I just thought the only ONLY thing that defined the Red Sox was that they couldn’t win the world series. So then they won, and they’re not really the Red Sox anymore. They’re just some anonymous team that players leave so they can go cut their hair and join the Yankees.

- Curt Siffert

He’s most known for his 16-year stint with Ted Koppel on Nightline, winning awards for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and TWA Flight 800. But, when that show was cancelled, he made an interesting move: Al Jazeera English.

He’s lead anchor over there now, charged with the western hemisphere. The network strives to be the first non-western international news network, diving head first into deep waters heavily patroled by CNN, Fox, MSNBC. They aim to compliment the others, to shift the balance of the international news mechanism, he says, and they do that by becoming a compliment to existing coverage, not a competitor.

“Where other agencies spend 80 percent of their coverage in North American, European, Japanese, and Israeli stories,” he says, “Al Jazeera, on the other hand, does 70 percent of its reporting everywhere else.”

And of course, he opened with Iraq.

“One thing every Iraqi knows,” Marash said, “is that they don’t want to be dominated by outsiders. The country has a long history of domination, and the Americans ignored that history. Instead, they went in with distinctly American ideas of good governance, inconsiderate of what the Iraqis want.”

Marash contends that we wrote our own book. That we ignored volumes of data in the world indicating that what we were planning would end badly. That the Middle East has played host countless times to invading bodies and without fail, the conflict ends badly. That, given all this, we should have known better.

It’s hard not to get into a discussion of conspiracy theory here. And it’s difficult, by the same token, to contradict Marash, who himself has spent years in the region covering these decades-long stories. But boiling down the current situation in Iraq to misunderstood objectives might just be too simple, ingnorant of administration objectives beyond stemming conflict in the region; objectives likely to take years to uncover.

More detail means richer communication, Marash says of journalists. “Reporters must represent reality with fidelity.”

And that’s what Al Jazeera English aims to do. By reducing the number of stories reported in any given half-hour segment, the network aims to drive up the quality and depth of coverage across all stories. It’s a challenge, he says, as the staff of the network comes largely from mainstream media, and breaking bad habits is an ongoing fight.

Dave Marash is a smart guy. Put him on the podium and he’s your wise old grandfather dutifully illumniating the world for you, one race at a time. He’s been everywhere, seen it all, and has the breath left in him to talk about it at length. But in an era in which major media news is losing ground to infotainment, Marash’s vision of Al Jazeera might just have arrived in the nick of time.

The Q&A brought out the question that most were undoubtedly thinking: “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing working for Al Jazeera?” Marash was ditifully diplomatic and long-winded with a response that ended up having quite a fine point on it.

There were sort of two responses among my colleagues. The majority of the responses were, “Well, that’s Marash. If there’s a brick wall, he’ll put his head into it.” And the second response was, sort of, “How dare he.” And particularly, “How dare he, as a Jew, work for the Arabs.” In many ways, it’s the same mentality as the Dubai ports case. “How dare we contract for port security with a global firm that happens to be based in the Arab world?”

Al Jazeera is a funny network. In the West, it’s the voicebox of the terrorist arm, heavily criticized for displaying Al Quaeda beheadings and desert manifestos. But what we don’t see, Marash contends, is the network’s diligence in reporting both sides of the conflict, as graphic as those sides may be. That’s what happens when you have a boss “whose bottom line is not the bottom line, is not share-holder value, but is the product itself.”

No, you can’t tell from the picture. Here he looks angry. Brooding. Somber. Morose. He came out on stage and sat in the chair awaiting his introduction for nearly a full minute looking just… like… this.

Scarey.

But then, the humor came, delivered secretly in that NPR monotone taking us all by sweet surprise. Jokes about drugs and penises. Jokes about Chautauquans and good manners. But mostly, he joked at the expense of the media.

His message, of course, was not to be funny. He came to Chautauqua to talk about the many messages of the media, the many masters served in the business. Interestingly, while the previous speakers leading up to Williams focused on what they were doing to change the way they do business, to make media better, his message was far more empowering: if you don’t like what you’re watching on TV, what you’re reading in the papers, what you hear on the radio, turn it off. Write letters. Make calls. When demand shifts, the market will change to follow it.

Williams’ take on the primary pain the media causes our culture is rooted in fragmentation. Many of these concepts that drive immediate access to focused and filtered information on the web — RSS, portals, subscriptions, etc — naturally drives consumers of media to be generally less informed than their predecessors. It’s narrow-casting, not broadcasting, he says, and this fragmentation of signal is mirroring the fragmentation of our populace as well.

Once, we were a melting pot, culturally diverse Europeans just wanting a place to fit in. Now, we’re a stew, made up of Mexicans, Asians, Latin-Americans, Africans, all coming to the US with one agenda or another, looking to reclaim cultural heritage or identity, to celebrate, rather than fit in. And the media, in search of ratings and circulation, is catering to all those angles at once.

Fragmentation is happening along age lines as well, Williams says. Media latch on to stories about medicare, social security, and the high cost of prescription drugs, catering to the fifth of the American population now over age 65. In the mean time, a fourth of the population are under 18. These are the drive-by media consumers, targeted with flash and drama by the media, anything that will grab the attention of their cell phones, their instant messaging applications.

The conservative-liberal divide is the third media rift: Rush Limbaugh plays host to Vice President Cheny on his show exclusively, narrow-casting directly to the administration’s right.

“Honesty doesn’t play in this media picture, because it doesn’t comfort the audience,” Williams said. “It doesn’t allow them to feel secure in thier opinions when you stand up and tell them something they may not want to hear.”

Yes, Williams got serious. He is, after all, a serious newsman. Listening to his comments, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that he was on track to much broader exposure. If there’s a chance to rebuild an aging media infrastructure into a new, relevant broadcast medium, Williams will be at the front of it.

Then, he called in the “Network” reference, the legendary Howard Beale call to action, driving a nation to cry out, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Of course, that movie’s over 30 years old. What are we doing carrying on about the same message, the same frustration, three decades later?

To me, it’s because the better speech of that movie won out in real-life America. It’s Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen scolding Howard Beale and extolling the meaning of the universe. It’s one of the greatest, most compelling monologues in cinema thanks to the brilliant expository of writer Paddy Chayefsky and as much as I want to repost it here entirely, I’ll just point you in the right direction to watch after a snippit:

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

Arthur Jensen on YouTube
Arthur Jensen MP3

And this may be Juan Williams’ legacy, the same as Howard Beale’s, the same as Don Quixote. But, like Huffington yesterday, the world needs its radical flagwavers, the smart rebels, challenging the norm. He is an oasis in the desert, if the masses can take a minute to stop and listen.

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huffington with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are correct. I’m just not sure which two.

Obviously, she was here to contribute to the discussion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bashing. To be sure, there’s been a boatload of each. But while the other folks in the discussion were from inside the fold, working in traditional media newsrooms and desperately trying to wrap their arms around this non-traditional whatnot, Huffington is coming at it from a different angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she contends hers is one of the highest trafficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a candle to the other representatives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rankings comparing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bottom).

I’ve always had trouble with the fact that her site is not much more than linkbait — limited original editorial content sandwiching link after link to traditional media outlets. But if what she says comes to pass, the Huffington Post might just become a significant player in the media landscape.

While those in the mainstream media (“MSM” as she calls them), are working diligently to drive more of their content to some level of engagement online, she’s talking about opening brinck and mortar news bureaus of bloggers and other citizen journalists and researchers all driving to support the huffingtonpost.com so-called news machine.

This would be an interesting convergence of one massive groundswell of disorganized force crashing again a weathered and heavily beaten shore. But it just may go to support her central thesis: all media will survive. Print is not on it’s last breath, nor is broadcast. Nor is integrity or editorial ethic. We’re just all working to figure out new ways to use them.

Traditional media isn’t helping itself in this transition, however. She pounded on the state of the industry with the build-up to the war in Iraq, reminding the audience of known-erroneous information published in guise of fact turned journalists into “stenographers to power to a very large extent.”

If the country can’t trust traditional media to give us the straight dope on such things, we’ll turn to whomever steps up to the mic (nod to Michael J. Fox in that movie where he was Cheif of Staff to Michael Douglas for allowing me to ape that line poorly).

And it’s Huffington’s turn at the mic, to be sure.

Her talk was all about blogs, the blogosphere, technology, new media, and so on. Which made it all the more ironic that the first question in the Q&A was, “For those of us … who are Internet-impaired, would you define the term ‘blog’ and ‘blogger,’ and tell us what the difference in a blog and a website?”

Good question. There went the last hour.

Still, this is a woman who knows something about managing one’s reputation online. She converted from Republican to Democrat ten years ago and weathered a stream of slings and arrows aimed squarely at her.

I write in the book, I have a whole chapter, on how hard it is to change your mind in public. Because what happens is your friends really don’t what to have anything to do with you because they feel abandoned, and the people in whose direction you are going don’t trust you.

Huffington is carrying an important torch for those of us who’ve chosen to be online, and this audience is representative of a significant portion of the world population who don’t understand the online ecosystem, don’t recognize the importance of blogs to newsgathering and public commentary, and they don’t know where to begin to find the good ones. That this firey Greek is helping dead-tree consumers to find new outlets, then she’s doing her job right.

The shifting dynamic between those two forces is exactly like the relationship between Sarah Conner and the T101 in the “Terminator” movies. At first, the visitor from the future(digital) seemed intent on killing Sarah (print). But as the relationship progressed and the sequels unspooled, the Terminator became Sarah and her son’s one hope for salvation. Today, you can almost hear digital media (which for some reason has a thick Austrian accent) saying to print: “Come with me if you want to live!”

Am I the only one who finds that … funny?

Such is, ironically, the situation with David Westin, current president of ABC News. Now, my experience with corporate lawyers on one hand, and my experience in the newsroom on the other, and there’s just no way to make this math work.

Yet, somehow, by all current measures and standards for broadcast news, it does. A decade ago, Westin stepped into the presidency and has maintained healthy development of news programming over the years. As a newsman, he’s learned the business from some of the best; Peter Jennings, Charlie Gibson, Barbara Walters to name a few.

What struck me most about his talk today was his overall tone of contrition. On Iraq: “We blew it.” On build-up to war and WMD’s: “We blew it.” On election projections in 2000: “We blew it. Twice.” In general, when there is a perceived failure in reporting: “We blew it.”

And that’s where he wraps up all critical failures in the field. “Whith all the changes we see in the media, there’s a temptation to be distracted from reporting,” said Westin.

In many respects, this connects directly to Harwood’s discussion yesterday on the role of newspaper reporting in the media sphere. Where TV fails, newspapers pick up some of the slack. Unfortunately, distration from reporting is perceived to happen more and more often in network television.

“The real difference between doing right and doing wrong in journalism lies in how closely we are to covering the news,” he said.

And that, according to Westin, is the thrust of his leadership in the ABC newsroom.

Take the Virginia Tech shooting, for example. The news head says that Charlie Gibson was widely lauded with critical acclaim in the media for level-headed and balanced coverage, not catering to the sensational, to the maudlin, to coverage designed to pull heartstrings. Instead, he said, they stuck to facts, driving toward who the assailant was, how he was afflicted psychologically, and how the University was equipped to deal with such situations.

Westin is on the Internet bandwagon. “The Internet offers the possibility of greatly expanding our newsgathering capability,” he said.

Take the Tom Foley/Page story, for example. As it originally hit ABC, the story was not ready for prime time. They posted the brief on the Internet and within hour were flooded with tips from other pages saying that they were insulted ABC would post that Foley was simply “overly friendly.” The story built itself before their eyes thanks to those following on the net.

Westin’s position is that the Internet becomes a bellweather, an audition stage for stories to make it to the big screen. At the same time, he laments the in depth reporting that is afforded print journalists. To me, there’s a contradiction — and opportunity — in there somewhere.

Imagine an ABC that leveraged its considerable breadth of reach around the globe and used the website as less of a test-bed and more of a place of reportage. This morning’s lead stories on ABCNews.com? Killer rains, Iraq, and John Edwards and his wife in a street fight with Ann Coulter.

ABCNews.com stories demonstrate what all three major network websites offer: TV reporters writing snack stories not fit for broadcast. Let’s see what happens when these sites become true journalistic assets. Oh, and don’t forget the iPhone.

Two more points stuck out for me. The first was the more obvious ethical issue: when is the reportage coming out of Iraq no longer worth the personal sacrifice we’re asking our journalists to make there? His take: when the value of the reporting is no longer worth the risk involved, they’ll pull out of Iraq. Note, according to Westin: “We’re not there yet.”

The second point I found interesting has nothing to do with the war, the news, or reporting at all. During the Q&A, an audience member asked if being in the Disney stable posed ethical questions for Westin in leading a news organization.

The advantages, he says, are significant.

When 9/11 happened, we went on the air obviously commercial-free, but we went on the air for about four-and-a-half days straight, 24 hours a day, and we preempted everything on the network. We commissioned millions of dollars in expenses immediately without ever calling anybody, and the only thing I ever heard from Disney was, “How can we help you?”

So, there’s the issue of resources. Clearly, had they been a stand-alone news organization without the rich uncle, things would have been different. But what about editorial sanctity?

People think I get calls all the time from our corporate headquarters saying, “Cover that story;”"Don’t cover the story.” That never happens. Now that’s because they’re really good people or maybe it’s because they know that, if that ever did happen, it would be an explosion. There’d be a huge scandal. But I can tell you, that doesn’t happen.

OK, so Disney pays the bills, and they don’t question or influence your editorial process. It’s a match made in heaven, right?

The problem is a different problem. We are about a $600 million business, in terms of our costs every year. Compared to the Walt Disney Company, that’s almost miniscule. And as a reult, this is not like the Sulzbergers owning a newspaper, or the Grahams owning a newspaper, where the news organization is at the center, the core of what drives the company and what they care about. This good news is they leave us alone. The bad news is the CEO of the compnay has a lot more important things to do…”

I’ll be damned if I can find just how many people visit Disney parks each month. But here’s a loose point of comparison. Since opening in 1967, approximately 500 million people have seen the Pirates of the Carribbean exhibit. How many people does the ABC News organization reach each month? 200 million.

Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat.Does Harwood have his real hair? Yes, he says, demonstrating his answer to what may be the most important political question of the morning.

Decline of the political party system? Hardly, he says. We’re just on the cusp of a new party system.

The new one hasn’t ended the parties; it’s changed the way people think and understand them, and I think they’ve actually emerged stronger, because people know what they’re voting for.

Do they really? There’s some data to support it, at least to support the assertion that when it counts, the public steps up to the plate. In 2000, only 105 million people voted. In 2004, that number went up to 122 million, largely attributed to strong sentiment one way or the other toward the Iraq war.

And yet, in spite of this solidification in the party system as Harwood proports, the American public is becoming less and less easy to pin down on some more traditionally divisive social issues. According to a recent study by the Pew Foundation, we the people skew right on gay marriage and gay adoption, left on embryonic stem cell research, and straight down the middle on abortion. We’re not moving further apart, we’re moving closer to center, according to the study.

Harwood is on the community line in this speech. I’m hard-pressed to find a scholar of media that doesn’t support the assertion that the search for viewers and increased circulation drives desperation reportage across news outlets; a drive to cover sensational and salacious that trumps – intentionally or otherwise – reporting stories to their conclusion. Dare we bring up Duke LaCrosse?

On the other side of the fence, political pundits are better now than ever at taking control of the conversation, themselves trumping newsgathering with talking points and spin.

But I’m not convinced Harwood made a clear and compelling connection that the media is complicit in the on-going bifurcation in the party system. Instead, I’d submit that media is reporting less adeptly on social issues, taking the easy — and cheap — out on hard reporting decisions, and the result is the appearance of a media role in goosing outrage and salaciousness for fun and profit. That the parties are better at this game than the media doesn’t make it news.A bit off topic, he brought up one of the best points of his speech in the Q&A.

Q: Let’s focus on newspapers for a second. One question has to do with what is the consequence of the reducation of newspapers, the reduction of staff, on journalism, and is there a ripple affect of reducing commitment in journalism in newspapers that will then have a consequence in the overall delivery in news beyond newspapers?

Harwood: That’s a very smart question, and it’s absolutely true for this reason. The most important piece in television news everyday is what’s in newspapers. One of the interesting things that I’ve noticied going from, you know, people you keep their foot in both camps: Television people don’t have a lot of self confidence about their own judgement.

This is the paper of record connundrum. I fully contend that much of the market for broadcast doesn’t consider their medium as important as traditional print news. This fuels the more symbiotic relationship between print and broadcast: news begins in the papers, is supplemented the next day in pictures, and is investigated to conclusion in print. The rise in cable outlets and their 24-hour coverage has had some affect on the practical application of this relationship, but it’s certainly there. Fewer reporters trained in print newsgathering will most certainly have a negative affect on quality and quantity of reportage.

I had the opportunity to meet Harwood after his talk. Turns out, he’s joining the online discussion and starting a blog this week through his role as a political reporter with CNBC. He stopped short of supporting the assertion that the rise of citizen media fueled by David Gilmor and his ilk was leading to a new middle-media. I told him I thought it was great, his journey into the blogosphere, and welcomed him. Where could we find him online?

He couldn’t remember the URL.Tomorrow, David Westin, President of ABC News.