Geoffrey Cowan
Hardly a month goes by without another technological leap into the Information Age. Direct-broadcast satellites can beam hundreds of TV channels into the home. The Internet, besides its staggering volume of written information, now offers music, news and talk from radio stations anywhere in the nation. Moving images from television and elsewhere are now poised to go on-line as well.
But just what kind of news, information or entertainment should flood the American home? Will the widening array of choices knit us closer as a society or unravel the social fabric? And how do you train the next generation of journalists for unforeseen opportunities and pitfalls?
Geoffrey Cowan, the new dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, is determined to force widespread debate on these issues. He recently left his government position as director of Voice of America to return to Los Angeles as something of an academic field marshal in the multimedia revolution.
Just as Northern California has been the center of computer hardware innovation, Southern California is emerging as the center of the software-based multimedia age. And USC has assumed an influential role, for the National Science Foundation selected the school as the country’s only national engineering research center for multimedia.
The Annenberg School, along with USC’s schools of cinema-television and engineering, also benefits from a $120-million endowment from publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg to promote cross-disciplinary work in news gathering, computers and information science. As dean, Cowan oversees more than 1,000 students and 50 full- and part-time journalism and communications faculty members. The son of Louis G. Cowan, the former CBS president and television pioneer in the ‘50s, he has been around media issues his entire life.
During his varied career, the 54-year-old Cowan has been an attorney, playwright, biographer of Clarence Darrow and Emmy-winning producer of “Mark Twain and Me.” He taught communications law at UCLA for 20 years and was chairman of the Los Angeles commission that wrote the city’s tough ethics law in 1990.
Cowan is married to Aileen Adams, also a lawyer, who is director of the U.S. Justice Department’s office for victims of crime. They have two children, Gabriel, 23, and Mandy, 13.
Sitting in his third-floor office overlooking the heart of the USC campus, Cowan spoke last week about the many aspects of his latest pursuit.
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Question: What technological developments will warrant the most attention from the Annenberg School?
Answer: If we had been talking a year or two ago, we would have thought about the Internet as a text base. But technology is developing so quickly that now you can hear your favorite station from anywhere in the world on the Internet. It’s something that we did at Voice of America. And, just this month, there was the announcement of Real Video, which means you can get real-time video over the telephone lines. Although it has fewer frames per second than your television set, it may soon be possible to get an infinite number of television signals into the home. From the standpoint of journalism entrepreneurs, this creates all kinds of exciting new ventures. But from the standpoint of journalistic ethics, things like accuracy and balance, the Internet creates a dilemma because you no longer have gate-keepers who can vouch for the accuracy of the product. That concerns us as a journalism school.
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Q: Why do you fear an erosion of ethical standards?
A: Daily newspapers are run by people who are trained by a journalistic code: one that requires them to get the story right; to check their facts; to make sure their stories are balanced; to be somewhat careful about invading people’s privacy, and so on. The most prominent newspapers have built a set of principles and readers have grown to trust them--even if they sometimes make mistakes. Talk radio sometimes puts people on air who are not terribly concerned about accuracy. But the Internet could go a step farther. Since anyone can create a page on the Internet, there is no easy way for readers to know the quality of information being disseminated. So that somebody who decides to doctor a photo could put it on something purported to be real news pages. And how would a subscriber know that these were doctored? So it makes the role of responsible journalists more important.
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Q: So what can a journalism school do?
A: We are trying to think for the future: What kind of standards could one establish? What kind of problems are emerging? And that is what a school of journalism and communications should be thinking about. I think it is both the responsibility and opportunity for the Annenberg School to participate and help provide some guidance and education for that changing environment.
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Q: Are you talking about instilling ethics in new journalists?
A: Absolutely. The single most important thing we do is train good journalists. In years gone past, people often learned journalism in apprenticeships. That’s less true today. People are looking more to schools to train journalists. As we move to these new technologies, it becomes even more important that the people learn the fundamentals of journalism. It means teaching them to gather facts, to analyze information, to ask good questions, to write with accuracy, balance and a degree of style and have a real appreciation of journalistic ethics.
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Q: Are you concerned about Internet users?
A: One of the central goals is to educate consumers on how to use the new technologies. The point is most dramatic for students, as everyone from President Clinton to Gov. Wilson wants to put computers in the schools. It’s very important that, as students have more access to the Internet, that the information be as reliable as the information we would expect in libraries or textbooks. For example, I’m told that someone who did Internet research on the Holocaust found just as many [World Wide Web page] sites that said the Holocaust never existed as there were informational sites about the Holocaust. As students begin to do research on the Internet, we have to be concerned that the information is accurate and balanced and complete.
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Q: A V-chip for the Internet?
A: I don’t think that’s the answer. We are talking about some way to help people understand what they are reading. The major debate over the Internet has been about pornography and obscenity. We should focus on making sure the information available to students is truly educational and that they are educated to become critical consumers. What is unique about the Internet is that it is unmediated. In some ways, that’s wonderful, because it provides a tremendous range and almost defies censorship. But people have to be educated to use it. . . . It becomes a challenge for educators to make sure people are able to distinguish what’s legitimate and what isn’t. Our school, along with engineering and the school of education, cinema and the USC library are all interested in this and other issues.
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Q: Are there other education issues?
A: There are a great many ways in which journalism is directly related to education. For instance, the number of regularly published high-school papers has dwindled precipitously. The reason is schools don’t have money and have closed down programs. But we think there are ways of using the Internet for high-school newspapers as an educational forum in L.A. and, more broadly, throughout California. We are talking about an on-line publication for the neighborhood.
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Q: What other kinds of new ventures do you see?
A: The Internet makes it possible to create on-line publications for people who have a common interest but who would not be as willing to spend money needed to support a publication. And you could never pay for television to reach them. People who care deeply about Burma have created their own site where they can communicate with each other about human-rights issues in Burma. They have a political impact, because they include some of the most knowledgeable people about Burma. What is perhaps possible for journalists is creating hundreds of such sites on specialized topics.
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Q: So the Annenberg School is also training entrepreneurs?
A: We are training people for leadership roles in journalism and communications. We are training people to look for niches and opportunities and, hopefully, to be great investigative reporters and great broadcast journalists--people who will create the next great enterprise taking advantage of new technologies.
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Q: The next generation of Rupert Murdochs?
A: Look at how technology has changed. Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner were not forces 25 years ago compared with what they are today. You would have thought Bill Paley and CBS controlled the universe. Nobody had heard of Bill Gates at that point. There is no reason to assume that, 20 years from now, the world won’t have turned just as completely. We are training leaders for the future.
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Q: Switching tracks, why did you give up a perfectly good job at the Voice of America?
A: I went to the Voice of America with the intention that I would be there for two or three years. So to be there close to three years was an appropriate amount of time. I wanted to come back to California and be at the forefront of local, domestic and international issues of enormous importance, both from the standpoint of journalism and communications more broadly.
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Q: I take it you want to keep a hand in international affairs?
A: I will be creating a public-policy component at the Annenberg School, including, for example, a Pacific Rim dialogue. There is a substantial debate within countries on the Pacific Rim, countries like Singapore and China, about how much information to make available to their citizens. The United States is premised on the notion that true political and economic development relies on an open market of information, as well as an open market of trade. Those issues need a forum where they can be openly debated and discussed. I think we can find ways of making the Annenberg School a center for that kind of debate. I have a particular interest in international issues, with my background at the Voice of America.
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Q: How about domestic issues?
A: There are a few things that make the Annenberg School and USC a particularly exciting place to be. Last summer, the National Science Foundation made a major grant to USC, designating it as the multimedia research center for the country. What that will do is combine the talents from our engineering school with journalism and communications, as well as the cinema school, to figure what these new technologies are all about.
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Q: What do you see as the most serious issue under study?
A: One overriding issue is the extent to which these new technologies will atomize society. Will they further alienate people from each other and make people more insular? Or, conversely, will they make people better educated and help them understand each other? You can see how this technology can go in either direction.
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Q: Well, isn’t the world becoming more fractured?
A: There is a real risk that we will become more fractured. In the 1950s and 1960s, by having only three television networks and news shows, we had a common language of politics in this country. There were plenty of problems with the networks, like, among other things, a lack of diversity. But they did have advantages. What made the civil-rights movement so powerful was that it was shown on the nightly news.
But what if no one was looking at the nightly news? Could a civil-rights movement that was based on information delivered nationally have succeeded 30 years earlier, when all information was controlled locally? The explosion of new technologies has tremendous strength in that we will have much more diversity of information. But it could have the weakness of forfeiting our common base of information.
If all people are tuned to Internet sites that reinforce their own prejudices and don’t expose them to different points of view, that can present some problems. That’s one of the things we need to be mindful of as these new technologies change the world we live in.
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Q: But isn’t competition good? The more sources of news, the better?
A: You want to make sure that people have a diversity of information. I don’t think there is anything wrong with people reading or listening to things that reinforce their own ideologies. But it’s the same thing as I was saying: The concern is to make sure people are educated consumers. When they hear a source of information, they say, “That’s one point of view, but I should test it against something else.” I think it is important that we establish a viewing, reading and listening culture, in which people try to get enough sources of information so they get a relatively complete picture.
