Kaplan urges media responsibility

Minutes before President of MSNBC Rick Kaplan's lecture was set to begin, a flutter of foreign tongues filled the air in the room at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. Kaplan had attracted an international audience of professional journalists and students to the Ewing Lecture on Ethics in Communications.

  

      The conversations punctuated by thick German and British accents soon dissolved to silence Tuesday night as Kaplan began, urging a crowd of roughly 50 people to consider their responsibility to fellow citizens when reporting the news.

  

      "Is it not our ethical duty to report the stories that need to be heard?" he asked.

  

      Kaplan, who has won 34 Emmys and previously served as president of CNN News, spoke of a time when journalists such as famed Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were idolized and journalism was a highly respected profession.

  

      "It comes down to digging deeper--digging much deeper," he said. "If you just 'do the news,' you lose. Isn't the public right in wondering what we are doing?"

  

      Although he peppered his speech with jokes--including an opening line about the upcoming Friday night NCAA match-up between Duke's men's basketball team and his alma mater the University of Illinois--Kaplan charged that today's news is often being analyzed as if it were an entertainment form. Offering examples from recent evening news magazine broadcasts, Kaplan explained that in treating the news as entertainment, the real issues are being overlooked.

  

      "News ought to be the ultimate reality show, but it's not," he said. "When news tries to do something it's not... they get themselves into trouble."

  

      He cited as an example his decision to ban MSNBC from airing car chases in progress. Instead, his channel has started to feature police specialists who analyze the chases--with the perpetrators' faces and names purposefully left out--and point out various facets of the pursuit.

  

      Another issue Kaplan singled out as problematic was the stronghold that five media stations--ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and FOX--have over coverage and news outlook. "There are fewer editorial viewpoints," he said.

  

      But he offered caution at the thought that journalism was dying or that "journalism ethics" was an oxymoron.

  

      "The idea of delivering the news is a time-honored profession--important for the country--and we're not going to let it slip away," Kaplan said. "Some of the finest people I know are journalists. I have a lot of faith in the good sense of the people in those newsrooms."

  

      Ellen Mickiewicz, a professor of public policy and Director of the Dewitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism, which sponsored the event, heralded Kaplan's values, skills as a teacher and his experiences as part of his draw.

  

      "I think that his values are ones we need to hear," she said. "His experience runs from journalism to the top of management, every bit of the industry, and you don't normally get that view."

  

      Kaplan's experiences working at four television networks--including his position overseeing Iraqi war coverage at ABC--attracted many audience members, including students Mariah Richardson-Osgood and Rachel Soder.

  

      Richardson-Osgood, a junior, said she was lured by his unique position within the journalism world. "[I am] really interested to hear his position on the media and his interpretation on what's going on," she said.

  

      Similarly, Soder, a journalism student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a staff writer for The Daily Tar Heel, said Kaplan's speech showed her a new side of broadcast journalism.

  

      "I think it's interesting the kind of circles that broadcast journalism and the media are going in order to cater to the mass audience," she said.

  

      In a more inspirational moment, Kaplan described a bookmark he found at a Barnes and Nobles bookstore recently, featuring a quotation from George Elliot. "It said, 'It's never too late to be what you might have been,'" he quoted. "To that I add, 'or what you might need to be.'"