Keynote Address
Speakers: Donna Shalala (click here for biography)
Soap Summit 2

Transcript of Proceedings
September 6, 1996

SONNY FOX: At the Talk Summit Donna Shalala was our speaker and she proved to be so effective and so wonderful that we asked her to come back and be the speaker tonight. She had a dialogue going between talk show people and teenagers and people out there. She ran a heck of a show. Donna's had a remarkable career. She's been a professor at Columbia. She's been the head of Hunter College, Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, the first woman head of a big ten college. And she is very, very much aware of the impact of communications. She's very concerned about children. She has her own teenage advisory group as part of her department. She is always involved with the media because she's so aware of its impact, so she is a natural for our mission here, which is to try to communicate to you some of the issues that we hope we'll be discussing further tomorrow in our session. It gives me a great deal pleasure and a great deal of pride to introduce the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala.

DONNA SHALALA: Thank you. Thank you very much, Sonny. It's nice to be back. I did have fun the last time I was here. I did get a couple of job offers. Better one from the President, so I think I'll stick around for a while. Let me thank David Poindexter and also congratulate him on his extraordinary work. It's always fun to be with Sonny Fox and get a chance to work with him. I have a number of friends in the audience, including a colleague, Jim Marks, who'll you get a chance to listen to tomorrow.

One of those extraordinary CDC directors who actually is responsible for our historic Surgeon General's report on physical activity, which we released this past summer and which I was at the U.S. Open to talk about with the athletes today. And a former colleague of mine, Felicia Stewart, probably one of the great experts on reproductive health who's here with her colleague, Mark Smith, from the Kaiser Foundation, and you'll get a chance, I hope, to interact with both of them and, of course, Gloria Felt. A combination of Felicia Stewart's appointment at Kaiser and Gloria Felt's appointment at Planned Parenthood, I think, David, are two of the most significant appointments in reproductive health and really gives us a step up of two extraordinary women for leadership in a country and in a culture in which this issue has become increasingly difficult. And Bill Novelli is here who runs the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. I have these wide-ranging responsibilities. In fact, when we get to the Q's and A's you can ask me about anything. I have about 40 percent of the Federal budget. I mean, if I don't have it, Bill Perry, the Secretary of Defense, has it and, shoot, I speak Arabic if you want to talk about Sadaam Hussein. Actually, being back in New York for another PCI Summit reminds me of the story about George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. Shaw had a big play opening up so he sent Churchill two tickets and a very searing note that read, "Bring a friend if you have one." Churchill, of course, not to be outdone, fired back a letter saying, "Sorry, can't make it opening night. Send me two tickets to the second night's show, if there is one." In that spirit I want to thank all of you for bringing me back to your second Soap Summit, not for a monologue but I hope eventually for a dialogue. I'll let you in on a little-known secret. I actually watched soap operas religiously in college. Down in our smoker at the women's college I attended we watched soap operas every day. In fact, a number of points in my own career soap operas have turned out to be very important. I watched them religiously in college, went off to the Peace Corps in Iran, came back and I had a few months before I started in graduate school so I went to the local department store and got a job. I was so energetic they made me manager of this food department and I had to schedule all of the middle-aged ladies, and they all had to be scheduled around the soap operas, and it was really quite generational in terms of who would work certain hours. So that was my second experience.

My third experience was a much more interesting one, and that is when I went to work the first time in Washington I worked for a cabinet officer, Patricia Roberts Harris, and who was a very powerful woman, a civil rights leader in Washington, very tough, but she would never have lunch with anyone. And after I left her employment I found out it was because she watched the soap operas during the lunch hour.

And, finally, my fourth experience was even more significant because it was the first time I ever really found myself more important than the soap operas. When I fired the football coach at the University of Wisconsin they ran my press conference live and interrupted the soap operas that afternoon. That's how significant firing the football coach in Wisconsin was. However, I now live in Washington and I no longer have to turn on the television to catch the melodrama and the madness of the soaps. I know that the American people think that the House of Representatives should be renamed "All of My Children." And, yes, in true soap opera style I did tell the President we could bring back our party back to life after the '94 elections by declaring that Newt's victory was just a dream. But in the spirit of David Letterman, I do have ten reasons why Washington is even hotter than "The City" and viewed by the rest of America as "Another World." Number ten, in Washington meetings always end with the same three words, "To be continued." Number nine, one day you're anonymous, the next day you're more famous than you ever wanted to be. Number eight, lots of fan mail, none of it suitable for children. Number seven, the most commonly asked question in Washington is, "Can you fix what I said in editing?" Number six, interesting dialogue. Everybody talks, nobody listens in Washington. Number five, when you watch life in Washington, your own seems more normal. Number four, you know you're having a bad morning when you open the paper and next to your name is the word "canceled." Number three, in Washington when people say "Break a leg," they mean it. Number two, Washington is a city with a million lawyers and they all want speaking parts. And number one, the number one reason Washington is a great soap opera, it brings "Entertainment Tonight" to CSPAN. That's a very important point.

Daytime television is entertainment. It's fun, it's compelling, it's dramatic, and it's an escape into the lives and emotions of your very memorable and mysterious characters. Take the entertainment out of daytime television and in my judgment you may well take the joy out of laughter or fireworks out of the fourth of July. So I don't believe that soap operas should be wrung free of the tears and the tensions and the romance and the ruin that have kept millions of people tuned in since the early days of radio. In fact, one of the interesting things about the study that Kaiser's gonna release is how much the core of the soaps have stayed the same over the years. I also don't believe that the government of the United States, or any government, should run onto your sets yelling rewrite. After all, this country and in this country we have a very precious First Amendment that we all must honor. And besides, I come from a Washington world where people still think that ii you have something really important to tell the American people you hand them a brochure. In fact, when I told people in my office how I was spending my Friday night a lot of them asked why. The soaps can't help you. They don't have anything to do with public health. Forget it. And I'm going to tell you what I told them. Believe it or not, you are part of the public health system in this country. When it comes to helping Americans get accurate public health information I will happily and shamelessly speak to anyone who reaches into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans and that's all of you. You increasingly fill the vacuums in this country once occupied by very traditional institutions. From family to religion, from schools to communities, with light and with shadow, with words and with emotion, you reach over 40 million viewers a day and you reach them where they live. When soap opera lovers talk about the trials and tribulations of their favorite soap characters you'd think they were talking about their best friends. They tape the shows, they watch them during the lunch hour, they frantically read up or quiz their friends about episodes that they've missed. That's loyalty, and loyalty elected officials can only dream of. Like real problems in life, your story lines don't begin and end in an hour. They stretch over time, and that's the significance of your power. They captivate their audiences every step of the way, and that gives all of you a golden opportunity to dig beneath the surface and offer real answers. But will you? The answer really is up to all of you, so I'm not here to preach to you. I'm not here to say that nothing has to change either. I'm here to challenge you as professionals, and many of you are parents and all of you are good citizens, to use some of this incredible power to help us transform some national tragedies into national triumphs. It begins with a story that I've been telling to entertainment industry leaders across the country and tragically this one is true. It's a picture of families in this country in trouble, of young people at risk, and of the challenges all of us face to give this story the right ending. Here's the scene. Enter today's parents looking exhausted. These parents are working longer hours with less job security and less time to spend at home. Many are single and many are raising children alone. They're worried about paying their bills. They're worried about their health and about the violence that's spreading its tentacles into their communities and into their homes. But more than anything they're worried about the welfare of their children, especially their teenagers and their pre-teens, and with good reason. The last five years teen marijuana use, for example, has continued to rise. We believe, in the Clinton administration, that this is a serious problem, a problem that has its roots in a very tragic myth that marijuana is a soft drug that won't do our kids any harm. That happens to be dead wrong and we need to send that message out to every parent and every child in this country. But that's not all we have to do, because every day in this country 1.2 million young people have at least five alcoholic drinks, 3,000 of them will start to smoke on any day, and 1,400 drop out of school. Every day in this country more than 1,000 teenagers give birth out of wedlock, 15 lose their lives because of guns, and approximately 25 are infected with HIV.

To put it bluntly, we have a whole generation at risk. And let me be very clear, none of this is your fault. None of it is my fault. But it's our problem. It's my problem, it's our problem, it's an American problem, and together we have to get together and take some responsibility to help solve it. Together we have to ensure that every caring adult, particularly parents, are engaged in the lives of young people. I like fairy tales. Every fairy tale I know, no matter what the culture is, ends the same way, caring adults save the kids. We have to be engaged in the lives of young people. We have to make sure that their parents talk to them often and early and that they have the tools they need to help their children bypass very dangerous mine fields like drugs and AIDS and smoking and teen pregnancy and make what I would call safe passages to adulthood. The fact is, for most parents raising children is more than a daily drama. It's very difficult, it's very confusing, and it could be made much less so with good information, good public health information in particular. For example, we know that we can prevent more than half the deaths in the United States by getting America to stop smoking, to eat right and be physically active. Half the deaths could be prevented by those three things. And because of a new report we're releasing today we know that adolescents who live with two biological parents are far less likely to use alcohol, to use cigarettes, or to use elicit drugs. The new study confirms what we've been saying all along about the power of keeping families together. Young people who live with both their parents are far more likely to have the strength and the resilience they need to make very smart choices with the only lives they'll ever have. So how do we take this information and bring it into the living rooms, into the dens and the kitchens of every American? That's where all of you come in and that's why I came here tonight. I'm speaking to you as a talented and as a privileged few with very great power but also, I think, with great responsibility. And that's why I'm asking you to fold into your stories accurate, life-saving information about these issues. I'm asking you never to forget that your audience needs to see not just anger and betrayal, but also the painful consequences of domestic violence, of preventable disease, of absent fathers, the unglamorous dead end that is too often reached when young people start down a very dangerous road of drugs and alcohol and tobacco and teen pregnancy and the dreams not just deferred but ended.

I understand that everybody in this room are entertainers by trade and I understand that you need to be ever mindful of the bottom line of profits and of ratings. But there is another role and another bottom line that I'm challenging you tonight to pay more attention to. It's your role as citizens, as guardians of the public trust, and it's the bottom line which is called our children and our families. I know that your industry is already making great strides on this front. "General Hospital" did its Emmy-award winning story on AIDS, helping teenagers across this country understand that they're not immune and that AIDS is not about them, it's about us. Click the channel and we've also seen a family raising a Downs Syndrome child and a teen heroine who uses a "Baby Think It Over" doll to teach, frightened would be the better word I think, her boyfriend about the round-the-clock needs and screams of an infant. The last story grew out of the first Soap Summit and it shows that your message can change without changing your ability to hold an audience spellbound. In fact, tomorrow the Kaiser Family Foundation is issuing a content analysis that shows that AIDS and condoms are appearing more often in story lines, but they're still the exception not the rule. Clearly we must do more, and that's why I'm asking you to take a larger role in this extraordinary national drama to improve the health and the lives of all our citizens.

I'm asking you to think about the public health consequences of each and every show because none of us are born knowing how to be good parents. Parenting is learned. It's a lifelong process and your shows can and should help. So if you're doing a story about a kid using marijuana, you have a golden opportunity to help parents recognize the warning signs and to understand the importance of sending clear anti-drug messages to their kids. If you're doing a story about the problems and rewards of parenthood, take the opportunity to show that children win when both parents take emotional and financial responsibility for them. If you're doing a story about a teenager getting pregnant, consider making the plot not just about passion but about the consequences, the poverty and the lost futures that our research shows that unwed mothers and their children are likely to face. If you're doing a story about characters struggling against domestic violence, why not run our toll free domestic violence hotline number as part of the credits so that families in pain know where to go for help. And if the story is about breast cancer, try working mammography into the script so the viewers understand how to catch cancer early, when they can treat it and beat it. And if you're doing a story about a young girl who fears she's HIV positive, take the opportunity to show parents sending the right messages to their children about the powers of abstinence and how to protect themselves against this virus. I know and you know that education and entertainment can go hand in hand, and they must, and I understand that your production schedules are really grueling and that up-to-date public health information isn't just laying around your sets. So I've come tonight to offer more than a challenge, I've come to offer help. I've come to make it so easy for you, not only to touch your audiences but to teach them.

At our department we have up-to-date information about drugs, about alcohol, about tobacco. You name it, we've got the information. We have access to the best experts on issues. Most of them speak English clearly, can talk to anyone. We can help from depression to domestic violence, from AIDS to breast cancer, in fact, any disease or disability. We have information about approaches that work to cut down on teenage pregnancy, to promote health, to protect families from abuse, to collect child support payments, to move people from welfare to work. You write the drama, you develop the characters, and we'll be there with accurate information that you need on any topic, any time. And that's why I'm pleased to include in the packet that you're going to get tomorrow a number that you can call at the department and a disc with useful information. We'll get you the facts this fast. You have your interns call us and we'll get you the facts. I know how difficult it is for writers. I had many friends who wrote for shows in New York and in California, and what they need is a quick way to get a turnaround to get the information. We'll make it real easy. When I made the same offer at the Talk Summit, the naysayers lamented that the talk show producers would simply put our resources in their circular file. They were wrong. At the Summit and after the Summit the calls started to come in and we regularly get calls now from the talk shows for information. They want to use our 800 numbers if they can on the show, and I think that if you talk to any of them they found us very quick in our turnarounds and our ability to respond both to put them in touch with the right person or to get them the information faxed out to them that they need right away. It's my hope that this second Soap Summit will strengthen the dialogue between leaders in public health and the entertainment industry. The President said over and over again that government doesn't raise children, the schools don't raise kids, the media doesn't raise our children, parents raise children, but all of us have an obligation to give them a helping hand. These parents are in a tough situation. Many of them grew up in the '60s and the '70s and have mixed feelings about how much they should reveal about their own backgrounds as they're dealing with their kids. They need help, and we think that all of us have an obligation to give them a helping hand, from TV to teachers, from athletes to artists, from parents to public leaders. It's going to take all of us privileged enough to have the trust of families to do everything in our power to honor but not to undermine that trust. This means as the world turns and changes we need to shed more light not just create more heat about the problems that are facing young people in this country. We need to look in close up at the real lives of millions of families who find escape in soap operas but have yet to escape violence, a lack of education, and preventable disease. And when all is said and done, we need to ask ourselves when given the choice and the power did we make the extra effort? Did we choose to have a positive effect, a negative effect, or no effect at all? Because when the lights dim and the credits roll millions of people still will be waiting, waiting for tomorrow's story and for ways to rewrite for the better the story of their own lives today. Thank you very much.

SONNY FOX: Now you know why we invited her tonight. Yes, sir.

QUESTION: I have a question. I remember when I was growing up the philosophy was that two parents who do not love each other should not stay together because the children would sense the tension and that would be unhealthy. My understanding is that that has changed now and that it is felt, as you said, that two parents in a home is much healthier.

DONNA SHALALA: Oh, I think we've got to be very careful about answering that question. What it doesn't show is that two parents with lots of hostility in which it's a very unhappy situation, that that produces children that stay away from this. What we're clearly pointing to is strong, mature relationships and two parents. No one, I think, in any place of responsibility should suggest that people should stay together in an abusive situation, that there aren't situations in which there simply isn't a spouse present. There are a lot of young women that have had children in this country that have probably made responsible decisions not to marry the other person responsible for this child just because that person isn't responsible, that one mistake doesn't make two. But the point is that what we're trying to say to kids in this country is wait until you're mature enough, both emotionally and financially mature enough both to create children and to create a relationship in which those children can be nurtured. We ought not to, in the process of doing that, avoid being supportive of a lot of single parents in this country or kids that are divided among parents. They're the ones that have the toughest time. They're the ones that need the clearest information as quickly and as clearly as they can get it because they don't have a lot of time to spend and they need the most help.

QUESTION: Thank you, Donna Shalala, for all your wonderful comments. You made the comment on contraceptive advertising for television and where do you see that? Where is your vision for that?

DONNA SHALALA: As you know, the department and the Clinton administration finally had the courage to sponsor some condom ads and I think by us getting our feet wet both the industry itself was willing to run some of the ads. We were particularly focused on safe sex for young adults, which is a very high risk group, not for very young people. So our ads were focused and the people in our ads, the CDC actually did the ads, were focused on young adults. We continue to believe that the issue of sex education for younger people, for teenagers, for pre-teenagers, really is an issue for local communities and for schools and, therefore, we have stayed out of the more controversial parts of this, whether condoms should be distributed in schools, should safe sex ads including condoms be aimed at younger and younger people. I realize that gives us a somewhat different position than some of the health education people in the country would like us to have, but what we have to do is think about what is the role of the national government and what is the role of local communities and parents and schools. The fact is almost every issue we're dealing with the most effective strategies are local community strategies. You want to reduce marijuana drug use in your community? It takes a community-based effort, schools and religious leaders and coaches and everyone who comes in contact with those young people having consistent messages and then taking into account that young people have too much time on their hands in many communities and need to be kept busy. So I think that what the President would like us to do is be extremely careful about what we provide leadership on. It was important for the national government to step out and put those condom ads on television nationally so that local communities got some comfort level in the kind of complex and very intense kind of decisions they had to make. So, but we will continue our focus on people that are basically over 21, between, you know, in their '20s, into their early '30s, which is a very high-risk group for HIV and for sexually transmitted diseases.

SONNY FOX: Bill.

BILL: Thank you for your comments. I wanted to ask you to follow up on a comment you made during your talk which is basically how do you tell your kids not to do in the '90s what you did in the '60s and '70s. That's the title of a book I saw.

DONNA SHALALA: Yeah, that's right. I started a conversation at my table about the special problem we have with these parents, us, our generation, because people that grew up in the '60s and '70s in particular may have had some drug experience themselves, particularly marijuana, and that's why kids are getting mixed signals about whether marijuana is safe, which it is not based on all the research. It's also a gateway drug. What we have done in this area is interesting. With the PTA we have actually a new series of materials for parents that the PTA is now distributing to millions of parents on how to talk to your kids about drugs if you had previous drug experience yourself. Now, Bill could also tell you that we have some of the same problems with smoking. How do you tell your kids they shouldn't be smoking when you just quit yourself and you started as a kid?

My answer to that is that if I once drove when I was drunk the last thing I should do is recommend to my kid that I have any hesitation about recommending to them that they should ever have a drink and get behind a wheel, that it's possible to be honest with our kids but it has a lot to do with the kind of conversation and the kind of openness that you have with your own children. The level of the conversation and listening very carefully to the kind of peer pressure that kids are under, not simply giving them a speech that drugs are dangerous, illegal and wrong, but having that dialogue is what parents have to have. Increasingly the materials and the training programs that we're doing for parents and the model programs talk about that dialogue and talk about the need to listen to teenagers. I do have a teenage advisory committee. The most important thing I do is I listen. They are, I have never known a generation that talked, used words like stress. I can't remember growing up ever thinking I was under stress. I mean, the most stress I was under was in the Cleveland City Championship when I was 11 and I lost the first set, was down five-one in the second set, and I came back and won it. But only because they announced that the men's singles should warm up and I was insulted, so I came back and won that match. But these kids actually talk about real stress and feel the stress. We have high teenage suicide rates, so the listening to kids, the fact that their parents are busy, the consistency of the messages they get, and increasingly the kinds of information we give them, but it's the conversation that's important. The soaps can do it because it's sitting and listening to teenagers and the kind of peer pressure they're under. But also, we've got to act like adults. They don't want us to be hip. We went out, General McCaffrey and I went out and talked to a bunch of teenagers before we announced our recent numbers on teenage marijuana use and asked them who they get their information from, who do they trust. Kids say their parents. They all say their parents first. Some of them say also their teachers and their coaches. But even if there's just one parent, they talk about how busy their parents are and how difficult it is to talk to their parents, but they all say parents. So if we don't reach parents in this country we're gonna lose all of this. I'll take one more question.

QUESTION: If you watch the soap operas you would think that no one in this country ever had an abortion, but there's something like one and a half million every year. Do you think [INAUDIBLE]?

DONNA SHALALA: What I want to lay out for them is the issues that I think real people are struggling with and real families are struggling with and abortion clearly and reproductive health issues. The soaps have done some wonderful things on planning issues, for example, and I know that because we've had some consultations on some of these issues. Do I think abortion should be mentioned? I'm surprised that you suggest that it's never mentioned. I'm pretty sure I saw a show last year in which abortion was mentioned, but that's up to them. The content is up to them. I can outline the major public health issues in this country, unwanted pregnancy for Gloria and Felicia and l, myself is a far more significant issue from our point of view, though clearly we would not want to avoid all of the reproductive health issues or the alternatives that are available. Over the course of this year the FDA has approved, or is in the process of approving alternatives to surgical abortion, which will change the nature of the politics of reproductive health over a period of time.

I appreciate your listening to me. Remember that we want to make it as easy as possible for this partnership and just know that when we sit around the cabinet table that there are a number of fans. I haven't caught the President watching the soaps yet, but I suspect, knowing his, how hip he is that he probably does it a little himself, too. So, thank you very much