Consider Martha Stewart

Martha Teichner, CBS News Analyst

Consider Martha Stewart.  When she was indicted recently, she was all over the newspapers.  Acres of column inches were devoted to her case.  She gobbled up air time on television and radio.   She received an incredible amount of coverage, this media superstar.

What got her into trouble wasn’t so much the fact that she sold thousands of shares of Imclone stock just before bad news sent the share price plummeting…what she is accused of doing is lying about it, of covering her tracks...she is accused of a criminal breach of ethics...that, should she be convicted,  you might think…would mark her with disgrace or shame…look up the word stigma in the dictionary, and there it is…to be marked with disgrace or shame….

There are many people who think Martha Stewart has already been stigmatized by the accusation alone.  She’s been forced to resign as CEO of her company.  Her television show has been dropped by many stations around the country.  But the fact of the matter is that people are still buying her towels at k-mart.  She’s still rich, and her lawyers have been out there telling us that she’s being targeted because she’s Martha Stewart.

And here we all are,  the newspaper, magazine, television, and radio consumers of America, subjected to every new detail in the Martha Stewart soap opera,  whether we like it or not.  It’s just about unavoidable.  And if we’re honest, many, if not most of us, would have to admit to a certain perverse fascination with the theater of it.   We’re leering voyeurs,  gathered to see whether we’re going to witness the downfall of the woman who personified perfection.  It’s like something out of greek tragedy...it was, of course, the greeks, who invented the word stigma.

So why is it that the entire nation pays attention to what happens to Martha Stewart, someone who, if the courts so decide, may deserve to be stigmatized…  she grabs headlines, even if she doesn’t want to…why, when the public and the media seem so unwilling to pay attention to incontinence,  deafness, paraplegia,  cancer, aids, disfigurement, blindness, you name it?  The list of physical and psychological conditions stigmatized unjustly in our society is very long.

People love a good story.  They love tales of the mighty brought down to size.  They love great romances, with or without happy endings.  People love stories about the little guy beating the odds.  They love scary stories, as long as their terror is only a fantasy.  If the terror is real, however, they don’t want to know.

I believe that the root of the stigma that attaches to health conditions, is fear.    That list I just mentioned…pick your choice. The prospect of any one of them is a nightmare, too frightening to contemplate for most people .

There but for fortune go I.

It should not be surprising, then, that the media are not falling all over themselves to address issues that scare people or make them uneasy.  Advocacy groups representing the conditions associated with stigma can argue all they want that public exposure can eliminate, or at least diminish stigma, but that won’t automatically result in an increase in the number of news stories, magazine features, or made-for-TV movies, no matter how justified.

Some of the morning shows and daytime TV talk shows have been willing to tackle tough subject matter and do it responsibly.  Michael j. Fox and Christopher reeve have become the public face of disability.  There was the movie, “a beautiful mind,”  but, for the most part, it’s an uphill fight to get anybody to take on issues that make people squeamish.

Just take a look at incontinence.  We’re talking about something do with an intimate bodily function that Americans have trouble calling by it’s actual name within the privacy of their own homes, let alone on television, with millions of people watching, or in a magazine.  We see ads for medications and related products, but not much else.

I can’t speak for print, but in television, there are a number of business realities that have contributed to the unwillingness of news organizations or network entertainment divisions to take responsibility where stigma is concerned.

Once upon a time, when there were only three networks, and the television audience was truly captive, the men in charge of making programming decisions, and they were mostly men, believed they had the luxury and the obligation to use the medium to teach, to raise the cultural standard in this country.  With money practically growing on trees, as advertising revenues rolled in, the attitude in news was, “tell people what we think they need to know, what’s important anywhere in the world, even if the topic isn’t familiar or popular.”  The assumption that, “we know better,” was a valuable one, to a point.

Without it, for example, we would never have witnessed the civil rights movement, a profound change in the racial landscape that is still evolving to this day.

But….these journalistic  visionaries brought to their profession a collection of prejudices and discomforts that looked a lot like a mirror image of the rest of society’s catalogue of subjects generally considered unsuitable for polite discussion.

I remember in 1980, when the CBS morning news did long, seven or eight minute stories, I was working on a piece about the battle taking place in the state of Florida between MD's and licensed midwives, over who could and should be delivering babies.  We filmed a hospital birth and a home birth as part of our story.  I was particularly proud of the way it turned out.

The day before it was supposed to air, the executive producer of the morning news phoned and informed me that the anchorman, who is a major on-air figure at CBS news still, had announced he would not allow pictures of babies being born on his show.  “people would find it upsetting,” he supposedly said.

What could be more natural, more wholesome, than childbirth?  I pointed out that the audience of the morning news was overwhelmingly women, who knew a thing or two about childbirth, most of them.

I asked the executive producer how the anchorman could justify his position, when he had permitted, even encouraged, the airing of pictures of a massacre in el Salvador a few weeks before, an incident in which hundreds of people were fired on as they gathered on the steps of the cathedral in san Salvador.  Was mass murder not upsetting?

The executive producer said, “you’re right.  I agree with you, but it’s just a thing he has, and I'm not going to fight him on this one.  He’s adamant.”  So the piece never ran.

The point is, the media are anything but monolithic.  “are,” I said.  The word media is the plural of medium.  Every single newspaper, magazine, radio station, local TV station, and network is distinct, with different needs, different viewpoints, different approaches.  How often do you hear, “the media is...something or other,”  as if there were some vast, single-minded, colossus dictating public opinion?  Nothing like it exists.

If you subscribe to cable TV, how many channels do you get?  Dozens, if not hundreds, I would bet.  People watch them at the expense of the three traditional networks.  It’s been a long time since Americans, en masse, sat down at dinner time to watch the CBS evening news and its counterparts on NBC and ABC.  It used to be a national ritual.

When I joined CBS in 1977, each of those broadcasts had in the vicinity of 20 million viewers every night.  Now it’s well below  half that, on a good night.  Where did the audience go?  To CNN, the food channel, a & e, all those old movie channels, ESPN, HBO, the internet...whatever.

That fragmentation has had dramatic effects on how news is covered and what gets put on the air.  Smaller audiences mean lower advertising revenues, resulting in much, much smaller operating budgets, even though television costs much, much more than it used to.

Instead of taking the approach, “we’ll tell you this, because it’s important, and you need to know it,” television news and entertainment executives alike are forced to do the equivalent of public opinion polling, much as political candidates do.  They go to a lot of trouble to find out what audiences say they want to see, what will keep them from switching the dial to something they find more, dare I say it, entertaining.

That is not an oversimplification.  It’s an economic fact of life, one that often overrules even the best intentions.  If it was tough before, addressing stigma on TV, it’s even tougher now, when programming lives or dies at the hand of the channel surfer.

So what do you do?  You understand how the system works, and you get smart.

A couple of weeks ago, the senate held hearings to assess the fitness of William Pryor, the attorney general of Alabama, to be appointed for life as a justice on the federal appeals court in the eleventh circuit.  Among other questions raised, was Mr.. Pryor’s record of opposing the mandatory construction of ramps in and around public buildings to accommodate wheelchairs.

Groups representing the disabled, you may recall, got out the troops.  There was considerable coverage.  You didn’t need a TV to know that a lot of people in wheelchairs showed up to protest his appointment.  The opposition was smart, but the opportunity was obvious.  It’s not every day that advocacy groups have that kind of platform to voice their positions.

The rest of the time, it’s not enough to wring your hands and say, “oh the media ought to be doing stories on x.”   Most non-breaking news stories are the result of carefully crafted pitches to individual news organizations and reporters, pitches that match the story with the program or magazine or newspaper.

I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of news releases, press kits, review copies of books, and telephone calls every week, pitching stories.  The competition is fierce, ultimately for air time, but first to get me to pay attention to the pitch.  Every reporter, producer, and editor I've ever known is similarly inundated.

The fastest way to turn me off is to pitch something that is totally inappropriate for the format of our show.  For example, I can’t tell you how many times I've gotten calls from insistent pr people, who say something like, “dr. John doe will be in NY the week of such and such to discuss his new diet book.  He would be an excellent live guest for your show any day that week.”

I then ask, “do you watch our show?”  The answer is invariably, “oh yes!”  I reply, “well, I don’t think you do, because a. It’s on Sunday…b.we don’t have live guests…and c. We do the arts, news analysis, and human interest feature stories, not diet books. “

I get furious, that this person has wasted my time, time I need just to get my stories shot and written, time I need to consider pitches that would work for our show.  If I can remember the name of the individual or pr firm, I make a mental note never to deal with him or her again.

Earlier I said, “people love a good story.”  A good story, well-told, with great characters, has a chance of getting on the air or in a magazine or newspaper.  A news release with a bunch of statistics about a disease or a physical condition whose sufferers are stigmatized in society has a near-certainty of being thrown out.   The facts and statistics flesh out the story, give it context and weight, but first there’s got to be a compelling story.  It’s the story that will make people remember the issue and care about it.  Reporters won’t know about that story unless somebody tells them.

I'd like to show you some excerpts from recent CBS news “sunday morning” stories concerning disability.  I can’t say we do enough, but we do better than a lot of shows, and the stories we put on, I believe, are the kind that help on the stigma front.

The first is about Doug Burris, repeatedly voted the most popular teacher at Miami beach high school.  He is head of the rock ensemble, a rock music group that has won just about every high school music competition there is to win.  He also teaches guitar, which is pretty remarkable, since he has multiple sclerosis and can’t move any part of his body, except his head.

…….run Doug Burris excerpt.……

Our executive producer really didn’t want to air the Doug Burris story.  He was very uncomfortable with seeing him.  He finally gave in, and after the piece ran, we got hundreds of e-mails and letters from people who were astonished by what he’s managed to accomplish.  The executive producer left me a phone message saying, “you were right.  I was wrong.”

Next, I'd like to show you a bit of a story about Ronan Tynan, a fabulous Irish tenor many Americans saw and heard after Sept.. 11^th…what they did not necessarily know was that he is also a doctor and an amputee.

……show Ronan Tynan…

 Another great character, whose story, certainly, would make people rethink the stigma of disfigurement.

Last, I'd like to show you a clip from two pieces I did on the deaf community in Rochester, NY.  Because of the number of institutions for the deaf that exist there and the size of the deaf population that has been drawn to them, Rochester is a place where there has been real headway in the fight against stigma.

……… show Rochester clip…

It’s hard work getting the message out there, getting the right stories and the right spokespeople matched up with the right media venues, whether we’re talking about CBS news  “sunday morning,” the noon show on a local station in grand rapids, or Charleston, sc lawyer, Harriet mc bride Johnson's razor-sharp, unbelievably moving new York times magazine cover story.

Sometimes it doesn’t work, but no issue I know has reached critical media mass without its advocates hammering away. whether it’s the civil rights movement or mothers against drunk driving.

I don’t know if it’s still happening, but there used to be an organization, I think it may have been a journalism school, that kept track of the number of times women correspondents appeared on the three main network evening newscasts.  At a news conference, every year, the survey was released.  The top fifty women were named, their stories tallied, and the numbers compared with their male counterparts.  Wire service coverage of the event guaranteed that people all over the country knew that fewer women than men were on the networks’ flagship broadcasts.

Every year the networks had their noses rubbed in their own discrimination, publically, and I do believe, now, the numbers are a little more equal.  I can’t say that the annual survey, by itself, tipped the balance, but nobody likes to be made out to be a bad guy, and it didn’t hurt.

It’s only a suggestion, but perhaps, if a foundation, or a journalism school were willing, the same sort of survey could be published every year, tallying the number of times stories about stigmatized health conditions appeared on various networks and in key newspapers and magazines.

A little embarrassment once a year, might not be such a bad thing.

A similar analysis of minority representation in prime time,  resulted in the networks agreeing formally to do better.  Those pledges didn’t just happen.  Major organizations with economic and political clout made them happen.

You’re saying, “ but we don’t have any clout.  We’re the victims here.”  Well, consider this scenario.

In a landmark advertising deal, Lexus cars last year agreed to sponsor a segment of our show, CBS news “sunday morning,” called “to the fullest.”  Every week or so for a specified period, we run an 8-10 minute story about an individual or institution pursuing excellence in an interesting way.  At the beginning and the end of the segment, like bookends, there are announcements that the segment is brought to you by Lexus, also committed to excellence.  Lexus doesn’t interfere with the choice of stories or how they’re told, so there’s no problem with the legitimacy of the journalism.  The only caveat is that the stories be about living life, “to the fullest.”

Collectively, sufferers of every health condition represented in this room, must consume millions of dollars worth of drugs annually, probably at a much higher rate than the general public.  Is there no way to bring consumer clout to bear to convince some big drug company or insurance company to sponsor a segment on an important network magazine show, that would have as its only caveat, overcoming the stigma of disability, society viewing disability in a different light?

When I see the same Vioxx ad two or three times during the course of our show, I ask myself, “is that why prescription drug prices are so high, all that institutional advertising?”  I wonder if the level of suspicion would be lower if we could watch, say,  I'm making up a segment name…something like, “count me in,” brought to you by the makers of Vioxx, committed to counting you in when the pain of arthritis threatens your way of life.   Probably for the same money, they look like heroes, by associating themselves with stories that do some good.  Just a thought.

It’s not easy to get your issue on TV or in a newspaper or magazine, but it’s not impossible.  Will that eliminate the stigma associated with these conditions?  Maybe it will help.  So the effort is worth it.  Thank you.