Q&A/Annenberg’s dean talks about how he’s taking the school global and wrestling with new technology—and why getting your news from “The Daily Show” may not be such a bad thing.

“I don’t think we’re going to go back to traditional news as the only way to get information.”

By JUDY WEST

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Trained as a political scientist, Michael Delli Carpini has spent most of his career in academia, including several years at Columbia, where he chaired Barnard College’s political science department. In 1999, though, Delli Carpini decided to leave faculty life behind and return to his native Philadelphia as public policy program director at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The decision, he says, was prompted by a “mild frustration” that the scholarship academics engage in “reaches a certain audience and then stops, and doesn’t really have an impact on the larger world and the things we really care about.” At Pew, Delli Carpini C’75G’75 was able to take the ideas he’d been thinking and writing about for 20 years—on media and the democratic process—and apply them to the real world, shaping programs designed to improve the quality of American democracy. Delli Carpini always knew in his heart, though, he would sooner or later return to an academic setting.

When Penn invited him to become the new dean of the Annenberg School for Communication in the spring of 2003, he says, “the opportunity was just too good to pass up.”

Q. What was it about the deanship that made leaving Pew the right decision?
A. It seemed the perfect mix for me … an opportunity to be at a place where I could do research and teaching, and help shape research and teaching in the field, and be a leadership person in a school that has a long history of being concerned about public discourse in the real world of policy.

Q. Has there been a big learning curve?
A. For the more dean-like responsibilities, yes. The dean is also part of the management team of the University with the other deans, and so that responsibility and learning and understanding about the University and the various schools and how it’s structured, that’s been a learning curve, and I’m still learning. The other part of it is the responsibility for Annenberg as a physical unit. I was here for about a month or two and I remember I was walking in the front door and it was raining. Several of my staff were standing there and they said, ‘We’ve got a leak in the basement and its beginning to flood.’ So I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really bad,’ and then I realized they were looking at me because the next move … was essentially my responsibility.

Q. How is the school doing?
A. We just recently had a national assessment of communications schools in the U.S. done by the National Communication Association. The study looked at all the major communication schools in the country by their specialties—ours are political communication, health communication, culture and communication and mass communication—and we were ranked No. 1 in the country in all four of those areas. So this is a good school, and while I’d like to say that’s because of the year and a half that I’ve been here, it’s actually because of the work that Kathleen Hall Jamieson has done and the support the Annenbergs have given the faculty, many of whom have been here for quite some time. I took over a school that worked really well.

Q. In what areas could the school be stronger?
A. My sense right off the bat … was that if there were areas that we needed to get stronger in, they were global communication and new media and technology. Both of those are obviously really important to the field and, coincidentally, important to the University. In an effort to jumpstart it we were able to get Monroe Price, who’s a professor of law and communication, to come as a visiting professor on an extended visit, and he’s brought with him his energy and knowledge about global media and comparative media and a number of international projects.

For example, he has very strong relations with Central European University in Budapest. We’ve begun to develop some exchange programs and courses and several of our faculty have taught at that university and our grad students have gone out there to do some work in the summer. Some of their grad students have also come to visit with us, so we’ve been building some bridges there to do more international work.

Q.In terms of new media and new technology, what kinds of issues are you focusing on?
A. There are lots of issues, from everyday life and culture to policy issues. For example, what does copyright mean in this new media world where you can get access to information, manipulate it and use it in a variety of new ways? A lot of this new media has tremendous democratic potential where you can get information that’s tailored to you in a way that’s very valuable and where you can communicate directly with leaders in a way you never could before, but that same technology has both commercial and political surveillance capabilities. Privacy becomes a big issue. ... We’d like to be part of that debate.

Q.What’s it like being back at Penn after being a student here in the ’70s?
A. It’s wild and it’s great. Penn was really important to me when I was an undergraduate. I entered the University not being sure what I wanted to do … and by the time I graduated I knew I liked being at a university so much I didn’t really want to leave. It was also a time when politics was more in the air. It was just coming off the Vietnam War era and I’d been at high school during that period. I was of draft age and had a lottery number and there was a lot of unsettledness about the nature of politics, and so that combination of being interested in politics as a real-world issue and knowing that there would be opportunities to think about it and study it and read about it and write about it and make a living doing that was very attractive. Coming back to Penn was a dream come true.

Q. Are students a lot less engaged politically now than they were then?
A. It’s easy to stereotype and say, ‘God I wish students were the way they were when I was in school.’ I think students are engaged now. My sense is that in many ways they’re more savvy than we were, they’re more practical than we were. If I were to summarize the difference it’s that young people are as or more engaged in civic life than we were—voluntary work, charitable work, one-on-one work—but they are less involved in politics writ large or in the sense of government or in the sense of voting. ... I think the general sense of what happened in the ’60s and ’70s is that young people tried to do something but it didn’t work and it was a failure at some level. ... I think that’s no reason not to try. I mean, politics is about struggle, ultimately, but I also think it mischaracterizes that period because a lot of what came out of it was really quite valuable and really did have an effect. ... If you look at the way high schools have focused in the last 10 years, it’s been a very strong and very effective service learning movement, but it’s focused largely on civic volunteerism.

Q. In “What Americans Know About Politics And Why it Matters,” you write our level of political knowledge now is the same as it was 40 years ago. With so much more access to information, that surprises me.
A. There are basically two arguments out there. One is we’re going to hell in a hand basket, the quality of education is going down, civics education is failing, the news isn’t as good as it used to be and entertainment is dominating the way people get their information. Those folks would’ve expected, I think, that people would be less informed.

The alternative view is there are much higher levels of average education, women and African Americans have been integrated into the political system much more effectively, we’ve got the Internet, we’ve got 24-hour-a-day news, we’ve got access to almost any kind of information that we want, so you’d expect in that environment that we should be more informed. ... And the good news is the negative trends have not caused us to become more ignorant than we’ve been, but the bad news is that all the positive benefits have been washed out by ... the more negative aspects.

Q. Does it concern you when people say they get their news and information from late- night talk shows?
A. My take is that it’s not necessarily bad. The National Annenberg Election Survey, which is run by Kathleen Hall Jamieson here in the Public Policy Center, included the question, ‘Where do you get your news from?’ and it turned out that regular viewers of “The Daily Show” were more informed than the average citizen and more informed than people who consumed their news exclusively from other places.

My argument is that if that’s the only place you get your news, you’re in trouble. But I think there’s something about that show that almost requires you to get news and information from other places because to get the joke you sort of have to get engaged and I think what “The Daily Show” does is it provides great commentary—probably the best commentary we have in this country right now on television in terms of politics. Most importantly, Jon Stewart has become probably the strongest spokesperson for the degradation of the quality of the news in the U.S. ... I think the cat’s out of the bag. I don’t think we’re going to go back to traditional news as the only way to get information. I think the whole nature of news is changing.

If you know where the information is coming from and it’s good information and it’s giving you different points of view and it’s usable information, then if it comes from entertainment, great. I think if you use those standards, “The Daily Show” would be viewed as a pretty useful contribution to American democracy. And I would say a good deal of what’s on traditional news would not be viewed as useful to American democracy.