Lecture: Ray Suarez

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Ray Suarez. Photo: Laurel Angrist. © 2007 Laurel Angrist.


“God only made three networks, and He’s not making any more.” That’s what Ray Suarez’s boss at the ABC Radio Network said just 30 years ago, referring to ABC, NBC, and CBS. At that time, when Suarez was just starting his career in journalism, such predictions were the consensus in the industry. No one foresaw the technological advances that were to come, nor could they imagine the ways in which these new developments would transform journalism in the span of three decades.

Suarez offered an audience of roughly 20 NYU journalism students a panoramic view of his career as a broadcast journalist in a lecture on March 28, 2007. Suarez, a 1985 NYU alumnus, has observed huge changes in media and news reporting since his days as a news editor at Washington Square News and a news and programming director with WNYU radio. Speaking frankly, his slight accent and informal manner giving away his Brooklyn roots, Suarez told students that within 10 years of finishing his undergraduate degree at NYU, the “frantic acceleration of change” in the media business made the industry almost unrecognizable to him.

“The world is flatter for journalists,” and the industry is “more accessible for people who really want to write, take pictures, tell stories.”

Suarez, a veteran of public broadcasting, is currently a senior correspondent on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. His lecture pinpointed the key changes that have altered the way the media operate in the U.S. These changes, Suarez said, have increased the amount of content available to the public, but have generally decreased the quality of much of the reporting underlying this avalanche of content.

For example, the wider availability of funding has made it easier to break into radio. Just a few decades ago, lack of financing was an almost insurmountable obstacle for anyone aspiring to operate a station. “In those days…the table stakes for entering broadcasting were so high, and the kind of figures that you had to throw around so daunting, that the historical conditions that led to the creation of the three broadcast stations at that time could never be repeated,” Suarez said.

Changes in funding and financing opened the industry’s doors to new capitalists, like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, with assets to leverage. Suarez also pointed to changes in communications regulations in the U.S. At one time, a license applicant had to promise the Federal Radio Commission and Federal Communications Commission that his or her station would operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” But the FCC did away with these regulations contained in the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987, during the Reagan administration. Now, stations are no longer required to cover contrasting points of view, nor do they have to report on crucial community issues as a public service.

Without this civic-minded mandate, station managers seeking to trim budgets gradually reduced news coverage and quickly forgot about serving the public interest, Suarez said. The major networks have “lost their commitment to the news,” he said, and moreover, the news these networks produce is disconnected from the vast majority of Americans and the way millions of working people live. Suarez added that news broadcasts no longer supply a mix of important, informative news and lighter fare. As such, he said, the networks are failing in their duty to provide people with the basic tools needed to function as citizens in the larger world.

“Life isn’t just whipped cream and a maraschino cherry,” he said. “There’s got to be something underneath there that provides the basic thing that the whipped cream sits on top of.” Most network news programs, he said, are “a little too heavy on the whipped cream, and there's no cake underneath.”

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Ray Suarez. Photo: Laurel Angrist. © 2007 Laurel Angrist.

However, certain aspects of the news business have improved as a result of new technology. Equipment is easier to use, cheaper to acquire, and requires fewer people to operate it. “Everything changed so fast, and in ways that were so unpredictable, that the business has never really quite caught its breath in the 30 years since then,” Suarez said.

As a result, he said, “the world is flatter for journalists,” and the industry is “more accessible for people who really want to write, take pictures, tell stories.”

“[But] the places where most Americans still get their news — the places that can still aggregate large numbers of eyeballs and eardrums — are the same places as they were 30 years ago,” Suarez emphasized. The major networks still act as information gatekeepers.

Now, he said, a journalist is more likely to work on his or her own, making the old team spirit of journalism’s previous era outmoded. In fact, rather than seeing themselves as the future employees of a news company, Suarez encouraged students to think of themselves as a compilation of skills that can be sold to news outlets sequentially.

Suarez also urged students to take advantage of any opportunities to cross-train between different media. He said that his experience and skills in both print and broadcast helped him to stay employed, even as job opportunities waxed and waned.

But even with this experience, journalism “is a tough way to earn a living over the long haul,” he said. And he proposed a simple test to students who think they want to make journalism their career.

If you like to learn new things — good. But, Suarez said, if you yearn to tell others about the new things you learn — “that’s it, you're a member of the tribe.”

Suzanne Krause is a second-semester graduate student in NYU's joint journalism and French Studies program.

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