Hodding Carter III, President and CEO, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: The Media Response to 9/11
For the news business, it is, as Dickens might have said, the best and worst of times. Over the last decade, the widespread networking of computers has reduced the cost of news gathering and dissemination for many organizations while lowering the cost of entry for others. At the same time, longer commutes, the rise of cable and the Internet, and the increasing diversity of the U.S. population have all contributed to a steady erosion and the fragmentation of the once-monolithic audience for hard news.
Against this backdrop, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, served to highlight the strengths and sometimes troubling weaknesses of the increasingly conglomeratized news business — from the unrivaled ability of the broadcast networks to focus attention on a single event and galvanize national opinion to the networks' over-reliance on thirty-second analysis and personal tragedy as a narrative device.
In the fall of 2002, Philanthropy News Digest spoke to Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, about the response of the national media to 9/11, the relative lack of media interest in and coverage of world affairs, and the implications of long-term trends in the news business.
Carter, who passed away in May 2023, was elected president and CEO of the Knight Foundation in September 1997. From January 1977 to 1980, he served as spokesman for the Department of State and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, and subsequently embarked on a career in television, first as anchor for the "Inside Story" media criticism series on PBS, where he won four Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award, and then as host, anchor, panelist, correspondent, and/or reporter for a variety of public affairs shows on PBS, ABC, CBS, CNN, and the BBC. He later served as president and chairman of MainStreet, a TV production company that specialized in public affairs television, and was a Washington-based opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal for ten years.
Carter passed away at the age of 88 in May 2023.
Philanthropy News Digest: It's been more than a year since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attacks that many people at the time believed would change everything. Has anything surprised you about what has, or hasn't, changed?
Hodding Carter: I think what has most surprised me has been the essentially incremental and almost invisible series of changes adopted by the federal government that, taken together, have in fact changed certain fundamental aspects of our criminal justice system and the flow of news and information in this country.
PND: Such as?
HC: I believe that a series of administrative decisions — adopted with very little congressional input and incorporated into legislation in the immediate aftermath of September 11 — represented a direct assault on American citizens' right to a trial by jury and on our ability as a country to adhere to the norms of international law as it relates to prisoners of war. For that matter, virtually every step in the war on terrorism has incorporated a direct assault on freedom of information, up to and including the gutting of Freedom of Information requirements in the homeland security legislation.
As I say, all of this has been done in the name of the war on terrorism, which is fair enough. But what has been done has not appreciably advanced that war, in my opinion. It has, however, very appreciably curtailed what we consider to be basic American rights and has also had the effect of putting us in the lone-wolf category when it comes to international law and cooperation.
PND: Has the mainstream news media in the U.S. paid sufficient attention to those aspects of the 9/11 story?
Carter: Little by little, the various journalism organizations and news outlets have awakened to the clear and present danger to civil liberties raised by aspects of the war on terrorism. What remains to be seen is whether there will be a sustained conversation.
PND: A few weeks after September 11, the Knight Foundation announced the creation of a $5 million fund for 9/11-related activities, which included $500,000 for a memorial to honor the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a field in southwestern Pennsylvania on the morning of the eleventh. Does the foundation plan to support any other activities or initiatives with those funds?
Carter: The foundation initially announced that it would do up to $5 million, plus $500,000 for the memorial. Later, at the behest of our board, we took that sum up to $10 million, and eventually, in response to a number of RFPs we issued, we actually gave away about $8.5 million in cash. The $500,000 is being held in reserve for the day that the families, the Pennsylvania county where the plane went down, and the federal government all decide exactly how they want to approach the memorial.
Beyond that, the foundation has not undertaken any other initiatives in direct response to 9/11, although we have helped several organizations that we have supported in the past to address some of the issues I spoke of a moment ago. For instance, we helped endow and over the years have supported a reporters' committee working for freedom of the press that, since 9/11, has put out two editions of a white paper called Home Front Confidential: How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to Information and the Public's Right To Know. We've also supported a number of other journalism organizations, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors, with whom we have several ongoing collaborations, in its efforts to make public the nature of the administration's actions vis-a-vis the curtailing of certain basic rights and to help them sustain that campaign so that everybody understands the gravity of what's being done in the name of the war on terrorism. Those two things come immediately to mind.
PND: How is the news media doing in terms of balancing national security concerns with the public's right to be informed?
Carter: To begin with, only a handful of media outlets in this country do original reporting on national security matters. There's the Associated Press, which is the main source of information for most news outlets in America about what's going on in the nation and the world. You also have The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and a handful of outstanding regional papers like the Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News. You know, you can pretty much count the ones that have overseas correspondents or that cover the Department of Defense and the national security and intelligence agencies on one hand.
Now, among that handful, I would say that they have been and continue to be extraordinarily responsible in handling material that could endanger the lives and security of Americans and America. I would also say that almost every horror story offered up about the irresponsibility of the press in these matters has had its basis in a deliberate leak by a government agency or official, and in many cases the leak has come from the very agency that complained about the story. I say that categorically.
There are occasional instances, nonetheless, in which the press has endangered national security. However, far more dangerous, as far as I'm concerned, is the free pass the press too often gives to government when the best thing it could be doing for the health of the Republic is to sharply question, widely investigate, and occasionally publicize, with great vigor, the misuse of governmental power in the name of national security.
PND: Based on the latest update of the community indicator surveys your foundation conducts on a regular basis, it's clear that for Americans living outside New York City and Washington, D.C., the economy, unemployment, crime, and education are of equal or greater importance than homeland security or the war on terrorism. Do those findings reflect a disconnect between the concerns of ordinary Americans and the agendas of major media outlets?
Carter: No, not necessarily. I think there's often a disconnect between the way people live their daily lives and the concerns of government — and therefore of the press — which tend to concentrate on what might loosely be called national and international issues. For instance, it does not surprise me that those who have not been directly affected by terrorism themselves would, over time and in the absence of further terrorist acts, be inclined to start thinking about the here and now, as opposed to the murky and uncertain future. And that's where we are right now vis-a-vis the war on terrorism. The horrible, harrowing, truly evil thing that occurred on September 11 was a national trauma. But as time passes and no other attacks of a similar magnitude occur, what had been a shared experience begins to fade and becomes more of a concern and source of pain for those most directly affected — the victims, their families, and the government of the United States.
On the other hand, if I'm living in Wichita, which is a long away from Pennsylvania or the Pentagon or New York City, the economic health of Boeing or the ability of Kansas farmers to make a buck is an ever-present concern.
I'll say this in defense of the news media, however: News, by definition, is that which is most emphatically different from that which is otherwise or routinely happening. In other words, it's simply impossible to conceive of major news outlets in the United States not concentrating their attention and resources on what was, after all, the second most disastrous day, in terms of lives lost on American soil, in our history, or concentrating on the aftermath of that day, which was a shooting war in Afghanistan and, judging by the administration's buildup of arms and material in the Persian Gulf region, a likely war with Iraq. These are major national stories. And in that regard, the press is merely reflecting a continuing national necessity, which is to reveal all it can about this very dangerous, shadowy enemy and, in the process, do what it can to secure the nation's security. But the average American, going about his or her business in small towns and cities across the country, including our twenty-six Knight communities, will continue to be most directly affected, until events occur that argue otherwise, by issues like the economy, crime, education, and so on.
PND: John Powers, a writer for LA Weekly, said of al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists in general that "They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us." Do the news media in the United States do enough to inform the American public about events beyond our borders?
Carter: No, they don't. They picked up the pace after the September 11 attacks because it was impossible not to, and we were made aware once again that we live in a world in which hostile forces, for reasons both good and bad, are arrayed against us. The events of September 11 and their aftermath gave us a healthy dose of history and education about the nature of both Muslim extremism and poor nations' disaffection with the policies of rich nations, particularly ours. But the truth, overall, is that there's not much proof in the pudding beyond that. The news media, which spent a vast amount of money in the aftermath of September 11 to keep up with what was going on in Washington and the world, including Afghanistan, has unfortunately allowed its coverage of international affairs post- 9/11 to become an episodic act of recommitment to the public interest. There has been no general beefing up of overseas bureaus or reporting. There has been no renewed commitment to covering, in an international sense, tomorrow's stories. We have witnessed a steady decline in the commitment of the news business to covering world affairs since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and despite the blip upward after September 11, the long-term withdrawal from adequate coverage of the world continues.
PND: What about news media in the Arab world? Does something like Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based television station, contribute to a constructive dialogue between Arab countries and the U.S. and its allies? And what, if anything, can a private institution with a relatively modest budget like the Knight Foundation do to bring a greater diversity of opinion to the Arab and Muslim worlds?
Carter: That's an excellent question, and the answer to it is more complex than time allows. But let me begin by saying that virtually all domestic news outlets in the Middle East are far removed from being objective purveyors of something approximating a factual account of daily events, either in their own countries or around the world. For the most part, news outlets in the Middle East are organs of the state and/or different religious or party factions. They are most distinctly not, for the most part, purveyors of anything except whatever the official state or party line is. Al-Jazeera itself is a unique enterprise in that it has become a conduit for the opinion and views of a number of important players in the Arab world who are not government spokespersons per se, and because of that it has played a useful role in providing information and views that, in the past, have not always had an outlet. But by eschewing a more balanced presentation in favor of broadcasting what amounts to blatant misrepresentation and propaganda from the likes of al Qaeda and others, it hasn't played a useful role. Call it what you will, but it's not journalism.
So the problem, in much of the world, is figuring out how to jump-start and accelerate a process that unfolded over several hundred years in the United States. How do you take an intensely partisan, intensely factional, often intensely corrupt press — which, by the way, is a pretty accurate description of the press in this country two hundred years ago — and move it into an era of professionalism where there is at least an attempt at fairness and objectivity and a commitment to using facts as a basis for what is being presented? How do you do that? Knight Foundation, for one, has done a number of things and spent millions of dollars to that end. We have funded efforts to provide professional training to journalists in places in which the idea of a freely functioning press is essentially nonexistent. We have supported the sending of journalism teachers overseas, including into areas in the Middle East, to help teach people the basics of straight news reporting. And, domestically, we have given money to help support access to things like Al-Jazeera, in an effort to enrich the menu of news and viewpoints available to the American people.
We are also working hard, through our support of two organizations, to make sure that the World Wide Web and the Internet are left as open and free as possible in countries around the world. Americans just assume, based on their own experience with it, that the Internet is and will forever remain a vehicle for the free flow of information from any place or country to any other place or country. But as the case of China periodically proves, as the case of Singapore periodically proves, as the case of Iran proves, that assumption has no basis in fact. Governments can and do filter and block the Internet when they believe it serves their purposes.
We are also exploring other ways to improve the quality of news abroad, mostly through existing organizations — I can think of three off the top of my head — whose major objective is the pursuit of press freedom and the safety of a free press abroad. One is the World Press Freedom Institute, another is the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the third is the Inter American Press Association. All three spend a great deal of time spotlighting abuses of the press by government or factions in other countries as well as the direct and often lethal attempts by governments and various factions to silence journalists whose reporting they don't want to see in print or on the air. We spend a lot of money in those areas, and will continue to do so. Is it enough? No. But we have to try.
PND: According to a report prepared by Princeton Research Associates, readership and revenue for print news outlets in this country are in decline, continuing trends that have been in place for at least a decade. I'd like to ask the same question the report posed: Are things in the print news business as bad as the report would seem to indicate? And if so, which of these trends is the most troubling from your perspective as a former newsman?
Carter: There are two things that ought to be seen as troubling, because they actually have some correspondence. One is the dramatic decline in reading by the American public, which almost directly correlates, when graphed, with the decline in voting, which is the basic responsibility of a citizen in a democratic republic. Of course, both acts require proactive effort, as opposed to passive reception, and both involve, by definition, participation in something larger than your own living room. I guess, as a journalist who has spent a good deal of his life working in print and a significant part of his life in television, that the report's findings merely confirmed what I already knew — that a significant portion of the American public has withdrawn from real engagement with a daily news product that covers a wide range of subjects. And that's disturbing.
PND: What can or should be done to reverse those trends?
Carter: You begin with the public school system, which has systematically withdrawn, or been withdrawn, from adequate teaching of civics and history. You go on to the audiences that exist, since nothing will recreate the audiences of the 1950s. And, of course, basic reforms in the way our political system is financed might encourage more Americans to believe that their votes have some connection to what government subsequently does.
PND: I think there's a feeling among the American people that the profession of journalism, over the last decade or so, has lost some of its credibility. Do you share that view? And if you do, to what do you attribute that loss?
Carter: Well, I agree with the general proposition, although I think I can say with some confidence that this is neither the first nor the last time that the standing of the press with the American people has been, or will be, in decline. Now, among the multiple reasons for that, there is, paradoxically, the fact that we have a much better educated population than we've ever had, which means the number of people able to question in an informed way what they read in the paper and see on television has never been greater. At the same time, because there are so many sources and varieties of information available today, there is the problem that you can have different, seemingly credible versions of the same story, and this multiplicity of views feeds a cynicism among the public that is quite new, at least in recent times.I also think the accelerating trend of conglomeration in the news business, which has had the effect, in many cases, of removing management control from communities where the news is being made, has contributed to the sense that the people who run news outlets are not responsive to, nor do they care about, the communities on the other end of the twenty-four-seven news avalanche. That has a lot to do with the decline in people's faith in journalists.
Still another development we've seen over the last forty years is the rise of the star journalist, of newspaper reporters as celebrities. And that development has been accompanied by a devaluing of the importance of absolute accuracy and the elevation of a rather dangerous subtext, which is that "truth" is what counts, and "truth" can be revealed by good writing or slick verbal phrasing, even if some of your facts are wrong. But people long ago decided that nothing is to be trusted in an article if the reporter doesn't know how to spell your name or has gotten a basic fact wrong. So there's a level of sophisticated sloppiness out there — the "I'm too bright to be troubled with mere facts" syndrome — which definitely affects how the public feels about the profession.
Finally, there was a time, not so many years ago, when the press was, for all intents and purposes, just a scrappy little participant on the economic margins of most communities. Today, in contrast, news is a very big business — though often only as an appendage to even larger conglomerates and businesses — and that fact itself leads a lot of people to say, "These people can't possibly be representing my interests. These guys represent the interests of the conglomerates that pay their salaries."
PND: That seems like a legitimate concern. Do you worry about the concentration of print and broadcast media ownership in fewer and fewer corporate hands?
Carter: As with all other aspects of life, the concentration of power in the hands of a few, without any form of democratic recourse and recall, is a bad thing. And it's not enough to say that the market will winnow out the bad apples. The truth of the matter is, the market doesn't always make choices based on quality; the appeal of a product is often just as important, in the sense that putting out an extremely good piece of confection can be appealing, though, ultimately, it's not good for your general dietary health. And I'd have to say that the power of these conglomerates to market and package their news products, often at the expense of substance in those products, is a bad thing. The fact that there are fewer hands on the levers also means there is more of a chance for manipulation and less chance that the free marketplace of ideas we rely on in a democratic society will prevail.
Finally, I think there is always and eternally the prospect that new technologies will generate new competitors for the entrenched powers, and that this will keep the system from ossifying. The problem with that theory, however, is that time and time again these new forces have been absorbed into or been bought by the existing powers in the communications world. So that while the number of communications channels is growing all the time, the number of entities owning them is not. And in the end, that leaves you in a situation in which "Trust me" is the motto of the news business. Well, "Trust me" is a very bad way to do business. As Ronald Reagan said in a different context, "Trust, but verify." And in the marketplace of ideas, verification is only possible with a multiplicity of views.
PND: A final question: In a keynote speech you gave earlier this year, you cited an old saying to the effect that the trick to the news business is to be first, second. You then suggested that the foundation world has much in common with journalism in this regard. What, in your view, should foundations be doing, or doing more of, that they're not doing?
Carter: Well, I could mention any number of specifics that happen to be my peculiar hobby-horses, but that wouldn't be very interesting. So let me simply say that if foundations are, as they like to pretend, the venture capitalists of the social sphere — that is, the people who truly understand that it takes ten significant investments to score one big hit — then we are clearly failing in terms of our own self-definition. In other words, regardless of the subject, we tend to be stronger on rhetorical commitment to major change than we are on investing in it. That's not an ideological statement. I mean, conservative, liberal, centrist, up, down, around, whatever — too much of our money is spent in conventional ways on conventional causes. Which is fine. But let's call it what it is, conventional charity, and be done with it. Let's not pretend that it's philanthropy. Charity is a great and good thing, and if that's what we're about, fine. But if we're about something else, if we're about what philanthropy ought to be about, which is taking great leaps and risk and experimentation, then we've got our work cut out for us.
When Andrew Carnegie established all those thousands of libraries, what, a hundred or more years ago, it seemed, at least in hindsight, like a rather simple thing. But, in fact, for Carnegie to do that required a leap of faith and a belief that if you made knowledge available to the people, they would use it to improve themselves. That was a radical idea at the time. It certainly wasn't the conviction of most of his fellow tycoons and members of his economic class. And, today, we're not seeing many of those leaps of faith. I wish we were, and I wish I had the genius to be able to tell you what the next big leap should be. But I can't. All I can tell you is that we need to do more to identify them and then we need to turn them into reality. That's what all of us who work in this field ought to be aiming for all the time.
MFN interviewed Hodding Carter in September 2002.