JOAN: Does the deliberate dumbing down of the news have the same effect as censorship, by cutting the public off from information that we need to make our decisions?

MARY: I say this as an old advertising pro: The news is for sale. The news is just a factor, like entertainment. The ultimate person who is responsible for whether the news is good, bad or indifferent is the viewer, because if the news is not good, fewer and fewer people will watch it.

LILY: People didn’t used to try to make money on the news. We lived through an era when the networks prided themselves on their news department.

MARY: Yes. That may be true.

LILY: Not because it was a money maker.

MARY: The news around this election has been particularly obnoxious, idiotic. But you’re getting the news that is essentially what most of the people are willing to pay for, or what they want. I know that sounds vastly oversimplified. But it is a fact.

LILY: Look how many good people they have destroyed just by petty humiliations. There’s nothing worse in this culture than being discounted or laughed at. They destroyed Gore. They destroyed Kerry as any kind of viable candidate, just by making fun of him windsurfing.

MARLO: Look what they did to Hillary, from the very beginning. With her headband, and her not wanting to bake cookies. My God, you would have thought this woman had robbed a bank.

JOAN: There was this great op-ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards where she wrote that what we’re getting, “what is left, is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism.” As intelligent women, when you turn on the American news, do you desperately watch to try and find something? Or do you go on the Internet instead?

MARLO: I always think that if I read enough stuff, possibly somewhere in the middle I’ll find the truth. But the Joe Klein article in Time was so interesting. And he said we get this low-level information and use it as news. You know — what Barack’s bowling score is. All this foolish stuff — what Hillary was wearing and what Bill Clinton said to a guy on the street. But nothing about the issues, nothing about what’s happening to this country, nothing about the war. The war is now on page 18. Iraq is, I think, now on the back of the paper. And we’re not interested in it. And today Bush is all excited about his $600 rebate. A $600 rebate is going to make up, he says, for the gas prices. How far will $600 take you?

JOAN: About 20 miles.

MARLO: And people buy it.

JOAN: Do you think there’s a will behind this deliberate stupidity of information that we’re being given?

MARY: That it’s manipulative?

JOAN: Not only treating the public with contempt but actually —

MARLO: Withholding. Yes, I think they’re withholding.

JOAN: As in, “If we tell them all about Barack’s score – bowling score – they won’t pay attention to anything else.”

MARY: Why don’t we do something about it? I mean, it is possible to do something about it, if we’re really that interested. Why don’t we band together and simply stop it? After the last election, which was certainly questionable, we just accepted — I mean, we are an accepting country.

MARLO: I asked Bill Clinton, at a dinner party, why he and the first George Bush didn’t go to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and ask them to come up with a foolproof way that our elections would be fair and honest.

JOAN: Brilliant.