Jeff McCall - Media Studies Professor, DePauw University Joins Houston Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
So the sixty minutes interview has got a lot of attention.
Can't wait to talk to our next guest about that.
His name is Jeff TheCall. He's the Media Stuce professor
to Paul University. There have been calls for the license
of CBS over this. There have been calls for at
the very least a release of the original interview Jeff
that they did so that they can see exactly how

(00:25):
much editing went into complete in some cases completely changing
her answers to questions, is this something just blows over
for sixty minutes or is this just another thing that
we're going to look back on it as the ultimate
you know, ultimately led to the demise of the mainstream media.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Well, I think sixty minutes has stepped on a landmine here.
You know, sixty minutes over the years has had a
great reputation as a as a you know, a bastion
of journalistic excellence, and of course it's quite in favor
of the kind of liberal audio and said it appeals to.
But I must say, you know, when you think about
Kamala Harris and her campaign, one of the key issues

(01:07):
has been can she explain her policies? You know, do
her policies make sense? You know, she has a reputation
as somebody who comes off as rather ambiguous in public
speaking and is famous for her word salads. So I
think when CBS started editing this sixty minutes interview, they
made a big mistake because really one of the issues

(01:28):
is can she be coherent? And when they get into
editing her to try to make her look better, they're
clearly trying to adjust the campaign rhetoric in her favor.
And so I'm not sure this is going to blow
over very quickly for sixty minutes. And one thing they
could easily do was just release the entire video that
they've got to let everybody see how they edited it,

(01:51):
because I think, you know, when one of the campaign
issues is can Kamala Harris actually express herself? I think
they owe it to us to let us be able
to see how she answered the questions. But you know,
I must say, I'm going to back up just a second.
It is common in media interviews, you know, on radio
and television to edit you know, the people you talk to.

(02:12):
That's usually done for time and to try to you know,
try to provide you know, some structure to the interview.
But this is not the case for Kamala Harris. Sixty
Minutes edited this to try to help her campaign, make
her sound yes, And it goes to show that the
media is activist in nature these days, that they've moved

(02:35):
away from their professional standards of yesteryear. And that explains why,
you know, in the gallop polling, media credibility is tanking
and has declined a great deal over the years because
people don't trust him. And well, the sad thing is
when the audience can't trust sixty minutes anymore, the media
as a whole, I think is in disrepair.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
It has been a long slow slide and certainly has
happened as cable and other non license so to speak.
I mean the FCC they have to be licensed to
broadcast in the public interest. And how is that in
the public interest? And that's why it is such a
big and hard fall for somebody like CBS.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, it's a real problem. And you know, you look
at the decline in media trust. In nineteen eighty, seventy
five percent of Americans said that they trusted the establishment media.
That number is now down to thirty one percent. I
mean that is a huge fall and another study by
ras Must and Reports now shows that only twenty eight

(03:38):
percent of Americans think the media even try to be
fair in their political reporting. So, I mean, you know,
when you get down to twenty eight percent of Americans
who even think the media even tries to be fair
in reporting, you know, that's a really bad number. And
you know, you go back to the you know, the
nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, when the Gallup studies showed
that media confidence was seventy five percent. You know, you

(04:01):
had you know, prominent journalists like Walter Cronkite and Chet
Huntley and Frank Reynolds anchoring news broadcasts and people had
confidence in them. And by the way, keep in mind,
in the seventies, we had a very polarized time as well,
coming out of the Vietnam era and whatnot. So when
people say, oh, the world is just polarized now, so
nobody trusts the media, well, the world was polarized in

(04:21):
the seventies as well, and people still trusted the media
because the media tried to be professional and tried to
adhere to a standard of fairness. And that is out
the window because they're totally into activism now. And the
people who run the media are not at all like
the people that they're trying to broadcast too.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, And I have to wonder, you know what the
push point is here as far as the advertisers go
to if you were if only thirty one percent of
the people trust you, at what point do you lose
the advertising that allows you to continue to broadcast. Jeff,
got to leave it at that for today, but thank
you so much. Jeff McCall Beni a studies professor at
De Paul University. At six twenty seven