Dumb and Dumber?  The Challenge of Local News and Public Education
Transcript

Greg: Well, good evening, welcome, my name is Greg Bush; I direct the Institute for Public History at the University of Miami and this is the first of a series of four programs this spring addressing the topic Democracy in Miami: A Work in Progress. Some, several people have said, somehow it doesn’t seem like a bunch of words that fit, but somehow they do. They can. This idea came out of a conversation I had last fall with Dean Jane Connelly. The idea was to address a set of national concerns resonating in this presidential election year yet with a uniquely local flavor and set of perspectives. These were to be community forums involving students, representatives of several nonprofit groups, and residents, the public in approachable dialogue with different kinds of people including experts. So I want to thank Jane and the College for their support. We also designed these to be accessible through the web with transcriptions of the proceedings and even streaming video for those who might be unable to be here or want to see it again and tell others. The flyers that you got about this program include the website, so within a fairly short period of time I think it’s going to be loaded with more stuff including links and things that you can read beyond what you see here tonight.

So I want to thank people in the library in relation to that. We have developed a set of panels with a number of broad ranging topics to be discussed in the next several months. Topics will focus on the diverse ethical traditions in our region, the problems of planning and growth management, and our next panel on March 29 entitled Up From Cynicism will be a program about politics, campaign finance and civic activism, and one of the people that will be in that panel will be commissioner Katy Sorensen, Thomasina Williams and several others will be there as well. Ric Katz I think is the third one.

I also want to thank the League of Women Voters and the Urban Environment League for promoting this to a wider audience. The Urban Environment League is having a dinner on the 9^th of March, if I am not mistaken, on the politics of funding for our parks at the Miami River Inn. If anybody is interested can contact me or the Miami River Inn, for further on that. I have tried to provide a sense of overall balance in this series even though each panel does not achieve a gender balance for example here or ethnic balance in each and every one of them, so be it. I think there is overall balance in it.

The format for each evening is going to be basically me making a few, maybe even provocative comments at the outset. Then each panelist will speak for five to ten minutes, add a little bit of back and forth between us and then open it for questions from anybody in the audience in the last 20 minutes, half hour or something like that. I’d like to be done at 9.

This evening we’re going to focus on a set of topics that normally do not get lumped together for a set of people that have never been together. The topic is essentially a takeoff of the Jim Carey movie Dumb and Dumber, and it’s all about the challenge of local news and public education trying to get some of us to think about that a little more together. Our guests are two newsmen and two educator or administrators: Tony Doris, in the yellow shirt is a resident of South Miami, a former reporter with the Miami Daily Business Review, an acute observer of the local scene through local public radio just taken a position as an investigative reporter with the Palm Beach Post. So you’re free from this area to say whatever you want (laughter). Michael Putney next to Tony is as many of you know a distinguished long time reporter with Channel 10, host of the Sunday Morning Show: This Week in South Florida and columnist for the Miami Herald. Merritt Stierheim, superintendent of the Miami Dade Public Schools, former County Manager, twice, City of Miami Manager, other manager positions. He’s a resident of Pine Crest and expects to be moving on to other pursuits come this summer. And then finally to my left is Walter Secada is from one perspective a new voice in the community, recently hired by the University of Miami’s School of Education from the University of Wisconsin where he created a distinguished record as a specialist in Multicultural Education, sharing one important study on Hispanic teen dropouts. Walter was born in Peru and grew up in Miami, so I thought his perspective, having been away from Miami for a while, would be unique.

Let me begin with a couple of general comments. Do local news media and public schools provide the basic tools and information in the aura of civility needed to produce citizens that can make informed decisions about local or national politics? Is that an impossible goal? Do they promote an adequate public dialogue on important issues? What pressures exist behind our schools and media that make them less effective than they could be in informing us about the complex world around us? Complaints have been long standing against the popular culture that diffuses both institutions. It is alleged that they often reinforce the lowest common denominator of appeal, dumbing down the public. The older notion was that we were becoming a mass culture of automatons, a nation of sheep, according to writer William Letterer in the 1950s. These days many see this as an overstatement derived from the simplistic fears of the 1950s as well. Yet lingering and unanswered concerns remain it seems to me. There has been a growing bureaucratization of education producing sometimes-deadening structures of sameness symbolized by what some see as the tyranny of the FCATs for example. There has also been a growing conglomerate dominance of news, which has often featured interchangeably sensational stories and blow-dried personalities. There is an ominous sameness about local news dispensed across the nation reflecting the presence of media consultants, as many have noted. And even Herald reporters note the fact that they have less reporters to cover local politics and serious issues in their paper due to bottom line restrictions and demand for corporate profit. So in one sense this raises serious questions, it seems to me, between several of these institutions. None of these are easily answered obviously, but I think these people can provide us with interesting and fresh perspectives. So I guess the bottom-line question is and then I’ll go away is: what are the key challenges of facing public education and the news media in producing better informed and engaged people in our world? So perhaps starting I can turn a little if I can to Tony if I can.

Tony: Sure

Greg: By the way, we’re going to have Alejandra over there who’s been helping put up a sign after 7 or 8 minutes something like that…

Tony: I’ll run out after 50 seconds or something. First of all, thank you. It’s an honor to be invited to a discussion entitled Dumb and Dumber. (Laughter). I’m not sure which, well, never mind. You face these problems as a reporter, the thing that you spoke about Greg that hit me the most, the restraints, the corporate restraints that we as reporters face. You know you go into journalism knowing you know you’re never going to make much money, but know you’re going to make the world a better place and then you hit an environment where they’re insisting on 30% profit margins and suddenly there are fewer and fewer reporters in the newsroom. Those that are there are running around like crazy, it’s not like most reporters are given all the time in the world to work on stories and to define the things that are really wrong with society and try to set about exposing them. So you know we’re in an environment where we’re told basically what to report within certain frameworks. You know at one point at the Daily Business Review I was doing a lot of, you know, county government reporting, looking at scandals and contracts being bid or not being bid and suddenly corporate decided "Well, we want to focus more on specific legal issues", and so you got to do what they tell you to do. So that’s one kind of example of what happens. I have colleagues at other newspapers in particular who have just seen the reporting staffs diminished. Jobs are kept open.

Meanwhile, wages are frozen or the fiscal year keeps getting pushed back six months, so the people who are there get discouraged and go on to things like marketing where they hope to make some more money. So a lot of the idealisms of your most idealistic people get diminished itself and so these are hard things to work with. And the things that can sometimes turn that around is when people come from the public who respond to what we write and do complain to the newspapers that there’s not enough of this and not enough of that.

And as far as the sensationalism, I know what, Greg you’re referring to because I watch some of the TV channels, not Channel 10 but some of the others in particular, and I have come across things in my reporting as a newspaper reporter where articles need more sensationalist aspects to them because as you’re reporting say a financial scandal, you’re looking at documents and numbers and spreadsheets, and they don’t cry out at you in any dramatic way. If you’re writing about, if you see some financial papers and you’re writing about a contract and you see some guy is paying 4 dollars for asphalt and this guy is paying 25 dollars for asphalt it doesn’t mean a thing until you realize that hey this government agency that is paying 3 times as more for asphalt than another government agency next door to it which means that all the taxpayers are paying tens of millions of dollars more a year out of their pockets so that one popular local family can reap huge amounts of money. And you know is that sensational? Or is that just finding the true drama and the true outrage in the facts? And so, maybe some of the TV stations and some of the newspaper articles seem a little more dramatic than they should be, but maybe on the other hand, we’ve all out there, I’m a reader just like the rest of you, we’ve become so used to things that we don’t realize when something is staring us in the face that really is atrocious. And so, we all pay this price. We’re all victims and we don’t realize it. I don’t mind a little sensationalism and a little entertainment value along with my news. It just depends on when there’s no news whatsoever and it’s all entertainment. My eight minutes are up.

Greg: Ok, ok. I guess Michael next.

Michael: Greg, thank you for the invitation, and I salute you and the University and I’m delighted that the University is going host one of the Presidential debates. I know this is part of what you hope is going to be a kind of a community wide dialogue leading up to that debate. Dumb and dumber, I thought that was one of the anchor teams in Miami. But having made that flippant and ugly remark, let me say that while in my dotage begin to see a "dumbing" down of news media from where I began 35 years ago. I also see some excellent people and without embarrassing say, Tony Doris. When Tony used to write for the Daily Business Review, it certainly gave me lots of good ideas, and I sort of liberally borrowed from some of his enterprise reporting dealing with say the Mas family and [ ] striking scandals which he was too discreet to mention, which family he had in mind but that was the family. That is the family.

Going back to what the premise of this, the challenge of local news media and public education. I have to say that as I was driving out here tonight, I was trying to say what does one have to do with the other, and I’m afraid the answer is not a lot. And honestly, I’m not sure that what we in the news media do should have a didactic or educational element. If I wanted to be teaching government, I’d have gotten a PhD and been here at the University of Miami or at FIU I guess. I chose not to. I chose to sort of work my side of the aisle. That reminds me, one of my favorite aphorisms is from Jesse [ ] who once was the speaker of the California Assembly, and he said my favorite political aphorism he said, "If you cant take their money, drink their booze, and play around with their women, and vote against them in the morning, you don’t belong in politics." I cleaned it up just a little bit. I think the problem of course in South Florida is that they take the money, they drink the booze, they eat the food, they fool around with the women and then they do exactly what the special interest tell them to do. But I like my side of the aisle. I think that there are all kinds of ways of being in the public discourse.

Every community, certainly this one, deserves a robust and vital kind of discourse, between us, between citizens. It’s just that, the only difference for me, I have a soapbox, but I try to use it with good judgment and without advancing my personal causes and passions which in fact I do have. I mean I work with a guy who today told me, I’ve worked with him for 15 years, and he said, "You know somebody asked me the other day, ‘what political party does Michael Putney belong to?’ And I couldn’t tell him." I said, "That’s the greatest compliment I’ve received, will get in months".

To refer to something, I’m kind of dancing around here, to refer to something that was just said by Tony, perhaps when I began as a young reporter at a 250 watt radio station in Columbia, Missouri which was way too good for me. I was awful and nearly wanted to throw up every time I went on the air, and I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri at the time. Perhaps back them I was naïve to believe that somehow being a journalist I could change the world. Well, let me assure you that long ago, I learned that I would be lucky if I could change myself, and occasionally, you can do a kind of a report that will have some influence on public policy, and that’s also the good. But I do not go to work everyday believing that somehow I am Don Quixote, and I am going to rail against the windmills and change anything. But I still am working on myself.

But let me say just briefly about television local news that it is too often awful and banal and appeals to the lowest common denominator, and my advice to anybody who believes that, as I suspect you do, is to take your channel changer and if its that way and you’re not learning anything, then just turn of your TV or go to another channel or pick up a magazine. I firmly believe that we all need to be better consumers of news. The news that you want in a style that appeals to you, it really is there, and maybe its on Channel 2, maybe it’s on channel 7, believe it or not, and they’ve got some good reporters, maybe it’s in the Daily Business Review, maybe it’s in the New Republic maybe it is on 60 minutes.

All I can say is when you feel that what you are watching or what you are reading is not worth the time, then there are two things to do: either put it down and pick up something else or go to another channel, or turn of the TV or the radio, or write a letter or call a news manager at that institution. It may come as a surprise to you, but believe me one person can have a huge impact on the news which we cover and the style in which it is presented. Four or five people can be a tidal wave in terms of changing things.

The one thing however, to go back to where we began, that may not change is that somehow, most people who are news mangers don’t believe with the exception for example, over the last year or two in say the Miami-Dade Public Schools or public institutions that have had problems. This man of course is trying to fix the problems and is sort of the myth of Sisyphus. He’s going up a hill pushing a rock and it makes a great story. Unfortunately, most news managers don’t believe that government makes good television. And I am grateful that I work with people, that when I go to work everyday. I sort of say, "here’s something about schools system or about Miami-Dade County or about the state of Florida or perhaps even a policy in Washington that I think is important", and I am a very fortunate reporter that most of the time these news managers, most of whom are 20 or 30 years younger than I am, simply say "sure that sounds like a good idea". So I am one of the lucky ones.

Greg: Thank you. Next.

Merritt: Oh right. Wow. Again compliments to you, Greg. I think that this is an extremely important subject, difficult to get your hands around. If you let me loose, I could spend a couple of hours, and I’m going to try to be selective because I understand we’re supposed to limit ourselves to about eight minutes. First of all, my two distinguished friends from the [ ] are among the best. Tony Doris wrote some very tough stories on issues that I thought were tremendously important, and I couldn’t get the Herald to write about them and I couldn’t get other media to write about them. But he stuck with it and did it. And of course, Michael, I wish we could clone him, for his integrity and intellect for what he presents to us every Sunday and what he presents in the his columns. And I don’t know you Sir, but I’m going to enjoy getting to know you.

Michael said dotage; I feel like a dinosaur. I don’t feel like one, I feel good but the chronology tells me I have been in this business for 44 years and if you name somebody at the Miami Herald I think I knew them quite well, going back to John Pennycamp and John McMullen at some point, and I see Dusty Melton out there. He covered me many years before he took up another business and I lament the commercialization, if you will, of the forth state. And I mean that, it’s painful for me because I’ve dedicated my life t public service and I believe in it and I love it. And it grieves me that years ago, not that long ago, when I was first county manager from 76 to 86, and we went through some very challenging times with Mariel and the riots and the Haitian Refugees and good times. We built the Decade of Progress. We had a lot of good exciting things going on. And I could, not walk out of a room and there were a minimum of three or four radio reporters…and they would stick the microphone in your face and they were investigative reporters for the radio station, they wanted to be on the cutting edge of news. It was competition on the drive time, and not just drive time but during the day, they would cut in with news.

Television was competitive. I’m going back to Ralph Rennick and Wayne Ferris and all the personalities and they were investigative reporters in television. Today, drive time, you’re listening essentially to somebody reading you the Miami Herald. Maybe they throw in something else, so if you read the paper, you really don’t have to listen to the news. Television reporting is primarily sensational. It is a ratings game and it’s commercial as hell.

I’ve had a wonderful love-hate relationship with the Miami Herald. I have a reputation over there. They called it the big hulk attack. When they would do a bad story or whatever else, I would be on the phone beginning with whoever I could get a hold of and chewing my way down, and now I am building a reputation as "Mellow Merritt", if you could believe that, but I am. I’m a lot more mellow and stoic about these things and yet it frustrates me when there’s a real story and I have to talk about the Herald because it is aside from the television it’s the only game in town. With all due respect, everybody else has niche marketing. I mean Miami Today is a fine little newspaper. It’s a niche market for the business community. Your Neighbors or your community newspapers is a niche market for the neighborhood and so forth. I could go on. Anyway, they’ll get a story and they’ll hold it. There’s no more, unless I wanted to hold a press conference and bring the television down, then they’d run with it. Otherwise, they’ll hold it for a slow day, a Saturday, when they’ve got a thin newspaper or whatever.

So going to the heart of your question, there is a tremendous challenge. I don’t really have this problem in the national scene. There are so many excellent reports and I don’t care whether it’s Newsweek or Times Magazine, The New York Times, or even The Herald and local publications. On the national scene, I think we get a tremendous amount of good information whether it’s presidential or Iraq or whatever it is. I mean there’s a plethora of sources of information. Plus your television, you know, 60 Minutes, so on and so forth, you know there’s a lot of good stuff.

I’ve always lamented that 99% of human existence takes places locally. When you turn on the faucet, you flush the toilet, you walk out on the curb, you have a streetlight out here, you need a police officer, building, fire, whatever it is, all of our existence takes place locally, and yet the focus is always on the national, and we really have very little influence over it and can’t change it. That’s been a longstanding, sort of frustration. So I have to be stoic; as the world turns, I can’t change it. It’s bottom line.

You know with the Herald, it started out 15%, then it was 18, then it was 18, then it was 25, now I don’t know if they’re going for 30 or whatever. You have an exodus of great reporters who leave. I told Alberto [ ] to hire this young man over here. He’s one of the best investigative reporters I’ve seen in a long time. I thought he was a great addition, and I mean I’m not picking on The Herald. I’m really not. Basically, I think they’ve been very supportive and helpful. We do have problems in construction, terrible, and maintenance and that was fair game. I would have liked to see a little more on the positive things that were happening, but you know that was fair game and we still haven’t missed, we’re not out of it yet.

Public education, teaching our children. Well, we teach to the FCAT. We want to teach to the Sunshine standards, but the focus is primarily getting that degree and hopefully helping our children graduate. Civics and everything. I used to have that complaint as city and county manager for thirty or forty years. That we don’t teach enough social… Who knows what the council manager form of government is? How many of our students in schools know what the commission manager form of government is? All of our Hispanic populations know "alcalde", "el jefe" and so forth and so on because of cultures that they may have left. But here’s the most popular form of government in America and how much do we educate? Zippo, as far as I’m concerned, and most people are relatively uninformed about local issues and if we look at the Hispanic media, we look at the Hispanic radio, opinions, not even always good opinions, but opinions and not fact. Ok, you want news or you want facts? So, you better shut me off.

Greg: We’ve got follow-ups…

Merritt: ok

Greg: Walter.

Walter: Well thanks for the invitation. Actually, there are things where I agree and where I disagree with my colleagues, and I’ll start with a little bit of my own history. I do remember Ralph Rennick. I remember back when there was Miami News and that case really interests me because it’s the source of those things why I disagree with your claim that there is no relationship between education and newspapers. In fact, both of them serve educative functions. Newspapers, whether you like it or not, the media whether you like it or not, does somehow inform. And it does provide an entry into important topics so that if something picks someone’s interests, he or she should pursue it, and I still remember the first Arab-Israeli war back in the 60s, six pages per day were devoted within the Herald to reporting that war. There were pictures. There were all sorts of information there. It was absolutely first grade. If you think about how much ink was spilled, but it was still a way to get into it. Certainly, the Miami News from back then did provide information, locally that was very good and very telling, and very important.

So, so far, schools also presumably educate the people. They expose you to ideas. They expose you to so-called facts. It would seem to both serve parallel functions in different ways. So I would beg to differ with you that there are no touchstones.

The other place where this really, but it is one of things that really does come home. For my mid-life crisis, I went to Paris. I figured if you’re going to do it, you should do it some place different. And there were a group of students that were upset that the Parisian French government had really shorted the schools outside of Paris for funding. They reserved the Champs-Elysees for a demonstration. You know that’s how you do it, you go make reservations at a French restaurant, you go make reservations at the Champs-Elysees for your demos. They shut down the city for this night, and the subways, the metro went under it, but the next day I was watching the news. Fifteen, sixteen year old boys and girls were talking about how their teachers taught badly, their schools, the paints were peeling, how all of these things were going on with the quality of education. It was a complaint, a legitimate complaint that they were petitioning the government.

Now you think about the United States where students would go and reserve, any, you know, Biscayne Blvd to have a demonstration about the quality of education in Dade County. You would think, "Wow, this is news. This is important news." The students held forth properly and magically, the French government found half a billion French francs to devote to the outset. Ok, so this is really interesting. I come back to the States. The first thing everyone asks me about is did I avoid the riots of the students. Why? National media in the United States showed a picture of student taking something and shoving it to the window of the Champs-Elysees. That is all that Americans saw about this.

Sensationalism, it does speak to how it is, what it is in salience to within national and local news. To me, I would have liked to see a little delving, for example, into what the Free Trade Association stuff was about, but instead what I read about was "Oh, goodness, back to the 60s". My goodness, if we have to go back to the 60s to talk about it, you guys are clueless about what’s going on. There are a few aphorisms. If any article starts with a statement about trying to draw references back to the 60s, they’re not dealing with the realities of today. They’re so enchanted with what they thought was going on in the 60s.

I myself have been interviewed by the newspapers. I myself have been talking to teachers and all that. I have five things, five rules for when you deal with the media.

Rule Number 1, you will be misquoted. Your job is to make sure you’re not misquoted. Your job is to make sure that you’re misquoted in something that doesn’t matter. But as a reader, that says I should read this. That person was probably misquoted. That’s how I read whenever I read or whenever I listen to the media.

Rule Number 2, they need a sound byte. I cannot tell you how many colleagues have gone and on and on only to find out that all those things were in the sound byte. So you give them the sound byte early and quick and you make sure it’s something that is understandable. When I have been interviewed about education, my two major sound bytes. If a kid leaves school…..

Second sound byte is how to do with…. I was quoted with "Hispanic dropouts". I [ ] a study on it and they called me the next year and said that the dropout rate among Hispanics went down about 3 percentage points. First of all, I hadn’t read the report, but they wanted me to comment on it. So my sound byte, real quick, could be a statistical hiccup, but it got the point across. You have to actually be able to get the point across in a way, because if you don’t get the sound byte, which you know they won’t misquote, rule number one applies.

Rule number 3, if you read the things, for example, the papers and all the things about Haiti, the sound bytes are all in there. They’re looking for that, they want conflict. So anything they can get you to say that seems you’re disagreeing with someone else, be careful because that is what they’ll quote or misquote. So if you and a friend of yours are put in the newspaper disagreeing, rule number one applies. Call your friend, have a beer, talk about it. So when you yourself are reading the media, those of you, or listening to the news, and you’re seeing how it seems two people really hate one another, look at rule number one, they’re probably being misquoted, or look at rule number two, it’s the sound bytes that are getting pulled out of context. Right? I’m being serious. You think I’m kidding here.

And conflict sells. Sounds bytes sell. Misquotes are the things that they’re going for.

But then Rule number 4, which everyone has to remember is that that is the only way we get our message across. That is the primary educative function, one of the primary ones that has to do in our society. So that the goal here is then to work with the media in such a way that we can get across what we need to get across in a simple manner that allows you entry. So that the person that is interested in this can pursue it further, and the person that knows very little about it, for heaven’s sake, leaves with a minimum number of misconceptions.

Yeah I do think both media and educational systems do serve those functions, though.

Greg: Ok, I have a couple follow up questions and then any of you can jump in too. What are, would you say is the real power of the media consultant in these days? In other words, what do they do? Are they really driving the bus? Is there any way to combat them effectively?

Michael: Yeah, a good question Greg and the easy answer is yes we have McNews in this country and to a sad degree we do. There’s certainly consultants. There are a couple, a guy named Frank Maggot out in Iowa, consults with a huge number of stations. The Washington Post consults with the stations for which I work. Seven stations have one guy who spends most of his time going around and tweaking what we do. I don’t find this, however, as nefarious or as frightening as I do the conglomeration of media ownership. That I find to be, and to use maybe an unpopular phrase, for a somewhat slightly left of center reporter, I find that to be anti-American and I find it frightening. And I think that the point that Merritt made is a very good point.

When you have Clear Channel owning 60% of radio in this country, and then you have an FCC which allows Clear Channel to do this and is allowing the big television networks, Rupert Murdock gulp and devour. You know, Rupert, gosh, and he’s very good at what he does but what this does is the tangible result is that when George Burgess, one of the many protégés of Merritt Stierheim when our county manager in Miami Dade county walks out of a meeting there are no radio reporters. Or maybe one lonely guy from WIOD who is asking a question. There are tangible results in the news that we read, the news that we watch, the news we listen to. The upshot for me is that the only maybe the best news operation in this country right now is National Public Radio.

Greg: Actually, a follow-up in relation to that too, why isn’t there any push for a local national public radio that would have a local public news? In other words, I was even thinking in terms of WLRN and so the pressures that you’re under there, why isn’t that kind of reformulated in different ways.

Merritt: think in a way, we have that Greg. There are a lot of local programming in WLRN both radio and television but because we can access the National Public Radio we get some tremendous programming that comes in on a national level. I mean Diane reeves, some of these shows are very provocative and very informative and very interesting. Interesting that you say that. That’s what I listen to. I’m tuned in all the time, many times on television.

Tony: One of the things that’s interesting about that though, I don’t know about the public radio standpoint, how you pay for local news, but you have a one newspaper town in Miami as you have all over the country for economic reasons that have been going on for quite some time. And when WLRN decides it wants to improve its local news coverage, they pay the Herald to provide local news. So you got a one newspaper town and that one newspaper is providing the local news to the one public radio station that has really good national news.

Merritt: Well, I’m going to defend that just a little bit. We got, you have a five minute presentation by the Herald that expands the…it was mutually beneficial because it was a concise synopsis. If you agree that the Miami Herald is the primary media outlet with the exception of television then they are giving you a conceptual or capsule report on what they have. That expands the listener-ship of WLRN. It’s beneficial to the Miami Herald and when we expand out listener-ship, then whatever advertising we have, this public radio station receives to do its good works is expanded. So, I understand we can be critical but on the other hand it expands the capability of our local public radio.

Tony: I don’t know what other ways WLRN could provide local news. But one of the things that you touched on before that has been really troubling for me over the years is the lack of local news in the major paper in town. You look at the neighbor section and ask yourself, "Do you feel that after reading the neighbor section every week" again there are a lot of people that work for the neighbor section, very intelligent people, if you talk to them, one on one who edit the sections, but "do you feel you really know what’s going on in your hometown?" I used to work for the St. Pete Times, longer ago than I’d like to admit, but they take their local sections and they wrap them the outside of their newspapers so that when it’s delivered to your door, you’re getting the Clearwater Times or the Largo Times, and underneath in kind of shadow letters it says St. Pete’s Times, and it is a daily newspaper with daily news and they take great pride in that. They take great pride in that and you don’t see that here and you don’t see that most towns, quite frankly. And that’s something that’s really lacking because the important local news happen locally and you don’t see them picked up and it’s not that things don’t happen locally. If there’s one thing that’s of huge importance well the Metro section might pick it up. But by and large, I don’t know what’s going on in my community unless there’s a crisis. And that’s a real problem.

Michael: You know part of, to go back what Walter had said earlier and Greg as well part of what I would fault public education, and Merritt don’t take this personally, but there are just so many people that show up in our newsroom and you know we have, I think we have the 16^th largest television market in the US. And yet we have very bright young men and women who show up in our newsroom having worked in three or four other small cities before they sort of earned their spurs and sort of get to Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and well I don’t want to name names but we have people that believe that gerunds will take the place of a burp and I say, "Why don’t you stop using gerunds?" And they say, "What?" The –ing stuff, how about present tense, how about past tense? Could you just try a simple [ ] declarative sentence? Don’t put an –ing. I am something of a pariah in our newsroom for having these heretical ideas but it also goes back to the last time that Merritt was the county manager, I’ll never forget being in the press room and they were discussing the budget. Now, I would certainly confess, as somebody with a couple of degrees in English literature that a budget is a daunting thing to report, and I’m not terribly good at it. However, a reporter from another station came up to me at one point and said, "Well they keep adding the [ ]. How do you add a [ ]? What is a [ ]?" So, that person obviously should not be trying to report on the budget.

Walter: That actually touches on a thing, which I have noticed the last few years, is that given the fact that you’re losing the number of reporters, the people who actually call me for interviews or call other of my colleagues for interviews, they no longer have a broad knowledge of the area that they’re covering. For many of them, this is the third or fourth thing in a huge list of things they have to do. So as a result, whereas in the past one could presume a large body of knowledge on part of the reporter that you could call upon and now I find I have to spend half of my time with them really educating them on what’s going on.

Michael: Merritt, how many reporters have you trained?

Merritt: You know the Herald had a policy when we were building MetroRail that it was sort of like the police policy, you know they’re just not going to leave a policeman on a beat for more than six months, and they would always change the reporter and this reporter would come in and it was a huge education, and it became so frustrating because I had to start at ground zero and try to tell them where we were, where we were going, and what the problems and challenges were. I never understood it. Now at the Miami News they have [Morton Lukeoff]. Now [Mort] was an institution. This guy knew more about what was happening in the county courthouse than the mayor, the clerk and me combined. I mean, I could tell you stories about him. It used to be a race to get the budget. He would lie, steal, cheat do whatever he had to do, break in to get the budget and beat the Herald.

I remember one time, very quickly, I was a having a meeting with staff because we had the energy crisis, you remember when everybody was line dup at the gas stations? And in the middle of this meeting, on the old courthouse, on the ninth floor, I took out a little portable radio. I had about six or eight staff people around and I flipped on the radio got a music station, went over to the door by my secretary and put it on the floor playing this music. And we went on and had our meeting and so on and then Danny Alvarez, at the end of the meeting, stayed and said, "Mr. Manager I don’t mean to be nosy, but why did you take this radio out and out it by the door?" I said, "Well, you see we have a reporter by the name of Morton [Lukeoff], and the courthouse was built in 1926 and it has letter drops in the door and you flip off the thing and Morton would come and put his ear by the letter drop and listen to what was going on. That’s a true story.

Tony: You know, I could say, you know, one of the structural problems with newspapers, is that we’re supposed to be generalists. So we need guides to teach us, you know, nobody knows how to read a budget, nobody knows anything about any specialty. It’s great when you can be a specialized real estate report or banking reporter and you learn what you need to learn. But you’re right, it’s, there’s not enough staff to let people specialize the way they used to and the other problem is, and it’s not unique to journalism, is definitely true that once you’ve been around for 20 years or so you’re a high number on your organization’s budget and so people with institutional knowledge is not as valued as much as it should be. I mean you end up sitting there giving advice to everybody who’s sitting all around you when they come asking you for questions and looking kind of glazed-eyed but it’s not valued on a corporate level. And after a while also, you can’t afford to support a family on that kind of living so that’s another reason that kind of institutional knowledge just goes out the door and you end up having to teach.

Walter: But then when you think about local news and you think about that sort of stuff, the people who actually know what’s happening in the neighborhoods, the people that have that kind of background knowledge to be able to report on things factually. You don’t have to write a long story to get to the essence of a problem. But very often I notice a sensational piece can replace an essential piece very easily. And I think part of the problem has to do with the human resources that you can place, that you can bring to bear on it. and that’s one of the tragedies right now that’s going on.

Greg: Let me just shift this a little bit, maybe back to the ability of students to in fact interpret the news. In other words, I guess I’m curious in terms of the school system. Do you teach visual literacy, for example? Or how to read the news? Or where would something like that come through so kids are getting the critical skills that are important?

Merritt: I would say that it would be the exception that it would have. I think our teachers may well use the media, the print media and so forth to help. I mean, it’s a good teaching technique to have the student research. I would say there’s a tremendous difference, however, between K-12 and the community college and the universities in terms of relating the teaching experience to local events. I mean we do have civics and social studies and so forth and so one. In today’s environment, in the average school, I’m not talking about magnet schools, I would say that’s out of necessity, de-emphasized as opposed to emphasized. Now again it relates to the teacher. A lot of different technologies in teaching. Some of our teachers, many of them, are very creative and will relate tot eh local environment in a teaching setting, but I don’t think it’s extensive.

Walter: There’s a disconnect because this is not kids don’t know what’s going on. I mean, just recently there was a bunch of problems over at Sunset Mall. It was reported in the newspaper. My kid could tell me in greater detail of what had gone on that, he had actually anticipated himself in terms of the answers that he was giving me or when I was in Madison County before coming here. If you ask kids of what was going on, in the variety of different pales not just involving their, you know, they knew a lot more, they were incredible sources of info of local information. Now it’s filtered through their eyes or whatever but they have a lot of knowledge.

Greg: I cant, I mean this is going to sound really naïve but why can’t the internet be used more effectively through the school system in teaching kids to be reporters to get more information out?

Walter: Hmm. Porn and free music.

Greg: I’m not trying to deflect here, but I’m not trying to…

Merritt: We shouldn’t lose sight of the home environment, to the parents and what role they play in local and contemporary affairs in terms of education, in discussing issues that are before the community or referenda or voting for candidates or what have you. How disengaged our parents. You show me a parent that goes to parent-teacher night or takes an interest in their child and I will show you a good student 99 times out of a 100. I could go into some more specifics on that but unfortunately if we’re going to really evaluate this let’s not talk about just the classroom because most of this begins in the home. I think there’s a lot of improvement that could be made in the home in addition to in the classroom.

Michael: It occurs to me that maybe something that we all could do and I’m fortunate in that I do get to see Alberto … and Tom Fielder, the editor of the Herald. I would like to and I think the next time I see them I want to tell them that I would like to, and I am interested and I read my Neighbors and like Tony I’m extremely disappointed. I don’t know what it’s like in your neighborhood Walter, but I suspect that the report of what happened on the Sunset Mall was probably third rate. It wasn’t very good. Why don’t we tell the Herald that we really are interested in local news and that our Neighbors needs to turn loose some very good people who write and edit those Neighbors. And I agree, I know some of those people, and they’re better than some of the product they’re putting out. And you know why? Because Neighbors was created to be an advertising vehicle, not to be an editorial that is to say editorial product vehicle. I went to work for the Miami Herald in 1977 at Tropic Magazine, it was the Sunday supplement. It was an excellent magazine back then. They had a couple of young writers like Old Carl Hinson, Carl Dorschner. I mean it was a terrific, serious, and they discovered that they could sell a lot more advertising by getting rid of Tropic, which was expensive to buy because it was printed on heavy paper and the salaries they had to pay these big, egotistical writers and editors. Yeah, big salary, I think I made 35,000 a year. And so they started Neighbors, really, as a marketing, advertising tool. But I think that if a lot of people went to the Herald and said, "Stop giving us drivel". I mean , "Start giving us things where we live."

Greg: It’s not really just your neighborhood, is it? It’s kind of a mish-mash of communities. It’s not very logical either.

Michael: Like my congressional district. It doesn’t have much to do with one another.

Merritt: Correct me if I’m wrong but when they abandoned Tropic, that opened the door for New Times and New Times moved in aggressively and has picked up that market.

Greg: Let me ask a final question and then open it up to questions from the audience. I feel we have spent a lot of time on the news and not enough on education. I guess a very general question of you, coming in and just seeing this huge bureaucracy that you’ve experienced in the year and half or so, what are your reactions of ways to really change it, that you’ve learned? How can it be changed? Can it be changed? Can any person do it?

Merritt: Well one person can’t change it. I can bear some witness to that.

Greg: Is it too big ?

Merritt: Without a need to question, I have changed quite a bit and I’m very proud of what we’ve done and Lord knows the institution needed changing. It was very insular, inbred, functioning a lot on paranoia and fear. You were either in or you were out and I could, again, give me two hours and I will spend two hours on this. And I think we’ve definitely changed quite a bit. A lot of new faces and so forth. People disagree and maybe I made a few bad decisions but by and large it’s been a positive experience. And I have baggage because of it and I think it’s healthy baggage. But you know, in the process of making changes, I’ve made some enemies because I’ve been taking apart some of what I think was wrong with the institution. The paradox of the education system is that the delivery system on the main mission, by and large, by our teachers and our principles is very good. I mean, we do very well in a very diverse community with socio-economic depravation, poverty and so forth. Our teachers and our principles, by and large, do an outstanding job. We have problems. We have double F’s for inner city high schools. I’m not discounting it.

The paradox is that while the mission is by and large being done, carried out very effectively with our students and the learning environment. The culture of the organization really needed radical change and I made a conscious decision when I recommended they do the search that I felt that I had gone for about as far that I could go. I mean I was hanging on a 5-4 boat, now I’m on a 4-5 boat depending on which way the wind is blowing and I said, "Do the search and I will take my liabilities, whatever they are, with me, and bring someone in prayerfully, prayerfully" because the problem is governance. The biggest challenge that the new superintendent is going to have is the board. Micromanagement.

I mean I made it very clear to the selection committee what I thought the problems were and I didn’t pull any punches. But hopefully a new superintendent, a leader, and I’m hopeful that the selection committee will give the board outstanding candidates. And I hope that they will. I think that they will. I am prayerful about that and I want to turn the reigns over to a super, a super person. A man or a woman that’s a leader. Educational knowledge would be helpful, in the best of both worlds. An educator who is a leader and a good manager, has intestinal fortitude, and occasionally can draw the line in the sand when it needs to be done. If the board can rally and they’re willing to move away from the micromanagement and some of the other problems that we have, well then I think I have hope. If not, then I’ve done the best I can and I’m proud of it.

Audience Member: ….and this made it a very lively presentation. I want to comment in terms f the erosion of public education because I think that’s partly of what we talked. But I envision of what is occurring in our society, globally, at the state level and maybe at the national level and of course at the local level, is that we’re seeing an evolution changes, and of course education is part of the equation, but what occurred in the 80s in the delivery of health care with the HMOs I made an analogy and maybe that is what is going to occur with public education in this decade as we evolve and how do we deliver public education. Perhaps with going back to the erosion with public education addressing the issue of the "charter schools", "voucher system", the district-cost differential and a number of global things that I anticipate in how are we going to face those challenges.

Greg: Are you addressing..?

Audience Member: No, just a thought. Maybe for comment. Mr. Superintendent.

Merritt: I think. I’ll take a first shot at it, I think you put your finger on a very critical issue. Facing public education not only in America but in the State. It’s a critical issue and there is a pride in election of choice with vouchers, charter schools and so forth and so on, but your core system is the public education system and it must be maintained and supported financially. I don’t know where we rank in America. People say we’re 49^th out of the 50 states. Whatever it is, it is. It isn’t where it should be, in my judgment.

Now, obviously, I may sound like a hypocrite because I’m sitting here on the one hand telling that the school system had major dysfunctional problems. I mean there were decisions made on construction and maintenance in the mid 90s that border on gross malfeasance, if not criminality. I mean, terrible decisions and we’re paying a price for it. And we have unfunded liabilities in deferred maintenance and so forth, and I don’t know how the district is going to pay for them. I hope I can give them a suggestion before I leave, but at the same time the school board and the superintendent have no control over revenue, everything is set by the state. I couldn’t raise taxes if I wanted to. I couldn’t do it anyway; I could recommend it not that I would necessarily enjoy that but sometimes you got to step up to the plate and be counted. So I really think Annie you put your finger on it…it is a question that needs to be addressed.

Somewhat philosophically, I’ve watched the pendulum swing from one side to the other for now I’m in my fifth decade of public service and what goes around sometimes comes around and you have to be a little. Doesn’t mean you stop fighting for what you need and what you know is right or what you think you know is right. On the other hand, I’m not fatalistic either. Because we don’t want to develop a two-tier education system of public education. We don’t want the "haves" and the "have-nots". You better watch it because some of those issues are out there. The core, the fundamental American system of life, government, whatever is a public education system and I have great faith in it and I believe in it. I’m devout about it now. I have a reverence for it and we just have to be vigilant. We have to fight for it.

Greg: Do you think it relates to a problem of a lack of cohesive educational constituency in the state of Florida that can make a difference? In other words, you have strong teacher unions, but is there really kind of a fragmented educational establishment that can be part of the problem?

Merritt: Well it kind of goes back to the question where I talked about parental involvement. I mean I must say it makes you wonder how much real, genuine, interest and commitment there is on the part of parents in a generic sense. How many of them come to the school for PTA? How many of them come to the school for parent-teacher meetings and meet with the principal and take keen interest? We’ve got so many school where the report cards pile up on the desk and the parents never come and pick them up. I mean is there a constituency? We’ve got a lot of retired people. That doesn’t mean they’re not supportive of education. I don’t necessarily buy that just because my kids have been educated then I shouldn’t pay taxes, that I don’t have any children so I shouldn’t pay taxes.

Michael: You know about education funding, not that I’m an expert at it. Since Bob Graham was governor the first term, the amount of money that has been increased almost annually under every subsequent governor under any republican or democrat has been significant and we somehow forget that. I think that the problem that every governor and ever legislature, and Annie served in the legislature, we have is that we have one of the most skewed tax systems anywhere. I mean we have a state, and Lord knows I enjoy as we all do, is the fact that we don’t pay a state income tax but we are too reliant on the sales tax and then special interests, the phosphate industry, all these industries with very skillful lobbyists like my friend Dusty Melton, who left, not that Dusty lobbied for any of those people.

But I mean we have tax loopholes that are worth billions of dollars and the legislature, although when John McCay was the state senate president, he tried to take on Jeb Bush when there were huge shortfall looming and said, "Why don’t we just get rid of five or six million dollars, you know, just a drop in a bucket?" and could that happen? Absolutely not. What the result is that school systems struggle under the funding formula in a state that not only cant build a first-class education system but then has systems like juvenile justice where a young child like Omar Paisley dies from a burst appendix because there is a second-rate medical provider and guards who are too frightened in the system to even call 9-11. I mean, the leg bone is connected to the hipbone. But when it comes back to money, the problem is a tax system that needs a massive overhaul and you know we need somebody with as much guts to look at how the state is run as say Leroy Collins said when it came to the question of integration. And Leroy Collins a great man simply said, "We’re going to integrate this state." And he lead the way. What we need is governor that is going to say, this is a huge problem and together we can fix it. we don’t have anybody so far in the horizon.

Tony: The other part of the problem that Merritt faces is years of mismanagement before he got there compounded with a natural aversion by any tax payer towards taxes, and the first thing people say is "We’re not going to give you any more money, you’re doing a terrible job" and it takes a long time of fixing things before people believe that anything at all has been fixed. And a lot of the problems take a long time to be fixed.

Greg: And you’ve got a learning curve and then somebody else coming through has another learning curve too.

Merritt: I think Michael really put his finger on it though because the sales tax is the most regressive tax that you can find and it really adversely affects the poor and we need some courage to deal with this. I am reminded also of [Ruben Nasky] and he wanted the corporate income tax and when the legislature wouldn’t do it he took it on the stump and he went out and he did it. It’s that kind of courage that we need. We still have homestead exemption. Why not grandfather that out. You got it today, you keep it forever, but if you die, you sell the house or whatever. Phase it out. We don’t want to attract anymore people here, we’ve got too many people now. The reasons Homestead Exemption was, we wanted people to come to Florida. That’s revolutionary? I’ve been saying it for forty years, but it takes some political courage.

Greg: Interesting. Other questions?

Audience Member: I think one of the curious things about this community is that this dialogue for example is taking place in English, whereas we have a large number of people in the county who discuss and vote in Spanish. I wonder what there is to be done about it. It is particularly noticeable here because due to a variety of historical accidents, you have groups of people who number one, have sort of slightly idiosyncratic visions of democracy, and number two you have groups of large numbers of people here whose economic interest go one way and whose ideology goes in another direction. And it seems to me that that is a serious and significant problem. We are probably not the only group that needs to be talking about it but I am interested in all of your perspectives on it.

Walter: I could do it in Spanish, it’s just you know there are people here who could. I am a little confused by your question. Is the question here the representative-ness of the audience and the panel. You’re right it should be being done in many other places. The kinds of issues that arise about the heterogeneity of the Dade County population clearly stuff that people are not ignorant though. You certainly know about the heterogeneity of the Public schools, I surely understand many of these things. Now I’m a little confused about some of the other parts of your questions. I guess to be blunt.

Merritt: I’ll take a shot. I know exactly what he’s talking about and that is we have a huge segment of the population that is predominantly Hispanic and maybe Haitian. And how are we reaching them? Because they come from cultures that are different and they’ve been assimilated. They’re American citizens now and how are we reaching them? You read El Nuevo and you read The Herald and you’re reading two different newspapers for the same article. I mean it’s amazing sometimes how the city desk whoever it is puts a spin on it for the Hispanic media versus this.

Michael: My favorite example of what you are talking about is the morning after Elian Gonzalez was snatched from his home. EL Nuevo Herald, the headline was "Que Verguenza!" And the Herald simply said: "Child Taken" or something like that. so instead of what a shame, an editorial comment in El Nuevo comes out of an entirely different journalistic tradition. Let me comment about your statement, and that is you having lived in this community for the last 25 years and having had a chance to go elsewhere and really loving to live and work here. One of our many collective failures, and I really mean Anglo collective failure has been to say to people who came from Nicaragua or Salvador or Cuba particularly, "We welcome you and let me help you understand what the American democracy is really all about." I don’t think we’ve done a terribly good job and I’m saying this for what is worth married to a woman who was born in Cuba. You want to her some of the conversations at our house about government and we cancel each other out when we go to the polls. You know it’s very fun and very lively. But I don’t think we’ve done a terribly good job.

Walter: Let me respond a little bit to that. the fact of the matter is, one of the reasons the common school was created was to in fact Americanize the children of immigrants. All you need to do is read some of the stuff [ ] wrote and other people wrote. Clearly, that was one of its missions and it’s a known fact that it’s the first generation immigrants in anything, people are always complaining about their lack of understanding of American Democracy, other cultures and stuff like that. When the Irish came, when the Italians came we were wringing our hands about how they didn’t understand, like, know or respect the American Democracy. Into the 20^th century, that’s the reason the continent was huge. Immigration, deal with the immigrants, train people from the proper places here in school and so on and so forth. So my sense is, look at the kids and look at the participation structures, how they deal with our democratic institutions. I don’t worry about the parents, I don’t worry about he uncles and grandmothers because they are of that generation. It’s the kids the ones who tell us how well they’re adopting and accommodating to the realities of American Democracy. And from what I’ve seen they’re doing a dynamite job so I don’t worry about it the same way I’m hearing people. Maybe I’m picking up wrong an undercurrent of subtext here. But guys, every single immigrant group, people have said the same things about them.

Tony: I’d like to pick up on something that Michael said because I absolutely agree with him that we’re not reaching out, that the Anglo press is not reaching out enough. You know there are a lot of efforts out there. But my perspective is, being married to somebody who is of Haitian decent, and I think that the media has to win the respect of immigrant groups if you want them to learn more about our democracy and about our society. And I shouldn’t say them, they are us. But I can tell you that I look to understand what is going on in Haiti just because I married into it and I’m more interested in it than most people would be. There’s been very little coverage of what’s been happening out there and even then there were a lot of reports that were completely skewed. And I was just telling my colleagues here before we began that I knew that Aristide was out a quarter to midnight on Saturday and he wasn’t out till 7 on Sunday but I knew about it. we got a call from somebody who knew about it and they had they’re own internal network that they call, "télé jole", word of mouth. It works for them and they laugh at what they see reported in the Herald or in any other press because they realize that A) it’s not accurate. It’s written by somebody who doesn’t have much experience with their country and they just know that there’s not that much interest about it here. And I know there’s reporters all over the world down in Haiti right now and yet I knew what was going on quarter to midnight and I didn’t see the first story come over on the internet till seven in the morning. So how do we expect them to respect the American Press and how it’s reporting on America if we do such a bad job on reporting on countries that are so close to us and so important to our own life down here.

Greg: (to Audience Member) Yes, you need to talk through a microphone please.

Audience: Good evening, my name is Sylvia, and I’ve lived in this community all my life. I’m Cuban-born but I came when I was a month old. What I do remember about the school system was the continuity of it: the principals, the teachers. When we were in elementary, going to junior high, everybody knew that Mr. K had a paddle at Shenandoah. It was like a reputation. So the kids went there know that they had to respect and those were the guidelines. I realize that times have changed.

However, when my children were going through school, and now I have a grandson and that’s my biggest concern is that continuity started to change. Every two years, every three years they change the principals. They move everybody, kind of like how you were saying with the reporters that you would get frustrated because every six months they would get a new reporter. Well, it’s the same thing for the principal and every time you get a new principal you have to start all over again of what is wrong with the child. That continuity is one of the things that we lack.

And even just thinking now with what you were all saying about the Neighbors section, about the Neighbors reporting the good principals in these schools and sticking to the principals and making that the school system as part of your community and linking it to your Neighbors section could probably be a possible solution to trying to bring this thing to work together again because it’s very frustrating every time you have to go to the school and everybody is changing.

That’s one of the things that I have noticed that is changing, and as far as the kids watching the news. I have friends that are teachers and one of the things that they have been struggling with in the last couple of weeks is the children have been fighting in the bathrooms. They’ve been fighting in the bathrooms because they’ve been watching what happened and now all the teachers are terrified to send the kids to the bathrooms and when they do they all have to go with the children…so that’s one thing where I do think the children do view the news and then they go and act out. As far as the parents being responsible, you’re absolutely right. Till this day when my daughter walks out the door, depends on her tone I know that she’s wearing something that she’s not supposed to and I’m going to catch her. And she’s 20 and I go "Woo, what are you wearing?" And I know. Parents. You’re absolutely right. It’s our responsibilities to be checking those book packs. "What do you have in your book pack and what are the notes?" That lie sin us, the citizens, wanting to change and holding parents accountable. I think we should be held accountable for the actions of a lot of our children because if we’re not paying attention to what they’re doing they are sticking the knives in the book packs and just like what happened with Columbine. And as far as the Spanish stations. I am Hispanic. I do what you said. I turned off. I stopped listening to the radio because of the profanity. The Anglos don’t know a lot of what really is being said in the radio in Spanish. Howard Stern….piece of cake from what I hear in Spanish. I’m horrified and a lot of our local states people don’t know what is being transmitted so I think that maybe the media should listen in a little more carefully to what is being said in other languages and what our community is listening to that nobody is really paying attention. This is being broadcast to children. It starts with education and our future, again, it is our children. Back to basics, I left the work force and decided to open up my own business just to educate people in the healthcare on how to treat people when they come into an office because I think we need to go back to basics and I think it applies also to our school system and continuity and building relationships.

Merritt: Let’s see because there’s several points there and I want to make notes. Let me begin with I don’t know what school and I don’t want to know right now but maybe afterward you can tell me because many of our principals are there for 10 years, 8 years, 6 years or even longer and unless a principal is being promoted, moves from a middle school to a high school or asks for a transfer to anther location, we maintain continuity. There may be a case where there’s a problem and the Associate or assistant Superintendent feels that a change may be warranted fro whatever reason. It’s more the exception than the rule that you would have very short term principals. In my reorganizations, really, and I did three of them, they really did not affect that many principals. There were those that were promoted, some that were assigned to principal- ships or administration. Out of 340 schools, it was miniscule that number of people that were affected. The other question about the bathrooms and we had a debriefing and another meeting on security today. I asked the question of whether or not we could put a video camera focusing on the door in the restroom, not on any of the sinks or the other facilities within the restroom, just so that you could see who came in and came out. The other idea was to put it outside of the bathrooms and it would be time-sequenced so that if someone came in at 8:21 in the morning, at 10:15 you would know that someone came in and someone came out. That’s under review at the present time but we are very sensate to problems that can occur in the bathroom, and many teachers use the buddy system where more than one person goes to the bathroom at one time. I think that covers the two issues that were directed to me.

Greg: Any other comments? Sally, did you have a question? Anybody else? I’m sorry. You were next?

Audience: So Mr. Putney, I was very interested to hear you say that you were interested in having a better consumer from the press and then I inferred from your later comments that I won’t repeat that you hope some of your employees and staff would have better skills in writing and speaking and communication. Dr. Bush then I was very interested to hear you later in the program ask a question about visual literacy and media literacy. The University of Miami, the School of Education, the Lowe Art Museum where I’m an employee, and the Richter library actually teach teachers in the School District visual literacy and the program comes with critical thinking and communication skills. Mr. Superintendent, I know that you’re correct in that a small amount of teachers are receiving that training, so I wonder what I can do somebody with the skills to improve the situation and presumably some resources to actually support that.

How can I work more closely with the school district to support these kinds of visual literacy and media literacy efforts to make sure that we don’t get into a situation of students that have and students that have not? Because I think at this time it’s mostly in small pockets, so as a practitioner what can I do? I’ve got the skills. I’ve got resources. I’m getting it done a little bit. What can I do to affect it more to broaden this so that eventually we receive the better consumer and the more educated news professional? If I can say that without offending.

Merritt: I would say see me at the end of the program. I will get your name and I will put you together with some of our curriculum people because we’ve got some very talented people. And I might add parenthetically, I know we’re not talking about information technology, but we just completed a very sophisticated strategic plan for our information technology. And we’re moving very aggressively. Money availability being critical to try to upgrade all of our facilities to put as many computers as we can into the learning environment. The cost of that strategic plan alone is 100 million dollars. We’re going to be chipping away at it slowly but I hope that I can see you when this is over. I will try to get you together with some people and I’m sure you can help. Thank you.

Audience: Historically, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas said to me one time that she thought that the reason that people in Miami got to know that place and love it was because women had meetings during the day and could exchange information and get to know one another. Now those opportunities certainly are gone and now we have a tremendous influx of people at one time. So there’s reasons for that, but I think about the Herald and their new look and obviously came about for their concern for lack of readership. I would think they’re advertising or advertisers would change if they lost readers. Maybe we do need this campaign that you’re talking about. A campaign where the newspaper would see the need to explain, and maybe not just the newspaper but we have to think that parents are the backbone of a family and the school system. I have a daughter where she does most of the work in the public schools where her kids go. She puts on everything that they do. She’s busy all the time. She says, "There’s nobody else out there." I think that these things that people don’t realize that they need to play a role and if they all helped a little bit it wouldn’t be a big job for one person.

Greg: Thank you. Any final questions? Because it’s just about 9 o’clock.

Audience: First, I’d just like to thank you all for coming. I think this is a really important dialogue and conversation. Individually thank you all for your public service because that is what each of you do. So thank you. Now I’m going to get a little bit more critical. I think the theme of democracy as an overarching theme in looking at the media is a very interesting one and I think that there is a relationship between the media and our educational services. I think that they are institutions hopefully in place to help us become a more robust democracy and to train more critical citizens. And I think that we’re failing in all three areas. Not as individuals necessarily but I think in the news media I don’t think we’re getting the facts and the opinions, which is a distinction that you were making a little earlier, as necessary as clean as it may have been presented. The New York Times has published in its headlines that there is a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. This is not true. That representation on television of that statues tumbling in Iraq was staged and set up. We know that now. In schools, I don’t know that our students are being taught to question. And my question here is how can these institutions, the news, the media, and the school systems train students to be critical and to be active, not to be passive and to question the very ideological frameworks which we are taught to just accept. Thank you.

Michael: First, you’re absolutely right. We, in the media often get it wrong. But then I do believe we eventually get it right. The very great reporter Judy who swallowed a lot of the information from Tel Aviv about Iraq and published it in the Times about the weapons of mass destruction which was a carefully calculated campaign to embalm the Bush administration and help give it a rationale for attacking. Eventually, the Times righted its wrong. I’m just reminded. Let me just tell you a very brief story. Many years ago as a much younger reporter I met Walter Cronkite, one of my heroes. After a couple of drinks, I said to him, "Walter, every night I love it when you get to the end and you say ‘And that’s the way it is on Tuesday March 1’. Do you really feel totally confident?" And he said to me, "No, what I really should say is ‘and that’s the way we think it is up to this moment as far as we know, so check with us tomorrow’". So all I could say is that people in the media like this gentleman and I hope myself begin hoping that we can put together facts, glean this information and give our consumers what we believe is an accurate and truthful picture. And then subsequent to publishing and going on the air, then we learn other facts which change it, and if we are lucky enough work for good publishers or good TV station owners, then the next day or in the next cycle of news, it could be 30 minutes later, you go back and you say "Yesterday, we told you it was like this, but you know what? It’s really more like this." So all I can say is, Do we screw up? Yes. Do we try to make it right? Yes.

Merritt: I would offer to him, and we have some teachers here tonight. I think aside from the parents and he home environment, teachers can have a very profound effect on the student in terms of critical thinking, in terms of the whole growth process. I know that, and I can think now back, how many years? Fifty some odd years ago teachers that really impacted me and I can remember vividly some of those teachers. I wouldn’t discount that. I am not suggesting that a high school graduate will be able to discern the inadequacies that you pointed out, or the fallacies. But having the ability to be a critical thinker in terms of that process, and then we continue to grow. The greatest people I know never stop growing and so when you come from high school and you go on and you’ve been stimulated it goes a long way I think to the issue that you raised.

Tony: I’d like to take an opposing view point. I think on a day-to-day basis the reporters I know work very hard to get it right and it’s very hard to get it exactly right. Some people come away with the viewpoint that they quotes are always wrong. I think that most of the time they are almost always right, but you remember it when they’re wrong. But I think by and large, the story gets out and if it doesn’t get out at first, it gets out eventually, but I think most of the time what you read is right. But I think the other point that is important to make is that most people are already very critical of the press just because its in their system. They’ve been told by all the bad people in the world, "Don’t trust what you read." And it’s the scoundrels first refuge to say that the "quote was wrong", or "I never did that", or "that’s not what I said". Sometimes the quote is wrong, but most of the time the press is being blamed because it’s convenient. They’re being scapegoat-ed. The messenger is wrong. I think that critical attitude is already ingrained in most people.

Audience: What I’m really questioning is to what extent are the institutions encouraging us to question. If you cannot question capitalism for example, how can you talk about the FAA? How can you talk about the sham election that we had here? I think these are some major issues and as long as we can’t touch these subjects, as long as our newspapers are not encouraging us to question and they’re just telling us that they’re reporting the facts. I think its some great advice to the media to call into accountability to raise questions for further…

Tony: One response that I can add to that is that there are different philosophies within different news organizations and as to what objectivity means, what things you can questions and what things you shouldn’t. Some of the newspapers I was brought up with are so concerned with reporting things objectively that they report half of what this side say and what the other side of the story says, even if what this side says is totally bogus. So you read the newspaper and you don’t know what to think. You see this side and that side and the reporter has done his job and you don’t know what to think. Other newspapers have a philosophy just go out there and report the hell out of it. Find out what really happened and just say it that way. When I was brought into the Daily Business Review, that was the basic philosophy that came down on high. So you’ve got to judge for yourself. But I agree, sometimes there are papers that are afraid to cover what should be covered.

Michael: I couldn’t agree more with Tony. I think you are actually saying is you know only want we in the media to be better institutionally, which is a fine thing, but I think you also want readers to bring more to what they see and hear. And educators. To create a system that brings people to create a critical thinking system and look at it and say "that’s bull"

Greg: I think we’re running out of time here.

Audience: I have one quick question.

Greg: Yes.

Audience Member: Do we teach the Constitution anymore? I’m serious. There are many many many people here who do not know what our rights are and although I’m a product of the public school system in New York and I got a great education and I’m a huge advocate of public education and I think that there are some things that kids learn in schools today that I wish they had had when I was going to school but I think the very basics are being ignored and that’s where I learned my rights as an American citizen and critical thinking.

Greg: Final quick question.

Audience: Quick question. I read the 5-minute Herald not the five minute, but I read it for five minutes. Then I go upstairs and read for about 45 minutes all the articles that come in from the listservs. How do you think the internet is going to change our view of the news? I mean I prefer the internet now. I get a global view.

Tony: I’ll jump at it. I’ve already been plenty critical of the newspapers tonight but one of the things that I started thinking when I got into the internet and got my computer was that i got so much of the national and international news from the internet. It’s there, but why is my newspaper which comes to my door the next morning presenting me with this wired stuff that I already read 10 or 12 hours ago? I’m sure newspapers are responding to that. what I see is a great opportunity for newspapers to refocus on the local news. But I’ve also been very surprised sometimes when you see a newspaper like the Herald go at a story and you see "My God, I got a lot more from their reporters covering the story than from anything I read on the web. There’s a lot more detail than I find in the web." But a lot of the time it is a waste because its just the same copy. But sometimes its an opportunity to get what he web doesn’t have.

Greg: Ok. Well thank you all very much. I really appreciate everyone for coming. Thank you in the audience.