The Changing Shape of Today’s Media – Part 1
Today’s episode of the EU for You podcast is the fifth of a series of six podcasts, featuring unedited recordings from our November 2005 conference on Media and Politics. The conference took place in three sessions, each consisting of a keynote address, followed by a panel discussion. The recording you are about to hear is the keynote speech from the third session, The Changing Shape of Today’s Media. To hear recordings from the first session, Freedom Movements and the Press, and the second session, Transatlantic Media Wars, be sure to check out previous blog posts.
Introducing the third session is Irena Grudzinska Gross, former director of the Institute for Human Sciences. The keynote speech is given by Orville Schell, Dean, Berkeley School of Journalism. Panelists include Fred Barnes from The Weekly Standard, Martin Simecka, then Editor-in-Chief of Sme, and Eugeniusz Smolar, Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Relations, Warsaw. The discussion is moderated by James Hoge, Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Affairs.
The session addresses the question of journalism’s future in light of media concentration, the growth of the Internet, and declining circulations of regular newspapers. In his keynote speech, Orville Schell admits that he does not have an answer to the question how to react to these changes. He cites a conversation he had had with Peter Jennings during a dinner just before the war in Iraq, in which he inquired when the issue of whether America should go to war would be debated. Jennings looked at him, rather stunned, and said, adamantly, “It is not going to happen.“ Schell commented: “So there was the contradiction, right there, staring us in the face: of all the thousands of hours that the networks broadcast in a given week or a month, there wasn’t an hour and a half to put a debate on the air about going to war.” Later, he said, the BBC did air the debate, “but it was our decision, our war, our policy issue, and nobody got to see it.”
