“The working title is: ‘A Brief History of American Ignorance,’” he announces, eyes atwinkle.

It sounds like a joke, so you smile. But he keeps talking.

“I want to assemble all the data out there that we all hear about,” he continues, “like, that American high school students can’t find New York on a map. Or that 80 percent of people don’t know Congress has two chambers. I want to put all of that together, and get the most comprehensive statistical portrait of what we do and don’t know, broken down by age, income and region, and chronology.”

Whatever for, you wonder. Kaplan needs no prompting. “In order to ask the question: ‘OK, did this get worse when television came along, or not?’”

Far-fetched as it sounds, he is absolutely serious. Holding the mass media accountable for the information (or misinformation) it spreads is what occupies Kaplan’s morning, noon and night. And he’s got the clout and backing to make a difference.

“When I told Norman about this,” Kaplan relates, “he said: ‘You gotta do this! You gotta do this!’”

Marty Kaplan heads up the Norman Lear Center – a very unusual research institute within the USC Annenberg School for Communication, where he is also an associate dean and a research professor. And the “Norman” to whom he blithely refers is, of course, Norman Lear – himself the dean of modern television.

Best known as the creator of such visionary sit-coms as All In The Family, Maude and The Jeffersons, Lear is no less a force in politics. He founded People for the American Way, a watchdog organization that has been monitoring the Religious Right’s activities for 25 years. He also founded the Business Enterprise Trust, a nonprofit group recognizing and rewarding progressive practices in corporate America. (The trust ceased operations in 2000.)

Last but not least, Lear is a force in higher education. According to USC Annenberg dean Geoff Cowan, the 85-year-old philanthropist is “the biggest donor to this school whose name is not Annenberg.” Last year, Lear made a $6 million pledge to the Norman Lear Center, bringing to $11 million his total support since the center’s inception in 2000. His gift includes the creation of the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment, Media and Society, which Kaplan holds. Including other sources, Lear Center funding now tops out at an impressive $20 million. That’s a whole lotta clams to determine if television makes people stupid.

But the Lear Center doesn’t only monitor the effects of television. Its reach extends to film, fashion, journalism, music, the Internet and beyond. Billing itself as “a multidisciplinary research and public policy center exploring implications of the convergence of entertainment, commerce, and society,” it produces a steady stream of media-related publications, research and events.

“We start with the premise that the desire or necessity to entertain has become central to so many other human activities,” Kaplan explains. “Then our job is to see how the need to grab and hold audiences’ attention has permeated all aspects of society, and what the consequences are, both for good and for ill.”

(Right about now you’re probably thinking Kaplan and his Lear Center associates get paid to sit around watching Outkast videos. Nice work if you can get it.)

Not quite. Nor do they spend their days tsk-tsking over the general decline of Western civilization. The center’s scholars and extended community bridge high and low culture, new and old media, in search of insights into the intriguing phenomenon that is 21st-century entertainment.

“Think of entertainment differently,” the center’s Web site (www.learcenter.org) charges visitors, in an eye-grabbing Flash text-animation montage that slyly embodies the very practices it critiques. “Think of it not just as leisure activity but as the way that messages grab (in bold letters) and hold (bold, again) our attention. Think of entertainment not just as a sector of the economy but as a driving force – maybe the (bold) driving force – of daily life in this brave new world. News (zoom effect), politics (zoom), education (zoom), religion (zoom), commerce (zoom), the arts (zoom) – today there is scarcely a domain of human existence unaffected by the battle for eyeballs, the imperative to amuse, the need to stimulate and titillate, to tell us stories, to play with us. The stakes for society are enormous. This is the terrain the Norman Lear Center is mapping.”

Its content is no less intriguing. Lear Center seminars sport such provocative titles as “Oprah: The Last Intellectual” – a symposium about the role of public intellectuals in the media. They tackle such urgent problems as “We Hate You (But Please Send Us More Baywatch)” – a seminar on the impact of one of America’s hottest exports, soap operas, in otherwise anti-American regions like the Middle East.

From a 2005 conference titled “Ready To Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity” to a 2001 book titled Artists, Technology & the Ownership of Creative Content, the Lear Center is systematically exploring the impact of intellectual property rights on innovation and creativity in the digital age. Speakers have included such high-profile journalists as Peter Jennings and NPR’s Jacki Lyden, as well as luminaries of Hollywood and Madison Avenue like Sex and the City creator Michael Patrick King, Gucci visionary Tom Ford, Women’s Wear Daily editor Rose Apodaca and remix artist-music producer Danger Mouse. 

A recent panel, “Have Blogs Replaced Newspapers, and Should We Care?” brought together original “Wonkette” Ana Marie Cox, Washington Monthly “Political Animal” Kevin Drum and L.A Observed’s Kevin Roderick. Their conclusion: No, blogs have not replaced newspapers. Without big city dailies, there would be no political blogosphere.

These cross-disciplinary sessions have attracted USC academics from such far-flung fields as German, philosophy, architecture, anthropology and art history – scholars keen to take a break from Hesse, Hume or Zaha Hadid and put their heads together in contemplation of, say, the hip-hop mogul as new American icon. The center, which has been headquartered on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills since it outgrew its offices on campus, has also hosted off-campus programs that mix it up at cultural hot-spots such as the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Lest anyone mistake the Lear Center for another trendy deconstructionist think tank, it should be noted that much of the center’s work has measurable, grounded impact in the form of media content studies, tip sheets and professional outreach.

Take the Hollywood Health & Society program, the health arm of the Lear Center. Partially funded by the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, HHS serves as a conduit for accurate health information to top-rated TV shows like ER, House and Numb3rs, as well as Spanish-language telenovelas. It tracks down experts of note to provide the latest information to writers and producers.

Not long ago, HHS director Vicki Beck fielded a query concerning a character who has been exposed to HIV. “At a certain juncture, I’d like for him to get sick,” the writer had explained, “or have a specific complication. By the end, I’d like for him to end up leading a much healthier life. Can you help me out?”

Beck hooked up the writer with one of 140 consultants currently in the HHS health expert database; the resulting episode was medically accurate to the last detail. HHS staff fielded 300 such writers’ queries last year, the most popular topics being breast cancer, bioterrorism, autism, AIDS, diabetes and obesity, and organ transplantation.

Elizabeth Klaviter, a researcher with Grey’s Anatomy, is a frequent user of this service. “At the end of the last season,” she recalls, “we had a story arc featuring a character [Denny] who was waiting for a new heart.” He subsequently became a love interest for surgical intern Izzy Stevens, played by actress Katherine Heigl. In last season’s final episodes, Izzy makes an unethical decision to bump Denny up on the waiting list. “It got a lot of attention and sympathy for people waiting for transplants,” says Klaviter, who credits HHS with helping the writers treat a complex issue with a high level of accuracy – “which enables us to write more in-depth, emotionally-driven characters.” Grey’s Anatomy was a second-place winner in HHS’ Sentinel for Health Awards.

HHS goes beyond playing matchmaker for writers and health experts. It also makes a concerted effort to measure the impact of accurate health-related entertainment. “There has been a lot of criticism about TV influencing young people, especially with regard to tobacco, violence and now music videos,” notes Beck. “But it’s gratifying to show the positive impact TV can also have.”

Lear Center staff conduct pre- and post-viewing studies of sample audiences, via focus groups as well as Web stats.

“Say ER is doing a storyline on syphilis in the gay community,” says Beck. “We provide links from NBC’s front Web page to the CDC home page, the National Cancer Institute, or other health agency links, and watch the post-show spike in Web traffic – which can be quite substantial.”

HHS also takes online polls. After the syphilis episode, researchers found 69 percent of chatroom visitors who had seen the episode claimed they were more likely to get screened for syphilis, while 56 percent said they were more likely to advise others to get tested.

When Telemundo aired a breast cancer-themed episode of the popular telenovela Ladrón de Corazones [Thief of Hearts], HHS tracked increased knowledge about cancer diagnosis and treatment among viewers. The study indicated a 13 percent bump in knowledge on two of three specific facts; 29 percent of viewers reported they would be more inclined to call a clinic or hotline for information after seeing the episode. These may seem like small numbers, but in a notoriously underserved and hard-to-reach community, it counts as real progress. “These are really specific behavior changes in really specific communities in need,” says Beck.

But the Lear Center’s signature project has to do with Kaplan’s particular bugaboo: the declining quality of local news.

“Entertainment values are driving out news values,” he explains. “People say local news is where they get the latest about their democracy, but currently, the stories that get aired are chosen and presented [with an eye toward preventing] you from changing the channel. It’s easier to cover sex, violence and celebrity during the news hour instead of complicated issues.”

This is another arena in which the Lear Center conducts much-needed research and measures impact. In an effort to quantify the seriousness of TV news, for years the Lear Center’s Local News Archive has methodically documented election coverage station by station. Since 1998, in on-going studies set up even before the center’s inception, researchers have eyeballed more than 15,000 local news broadcasts from around the country, examining how political stories were framed and clocking the segments allotted to candidates’ positions and voter issues. The data are not encouraging. During the 2004 election season, a typical half hour of local news contained just 3 minutes, 11 seconds of campaign coverage. Candidate sound bites, if aired at all, averaged 12 seconds.

The reason Kaplan, who is the project’s principal investigator, finds these figures so appalling is because he believes they portend erosion in American democracy itself. In the absence of local TV election coverage, voters are being left at the mercy of campaign commercials, infamous for their manipulations and distortions.

“We would prefer viewers get their political content in places other than political ads,” he says pointedly.

The Local News Archive, and its companion project, Reliable Resources,  do more than critique local news. They work to make it better. Reporters – and anyone else – enjoy open online access to all archive content, as well as to “best practices” videos.

“We send them clip reels from stations that have done exemplary jobs,” Kaplan says. Thousands of free video compilations and how-to guides have been sent to news directors, reporters, producers and journalism educators across the country. “We’re saying: ‘Look, they did this in Tucson. You could do this in Boise!’”

The center also hosts mid-career workshops and instructional seminars for reporters; it distributes new books and studies on broadcasting issues. And it runs recognition programs like the prestigious Cronkite Awards, doling out special praise for best practices in broadcasting.

“We know what murderous competition reporters face,” says Kaplan. “We want them to see it’s possible to be the No. 1 station in your market and not have to give up on covering politics and public affairs – stuff normally considered ratings poison – in ways that are thoughtful and useful.”

The Lear Center also gets into the thick of television legislation and Federal Communication Commission regulation of news broadcasting. The well-spoken Kaplan has testified before the FCC and Congress a handful of times in the last few years. “The notion that TV has a responsibility to do something to serve the public interest, which is what they promise when they get their free license, that notion is not even on the table at most places,” Kaplan fumes.

Such efforts have already made an impact. In 2004 FCC chair Michael Powell and Senate Commerce Committee chair John McCain sent a letter to the five major broadcast network chiefs. Citing a Lear Center report (indicating that during the sevenweek run-up to the 2002 midterm elections, half of all top-rated local news broadcasts contained no campaign coverage whatsoever), the letter “challenged” stations to provide “significant information on the political issues facing the community, candidates’ campaign platforms and candidate debates during this election year.” The same study was cited in House Energy & Commerce Committee testimony.

“That’s why all the studies the Lear Center does are so important,” notes USC Annenberg School dean Geoff Cowan, who is himself a former director of the worldwide broadcast service Voice of America.

It wasn’t just a longstanding friendship between Norman Lear and Marty Kaplan that started the Lear Center. Rather, it was a mutual fascination and frustration with all things media and democracy. The two men met at a 1982 New Year’s Eve party in the home of then-Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, journalist Sally Quinn. While others sang “Old Lang Syne,” Lear and Kaplan railed against corporate control of the media. His television maverick days already behind him, Lear would go on to an important philanthropic career.

Kaplan, who was chief speechwriter for then-Vice President Walter Mondale, would go on to be a studio executive, a journalist and a commentator for NPR and CBS. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in molecular biology (while serving on the editorial boards of the Harvard Crimson and Harvard Advocate, and as president of the Harvard Lampoon, a hat trick no undergraduate has duplicated before or since). A Marshall Scholarship took him to Cambridge University, after which he did a doctorate in modern thought and literature at Stanford.

It was his years in Tinseltown, however, that led Kaplan to ponder deeply and personally the ramifications of a runaway marriage between entertainment and commerce.

“In Hollywood, many – though not all – people with power don’t understand that their jobs include a component of moral responsibility separate from a return on investments to the shareholders and from the goal of maximizing profit,” says the man who spent a dozen years as vice president of production at Disney, four of them as vice president of production.

“Don’t forget,” he likes to remind entertainment powerbrokers, “what Dickens did to hold his audience is different from what MTV does. But both had the same intent.”

An advocate of movies with brains, Kaplan wrote and executive produced the political comedy The Distinguished Gentleman and penned the screen adaptation of playwright Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy Noises Off. “My experience,” he says, of his years in the entertainment industry, “was that sometimes it wasn’t possible to stop the schlock train, but that on other occasions you could make a forceful case for the uplifting and inspirational potential of an incredibly powerful medium.”

The original inspiration for the Norman Lear Center came from Ken Auletta’s 1993 exposé, The Highwaymen. In behind-the-scenes interviews, a group of high-power studio executives and filmmakers are asked: What wouldn’t you do for ratings? Would you, for example, show a real suicide? Their answers range from stunned silence to appeals to creative freedom.

“Off the top of my head, I’d pretty much do anything,” filmmaker Oliver Stone told Auletta in a 2005 follow-up study. “... You can do anything as long as you do it well. I think Hitler would make a great movie.”

Horrified, Kaplan drafted “The Entertainment Initiative,” a mission statement posing some broad questions: How does marketing determine content? Should there be safeguards on the awesome power to simulate reality? Is American culture America’s real foreign policy?

Norman Lear was taken enough with the idea to fund the initiative and agree to lend his own name to it, giving Kaplan carte blanche to investigate and debate these topics. Today, the center’s eight professional staffers oversee dozens of research projects, publications, courses and public events. Three scholar-activists contribute their talents as senior fellows: the current batch are author-journalist David Bollier, an advocate for defending the Internet “commons”; film and culture critic Neal Gabler, who recently published the first exhaustive biography of Walt Disney; and former Duke business scholar and Internet public-domain advocate Laurie Racine.

Cowan, the USC Annenberg School’s dean, puts the Lear Center’s future into perspective: “As technology has changed, and as the Lear Center has evolved, I think a whole set of additional questions has sprung up – with no end to how important they or their answers will be. Therefore, there should never be an end to the importance of a center like this.”

Kaplan is in no danger of running out of ideas. A seemingly never-ending list of potential projects beckons: projects inspired by bits of TiVo-this and Yahoo!-that, which Kaplan shares with Lear, a fellow Web-addict, at all hours of the day and night – especially around 6 a.m. (A prolific blogger, Kaplan also composes acerbic commentaries appearing two or three times a week on the Lear Center’s home page and The Huffington Post. Some recent topics: moronic editorials in the mainstream media; how to jimmy an electronic voting machine, complete with helpful video; and the duplicity of political figures.)

“The next really big thing we want to tackle at the Lear Center is science,” says Kaplan, his eyes brightening. “I’d like to bring our analysis regarding the process of creativity and the impact of intellectual property law to science: What does it mean to be original in science?”

The words are coming fast now.

“I also want to do a case study about the media’s impact on immigration policy, and… especially Lou Dobbs and Spanish talk-radio, and I’m really interested in what grabs people’s attention in virtual worlds, like Second Life…” 

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