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.
MARLO: They’ve made so much money off of this country, isn’t it time that they use their brilliant brains to help us figure out how to have a fair election? We’ve got Jimmy Carter traveling all over the world trying to make sure that peoples’ elections are fair. And we’re getting our elections stolen in this country.
MARY: Well then, why don’t we take it on as a cause, you know?
MARLO: I think we should.
MARY: People do get what they ask for. What they’re willing to pay for. Then they’ll say, “We don’t know what to do. There’s no way to start.”
MARLO: That’s one thing we could do. We have two elections that we know were fake.
JOAN: There’s a lawyer in Albuquerque called John Boyd who managed to get paper ballots mandated for New Mexico and a couple of other states. And he did a countrywide campaign for paper ballots in every state four years ago. He had fund-raisers in L.A. and nobody came.
MARY: You’ve just got to think — a little bit — about the fact that you get what you pay for, you get what you’re willing to take, you get what you’re willing to accept.
MARLO: And I think people have accepted that it’s all corrupt. You can’t have this much corruption for this long. People step back and say, “OK. Let me take care of my family. Let me do my work well. Let me pray to my god. And let me just get through life because it’s too corrupt.” Because it just feels like a mushroom of corruption. You read the paper and you just say, “Oh, don’t do that. Don’t do that to people, for God’s sake.” The government is continuously doing really, really destructive things to this country.
MARY: Well, why don’t we get on our site — something that happens every single, solitary day — an area where we report something, and we get people to join us, because we’re getting more and more women to join us?
MARLO: To think about the terrible thing of the day, and what could be done about it. Because I think it’s going by —
MARY: You know, you get a gang of women together, they can be very effective.
JOAN: We’ll have the “shame of the day.” In fact, it’s already part of Change the World, which isn’t —
MARY: It should be a thing of its own because it’s not about helping people who need things, or making things better. It’s really about getting rid of the criminals. And seeing them as criminals and making other people see them as we see them, because we’re right and we have facts.
MARLO: Have you seen this documentary called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” I haven’t seen it, but a friend of mine asked, “What do you think about the electric car?” And I said, “It doesn’t really work, does it? You can’t go very far or can’t do this or can’t do …” This whole documentary is about the fact that the auto industry just sent out misinformation to destroy the whole electric car thing, when it could have really been successful.
MARY: But an awful lot of people overrode that stuff and went ahead and got the first combination cars. The hybrids really happened in California.
LILY: I have a Prius. It runs fine. But I’m sure there’s a way better technology that could be created for the mass market. And they will … and it will be, eventually. In Vanity Fair just the other day, Graydon Carter quoted Bobby Kennedy, Jr., as saying that the Midwest is sort of the Saudi Arabia of wind.
LILY: Nobody wants to see the greater good for more people. They want to see the greater good — for their individual group.
MARLO: But we’re investing so much money in so many lives in a war, and no money at all in alternate fuel and technology. And where was the media for that?
JOAN: Mary, when you were Wells, Rich, Green, were you guys buying advertising time during the network’s news?
MARY: Sure.
JOAN: So, you didn’t care that the network news was heavy and sometimes dull?
MARY: Well, actually, at the time I think the network news was better than it is now. I wasn’t really judging the network news. I was so busy just trying to keep that agency up and keep everybody working and just get going. When you start a business, you’re kind of focused on survival. I approved media plans. But media plans involved so many different kinds of media in so many different places.
LILY: And you’re supposed to get results for your client.
MARY: And you’re looking at numbers. Half of the shows I bought in I never saw. I couldn’t because I had very big clients. I wouldn’t have done anything else, you know, if I —
JOAN: I don’t know when it became that everything on the news was about Jessica Simpson.
MARY: They think that’s what people want.
LILY: Because the culture is dumbed down, regular, ordinary people have less time to even reflect on anything. They have to work. They’re fed so much disinformation. So many lies are in the culture and in the media that I don’t think people even know any more. And now we have all these third-world countries, who will never have had a chance at aspiring to the middle class, because there’s nothing left. And if they do, we really don’t have any resources. We have used up so much of the resources without thinking of the future. Think of the third-world countries who live so desperately. What if they suddenly were self-sustaining — and then they tried to create a better standard of living for their people?
MARLO: Think of all we could have done in this world with the money on the war. You read stories about the starvation and the AIDS and the TB and all these things. And … we spend all this money.
Can I just suggest one tiny part of what’s terrible that’s going on? The loss of honor. There’s no feeling about honor. A couple of weeks ago Cheney was on some show and the woman interviewer said, “About 75 percent of the people in this country are against the war.” And he just looked and said, “So?”
MARY: I think he probably has accomplished all that he’s interested in.
MARLO: Clinton was impeached for a girl under a desk. And Nixon went to hell for the dirty tricks of a campaign. It’s … it’s mind-boggling to me what they’re getting away with.
LILY: Wait, we haven’t had our next election either, yet.
MARLO: Oh, imagine McCain — Mr. One-Hundred-Years McCain.
JOAN: Mary is going to figure out a way to sell peace and humanity and common sense.
MARY: Right.
JOAN: And she’s going to use this line from Marcus Aurelius, which is, “What is no good for the hive is no good for the bee.”
LILY: And Marcus Aurelius is from a loooooooong time ago.