Who Does the Media Work For?

I spent an evening talking with a Russian man about the snow on the mountain, the food and the people at the party. We were at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Near the end of our conversation, he invited me to a panel he was hosting the next day.

I went. That was when I learned I had been chatting about the powder with the current Deputy Prime Minister of Russia.

We stayed in touch. I persuaded him to do a remote interview for my Bloomberg television show after we returned to Moscow and New York. He agreed.

About ten minutes before we went on air, a fax arrived with the questions his staff expected me to ask. I told my producer to thank them for their suggestions. I would ask my own questions.

I hosted a financial television show, and my priority was to find out how much oil Russia could produce. His first suggested question was about how great Russia was.

We went on air. I asked about oil. He answered the question about Russia’s greatness. I asked another question. He answered the next one on his list. We carried on like that, each of us conducting a different interview. It could have been a sketch on Saturday Night Live.

That was in the late 1990s. I understood why a government official wanted to control an interview. I also understood it was the media’s job to prevent that.

Years later, I said something in a meeting at CNBC that made people laugh when our boss asked us who we worked for and I answered

“We work for the viewer.”

I meant it. At Bloomberg, I had been taught that our obligation was to the person relying on our reporting. At CNBC, I was told I had the business relationship backward. Advertisers paid for access to viewers. The viewers’ attention was what we sold.

That distinction explains much of what went wrong with the media.

When attention is the product, fear and conflict become valuable. Every publisher, including me, can see what makes people stop scrolling.

The pressure is to give them more of it, whether it helps them understand anything or not.

At the same time, powerful guests gained more control over the questions they faced. When I was a young reporter at Bloomberg, getting someone to agree to an interview did not mean I got to conduct it. An editor could assign the reporter who knew the subject best and would press the hardest.

Later, I watched guests favor friendly interviewers and avoid difficult ones. A booking became a prize worth protecting. The newsroom got its guest. The audience got an interview. The question that mattered were never be asked.

The Russian Deputy Prime Minister sent a fax. Today, the same result can be achieved without sending anything. A powerful person can choose where to appear and the reporter learns which questions end the relationship.

No one has to announce that the interview has been compromised.

This is why missing questions worry me more than any single false statement.

A false claim can be checked. A question nobody asks may never enter public life. Who benefited from a decision? Who paid for it? What alternatives were dismissed? What did the official’s explanation leave out?

A free press is meant to bring those questions into the open. Without them, people can watch the news every day and still lack a shared understanding of what power is doing.

I think about that fax. The Deputy Prime Minister’s attempt was obvious enough to be funny.

What should concern us is how often the same attempt now succeeds without anyone noticing.

“We work for the viewer” …. It should never have been a laugh line.