What could I conclude but that this woman was more full of shit than just about anyone I had ever met? She was clearly off her rocker when it came to international politics. Worse, the comments about CBS seemed to indicate she was desperate to impress. I had heard rumors that she was being considered to replace Klein there, but frankly, I dismissed them out of hand. Klein was obnoxious, but at least he had a track record. Who the hell did this ignorant pixie think she was? Well, Laura Ingraham understands the media better than I do. She has something more important than knowledge or experience — and she knows it. She has star quality.

Laura was hired by CBS to replace Klein, and together with Bill Bradley offers regular commentary on the Evening News. She also worked as a regular pundit on MSNBC, thereby becoming the only person in history, as far as I know, to negotiate simultaneous contracts with both NBC and CBS news. Neither one could live without her. She also turns up regularly on Imus, “The McLaughlin Group,” “Politically Incorrect,” in Vanity Fair and on the New York Post’s Page Six. One day she is flying on Robert DeNiro’s plane, the next she is dining with Dustin Hoffman. Laura look-alikes have begun sprouting up all over the media, spouting right-wing anti-feminist politics as they brush their peroxide blond locks back and straighten out their leopard miniskirts on camera. Who cares that, to most women, Laura and her acolytes’ right-wing Republican politics have about as much appeal as a stag party in a strip joint.

Laura recently left MSNBC, presumably for greener pastures, and so I can write about her without any professional conflicts of interest. I admit to liking her and missing her around the station. Unless the subject was law or a Clinton-related scandal, Laura rarely seemed to know much about the subject at hand, but she never evinced any ambivalence about where the real issue lay. She once destroyed me in a debate about the upcoming election when I tried to argue that the great unaddressed issue between Clinton and Bob Dole was the ravaging effect global capitalism has had on peoples’ lives and communities. She just laughed. We were, after all, on television. Just how did I expect to explain to soccer moms that their problems lay not with taxes or family values but with highly mobile capital markets? Laura looked and sounded great and responded with some snappy Republican campaign slogan. I was toast.

More than anyone else alive, I fear, Laura Ingraham speaks to the Zeitgeist of the contemporary American media. She is young, sexy and ambitious. She argues politics the way lawyers argue cases, as if there can be no possible interpretation other than her own, and what can possibly be the matter with her pathetically out-to-lunch opponent? She is a class-A schmoozer who understands her considerable gifts and exploits them to the fullest. If there’s someone at a party or a lunch or even in a TV studio Laura wants to talk to, she’s there, and suddenly the guy is an old friend.

What Laura is not, however, is a careful thinker or knowledgeable analyst. Her professional training is pretty much limited to a bomb-throwing stint at the Dartmouth Review, three years of law school, a clerkship for Clarence Thomas and a sexy appearance on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. I understand why she was hired by MSNBC, which puts a premium on youth and hence is willing to cut workers slack in the experience and reasoned thought department; and a beautiful right-wing blond on “The McLaughlin Group” requires no explanation whatever. But CBS News? Opposite Bill Bradley? This is not a morning show, where Molinari-esque perkiness comes with the coffee. This is the flagship news program of what once was “the Tiffany network.” Are great looks and superficial debating abilities so valuable on television that a Laura Ingraham is equivalent to a former senator who rewrote the tax code and has provided the country with some of its toughest political speeches on race for the past two decades?

Well, yes. CBS’s ratings may be in the toilet, but no one is blaming Laura. The network is most often criticized for sticking to stodgy old formulas that emphasize “real news” at the expense of the feel-good, tabloidy stuff that is eating up the business the way Godzilla swallowed Tokyo. We have reached the point, it seems, where exactly the same qualities that make someone a likable sitcom star can also land them a job where Bill Moyers and Eric Severeid once sat. What I don’t understand is why Laura is satisfied with just politics. Diane Sawyer once worked for Nixon but, as glamorous agent for our celebrity yearnings, she can now buy and sell small countries. Ditto for the apolitical non-journalist Barbara Walters. Laura Ingraham has catapulted herself atop the greasy pole of political commentary in a period when most aspiring TV personalities are still peddling their wares in Peoria. Can it be long before she’s showing Queens Diane and Barbara the door as well? They are showing a few wrinkles, after all.

Microsoft spokesperson Vivek Varma has called the conference, titled “Appraising Microsoft and its Global Strategy,” a “misguided effort” driven by Microsoft’s competitors and said the list of speakers “reads like a rogues’ gallery.”

Salon spoke about the conference and the alleged Microsoft’s threat with Nader and Jamie Love, the technology specialist at Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law in Washington, D.C.

Jim Clark of Netscape has called Microsoft an “evil corporation.” Do you agree with that characterization?

Nader: The words I use is that Microsoft has strong monopolistic tendencies to their business strategy. Microsoft has this belief that if they don’t control everything, they will control nothing. They have a total zero-sum view. With their 90 percent control of the operating system, which generates spectacular profit margins, they can use the money from this monopolistic position to leverage their control into one area after another. Their browser (Internet Explorer) is just one example of that.

What are others?

Nader: Well, they are moving out from software, right through the computer industry to other service industries, like banking, insurance, travel, publishing and cable. And they’re moving from conduit to content as well.

Netscape still controls the lion’s share of the browser market. How do you see Microsoft taking that over?

Love: In its implementation of Java, Microsoft has adopted a kind of “Java-plus” strategy. Rather than having the plain old Java code, they’re using an embrace-and-extend strategy, whereby Microsoft embraces the open standard of Java but then throws in some extensions which make it perform better with future versions of Windows 95, but not at all with non-Microsoft systems. Sun Microsystems is now suing Microsoft for violating the licensing terms. We think the government could do something in the antitrust area regarding Microsoft’s attempted perversion of Java.

Apart from the Java licensing issue, what is so wrong with Microsoft branching out into other fields?

Nader: First of all, apart from antitrust considerations, it’s just not healthy for any economy and society to have one company play such a dominant role in even one field. It’s even less healthy if that company has a dominant role in all kinds of commercial and industrial sectors. This isn’t just John D. Rockefeller trying to dominate the oil industry. This is a company trying to be the toll collector at gateway after gateway on the information superhighway, using, in effect, a closed-door business strategy. The result is, innovation suffers. Venture capital for potential competitors dries up. Venture capitalists will say, “Why bother? Even if company X comes up with something that’s good, it’s not going to be able to deal with Microsoft’s power.”

You said earlier that Microsoft was moving from conduit to content. What’s the problem with that?

Nader: When it comes to content involving commercial transactions, the more control Microsoft has, the more they can intimidate critical reporting on them. For example, we had people who wanted to take part in the conference, but their CEOs squashed them. This was in industries like travel and newspapers. This spills over into news reporting as well. They now have MSNBC. There was rumor last week that Microsoft wants to buy CBS. We’ve already seen that the TV networks handle stories differently depending on their commercial alliances. For example, when some nuclear plants in Connecticut had to shut down last summer, CBS, which is owned by Westinghouse, and NBC, which is owned by General Electric, never reported it. So if Microsoft actually buys CBS and establishes more alliances, say with Disney , which owns ABC, the penumbra of their intimidation is going to be extraordinary.

Specifically,
how do you see Microsoft impacting the television business?

Love: The real threat is down the road. With their monopoly over the operating
system, the question is: To what degree are they going to make the Microsoft
browser the front end to television sets, which is exactly what they want to
do? When you have (TCI Chairman) John Malone saying, “Microsoft is not going to dominate the cable industry the way they dominate the software industry,” it’s time to start worrying.

Why?

Love: Because Malone
is saying that he knows that Microsoft is interested in this
integration of multimedia through the front end of a television, and he’s
afraid of Microsoft. Just yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows 98 and
the new version of the Internet Explorer (4.0) will permit you to receive TV signals and download data directly into your computer. So down the road, when we turn on
our combination TV-computer, Gates would like control the operating system
that will help us navigate from video to audio to data to online commercial
transactions. He wants everybody who wants to play in that Web environment to
be his partner. And if you’re a competitor, the odds are your products will be
hidden deep in the menus. They’ll crash more. That’s the game that’s
already been played on the desktop. The question is whether or not Gates can
take it into multimedia.

Nader: In other areas, they will destroy entire industries. For instance,
the encyclopedia that Microsoft is in right now. They’re not printing
encyclopedias. They’ve got an online version that is squeezing the existing
print versions. So in terms of access and the use of encyclopedias, Microsoft
is already the big kid on the block in an industry that’s been operating for
150 years. In the billing and presentment area of the banking industry,
Microsoft is going to the banks and saying they’ll give them the software for
free. Once they get a lock on that, they’ll be the toll collector for that
whole area of online business. Just think of the leverage. Pretty soon,
they’ll move into financial services. They’re not going to build new banks.
They’re just going to channel existing industries onto the information
superhighway. This is Microsoft’s global business strategy.

But isn’t it true that as a Microsoft spokesperson said about the software business, that the whole field of high-tech is a “dynamic, innovative market.” Wouldn’t we be going in these directions, with or without Bill Gates?

Nader: When the auto started to replace the
horse-and-buggy, there were a lot of auto companies. They had
different engine systems and all kinds of different innovations. There was
the Stanley Steamer, an electric car, and the internal combustion engine.
What you’re seeing here is not just a horse-and-buggy industry that’s being
challenged; you’re seeing dozens and dozens of industries that are being
challenged by an emerging monopolistic competitor. It’s almost as if the
entire horse-and-buggy industry were challenged by a giant General Motors
from the get-go. And that is where the innovation will suffer, that’s where pricing will become more and more
burdensome once the Microsoft monopoly kicks in. Don’t forget that a lot of
monopolies get started with predatory pricing. One form of predatory pricing
is to give away your product, which is possible in Microsoft’s case because of the enormous profits it gained from the monopoly over operating systems. That should be
considered unfair competition.

Love: Everybody expects technology to create upheavals in industry and new
players. What’s unique about Microsoft is that it’s trying to become the central player
in unprecedented areas of business.
Its ability to leverage its power, to provide the crucial
software for program interfaces, standards for performing secure credit card
transactions, video-streaming and so forth puts them in a position where they
become a partner in all these businesses. At any given moment, they can go
from being your partner to being your direct competitor.

What do you hope to achieve with the conference?

Nader: We want the conference to put all this on the table, in public. We would like a response and a dialogue with Microsoft and
Bill Gates. In his book, “The Road Ahead,” Gates made repeated points
about the need for dialogue on the emerging information superhighway
in a period of technological change. This conference is right square on
that principle.

You have said that some of the invitees felt intimidated from attending.

Nader: Of course. Why do you think the conference is being held in the first place?
There’s a fear and intimidation that is spreading rapidly throughout the
software industry and is beginning the spread in the other industries that
Microsoft is starting to penetrate. This reluctance to speak out in a
supposedly free economy and free society is very unhealthy and very
troubling. The fact that Novell, which is very critical of Microsoft, doesn’t
feel that it’s able to make a presentation at the conference, illustrates
just how much the doors on free and critical speech in the business community are
closing. There’s great fear. Some have even joked about needing a witness
protection program.

Have you been pressing the Justice Department on the issue?

Nader: They don’t respond. They just listen when we talk with them. They have three
problems. One is they’re not adequately staffed with skilled people to deal
with a company like Microsoft and the high-velocity change in the industry.
Second, Microsoft is very politically wired through the vice president, the
president and other members of the administration. That sends its own signal
to the antitrust division of the Justice Department. And third, there is a great reluctance among the people who know about Microsoft’s monopolistic practices to become willing and open witnesses. The ability of Microsoft to retaliate is a many unsplendored thing. They can do it by restricting access to the code committees, getting other companies to veer away from what they consider a Microsoft-unfriendly
corporate critic, they can raid them, move into their industry with predatory
pricing practices.

NBC might as well not have bothered with “T-NBC,” a chintzy Saturday-morning lineup of live-action shows aimed at adolescents, including “Saved by the Bell,” “Hang Time” and “City Guys” — educational, one must suppose for lack of other evidence, because they’re set in high schools. That’s not to leave out “NBA Inside Stuff,” which continues to teach viewers that the NBA is really, really cool. The other networks just barely pick up the slack. While the squiggly animation of ABC’s “Science Court” might send some youngsters reaching for their Ritalin, amazingly it’s the only new offering that has solid educational content — and, as a bonus, it’s even funny.

“Sports Illustrated for Kids,” on CBS, wraps clunky social lessons in irresistible packages, such as an interview with NBA basketball player Chris Webber’s dad explaining that he stood by his son after his bonehead timeout cost his team a chance to win in the NCAA finals because — now listen carefully, kids — “Chris took responsibility for his actions.” CBS’s “Wheel 2000,” a revamp of the evergreen game show “Wheel of Fortune,” takes the letter-but-not-the-spirit of the law tack. The show offers many useful lessons, such as that a computer generated co-host named “Cyber Lucy,” whose legs are four times as long as her torso, can teach girls to be pretty accessories just as well as Vanna White can.

Later in the morning, “The Weird Al Show” — imagine, if you will, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” relocated to Mineola, Long Island — shows us how big a joke the FCC rules really are. “When you’re out in public, always check to make sure no spies are following you,” intones a narrator of a reappropriated ’50s educational film. “And if there are spiders on you, roll, roll on the ground. Spiders are icky.” Educational? No, yes, maybe and whatever.

Much effort on the part of our legislators brought us to this pretty pass. Enacted by Congress in 1990, the Children’s Television Act became law without the signature of President Bush, who whined that legislation limiting commercials during kids’ shows, prohibiting infomercials for toys and calling for a commitment to educational programming would compromise broadcasters’ First Amendment rights. It was one of those doozies of the era, like Reagan’s insistence that trees cause pollution. Given the chance, Congress knew better than to pass up an opportunity to score easy points with parents.

In the years since children’s TV was deregulated wholesale in 1983, cable has come into its own, with the luxury to take risks the networks and established syndicators didn’t think they could afford. The results are obvious in any week’s Nielsen’s: Nickelodeon consistently ranks at the top of the cable ratings. The year-old “Blue’s Clues,” Nick’s sublime quiz show for preschoolers, rocketed into the top 10 — despite the fact that each week’s episode airs for five days in a row, just the way 3-year-olds like it. My statistical sample of one indicates that 6-year-olds watch the Discovery Channel the way the White House tuned into CNN during the Gulf War. “Edutainment” CD-ROMs like “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” — which was so popular it inspired a long-running TV version on PBS — have, like the kid-friendly cable offerings, seized the minds of the privileged minority of children who have nice computers at home and moms and dads who can afford a lot of high-tech “educational” toys.

Educational TV is a way for networks to convince advertisers they’re reaching the same high-status audience. The problem is you can’t expect children to soak up the educational programs and then filter out the commercials that fill a third of every hour. Disney-owned ABC has been particularly shameless in its advertising abuse, airing a barrage of commercials for the video release of “Cinderella” in the middle of “101 Dalmatians” and “Winnie the Pooh” broadcasts. Cyber Lucy may be on hand to provide factoids about the solutions to the Wheel 2000 puzzles — “See, most people think spa-ghetti came from Italy, right? But it actually originated in Chi-na, and was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, who traveled there on one of his many journeys as a world explorer!” she informs her young viewers. But Lucy, the shadow of the valley girl of death, is also the one designated to describe “fabulous prizes,” like “a Jeep boombox with CD, cassette and AM-FM radio!” Let’s see if I got this straight … Marco Polo brought a box of spaghetti back to his Jeep … oh, never mind.

Advocates for educational TV are counting on “Sesame Street” as a model, which it is by default. (Presumably someone’s noticed it isn’t bad for product licensing, either, with a billion dollars in sales each year.) But as ill-equipped as commercial television is to deliver the same goods, things aren’t so simple even when Mattel doesn’t own the hour. Who decides what messages to beam into impressionable brains? Should it be William Bennett, whose “Book of Virtues” was translated not long ago into a PBS show that, by implication, teaches the values “Sesame Street” doesn’t? (Guess which program features African-American girls extolling the joys of hard work.) The credits of the new Saturday morning shows are filled with more letters than a box of Alpha-Bits, representing the credentials of educational consultants who’ve decided they have a calling to a higher place than the classroom. Let’s hope they know what they’re doing.

Why does the media bury foreign news? The short answer is that the audience isn’t there. “The readers, the viewers, the listeners are much less interested in news outside the U.S. than news inside the U.S.,” says Marshall Loeb, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and former editor of Time magazine. In the post-Cold War era, says Loeb, “we are looking inward … we can’t influence French elections but we can affect the local school board.”

Yet today it is more important than ever that Americans learn about the world, argues Raymond Bonner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times. “Look, we are a very introspective nation. This is what is so paradoxical. We are becoming more and more isolationist as the world is getting smaller and as we become more dependent on the rest of the world.”

Behind the diminished coverage, of course, is money. As news companies have been acquired by giant corporations, news has become just another entry on a profit and loss ledger — and foreign news has been the first to go. Within a few years in the late ’80s and early ’90s all three major television networks were bought up by corporations whose engines are fueled by profits. NBC was purchased by General Electric, CBS was taken over by Westinghouse and ABC was sold to Disney. It didn’t take long for executives to figure out that the foreign news bureaus were black holes that sucked up money. So they slashed and burned budgets, closed down bureaus and sent correspondents and their expense accounts packing. Now entire continents are covered by a handful of stringers. Even family-owned papers such as the Washington Post were not immune from cost-cutting pressures. After the paper went public, profits that might have gone to expand coverage would have to be split with shareholders who wanted a return on their investment.

Michael Moran, who returned from working abroad last year to be the international editor of MSNBC’s Internet service in Redmond, Wash., bitterly complains about the corporate influence on American news coverage.
“This change really drove me out of the country,” says Moran. “Look at the television industry. Every major network has shut down foreign bureaus in the last couple of years. In some cases, such as CBS, it was an absolute rout.” Critics like Moran argue that fewer people do any real reporting anymore. Now everyone buys their footage from foreign news outfits and dubs their own voices in. The role of the journalist as an arbiter, as an intelligent filter, says Moran, is fading away.

“I would disagree,” says Allen Alter, head of CBS’s foreign desk in New York. “I don’t think our mission has changed.” Alter concedes that the network news divisions are run with much more of a business sense than in the past. But then, he says, journalists used to live high on the hog. Now stories and expense accounts must be justified as with any other business.

Alter stresses that CBS still puts more international stories on the air than the other networks. (Despite closing many foreign bureaus, CBS Evening News does carry nearly twice the number of stories with international datelines than NBC. CBS is also consistently the loser in the ratings war.)

Alter and others at the networks dismiss charges that American news organizations are letting the public down by airing fewer international stories. Expenditures have to square with interest, says Alter, and the surveys show there is diminished demand for foreign news. “I can’t deny the numbers,” says Alter. “They are down. It’s an uphill struggle all the time.”

But Loren Jenkins, head of the foreign desk at National Public Radio — who won a Pulitzer Prize winner for his foreign reporting at the Washington Post — says such arguments are “just a bunch of bullshit. Who is to say what people want?” he says. “It’s not the responsibility of the media to gauge what people’s desires are.”

Journalists like Jenkins bristle at the idea that consumer demand should drive editorial decisions. There are some things, he says, that people just ought to know. Americans may not be interested in this month’s elections in Algeria, but the fact that we get a lot of natural gas from that country and that they have a huge migrant population in Europe are reasons to cover the story. “A lot of people may not listen, and that’s fine. But it’s our responsibility to provide the coverage. By not covering these stories those people (in TV and newspapers) are just copping out and are trying to maximize their profits.”

NPR, not beholden to advertisers or ratings, has been labeled “elitist” in the past for such attitudes. But it’s hard to argue with its large — and growing — audience share. On many days international stories fill up as much as 40 percent of NPR’s air time. Yet no other news medium, except possibly the Internet, can boast NPR’s 24 percent audience growth in the past five years. Coincidence? Possibly. But some — like Jenkins — argue that people have turned to NPR because of its foreign coverage.

One ABC producer, who asked not to be named, says it is unrealistic to expect the news to solve all the world’s problems, or even cover them all. “We do as much as we can under the constraints we are under,” he says. “ABC still has to be a money-making outfit. It’s unfair that we are supposed to have the responsibility to educate people.”

When Henry Luce ran Time, adds Marshall Loeb, he said his purpose was to produce a great magazine and make a nickel too. Loeb has nothing against anyone making a nickel, but he believes the cost is becoming too high. “We have become a lot less proud of our news,” Loeb says. “Ask not for whom the bells tolls — it tolls for thee.”