick O’Regan: But surely Australians are always going to be interested in what makes them uniquely Australian and there will always be a market for film and television that tell our story, if you like, in our own voice, which is the oft-repeated mantra here: hearing our stories in our own voice. Surely there’s a market here, albeit a much smaller market than the global one, that people who want to make television programs and films about Australia will be able to sell them to people who want to see them?

Geoffrey Atherden: That’s the mantra, that’s true. But the evidence from the industry report that was released by the Film Commission today is that even though Australian dramas rate well, they do well with audiences, spending on Australian drama is reduced and the number of hours of Australian drama is down. So the market’s there, but it’s a market that the commercial networks won’t necessarily meet if they don’t have to. And the reason for that is, that the way that the film and television markets work, particularly the television market, and that is that the cost of making a television program is recovered in the home market.

So an American program which costs ten times as much as our programs cost, has its budget entirely recovered in the American market. But when they sell into Australia they sell it at about 1% or 2% of their production costs. So something that costs $US3-1/2-million an hour, sells them here for about $35,000. An Australian program costs about $300,000 and there is a ratings difference. You know, Australian programs rate well, but so do American programs.

And network executives, faced with the choice of spending $300,000 on a new Australian drama that might or might not work, every new drama is a risk, spending that sort of money, or spending a tenth of that $30,000, $35,000 on an American drama, with a proven track record from America, it’s already been proven with audiences, it’s not one of their failures, there’s a strong incentive to do that if there’s not a requirement to show Australian drama.

Mick O’Regan: Well Geoffrey, what do you think the strategy for people who advocate your position is from now? If this agreement is signed, and the enabling legislation is passed and it becomes part of Australian law, does that mean you’ve lost a cultural battle or does that simply mean you have to re-focus and strategically re-enter the debate to try and ensure that there are protections for cultural industries?

Geoffrey Atherden: I think that the protections will be gone. What we have to get is more support, because some forms of support like taxation measures, and government subsidy, are not affected by the trade agreement. So we’ll have to ask Federal and State government to provide more assistance in those forms. And the pity about that is that it means you’re always going to government cap in hand asking for money. It’s a much weaker position than just having a regulatory requirement that requires broadcasters to broadcast a certain amount of Australian content.

Mick O’Regan: President of the Australian Writers’ Foundation, screen writer Geoffrey Atherden. And bringing the program to an end for this week.

My thanks to the production team of Technical Producer, Jim Ussher, and program Producer, Andrew Davies.

Guests on this program:
Professor Graeme Turner
Director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland.
Kevin Klose
President & Chief Executive of US National Public Radio.
Geoffrey Atherden
Screen Writer.

Presenter: Mick O'Regan
Producer: Andrew Davies