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Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Ever had something you love dismissed because it’s “just” pop culture? What others might deem stupid shit, you know matters. You know it’s worth talking and thinking about. So do we. We're Tracie and Emily, two sisters who think a lot about a lot of things. From Twilight to Ghostbusters, Harry Potter to the Muppets, and wherever pop culture takes us, come overthink with us as we delve into our deep thoughts about stupid shit.
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Deep Thoughts about Journalism in Pop Culture with Jon Shorr
Good night and good luck and you stay classy, San Diego!
On this week’s episode of Deep Thoughts, Tracie and Emily welcome media studies professor (retired) Jon Shorr to talk about how pop culture has conditioned us to think about journalism, reporters, and “the news.” From Lois Lane to Woodward and Bernstein to Mary Tyler Moore, we discuss the ways comics, movies, and television have introduced us to a profession few of us have direct knowledge of and how our assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality affect our experience of the news.
If you’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, throw on some earbuds and take a listen!
Find more of Jon's work on Burning Bright, a weekly podcast presenting poetry and prose by writers over 50 from Passager Books
Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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I'm Tracy Guy-Dekker and you're listening to Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, because pop culture is still culture, and shouldn't you know what's in your head? Today, my sister Emily Guy-Burkin and I will be joined by our friend John Shore, who's going to talk to us about the news in pop culture. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Have you ever had something you love dismissed because it's just pop culture, what others might deem stupid shit? You know matters, you know it's worth talking and thinking about, and so do we. So come over and think with us as we delve into our deep thoughts about stupid shit. Okay, so welcome John.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's nice to be here.
Speaker 1:So, folks, while John was teaching high school English, he realized that his students were much more interested in, and knowledgeable about, the TV shows that they'd seen the night before and the movies they'd seen over the weekend at the drive-in than in the great literature he was trying to teach them about in his classes. So he became interested in the mass media as literature and as values shapers and got a master's degree and a PhD in related subjects. He consulted with school systems around the country about media literacy and taught at the university level for about 40 years, over 30 of them at the University of Baltimore. He's retired. Now he does some freelance writing and editing and he also produces a weekly podcast, burning Bright for passenger books, which is a small nonprofit publisher of literary works by older writers, and we will link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 1:So we're going to talk about the news in pop culture, specifically journalism. So I'll start by just a little like what I learned about journalism from pop culture, and then Emily will briefly give hers and then John will turn to you to ask you. You know what's at stake here and why we're talking about it. So when I, when we, first talked about doing this, what came to mind immediately for me is actually all of the superheroes who were involved in journalism. You know, superman's alter ego was a reporter and his girlfriend was a reporter. Spider-man is a photographer, right Photojournalist, and Emily you reminded me of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had a reporter, like it's sort of a somehow the news that somehow, pop culture taught me that journalism is a thing associated with superheroes.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm going to go with today. What about you, em?
Speaker 3:So I got kind of a negative message about journalists from the pop culture that I consumed. So, yes, superman and Lois Lane were like good journalists, but J Jonah Jamison, who is Spider-Man's or Peter Parker's employer, is kind of a sleazy journalist. And then I'm thinking about Courtney Cox's character in Scream. Gale Weathers is shown to be kind of like the news equivalent of an ambulance chaser, and then, oh gosh, ron Burgundy from Anchorman All of the men in those movies are complete idiots.
Speaker 3:So, and I'm thinking about that, I'm realizing like, from a lot of pop culture I've gotten like this negative view of journalists, although from books that I've read it's been a more positive view, which I think has more to do with the fact that books are more likely to be written by people who either are or are friends with journalists. Yeah, and then the comic books would be my guess. But yeah, I definitely don't feel like pop culture has given me a very leer view of what journalism is and how it works, and you know both the highs and lows, the nobility and the depravity of the profession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. All right, john. What's at stake here? Why are we talking about journalists in pop culture?
Speaker 2:I think we're talking about them for a couple reasons. One is the reason we talk about anybody, any representation in pop culture, and that is because one of the things we know as researchers is that if people have direct experience with whoever, that forms their view of them. So most people have a sense of what school teachers are like because they've spent time. If your parents are police officers, you know what police officers are like. If you have very little experience with police officers, or doctors or lawyers or whoever it is, your image of them tends to be formed by media representations of them. And we know that across the board. And that's also true with journalists, with reporters, with editors, with photojournalists, the paparazzi, the owners of media businesses. It's all the same, it's the same phenomenon, so that's one reason to pay attention to it.
Speaker 2:The second has to do with the function of the news media in our society. And from the very beginnings, back in colonial days, the thinking was that in order for people to function in a democratic society, they needed to be able to have access to information that would let them understand and make sense of what was going on. So that's two institutions. The educational institution, public education, is very important, primarily again from the beginning so we can learn to read, write, think, process information, analyze arguments, all those kinds of things, and then access to information and different points of view so we can make educated decisions about who we're going to vote for, how we want this country and the government to run and what's our place in it and all that. So that's a general background. Does that make sense? Sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right.
Speaker 2:So, given that we start looking at kind of what media representations are actually like, so we can think about what pop culture teaches us about the news media, and you've both talked about this. One of the things that pop culture teaches us is that news people want to get the story, get it right and get it first, and there are a lot of movies and television shows that we can talk about that do that. A second thing that pop culture teaches us is that news is a business and whether we're looking at the photojournalist, the paparazzi who are chasing celebrities and ambulance chasers to get the picture, because that will sell the newspaper, that's what people want to see on the six o'clock news or on whatever it is. So it's a money game.
Speaker 2:The news organizations are generally profit making enterprises. The owners want to make money and secondarily or primarily in some cases, they want to use their power to promote their agendas, which sometimes are business related agendas, sometimes their political agendas. So up until recently, the sense was that the news agenda outweighed that profit or propaganda dimension. With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the conservative media, it's changing, because conservatives for a long time have felt like the news media were controlled by liberals and we can talk about why that idea exists. So that's that. We talk about some specific pieces of media. Do you want to go back to that?
Speaker 1:I'd like to talk about the brand, if you will of the journalist pre-Trump. So, 20th century, the brand of the journalist. I think we heard two different sides from Emily and me, and then your background also reminded me of moments I was actually thinking of. We talked about one episode, we talked about Muppets from Space, and there's a scene where Ms Piggy comes and says oh, great news, gonzo's been kidnapped by aliens.
Speaker 1:I got the story. That is what you were just talking about about the importance of the news and the business and, in that case, the prestige for the journalists themselves. So I'd love to talk about that brand of the journalist and how it was built in our imaginations. If you could kind of point us to specific pop culture moments not the Muppets, probably- Not the Muppets, no. You can absolutely point it out, but if you think that's appropriate.
Speaker 2:Okay, Well, probably the most important movie, journalism related movie in the past 50 years was All the President's Men, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about Watergate, about uncovering Watergate, and that book and the movie that was based on the book Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Nancy Marchand various other people. That movie kind of created a groundswell for students wanting to go into journalism. Journalism programs in colleges and universities all over the country just were suddenly overwhelmed with students who wanted to be investigative reporters, who wanted to dig up and dig out stories and make the world a better place. It was the same as detectives, but not quite as dangerous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, woodward and Bernstein, I actually haven't seen that movie. So this is really even just from the zeitgeist from that movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like that, those two. They were heroes, right, absolutely.
Speaker 2:They protected democracy. Absolutely. They protected the.
Speaker 1:American people.
Speaker 2:Yes, and the way they did it according to the book and according to the movie. Who knows the reality? But according to the book and according to the movie, they would investigate, they would get leads, they would question people, then they would get. They had to get verification. They couldn't just say, oh, this person said this, so that's the truth. This person said this. Now let's find two or three other people who agree, who can triangulate on that single fact. And the editor of the Washington Post, you know just, and the sub editors all the way up said this is the important thing. The reporters Bernstein and Woodward said the story is really important. And the editors said the story isn't important at all if it's not accurate. And if it's not accurate, we lose all of our credibility. And so what that movie taught this generation was Getting the story is really important, but getting it right is Even more important.
Speaker 1:So they were. They were heroes, but they had integrity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and again. Going back to the, the larger picture of news media and movies, think about detective shows. You know, people are going out and trying to find out what happened, who committed this crime, for what reason? Do you arrest the first person? Or do you have to come up with evidence? And what's the nature of that evidence? So, so, journalists in this model are doing exactly the same thing. So, and and, just as with police and detective shows, there are corrupt police and detectives. There are police and detectives who aren't really corrupt, but they just want to be able to close the case. We just want to be able to be done with the story and get it printed. So you know it, it's a phenomenon, it's a. It's a more generalizable phenomenon.
Speaker 1:How did that? But how did I feel like the brand of journalists from the high of you know, a groundswell of people wanting to enter a journalism school, to what has happened in the past Six to ten years, like the brand has totally changed absolutely. How? How did that happen in terms of pop culture on media?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one major factor was this, this, this tension that exists between editorial and ownership, editorial and business, and Historically there has been a Really thick firewall between those two divisions of news organizations the, the Journalists, job, the reporters and the editors and the photographers etc. Their job is to go out and get the story and to make it as as Interesting a story as possible but is also also as accurate a story as possible. The business side is to say how can we monetize that information, how can we sell more papers, how can we get more people to watch the news? And so over time you know that that Shifted some.
Speaker 2:So if you think about television news and pretty faces, right, you can have a wonderful reporter or a wonderful anchor who can take information from lots of places and process it. But there there came to be this mindset in in television news that People would rather watch, would rather look at a visually appealing news person than a visually unappealing news person. So an example of that I don't know if you've seen the movie broadcast news Holly Hunter, william Hurt, albert Brooks, jack Nicholson was in it.
Speaker 1:I think I have seen it, but it's been a long, long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm, yeah, albert Brooks was this. You know this dynamic Reporter and you know. But if you can picture Albert Brooks, he's not that much to look at and whenever he was on television he perspired, he was just sweating profusely. But a wonderful reporter, william Hurt, if you can picture William Hurt was this handsome, very together. You know he had, he had a broadcast announcer voice and he could talk like this and so he became the face of the news, not because of his ability as a journalism, as a journalist, but because of his ability to attract especially female viewers who were, you know, 29 to 55 year old. Women historically have been a really major piece of Business and marketing. They're the people who buy so many things and influence the men in their lives to buy so many things.
Speaker 3:So I'm thinking Like the, the big difference between like Woodward and Bernstein, and then like talking about like, like broadcast news, the, the film is the difference between print and television journalism, and I feel like the the rise of the 24-hour news channel has also affected it, because you know, I, it's been my dream that at some point in my life I can say stop the presses thing because of you know the pop culture. But With print news it feels like there's more time to get things right, because if it doesn't go into today's paper can go into Maros, whereas with the television news, especially if it's on 24 hours a day, you need to get it out quickly, you need to fill the time or you need to be ready when the camera goes. You know you can't. You can't put a filler article in like you can with print news, and I feel like that has made a major difference in how we view the news just in general.
Speaker 2:Right. So so I think you brought up two, at least two things. One has to do with the amount of material you need. So if you're doing, if back in the days of time and Newsweek and Life magazine they had a, they had a week or, you know, in some cases a month to do to get the story right, and so it could be a Really in-depth story that you know talked of 30, 40 sources and it was edited and re-edited, revised, etc.
Speaker 2:With the daily newspaper, it's not, it's not just television, but it's, you know, it's radio, it's, it's, it's print, but it's a time function. So the daily newspaper, there isn't that luxury for most stories. With television, you know, same, it's daily. So the six o'clock news, the noon news, the 11 o'clock news. So there's that.
Speaker 2:Now, when you're, when you're doing a news story, you're out talking to a lot of people, whether it's print or television, whether you're taking your notes with a camera, with a microphone or with a notebook and a pen. You're writing all this stuff down, you're talking to all these people and then gradually you figure out when the the fact, which facts are reliable, which facts are a little questionable and which facts are not reliable at all, and you start to make choices. You make editing choices. Then you think about what order do we want to put these facts in? What's the lead, what's the duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And you, you come up with a story, the same way that you create any product. If suddenly there's a 24-hour news channel, which which happened in the 90s I get those of the the late 80s, early 90s that that trend started Now a couple things happen.
Speaker 2:One is you need news to fill the time, which means you'll run almost anything, just because you can't say, yeah, we're working on that story, go go watch the young and the restless and come back at 230. Well, maybe we'll have a, we'll have something. For they can't do that right, and the reason they can't do that is because of the business of broadcasting. If they lose their audience, they, the audience, isn't there for the commercials and, on some level With profit-making news organizations, the only reason they're, the primary reason for the news, is to keep people tuned in for the ads, and that's true television in general. Whether cable broadcast anything, the reason For the programming is to is to attract a certain audience that will then watch certain commercials.
Speaker 2:If you think about a newspaper, the average daily newspaper is 70% ads, 30% content. We don't even think about that as as readers, but that's the fact. It's there, so that will turn the page and See the ad that's next to the, the continuation of the article. So one piece of it is filling the space and the other piece is because you have to fill the space. You don't have the luxury to Fact-check in the same way. So if you think about CNN or Fox or MSNBC or whichever whichever, when you look at there's always oh, oh, something's happening. We're gonna go there now live. That's great, they can go there live. Very often what they're going there live for is irrelevant.
Speaker 2:Right or you know, or it's just somebody's opinion. It's not an important fact. It's just an opportunity for some senator walking down the Capitol steps to say here's what I think about that, and CNN and MSNBC and Fox want that because they need to fill the time, something I think is interesting to think about in terms of, like the way that news has changed over the past 50 years.
Speaker 3:And then you know the the addition of television news and what you're talking about with, like pretty people. If delivering the news is where a journalists ego lies Because I'm thinking with, like Woodward and Bernstein their ego lies in ferreting out the story, getting it accurate and writing it well. Their names are household names now, but I don't, like I don't have a good sense of whether an investigative journalist wants to be a household name or not.
Speaker 2:I can't speak for all of you journalists, but no, but one of the things that reporters think about is the beat they're on, is this, you know, are they on the police beat, the courthouse beat, the school beat, the education beat, which is likely to get more front page time? And the more front page time you get, or the more often you're on the television news, not as a reporter who fed information to somebody else who's going to read it, but for you to be on there with your face, like you know, medium close-up, what that means is more recognition. What more recognition means is you can demand a higher salary. What more recognition means is that a newspaper or television station or news channel at the next higher level is going to be more likely to notice you and offer you a job. So all of these things are at play and again, that's not just the nature of the news media. You know these examples are, but in many different professions visibility matters in certain ways.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking about this in part because I'm journalist adjacent I write about money. So, like I'm not a journalist but have some similar skills and thinking about where my ego lies when it comes to my writing and in previous jobs I used to be a high school English teacher and like my ego about being a high school English teacher and how that is going to be different for different professions, like what are the things that you're proud of? And then how that also changes between, like, print journalism and television journalism. Because, like the example you're giving with, in broadcast news, like you know, albert Brooks is proud of his ability to, you know, be an excellent reporter, but it doesn't matter because William Hurt is proud of his face and the fact that it brings the ladies around.
Speaker 3:So like getting into that, into like what, what, where the ego is, and what that's going to how that's going to affect how journalism works Well.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure that journalists are different from anybody else in that respect. I think, you know, as, as human beings, we're on an ego continuum, as we are on so many other continuums continuum, and so there are people who are very egotistical in any profession, in any relationship, right and there are people who aren't, who are more interested in other things or, for various reasons, are shy or, you know, introverted, whatever it might be. They're more social, you know, social product oriented than than personality oriented. So I'm not sure that that matters. One of the things, though, that that does matter is noticeability, visibility. I'm not quite sure what the term is. If a New York Times reporter walks into a scene where there's something happening and starts talking to people, basically nobody notices him or her, right they? You may know that name if you read the New York Times or the Boston Globe or the Baltimore Sun, but you wouldn't recognize that person's face or voice If, on the other hand, that that reporter or that anchor person, yeah.
Speaker 1:When Anderson Cooper shows up, yeah.
Speaker 2:And when Anderson Cooper shows up, the story stops being whatever the story was and starts being oh my God, anderson Cooper's here. So it works both ways. And you know and we know this again from from you know celebrities in general that that when you become famous you lose your anonymity and, depending on your ego, you know that may be a good thing in certain ways but it also means you can't go grocery shopping anymore. There were cases years ago, back when soap operas had huge audiences in the early days of television, when an actor from a soap opera was interviewed and said he can't. He can't walk down the street anymore because women come up to him and hit him with their purses and say how could you do that to that poor woman?
Speaker 1:I'd love to talk a little bit about gender and the role of gender in the brand of journalists. I'm thinking about Woodward and Bernstein, whose names we know in part because of the movie I mean what they did actually in Watergate but also because of the movie, the book in the movie, and then also, like my kid is almost 12, but when she was little she had that like bad girls of history or something like that, and Nellie Bly was one of the one of the characters sort of featured, who was a really skilled and brave investigative journalist in the early days of print, you know, went undercover in a mental institution just really remarkable things whose name I had never heard until I got this like story, this storybook for kids.
Speaker 1:So anyway, what I'm thinking about is the role of sexism in sort of keeping Nellie Bly's story from pop culture to a certain extent, but also also in the way that and I'm actually maybe more interested in this the way that we perceive, as you know, in the zeitgeist, as we perceive female journalists that you know, walter Cronkite was the voice of the news, a specifically male voice, and his successors have been male, and my sort of picture from media of female journalists is more of that broadcast. She's hired for her looks rather than her skill, and I know that is not fair to female journalists. And yet that is the impression that I have internalized and I'd love to hear from you, john and M, if you want to share, like why is that in my head?
Speaker 3:Why is that in my?
Speaker 1:head.
Speaker 3:I want to jump in before John answers. Just that. Also, like the fictional representations of thinking like Lois Lane, there is the dramatic irony that you love, like we know that Clark Kent is Superman and she doesn't, and there is this sense of like how she's not a very good reporter if she can't read it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he just takes his glasses off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and she is the only woman in the newsroom. So like there is this sense of like she's the hard nosed, like you know really feisty, which I hate that word. You know woman who is hard charging, but you know her little lady brain can't. Yeah, clark Kent, superman the same person.
Speaker 1:Okay, so there's one thing from why it's in my head. But anyway, yeah, John, what do you think? Where's this like? Not the sexism that generates it, but the pop, pop culture that reinforces it. Where is it coming from?
Speaker 2:Well, it's coming from the culture that you're talking about, walter Cronkite. In the in the 50s and 60s, women were not viewed as professionals, you know. They were housewives, mothers, sex objects, etc. Right, and the, the women's movement beginning in the early 70s started to change that and now we see a lot more women reporters, anchors, and let's not just talk about gender, let's talk about race, for example, you know, let's talk about gay versus straight. You know, these categories of people that used to be relegated to, to a lesser status, right by any other name, right. As the culture has shifted, people from those categories have been brought in more and been allowed to enter the mainstream. So we see it with women, we see it with African Americans, we see it with Asians, we see it with gays. We, you know an on and on and on transgender. We see that we, there's no way we would have seen that in in the news media and, you know, except as a freak story up until relatively recently. So I don't think it's it's fair to to measure where we are now by looking at Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley in the 50s and 60s. I think we have to look at 2024 and say what's out there and to what degree is it better reflecting the culture than the 50s and 60s representations of people in general? And clearly we're not done. It's a work in progress.
Speaker 2:But it wasn't until relatively recently that either a network or a local newscast could have a female anchor or co anchor, or a black anchor or co anchor. And even if the management thought it was a good idea, they were afraid that there would be enough viewers who wouldn't take that woman seriously. Because as men you know, we grew up culturally learning not to take women seriously. You take men seriously, and so if a woman is delivering this really important information to us, by definition it must not be that important. So it's one of those push-pull situations where we want it to happen, but it can't happen until the culture catches up with it. But one of the ways the culture catches up with it is by people in power putting those role models out there for other people to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it happened, but it's gradual.
Speaker 3:Something that's interesting that I'm thinking about is talking about ego in journalism, and the reason why I brought that up is that often we're shown in pop culture that journalists care about themselves more than they care about the news, and so the examples that I can think of off the top of my head are, like I mentioned, gail Weathers and Scream. Now, granted, that's not that recent, it's 1997. But then Ms Piggy in Muppets From Space, 1989. Yeah, same era, about the same time. And then that episode of Lucifer Tracy with the paparazzo, the young man who is black, who he wants to be first to get the first picture, and that's from 2016. So again, eight years ago. But it does in some ways seem like there is this pop cultural undercutting of the idea that you can get good news from a marginalized and that they are out for themselves rather than for the news, the nobility of it, the importance of information, all of that, and those are all three very separate examples.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very separate, but I think you're getting at something that I'm also thinking about, which is that talking about the news on deep thoughts about stupid shit is kind of new for us, right, because it is pop culture, but it's also, until recently, not exquisitely entertainment, or at least that's not the category that we put it into. So I'm curious for us to add to the conversation not just the people actually anchoring the news desk locally or nationally, but also those entertainment pieces that are being produced about anchors and who are those folks, and I think that's kind of what Emily's pointing at.
Speaker 2:Sure, so it's not new. The front page 1931, his Gal Friday. Back in the early 30s, citizen Kane was about journalism.
Speaker 2:Yeah 1941, you know the, still on many people's charts, still the greatest movie ever made. So there's all of that stuff. Good night and good luck about Edward R Murrow. So you have those. Then there are shows like Network 1976, I don't know if you can.
Speaker 2:You know Faye Dunnaway, peter Finch, william Holden it was a Patty Chayevsky movie but there was the news dynamic but also the ownership, and that's the movie in which the Peter Finch character, howard Beale, says I'm mad as hell, I'm not going to take it anymore. He basically has a nervous breakdown on the air and editorial wants to pull him immediately. Ownership says this is great, let's put him up there every night. Being crazy, he says he's going to commit suicide on television. This is outrageous. Ownership says let's keep him there because think of the number of people that'll watch. So these things have been going on.
Speaker 2:Then you have shows like the Mary Tyler Moore show. Right, the Morning Show. But shows like the Mary Tyler Moore show are set in a newsroom, at least partially. But it's not about the news, it's a family show. The family happens to be the people she works with and there's the father figure, ed Asner, lou Grant, the goofy brothers, ted Baxter and Murray, and her best friend Rhoda, and all these people. But there's another whole subgenre of comedy shows that are set in a profession. Welcome back, cotter.
Speaker 1:Right, it's a teacher show.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not really about being a teacher, it's about being a comedian right, and you can go through all these shows, whether it's doctor shows, lawyer shows. That's just the setting, but that's not what they're about.
Speaker 1:I want to linger on Mary Tyler Moore, actually, because I think that's a particularly interesting one, in that Mary was the protagonist and Murphy Brown's another one.
Speaker 1:Yes, murphy Brown's a great one and in some ways those are like Like Murphy Brown's, almost like an iteration of Mary Tyler Moore, where they made her even tougher and even more effective as a journalist. I think, because I think that Ted Baxter and the I can't think of the anchor's name Are very similar characters, even right, and there was a sense. I didn't watch Mary Tyler Moore. I haven't seen all of the series, right, but I certainly watched it a bit as a kid and Mary was the journalist with integrity, right.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:Ted was just the good looks, which completely subverted the kind of sexist picture that I was talking about having internalized, as did Murphy Brown. Right, I think the one guy that Murphy worked with was actually good, but the other guy was just a pretty face and a nice voice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was the anchor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is really interesting to me, that I had this sexist furniture in my head despite, like we grew up on Murphy Brown, like our dad had a big crush on Candice Bergen, and so we watched it every week.
Speaker 2:Who wouldn't have a big crush on him? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that's okay. All right.
Speaker 1:So I'm interested in pulling this apart a little bit that we have these clear, very popular pieces of pop culture that gave us these competence. Competent female journalists subverted the sexism and yet can we like tease all that yeah.
Speaker 3:Jump in them. Can I speak to that? Something I think is interesting is that Murphy Brown and the Mary Tyler Moore show are not about journalism, like John just said, and that's part of the reason why we don't like. When I think of Murphy Brown, I think of Dan Quayle, I think of her baby that she named Avery, I think of Eldon the painter, I think of the place where they went to get drinks, I think of the newsroom, not the studio, and similarly with Mary Tyler Moore, I don't really think of the journalism of it, and I think that's part of what's going on. There is that, like pop culture will allow us to have these female journalists with integrity, who are good at what they do and competence, but only if we don't get to see them in that setting, or at least not focus on it Like.
Speaker 1:our focus is their private lives.
Speaker 3:Yes, interesting, and so I think that that's part of it, because it's just the one step forward, two steps back kind of thing, where like oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, you can have a career woman, you can have someone who's hard driving, who's like good at her job and all of that, but we're going to focus on our love life. What do you think of?
Speaker 1:that John.
Speaker 2:I think a couple things about that. I think you're making a bit of a generalization, but I don't disagree with you. The morning show do you know the morning show?
Speaker 1:I don't know that one.
Speaker 2:Okay, jennifer Aniston, and Was that on Apple TV.
Speaker 1:That's the one that's streaming on Apple. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I haven't seen it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but basically these two very competent news women. Complications ensue, but it's also about their private lives as well as their public lives. But I think there's one other thing going on here that's worth considering. There's a psychological theory that says that we absorb information that supports our biases and points of view and we ignore or reject information that contradicts them Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:Confirmation bias yes yes, confirmation bias.
Speaker 2:So there are instances of these other people in responsible roles, but for many of us, we tend not to let them through as readily that plays out, however, it's going to play out over time and again. It's shifting, but culture changes much more gradually. People who are being mistreated in society are always upset that change doesn't happen overnight, and the rest of us, who aren't being mistreated in that particular context can step back and say well, yeah, it is better than it's better than it was five years ago, and that's better than it was 10 years ago or 25 years ago. Well, that's true, and it's not fast enough.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Something that you're suffering less than you used to suffer is not actually it's not actually particularly comforting.
Speaker 2:The train is going in the right direction, but it's going 20 miles an hour instead of 85 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:While you suffer. Yeah Right, yeah Well, we're getting close to our time. I want to make sure, John are there any points? That you wanted that you joined the studio with us today, that you wanted to make sure that you said that we haven't gotten to yet.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd like to talk for a minute about why people historically think that news people are liberal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's talk about that and that apparent bias, and this may be part of my apparent bias, but when you're doing the news, I don't mean reading a script on the air, but when you're a reporter, when you're an editor, it's about getting information. It's about asking questions, it's about asking follow-up questions, it's about being critical of the information you're getting, it's about processing. And if you think about liberal religions versus conservative religions, whatever the denomination, there's that difference. Liberals tend to be interested in asking questions and finding things out and maybe having their minds changed by what they find out, where conservatives, whether it's political or religious or economic, are much more interested in holding fast to their belief system, so that almost by definition, journalists are going to be liberals. But I'm a reporter, therefore I support democratic candidates.
Speaker 2:It's not that kind of liberal, but there's a liberality, a liberalness in the function. Then, on top of that, is education level and in contemporary society, news people, journalists, tend to be college graduates and college. One of the main functions of college is to teach you how to think, how to question, how to analyze, and there's this increasing again rift between educated and noneducated, and so everything reinforces everything else, and if you're a conservative who didn't go to college, it's really easy to just take that and say, yeah, look at them, they're everything you know. They're everything I'm not. They're everything I don't want to be.
Speaker 3:That actually reminds me of something. I've seen several things recently talking about why there are so few right wing comedians and part of it, and you can go on YouTube and find all kinds of videos where people will show right wing comedians. All have the same joke, which is I identify as a fighter jet.
Speaker 1:My pronouns are.
Speaker 3:My pronouns are yeah, or my pronouns are guess my ass.
Speaker 1:Or whatever they are.
Speaker 3:USA, yeah and so, and I'm thinking that there is a similarity there in that comedy requires good comedy requires a kind of curiosity, a kind of observation that good journalism also requires, like you need to be open to looking at things in a different way.
Speaker 3:Yes, if you want to make a joke, that that is like because jokes you need to surprise in order to to to make a joke that is successful. And similarly with with journalism, if you want to get to a story that you didn't know beforehand, you have to be open to learning things you didn't know before. That, to me, is very fascinating because I think that there's a very there's a similarity there with the comments you see all the time like why are comedians so liberal and why is the news media so liberal.
Speaker 1:The distinction that I'm hearing that both of you are making is about a comportment toward the world and toward truth which is not political. It's actually a way of understanding how the world works and and how, and one's place in it, and being willing to revise one's understanding about one's place in it, which is liberal, but in the lower case L use of that word and there and therefore also often goes with liberal in the uppercase L of the word, and it's a really yeah, I think it's an interesting and important distinction that it's not about a political polarity.
Speaker 1:It really is about a way of interacting with the world and with truth and oneself. Yeah, cool, all right. Any final thoughts before I try and see if I can reflect back some of the highlights of our conversation.
Speaker 2:I'm. I don't need to say another thing.
Speaker 1:You're good, cool, all right. So let me see if I can reflect back and each of you please feel free to like, fill in nuance, correct, edit. So we're talking. We are talking today about the role of, or the. I deemed it the brand, so I'm going to stick with that the brand.
Speaker 1:The journalists have the brand awareness and, specifically like the attitude that the public has toward the brand of journalists as we see it in pop culture, and we've seen it shift from a high of, after all, the president's men and the stories of Woodward and Bernstein, where droves of young people wanted to become journalists because Woodward and Bernstein were American heroes who protected democracy with integrity and a commitment to the truth. Through the recent years, since 2016, where we've seen just a real muddying of the brand of journalists who we're not sure as a people, we're not sure if we could trust them, we're not sure they actually have integrity, we're not sure they actually have the American people's goodwill at heart, we're not sure they what relationship they have with the truth and sometimes they have. We didn't say this today, but you know, the idea of you know alternative facts from the past eight years is something that was inconceivable in the days of Woodward and Bernstein.
Speaker 2:If I could just just jump, jump in there about alternative facts. I think one of the shifts right now is the shift from here is the information to. I want the information to to support my position right.
Speaker 1:So confirmation bias has become out of the background and into the foreground.
Speaker 2:We're saying it out loud and explicitly and if it doesn't support my position, then not only do I not want it, but I am going to try to convince people that it's wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that it's inaccurate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's inaccurate. Yes.
Speaker 1:So that's sort of the shift that you came into the studio kind of describing and then when we looked back at some of the pop culture moments of it, we saw we see, we see them the shift from print to broadcast radio and then broadcast where the journalist maybe we knew their name, but the idea of the celebrity of the journalist became sort of a factor in this shift so that we as the public came to believe, have come to believe, that at least for some journalists, maybe many of them, maybe most, there's a ego in the celebrity, whether it's about getting it first or getting it best, or you know, anderson Cooper showing up and changing what the story is actually about.
Speaker 1:That the actual celebrity of the journalist has changed the way we think about journalism, especially if we go all the way back to, like his girl Friday, where we may not even, you know, know the journalist names, and you also brought to our attention the different roles in presenting the news. So there's, there's, there's the journalists themselves, but then there's also the person for whom the business is the primary driver, the owner in the case of was it. What movie was it with? The was it network?
Speaker 2:Well network is an example. There are many of them. Broadcast news is an example. Citizen Kane is an example. Citizen Kane, charles Foster Kane, owns this big New York newspaper and it's during the Spanish-American war in Cuba and he sends a reporter and the reporter says there's really no story here and Kane says you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's an old tension that pop culture has been waiting for a long time.
Speaker 2:I was going to say one more thing about television news and anchors. And there was this movement started in the late 80s about family, the news anchors as your friends. And we've seen billboards, we've seen signs on the sides of buses tune into the 530 News and it shows the three anchors and the sportscaster smiling because and we go there not because the news is better, is presented more effectively, but because we like those people, right, right, they are our friends.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking about because my eldest was born in 2010. And so I would end up watching the, I guess the Today Show, with one with Matt Lauer and Ann Curry, because that would be when, when he'd be nursing and I got to. I liked watching it, and Matt Lauer's ouster because of the Me Too movement also didn't surprise me, based on having watched it regularly, because I wasn't watching for him, but the persona he gave off was appealing. I just for I found him smarmy from the beginning, but anyway. But I'm just thinking about the fact that I kept watching it, not because I wanted the news you can use, or like you know best fall recipes, or you know the things, but because I liked the people there and wanted to see them. And granted, morning news is not that is usually for for the people who have schedules, or the moms who are staying at home, or the parents are staying at home or whatever, but it's still. Or you know people in dentist waiting rooms, it still is.
Speaker 2:They are journalists, yeah, yeah journalists and it's a chatty format, because chatty is is about personality and about bringing people into the conversation, even though you, as you as a nursing mother, are not part of the conversation, but but you like to on some level. You think you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So those examples today show we're thinking about this is a little bit of a departure for us on deep thoughts, but we have multiple layers here that we're talking about. So we're because because the journalists, the those TV shows are a piece of media, and also there is pop culture, media about that, and so we talked about that distinction as well and the ways in which, specifically around representation, specifically around female representation, with Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown, and we saw some examples where the pop culture about the media, about the news media, gave us these strong female characters as reporters and then also had us focus on their love lives or on their personal lives in one way or another. And it was a. It's a give and take, it's a push pull, it's both. And what pieces am I forgetting? The highlights from our conversation?
Speaker 3:Where the idea of liberal bias comes from.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, as a liberal bias, as not about a political polarity but about a comportment toward the world, truth and one's relation to both.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unrelated to that. But going back to what Emily said about Matt Lauer and sensing something, in the series, the morning show on Apple, the Steve Carell character is Matt Lauer and something very similar happens. It doesn't play out quite the same way but it is clearly that story and that's something else that in these entertainment shows about the news media, as with entertainment shows about many other professions, if when something happens in the profession, some controversy, very often within a couple seasons of it, you see that story playing out in a more or less fictionalized way on the entertainment versions of the profession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what we're thinking about. Yeah Well, this was fun. Thank you, john, for joining us. Listener, if you are enjoying John's voice as much as I am, please go check out his podcast. It's called Burning Bright. We'll put a link to that podcast in the show notes and next time M. What are we talking about?
Speaker 3:Next time I'm going to bring you my deep thoughts about the fifth element. Oh cool, it must be found.
Speaker 1:All right, I really enjoyed that movie when I watched it, and you and I have talked about Lilu and some of her problematics when we talked about Born Texas yesterday, so I look forward to unpacking it further and do you have any listener comments you wanted to share?
Speaker 3:Yes, I have a comment from James about the Buffy episode that we did with Kate Moody. And James says I just watched the Buffy episode I was made to love you, which is the one that Kate Moody really went into about kind of in-cell culture. And James says damn, he really is like 100% in-cell. Before it was even coined I forgot how much I deserve a girlfriend. She's supposed to love everything I love. It's sort of played for laughs, but not really Uncomfortable laughs maybe, but then the same character returns next season as a rapist and serial killer.
Speaker 1:So yeah, kate was onto something, she was onto something.
Speaker 2:She really was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Well, john, thank you again for joining us.
Speaker 2:My pleasure.
Speaker 1:We will see you next week. Do you like stickers? Sure, we all do. If you head over to guygirlsmediacom slash, sign up and share your address with us, we'll send you a sticker. It really is that easy, but don't wait, there's a limited quantity. Thanks for listening. Our theme music is Professor Umlaut by Kevin MacLeod from incompetechcom. Find full music credits in the show notes. Until next time, remember pop culture is still culture, and shouldn't you know what's in your head?