A Conversation between Bob Steele
and Roy Peter Clark

Bob Steele is associate dean and director of Ethics Programs at The Poynter Institute. Roy Peter Clark is Poynter's associate director and senior scholar. Like a lot of other people around the country this week, they found their lunchtime conversation turning to the coverage of the fatal plane crash of John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and Lauren Bessette. Bill Mitchell, editor of Poynter Online, asked Steele and Clark to continue their conversation in front of a tape-recorder. What follows is an edited transcript of their discussion.

Clark: I'll begin by saying that, while I recognize the legitimate news reasons for extensive coverage of the death of JFK Jr., I'm concerned about over-coverage -- the amount of time and energy and resources that are committed to this particular story as opposed to others -- and the exaggeration of celebrity as a news value, which I think may have reached a crisis point in the country.

Steele: Roy, you can make a reasonable argument about the over-coverage. You have to think about what else did not get on the air or did not get in newspapers or magazines in the last four days because there is so much coverage of the Kennedy tragedy. That is a reasonable concern. Of course, the media landscape in 1999 is very different than it was even three years ago. The amount of total coverage available on MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, CNN, the traditional networks, talk radio, CSPAN, and others is much greater than it has ever been. So, that is part of the equation. The statistics tell us that the public tuned in in major, major ways to the coverage. MSNBC and the Fox News channel registered record numbers of households tuning in on Sunday. Both were up over 600% compared to weekends earlier in the month. CNN's coverage was up from the norm and AOL logged one message every second on Sunday afternoon related to the Kennedy disappearance. So we know that Americans tuned in in very large numbers to broadcast, to cable, to Internet coverage of this. And my guess is the readership of stories on this on Sunday and Monday, and probably even into the middle part of the week, had to be significant.

Mitchell: This raises the ongoing tension between what readers and viewers want and what they need. Are there any news organizations that you've seen that have done an especially good job at reconciling that tension on this story?

Clark: I haven't seen anyone or anything that I thought stood out from the rest. I think what we are going to [see] two or three weeks or a month from now is that all of those people who watched and read this coverage will not respect us more as news organizations because of it. That's a paradox that we have to deal with. I have no easy answer for that.

Steele: I think we have a crisis in journalism. Recent studies by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Radio and Television News Directors Association bear out the concern that the American public believes that we overcover and miscover celebrity -- whether it's the O.J. trial or the Princess Diana death or other matters of celebrity. We need to figure out ways in which we appropriately cover celebrity. Maybe the biggest message in cases like this is how we can better apply Aristotle's Golden Mean. How we can bring proper perspective to stories like these.

Clark: The Chicago Sun-Times put the Columbine shooting inside the paper. That was such a contrarian act that it seems almost irrational and illogical given the nature of the interest in that particular news event. But it speaks to the desperate [desire] to do something to change the spiral. Now as we talk, there are probably more and more reporters out on Long Island waiting for Caroline Kennedy to say something, and God help them if one of them is not there when she decides to speak. I don't know a way out of that.

Steele: I believe that good news organizations, with a story of this nature, find ways to be measured, highly professional, and thoughtful in their coverage, and accomplish the goals of giving the public what it needs, and still offering the public what they want.

What I've heard on NPR Morning Edition, "All things Considered" gives me insight to everything from the mystery involving the disappearance to the nature of the search. [The coverage addressed] questions of whether the search was beyond the norm because of the celebrity of the family, the debates about aviation safety, and some of the personality elements of the story.

The coverage I've seen in the St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times -- even though it's more than I've wanted to read -- has been fascinating. It relived for me some of the historical elements of the Kennedy family, both the Camelot image and that JFK was significantly responsible for the American involvement militarily in Vietnam. I found historically it did for me what I thought was important and that gave me a longitudinal look at the Kennedy family.

How can we make sure that we continue to cover the issues of race relations and the struggle of the migrant workers in America and the growing elements of religion and spirituality in our country at the same time that we are covering events of this magnitude?

How do we do the nuts and bolts stories and the routine issues of our community and the societal issues of import with a greater degree of professionalism while still covering something like this? It's not an either or equation.

Clark: I think Aristotle is going to be in conflict with Aristotle Onassis.

Mitchell: Is there any coverage you would like to have seen of this story that hasn't been done? If you were running an assignment desk at a station or a paper, where would you be sending reporters on this story?

Clark: I don't want to see another moment of news or another line of news committed to this story. But I have to say that in the network coverage and in most of what people have seen on TV, there has been an appropriate politeness and respect for the dead. There have been some inhibitions about unraveling the darker side of the Kennedy myth. If we did we might actually look ghoulish or insensitive; but what has happened as a result of that is that we've gotten all of this talk about JFK Jr. as the prince of America. We've had the sometimes cloying testimony of either political insiders or people who are themselves celebrities as a result of their news profile, and who connect with this event in ways that I think many Americans don't share. This is probably more equivalent to the death of Princess Diana than it is to the assassination of Robert Kennedy or something that has a greater political context. It's really more about culture than it is about politics. Which is why it is probably harder to make the right decision about how to cover it.

How much more degraded does the image of the journalist have to become before we stop pressing our foot on the accelerator so the tire digs deeper and deeper into the sand? Maybe there is a strategy that incorporates a greater degree of public self-reflection on some of these issues and questions.

I thought it was quite useful when Jonathan Alter (of Newsweek) was talking on Wednesday's Today Show with Mike Barnicle, whose presence as an NBC [commentator]--given the scandals of last year--was quite remarkable. True, he knows Boston and I'm sure he knows the Kennedy family, but Jonathan Alter talked about the very hypocrisy of their own presence at that moment on the air, even what we are doing in questioning the decisions of journalists here today, is taking advantage in a way of the unfortunate death of a young man.

But maybe we need a little more of that, more of a revealing of why we're making some of the decisions we're making, trying to put it into perspective, second-guessing ourselves, maybe making a contrarian decision and trusting [the idea of] being open with the public about what we're doing. And at least seeing how it flies -- rather than following the herd, which is really what is going on now, with a few exceptions.

Steele: The whole notion of celebrity is a big part of this. I think you're right, Roy, in saying this is a story about culture more than politics even though the Kennedy family has deep roots in the political world. Our nation is one that is in many ways captured by, captivated by celebrity. Whether it is celebrity of movie stars or of athletes or of powerful people. Something in all of that that has eroded the values of our society when second-string outfielders are paid dozens of times as much as a highly qualified third grade teacher, when a movie star makes 50 times as much as an architect who creates wonderful buildings. There is something wrong in our society, and the media is part of the problem in the elevation and then the over-coverage of celebrity. And I don't know whether the media can be a catalytic agent to a serious conversation about this notion of celebrity. But we must have that conversation in some way. There is great irony of course that this is all happening in the wealthiest nation in the world and in many ways the most advanced technological nation in the world and yet we are trapped often times by the celebrity notion.

Clark: At the risk of sort of mixing apples and oranges, having recently written about the U.S. women's soccer team, I think it's an interesting case study. It does go against our expectation of how things work in the society. We have a group of fairly obscure women operating essentially as a unit even though there are one or two standouts, who capture the nation's imagination and, with some good marketing, wind up getting a surprising, some would say disproportionate amount of attention given what our cultural media and athletic expectations might be. They are women rather than men, they don't make a lot of money. Part of what made them seem different, interesting, heroic -- almost noble to us -- is the fact they were willing to operate in obscurity and for what they loved to do and not for the glory of being on national TV in front of 100,000 fans at the Rose Bowl.

There may be some lessons in that a cultural change may have to begin with an attention on not the JFKs of the world, but the people who are laboring in obscurity in neighborhoods -- as Mother Teresa was long before the camera found her. Maybe for journalists there is a lesson there that we need to spend more of our energy bringing into the light of day those people who are laboring in obscurity for good causes so that we can gain some hope and affirmation and attention to higher democratic purpose as opposed to the more banal or celebrity-driven kinds of impulses in the culture or society.

Steele: Recently, I was in Austin, Texas and Seattle, and in both of those communities the newspaper offered a number of obituaries on what we might call the common folk. On bakers or school teachers or nurses who had passed away who had offered something over the years, not of the magnitude of the Kennedy family, but probably equally as meaningful in their communities. It seems to me that newspapers, broadcasters, and the Internet, in their own ways, should cover a community from birth to death and all that is in between in offering an insight into people who make meaningful contributions. The St. Pete Times this morning had a fine story on an accident on the Interstate in which four passersby jumped out and were heroes in a sense in potentially saving this man's life.

There are so many different channels of information in terms of the Internet, broadcast cable, and newspapers, it is overwhelming; and with a major story like this, it comes down on us like a ton of bricks. The beauty of all [that media] is there is so much to choose from, that even on a weekend in which the Kennedy coverage was dominant, we didn't have to look that hard or that far to find other stories.

It's the responsibility of consumers to put in perspective stories, to search for a wide range of information. And, of course, it's the responsibility of journalists to cover not only the Kennedy story well, and cover it with professionalism and cover it with a measured degree of intensity, but also to provide all the other stories of race relations, economics, and religion that probably have not been as high a priority, but should be.

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