Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion 20240704

Good afternoon and welcome to our audience gathered here and welcome to everyone who is watching us live on cspan. We are here for an important discussion here today on a topic called beyond objectivity producing trustworthy news in todays newsrooms. I am from the Walter Cronkite school of journalism. I am pleased to be joined today by two distinctive individuals, glenn downey, who is the former executive editor of the Washington Post, who now serves as a professor at the Cronkite School. And andrew hayward, to my far left, who is the former president of cbs news, who is now a Research Professor amongst other things at the Cronkite School. Today, we will engage in a discussion about the report that mr. Hayward and mr. Downey worked on about beyond objectivity, examining what that means from a contemporary point of view in todays newsrooms. Just a little bit of background about this report and how we got here, we work presented with an opportunity to explore issues that would be of importance as it relates to helping to build trust in media and trust in journalism. We were given some support by the foundation and looking at what would be an important topic for us to explore. Fortunately enough, we were able to turn it over to these two gentlemen, who produced the ideas to explore what objectivity means now and how that has evolved, and where that is taking us, and where we can go from here. This report has generated a great deal of attention. It has been covered in lots of different places, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, to bloomberg, to all sorts of National Media outlets and people who are associated with covering the media. Some have pandered. [laughter] some have said that it is an excellent report. As dean, i have been asked, what is my stance on it . First, i will say that this is an example of research and i am very pleased with the research that mr. Downey and mr. Hayward conducted here. They conducted some 75 interviews with people to get to the heart of the matter. We support academic freedom. I support the work that they have done and i am very pleased with the outcome in the sense that it, first and foremost, has sparked a conversation, an important conversation. We hope to continue this conversation here today. We look forward to your involvement in this ongoing discussion, this can forth, and where we go from here. With no further ado, i want to turn it over to the esteemed panelists so they can give opening comments. Then, we want to again engage in the discussion. We will start with mr. Downey. Glenn thank you very much. As the dean said, we interviewed 75 news leaders and journalists route the company thereof the country at newspapers, television stations, and networks that own the stations. We discovered they are already involved in a dialogue that we wanted to capture. That is to say that a number of people we talked to, people who run News Organizations, say that the definition of journalistic objectivity is no longer what they believe in or practice. That is because they regard it as a white male, very narrow definition of what is news and how to cover news for white males, traditionally. That is with newspaper and journalistic teams becoming diverse. They are looking to go beyond objectivity to produce news that is accurate, fair, aggressive, and enterprising. And again, getting into communities that have not been covered before, getting into subjects that have not been well covered before, and getting away from both sidesism, or you tried to balance out Climate Change for example, many voted scientists about the problems and then doubters to balance it. That is not the case anymore and should not be. Theyre trying to engage the diversity of theirs newsrooms and communities in ways that have not been number four, including by allowing people into under covered communities to share stories they have not been covering in the past. As a result, all of the interviews see in the report, whats going on out there, we came up with a playbook for newsrooms that want to work on this change. It has six general categories striving for accuracy and the pursuit of truth. Unlocking the diversity of newsrooms and the identity of their reporters. We talk about that later, if you want to. Creating a clear and consistent policy to guide your political activity, which is a hot subject, as you know. What should journalists be doing outside of social media and the newsroom . Investigative accountability reporting. This is not something you find reliably on the internet unless it is coming from a good News Organization. Show your work, so the public is no longer wondering where all of this came from and has ideas about what we might be thinking about. Instead, show your work. Say in stories where things came from. Say what you dont know. Put it on the internet if you have internet access, as most News Organizations have, the documents and data used, and so on. Finally, determine your newsrooms core values. There are a number of special interest startups covering things like climate, race, so on. They declare their values. They declare what it is they are doing, why they are doing what theyre doing. To what extent should other newsrooms that are serving everybody be doing the same thing . Explore what your goals are and discuss it within the newsroom itself. Should you also tell the public what you are up to . Battinto thank you andrew thank you. My interest is toward Television News. Local Television News has held up relatively well in the declining trust the American Public has for the news. It often comes up at the top of surveys as the most trusted. I think for a couple of pretty obvious reasons. One is that local news cannot dismiss because you can check it out for yourself. You know the light on elm street has not been fixed or that the warehouse that burned down has not been boarded up properly. Also, the reporters often live in the can unity and you actually know them. It is a place where people inherently have common ground. A lot of the toxicity of public conversation now reflects divisions among people who dont know each other or experience one another. But even in that context, local Television News had it too easy for too many years. It was a comfortable monopoly of stations. It is striking that most small and mid town cities, or you could get a sunburn if he held the newspaper up to the light, there are still three or four competing Television Newsrooms. But that allows stations to get away with not really serving their communities deeply. One of the roots of this report was the idea that we are dealing with a more complex world, a world where journalistic competitors are going to meet in the digital arena in the distance between them is going to blur. Television news stations are going to have to become more responsive, and a lot of them are. We were pleasantly surprised. We have been doing work with tv newsrooms. They are actually not only undergoing cultural change, which we can talk about if youre interested, but really reaching out to the communities and trying to reflect the diversity, even though it is broadcasting. The challenge now is to combine broadcasting, that onesizefitsall monolithic view with narrowcasting, which is reflect above the interest of communities and the people who work in the newsroom. What we are really trying to i will say preach, because that sounds too us, but what we are trying to encourage as a cultural shift, flipping the script from a bottomup reflection of the true interests of the people you are serving. I think that reflects the complexity of the world we live in today. I see im not the only grayhaired one. Remember what Walter Cronkites tagline was at the end of every evening broadcast. Thats the way it is. Andrew thats the way it is. Thats right. If any anchor person said it that way today, we would laugh. It sounds like an Impossible Task to summarize the whole world in 20 minutes. Back then, it was plausible and he was the most trusted man in america. Thats not a knock on walter. Our school is named after him. [laughter] if any anchor person were on us today, she would say, that is how we did our best to find out whats going on today. [laughter] dont hold your breath for that. I think we are encouraging a more complex world. There is one more thing about diversity. I want to get to your questions. But when i started at cbs news, some of my friends from there are here, in the 1980s, there was already a commitment to diversity as a statistical and moral imperative. That is kind of where it ended. There was tremendous pressure to confirm conform to the existing culture when people enter. Black people could not pretend to be black, but they were basically sanded down to act as white as can be. Women had to conform to certain stereotypes that were definitely developed by men in order to get in. If you were gay, you werent gay. You were in the closet years, let alone tapping into peoples Life Experience to enrich anything. There was pressure to conform, rather than inform coverage with the diversity of the newsroom. That is changing now, i think belatedly. We hope to encourage that with this report as well. Leonard i just want to emphasize two other quick things. We are not advocating advocacy i any means. Critics of the report shows that, saying that andrew we are the woke control. Patrol. [laughter] Andrew Leonard you didnt know pterodactyls could speak, did you . [laughter] andrew changes going on out there and you need to prepare your students for this new world. One thing we emphasize is dialogue within newsrooms. We are not advocating advocacy. We are not saying the diverse backgrounds of newsrooms means putting opinion into stories based on your views. However, you need to discuss your backgrounds, views, thoughts about coverage within the newsroom. There needs to be a safe place for that. We discovered a lot of newsrooms doing exactly that, that have different ways of having discussions amongst the staff, even different caucuses or different diverse groups of the staff. As andrew says, the newsroom is a safe place where you can discuss all of these things freely, then decide what is the best journalism that should come out of this. Battinto that is a fantastic introduction from you both. You all have had a long career long careers in journalism and education. It would be shocking if anything surprises you at this point. But i have to ask you, what surprised you as part of this process, this research you conducted in the outcome and response . Leonard two things. One, we thought we would be introducing this topic to news leaders. In fact, everyone we talked to said this is a really important thing that we are already starting to discuss. This is bubbling up organically in newsrooms. One surprise was not so much that we were preaching to the choir, but that we were all trying to learn new songs at the same time. That was the main one for me. I guess the second one is the complexity that people are wrestling with, people and educators in the room, making the case which may sound oxymoronic for nonbiased journalism that grows out of multiple perspectives. That is a challenge that we all face. And the fact that newsrooms are wrestling with in multiple ways was also a surprise to me. Leonard i was surprised when we conducted these workshops, which we did at local television stations and newspapers around the country. How already engaged they are in many of the things we were talking about it how interested they were in our thoughts and advice to continue going in those directions. We are talking about newsrooms that are strapped. Where talking about the Arizona Republic that is fighting hard to maintain a certain staff size. It is experimenting in these areas. They have hired a hispanic woman to go out into the hispanic community, which is very large in the phoenix area, and discover more about whats really going on and whats important to them. And then coming back and creating new beats and hybrid beats, in some cases, because the staff is so small that semi has to cover housing, education, all these things at the same time. But to be informed by the things they learned out in the community. We also discovered that some of the television stations around the country are now putting people, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, into the community. Go live in this part of the new york area and do your reporting from there. That becomes your feet and that is going help us better understand how to cover this area. Battinto we want to open it up to questions from the audience. Another question that i would have is, do youll feel that this pursuit of objectivity has somehow contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation . Leonard thats hard to say, because much of the sources does not come from factfinding news media. It comes from opinionated news media, from other sources on the internet, and not the factfinding newsrooms we are talking about that make up most of america. I dont see that as a larger problem, as the reaction of the people who believe that sort of thing to the factfinding news. They were criticizing the media because it does not agree with what they want, as opposed to presenting the facts. Andrew i would say it has contributed to misleading information. Thats because of a lack of context insomuch reporting. Amy and i both have yellow lanyards. We are wearing yellow lanyards. Are they standoffish . No, we were too late to get the green ones. [laughter] thats my example of reporters digging a little bit deeper. [laughter] we have talked a lot about in one of our workshops with a tv station, one of the morning anchors said that there is often a crime that happened overnight and i dont have access to the kind of context youre talking about because all i have is the police report. For many years, we too courageously accepted the Police Spokesman as the authority for what happened. We learned that while those are also often valuable, important inputs, those are often the wrong story, a selfserving story. What we said is that this number five in our workbook, show your work, you can say that we havent had the chance to go out and do that, but we will do it at noon, 5 00, 6 00. There is an encouraging develop it of stripping away the magic of journalism. Instead admitting it is a work in progress almost all the time. Battinto yes . Please introduce yourself. My name is richard. [indiscernible] what has come up, as far as what universities might do . [indiscernible] i just wonder if the whole university has been thought about. Leonard i want to read the question. He leads a very interesting center that focuses on student led reporting around the country. The question is, what is next for educators . Since i got to repeat the question, i will let andrew answer it. [laughter] first of all, this is my project of news. I want to be talking to you about what you know about all this universityproduced news. It is rapidly increasing. Students who are at the conch right school, they have the conch right news program on television and on the internet covering arizona. The only Washington Bureau for arizona is conch right news. Many nori many News Organizations around arizona take these students and in print. Many universities are doing that now. Much more than before. Cronkite was one of the early ones. Some other universities are putting their students to work in Community Newspapers to save those newspapers, just a few around the country so far as an example of that. We are working on the ownership. There are universities they are very interested in. I think some have already started having the owners of failing newspapers donate it to the university and have the University Run them. That means that it goes beyond the journalism school. That means you can have different parts of the university providing other parts of the services to that newspaper without having to pay for an Advertising Department and Something Else like that. I see a big role, a growing role, for universities in the future of local news. Battinto yes . [indiscernible] leonard come up to the microphone. It seems that the line between social media and Mainstream Media [indiscernible] if so, how did these news leaders and Mainstream Media plan to find that . Andrew i think social media has certainly contributed to a severe deterioration in the quality of the conversation in the public sphere. Because of the incentives that social Media Companies have, they are all wrong. They are to exacerbate conflict and emphasize emotion over information, and to actually get people to get mad or sad, as opposed to being informed. I think that is where misinformation and disinformation have flourished there is an epidemic of sharing indiscriminately that has made matters worse. Theres really two issues. One is, what is mainstream journalism for upstart journalism do about that . The answer is, just hope that at a certain point, facts, accuracy, context, all things we talk about, fairness, will engage in and win the fight for peoples minds, especially if you are willing to call out misinformation and disinformation aggressively, which is increasingly happening. We take a conservative stance on social media policies and News Organizations. There is a school of thought that your social media personality is separate from something of your own. You can be an advocate on social media as to go back to the newsroom and be a trust a reporter. We dont think so. We think that if you are going to be a journalist, you forgo certain other rights that other americans have to Free Expression for the privilege of actually communicating accurate and contextual information to the public. In any case, we dont set the policy of News Organizations, obviously, and thank goodness. I think it is up to organizations to address this candidly and make sure they have a clear, consistent, fairly enforced policy that their people can follow. The lines should not be blurring. It is wonderful that we have the ability to communicate, that anybody can communicate and connect with people around the world. That was wonderful and potential. People were optimistic about social media when it started. I cant imagine anyone is optimistic about it now. Sorry. Leonard several things to say about that, in addition. First of all, as a number of news leaders told us, who still have the traditional policy that we advocate for not engaging in opinion on social media when you are working for a News Organization, unless you are an opinion colonist, obviously, the crowd ability of News Organizations are already under fire. If you contribute to that criticism, if you are engaged in opinion on social media, the credibility of your News Organization should come first. Secondly, your own credibility should also be important. Not only are people watching for what news media might be doing, but they are watching out for what you are doing that might be biased. If you can cover politics for investigative reporting, i tell my students that i have been teaching for 15 years. I am really old. I tell my students all the time, everything you do on social media, everything, not just in reference to your reporting work, everything you do is creating a permanent record that can always be found, can never be erased. 20 years from now, you will be covering a contentious political race someplace, and someone will say, back in university, i saw the side you were on and i bet you are still on that side now, so i dont believe you. I encourage people not to be engage in social media for taking come back to hunt them. David fair in thought, he used to work for the Washington Post and now works for the New York Times, he uses social media all the time for his investigative reporting. He actually writes things out on his notebook pad and hold them up to his camera to say, here is the things i know so far about Donald Trumps foundation. Heres what i dont know. I dont know where that portrait is. Can you find it for me . Sure enough, someone found it for him. It is a great reporting tool, not an opinionated place. Andrew it is also a terrific transparency tool. It is a great place to share your process to build trust by being very open about how you know what you know, what you dont know yet, and what you are still working on it i dont mean to be entirely negative about it i think used properly and communicated to your students, here is a great way that social media can enhance your work in connection with your users, readers, viewers, listeners. Im from the university of kansas. You refer to reporting not just accurately, reporting truth. In this posttruth world some people say we are in, do you think reporters have to go beyond objectivity to report the truth . Leonard reporters, as always say, should be pursuing the truth. The absolute truth is hard and it is in the eye of the beholder. But you want to pursue it with facts as much as you can. Pile facts upon facts and see how close you can get to the truth. I tell all of my investigative reporting students that. I have many investigative reporting projects in the news media, for example. That is one of the things i asked them. What are the findings . Did they look like they were supported by the reporting . You are pursuing truth as much as you can. Thats why you also want to come back and followup. I remember back in my career, decades ago, you would do a six part series in the Washington Post, then move onto the next six part series. Instead, he should be following up with the first six part series to figure out whats going on. Another thing andrew has acquainted me with his solution was impaired not advocating solutions, but examining whether our potential solutions to the problem that youre looking at. Are there other ways it is being done . Report that and let people judge whether or not thats a better way to do things. Andrew we say to strive for truth. I dont think achieving it the difficulty of it should not keep you from striving for. You have a wonderful quote paired best available version. Leonard the best available version of the truth. Thats what they always said. Andrew and you got to work with them. Leonard yeah right. [laughter] battinto im coming to you. Wait for the microphone. Thank you for the shout out about the lanyard. I used to cover andrew. I just wondered if you all had any success in your conversations with the owners of the media, the people who are stripping local newspapers. Is there any overlay . You said you are talking and universities are stepping up. Im wondering, is there an argument to be made about what you are doing over here to people who are down to one reporter in the newspaper . Do the owners see this as a way to do something they see as value . Leonard the answer is, the wrong owners, absolutely not. They only try to pull his much money out of the newspapers as they can. Shall the printing presses, the building, cut down the staff, and pull out as much profit as you can. If they eventually die, fine. But what is happening, encouragingly to me, people are going down and saying, look at these 12 papers here. We can do a better job with them. We can pay you for it. So, they will buy them. The owners that are not caring about the future of news, dont bother with them. Its the new owners and another interesting thing to me, people my age, some of them have retired to small places around the country. They are buying a local newspaper and running it. They are fixing it so it will survive after they are gone. And a lot of Little Things like that going on. But in terms of the present chain owners, forget about it. Battinto i will come back to you. Thank you very much for the incredible study. Let me do a point of privilege, since i had the opportunity of working with you. My question is about the audience. You both remember the public journalism and civic general is him civic journalism from the 1990s. How much did that apply to the journalists you talk to and the audience . Are you going to do a followup project and talk to the audience . Help us understand the role of the audience. Andrew i was a skeptic about the whole civil journalism movement. It relied on the public to do journalism. I dont want to overstate it. I was skeptical of that, but i think a big part of our emphasis is connecting with communities, as opposed to this topdown model of yesteryear. Again, under the name objectivity, it left out so many groups that needed to be served by journalists. I think part of surviving and thriving in the new world is understanding the complexity of the communities you cover, connecting with them, hiring journalists who have the experience and credibility to connect with them even better, and reflecting that. Leonard can speak about this as well. The can unities we have talked to, they are making concrete efforts and restructuring their newsrooms in order to connect better and listen better to communities. That l word, listening, is critical. I think it has played too small of a role. Give her the complaint very often, i think especially from communities of color, we only see when something bad happens here. That is starting to change, still too slow, but the notion of reflecting a more nuanced view of life in our cities and communities, i think, is starting to happen. Leonard to come back to our workshop, they discovered through their work that the number one issue in the community was housing, which they somehow did not realize. As a result, they now have a housing beat. Battinto lets go to the back. Andrew wait for the microphone for one second. Dr. Carolyn nielsen from western washington university. I appreciate you open your comments, acknowledging that this centers on whiteness. The example that you gave was the Arizona Republichearing hiring a latina reporter going into the community to find out what is important to them. I want to know about the responsibility of white people in the newsroom and white managers, who are most exclusively in power in the newsrooms, ensuring that coverage is more inclusive. Leonard a good question. First of all, in the case of the Arizona Republic, it is spanishspeaking, which is important, because she is able to discuss everything in the community in spanish, where some of the other reporters did not have that link which facility. Your overall point is well taken, which is to say that even during my time, a long time ago, i purposely did not assign stories by race. We had white reporters covering things in the black community, we had black reporters covering all sorts of different things. You dont assign by race at all. It is important for white reporters to learn about whats going on in the rest of the world. In fact, in some of the assignments that we discovered in the cbs local television stations, when they sent people into their communities, they dont decide by race who is going to go into that community. There are white reporters going into nonwhite communities. Andrew i think while the majority of journalists are white, you can only accomplish this by encouraging them to be much more inclusive in their thinking and in their attempts to connect with different communities while you are enriching your newsroom with a much more diverse staff. It is a work in progress. I dont believe in identitybased assignments. But i do think a healthy newsroom culture, like what leonard described earlier, would allow anybody and there are examples of this cropping up around the country anybody in the newsroom to speak up about coverage, even if she or he is not directly involved in it. That is something new, not a journalistic tradition. But actually, there are formal and informal meetings, or people in the newsroom can influence coverage. I mean that in a positive sense of the word, based on their own unique perspectives. We are not going to wave a magic wand and have newsrooms that are as diverse as america is overnight. We are getting there. Much more slowly in the leadership ranks, to your point. But i have not given up on the possibility that white people can evolve. [laughter] battinto yes . Institute for rural journalism and community issues, university of kentucky. I think most americans dont really know how journalism works or is supposed to work. I have always been an advocate for repeated explanation of that. Our devotion to the discipline of verification, for example. Are there any news outlets that you know of that do an especially good job explaining to the audience how we go about our business . Leonard thats a good question. Andrew on the tv side, one of the largest Ownership Groups, techno, which is an odd commercial brand name tegna, which is an odd commercial brand name, it is derived from gwinnett, and they threw the letters against a wall. [laughter] they do something called verify, which goes well beyond Fact Checking, although it does do that, to explain where information comes from in a very accessible way. Back to bills question about civic journalism, they even had experiments where they would take an audience member along on a factfinding journey, very imaginative, great television. Theres another big Ownership Group that is starting down this road. I think it is a really good point. I think repeating it and making it clear, not assuming that people understand it, is very wise. I dont know that in the newspaper world, there is quite as much of that. But there is room for it. Leonard has made this point any times. One of the great things about not just social media, but Digital Media in general, there is too much real estate available to say more about your reporting. You can put your sources, obviously without violating confidentiality, but you can put original materials online, describe the process. If you look at the podcasts or some of the younger skewing platforms, some of the journalists working on youtube and tiktok, they are extraordinary in the voice that they have that connects very simply and makes an emphasis puts an emphasis on laying out the process and how you know what you know, and admitting what you dont know. I mentioned earlier the phony auditions of journalists. You are starting to see this in television a little bit. If you think about it, so many of the trappings of tv were designed to artificially create credibility with the big desks, perfect hair, deep voices, amazing grooming, clothing, all of that. Fine. But it is a digital medium. Real credibility comes from convincing people that you are doing a job in an ethical way. I call it earned authority, rather than asserted a 30. Earned authority is that when there was a factory that collapsed, i went to the building and came back to tell you what i found out and what i still dont know. Leonard a lot of young people, like my children, who are in their 30s and 40s andrew youre only in your 70s. [laughter] leonard they listen to these podcasts, and they love listening to these ones where the journalist is revealing everything they are doing, including getting into blind alleys and making mistakes, educating young people about how journalism is done. I think thats very valuable. For newspapers, Fact Checking is expanding. The Cronkite School is involved in it, among other things. But the Washington Post checking group is not only involved in particular kinds of Fact Checking, but also expanding that to better explanations about what has been false that they are looking into. Sometimes, also showing something controversial has turned out to be true, which is also useful for the reader. Battinto ok, lets turn a little bit and talk about the implications that this has for education and how students are coming to us. It has been an observation of mine in the observation of many of others that students are coming out to study journalism and media, and they are coming with somewhat of an activist mindset. Its good that they have that passion, but how do we work as educators to keep them inspired, but also to guide them . That is sort of an open question for you, but also to the audience as well. Im interested on hearing your thoughts on that. Leonard since i teach investigative reporting, that motivation is useful, obviously. But we emphasize that you dont start out what the story is going to be. You are not starting out in fact, you have to be open minded about the fact that it is often the case in investigate reporting and actual media, you will do enough reporting to realize that your original concept of what this investigation might be about was wrong. In fact, there may be nothing to investigate at all. Drop it and move on to the next one. I have been advocating that for decades. You have to be prepared, have these ideas. That curiosity is really important. That sense of mission is really important. But be prepared to stop and look for the next thing if you are barking up the wrong tree. Andrew in the report, i wont get the quote exactly right, at the executive editor of the mere times says there is no room for an activist. If you are an activist and that is your goal, you should probably not go into journalism. That said, journalists can change the world. There are many ways, and we try to get into this a little bit into the report, that you can influence change. That it is by reporting. A big part of it is by choosing what to report on. This is a point that a cbs executive reports. The weight of your coverage, what you are choosing to focus on, it is a way to draw peoples attention to important issues. If you are hoping to go into journalism as a platform for activism, i think that is unfortunate and certainly does not build trust, which is the goal here. Leonard there is a difference between activism and a Journalistic Mission. You do have to have a Journalistic Mission to go into journalism nowadays. It is not an easy life. As i tell my students, its not good for your social life, your family life. Andrew your bank. Leonard not good for your bank account. But it is important work and you have to have that sense that you want to do this import work. Andrew to go back to something we talked about before, stressing to students that these are not simple issues. There are News Organizations, going back to our defining a newsrooms missions, there is balancing these journalistic principles with a point of view. The martial project is a wellknown one focused on the Carmel Justice system. It is deeply flawed and there is heavy scrutiny. That said, we interviewed its founder. That said, you still have to report accurately with context and go where the information leads you exactly as leonard said. I think embracing nuance and complexity is an important thing for universities to do. Most universities dont have the luxury of time to do that. One of the real contributions that educators can make, to your point, dean, is to actually reflect complexity and imbue the students with these core values that they will then apply on a casebycase basis to complicated journalistic problems. Leonard that is why i think the Teaching Hospital is Teaching Hospital model is so good. That is cronkites model and many other journalistic schools are doing the same thing. Having students actually do real journalism, whether it is student journalism, journalism for the community, as many universities have, like cronkite news, or investigative news. But also those that are getting involved in their Community Newspapers and taking over. The more that students are doing actual journalism under the supervision of good faculty, the better journalists they will be. Andrew what about the deans challenge . Does anyone have any comments . Battinto i think we have a raised hand right here. It is not a comment to the deans question, but you just mentioned the modern Journalism Mission. If you had to put that into a mission statement, what would you say right now should be the modern Journalism Mission . Andrew 16 words or less, leonard. Go ahead. [laughter] battinto im going to go to the leonard im going to go to the report. We pondered over this to say what we wanted to say at the outset. Andrew if you can find it, you are a better man than i . And i. Leonard fair, factbased reporting, trustworthy news is arguably more important than ever because of the publics concern about the trustworthiness of news. In my own words, i guess it would be first of all to reflect reality to the audience. In all of its aspects. Secondly, it would be to hold accountable everyone in society who has power over all of the rest of us. Often, that is thought of as just being political power, but it is not. Look at investor gave reporting in the sports area, or terrible things have been going on in sports in decades, with nobody revealing them. Now, they are being revealed. Accountability is externally important to me. My whole career is dedicated to it. I started as an investigative reporter, i supervised them, and again, that is not something youre going to find elsewhere. All this information is coming from everywhere. This is unique in that cacophony, a very important mission. I will andrew i will them with my answer. Battinto i want to go back to something i said at the top, and maybe i will construct the question in a different way. Our society has become much more media savvy. Understanding the role that traditional journalism has tried to play in being objective in presenting both sides, do you feel that savvy, bad actors have somehow exploited that system to get their message out, whether it is false information, inaccurate information, or to promote an agenda, knowing that journalists will somehow be unknowing participants industry beating that information to cover both sides . Andrew there is no question of politicians and other institutions have become much more sophisticated at channeling their information, quite overtly bypassing journalists, manufacturing facts to their point of view. People understandably made fun of the alternative facts comment early on in the trump era. I thought it was a very profound unit a very profound idea. If you look at, lets say, fox news. Most of the things they talk about are true, they are just carefully selected to advance a particular perspective. There alternative facts that are facts. I will give you an example. The one illegal immigrant who murdered an iowa farmer, not the 40,000 who helped bring the harvest in, it is true that crime happened. Im making it up. But that crime happened. If thats what you hammer away at all the time, your perpetuating a certain point of view about the border crisis that fits with the philosophy that the prime commentator asks. I think you are right, dean, that facts can be abused. The role of journalism is to call that out. But that becomes complicated because we talk about both sidesism. Again, if you look at putting all these ideas together, the notion of accountability, feature reporting, which is a kind of expertise, transparency, striving for context, beyond just what the facts are, that is meant to be a countermeasure to the abuse of socalled facts that are actually there to deliver a point of view then be an honest broker of permission for the public. Battinto then, i will go a little bit deeper. This is a question from the audience. Arent we still then attached to that quest that medianews is asians to aggregate audience and bring as many people as we can to what we are writing, distributing, producing. Do we risk then turning off broad swaths of audience if we are looking to somehow redefine what objectivity means in our current environment . Andrew i will let leonard into this, too. But certainly, it you have seen, if you look at cable news, what i call an embarrassment of niche is. The Business Model there is to identify a passionate not even plurality, but segment of the audience, and overserved that segment. That is a very good Business Model for some. It does not, in my view, and this could be true for life skewing news as well, i dont think that really serves the nation very well. That it is a very good Business Model and it caters to a particular kind of consumer. Circulation is always going to be an issue. I think what we are betting on, and it is optimistic, i guess, is that certainly in the local sphere, if you really can establish that you are doing trustworthy news that recognizes the complexity of the community that you are serving and that listens to its different members and is responsive, and you are very open about the process, as we have been discussing, that is a commercially viable model. But i think you are right, it is problematic. I certainly dont think, on the local level, pandering to a particular niche is going to be the answer. I think nationally, while we have the example of cable news, and with going down that road from the business point of view successfully, there are organizations like major newspapers that are doing a really impressive job, despite all the economic pressures, that are trying to not be onesizefitsall. We have gone from one to many, the Walter Cronkite model, the cliche is to say we went from one to many, than many to one. But we have gone from many to many. They are also the hubs of their own networks. In many worlds, figuring out how to make that something commercially viable so that it is not the blind leading the blind, trying to please everyone, i dont think thats going to working more. Its not easy. Its one reason we are doing this work, because we think newsrooms are struggling. Leonard on the same surveys that show disagreement amongst americans about national News Organizations and what they are doing, they also show everybody once more local news. Everybody once more local, accurate news. There is no political disagreement about that. Which is why i think focusing on local news, as i will report us, is really important. Local news must be saved, not only for what you need locally, but it is something that people are not seeking opinion on. Battinto yes . Hi, i am grace, a 30 year phd student at the Cronkite School. I have a question. May be a great time to bring it up, as you just talk about local news importance and covering it. My question would be about interNational News coverage. Did your study find anything along the lines of how interNational News is covered . What does an audience feel, how did they know it is being portrayed or covered in an objective way . A lot of americans may not be aware of interNational News, whats happening. There is the ukrainian war with russia, of course. But there is so much happening in the world. Im just wondering, did you find anything in terms of how objective news is perceived, if at all, regarding interNational News coverage . Leonard cliche that everything global is local and local is global. Did you find that there was any infiltration of interNational News at all Climate Change, for example . Thank you. Leonard Climate Change, obviously, is a local, national, and international story. We were focused, again, on local news around the country and its coverage around the country. Andrew we werent doing an analysis of coverage as much as we were culture. Leonard yeah, how the news is produced. Andrew speaking personally, i share your concern, grace. Given how big our country is, it is also astonishing and maybe they are related how prevention all Many Americans are and how limited their understanding is in international affairs. My parents are foreignborn, so maybe i have a particular bias there. It is available if you want it, including many rep eatable sources, but it is not served up as a daily diet. Maybe this will contribute to greater interest into whats happening outside of our borders certainly, issues like immigration do. I think increasingly, we are going to have Worldwide Competition for water, food, and tremendous pressure that comes from the developing world to develop worlds. Maybe we will have to be more interested. This is certainly a major gap in american journalism that maybe we will address, if the dean lets us, in beyond objectivity 2 the longawaited sequel. Coming next summer. Get your popcorn now. [laughter] battinto we will come to that in a moment. Lets go to you. Hi, my name is catherine. I worked with sp jay and others for a very long time about agencies forcing reporters to go through Public Information offices to be able to speak to anybody. And related constrained. I dont know why we are not talking about this paid i think it is one of the most serious censorship issues going on. From what we can tell, they did surveys going back about 10 years ago. What we are hearing around the country now, is only getting tighter and tighter. At the federal level, it is horrific. We are hearing it all over the country. They are learning in their Media Relations conferences, etc. , and it is supposed to be a professional kind of thing to do. We are talking extensively about where the virus came from, and there are 70,000 people in health and Human Services trained to never speak to a reporter. I think that is insane. I think it is human rights abuse. Some of those people could tell us what is going on. Andrew sure. Is there a question lurking in there . [laughter] why are we talking about this . Why are journalists talking about this . Im talking about the New York Times and that washington journal reporters. A reporter said just the other day, i pleaded with the cdc to let their scientists talk more often. And as long as we are asking people in power to please let us talk to somebody, we are in deep trouble, whether we know it or not. Leonard i dont disagree with your analysis and i think that is probably a very good subject for another report, another research report. I do advocate to students, as i advocated at the end of the post, that you try to go around Public Relations people as much as you can. That means sometimes dropping in offices or knocking on peoples doors. You just have to be very aggressive. It nevertheless is a terrible problem. The federal information act is in real disarray. I did write about that. I have written three Different Committee to protect journalist reports on relations between the media and first the obama ministration the obama administration, then the trump ministration, and now the biden administration. I would say, however, that we get a lot good reporters get the story anyway. I dont believe that. I believe we get some stuff some stuff from trump. But i think they are pretty successful. Everybody at the cdc takes training. You never speak to a reporter. Not just their reporters have to be aggressive as they can be but the problem has to be studied. It beats back even they death even though they are hard to report because the reporters by their nature develop sources that are the that go will be on Public Relations apparatus that is set up to get a certain point of view out. At the National Level, the highest levels of journalism, we see a lot of reporting not reliant on the pr officer but locally, thats very hard. Only because the resources are so thin. At the same time, with a b reporter, you can work at the statehouse and talk to legislators directly. I actually dont have as dark a view is you have. Im pleasantly surprised by how often you read reporting that clearly goes well beyond the official pr which you can debate about. We didnt really deal with it but you feel more needs to be done and i dont disagree. I would caution that we get good stuff and that almost is camouflaged of how much is successfully hidden with this stuff. I will build a bridge with what catherine is saying and then to our report. The fundamentals of the report talk about Building Trust with our audiences and communities that we cover. I would posit an offer that journalism is fundamental to functioning democracies, functioning society. I would say its important as infrastructure for society is equivalent to police and fire, its a public safety. If we were to call the police and they didnt come, we wouldnt have very much trust for the police and how they serve us. If we were to call the Fire Department and they didnt put out the fire, we wouldnt have much trust for them. I think what you are saying is to help to build more trust in the value and importance of journalism in our society is we have to deliver these stories where we are facing, you mentioned the pr practitioners who try to put a roadblock. We have to find a way to get past those roadblocks and deliver the stories that are tough and not give up. We have to be dogged in that pursuit. I think that is one way we can help to build even more against trust and the better relationship with the public that we serve and they will rely on us and count on us and we come through for them. A question here . I believe we have a problem with the demand for local news. I think thats driven in part by the last six years of politics where theres been a show going on at the National Level and is very entertaining to many people. Social media has kind of broken down the old geographic boundaries of information. People are less interested in whats going on in their communities. Andrew i agree with that. We can have a debate about that but if you look at the circulation figures, part of that is driven by less interest. I talked to rural, weekly and daily people who say that very thing that people are not reading papers because they are too busy following donald trump and other people on facebook. How do we get people more interested in local news and help them understand the value of it . Leonard by getting out in the community and covering what people are interested in. The same polling that shows all kinds of problems with the audience for National News showed people are very interested in local news and those people that are trying to make local news better around the country including in small, rural areas, their audiences are writing because they are doing the job. They are supplying the news and many of those local newspapers have just advertisers now. Why would you want to read them . Battinto we will go in the back. I am the executive director of the Dow Jones News Fund which is a nonprofit that provides internships for a lot of college students. I want to get back to the activism question. I do think there is an issue or growing issue with young people finding journalism as a career choice that they see as interesting, exciting and worth their while. I think one of the things that helps them see it that ways if they see it as activism. I think i understand the concern about activism and advocacy versus passion but i think we have to find a way to get young people to see it as, you know, and activism, and active, something they can do that will change the world. I think weve gotten away from that. I wanted to ask you, especially when it comes to people of color. A lot of young people of color want to get into journalism to write what they see as the wrongs that are out there in Mainstream Media. How do you balance that . Its hard to tell somebody who is hispanic or africanamerican, dont ever veer off into advocacy for your Group Without them feeling like they are being suppressed. Leonard when we say not advocacy, we may not advocating a certain way to run a city or run a school or Something Like that. With advocacy for the context that comes with the journalism color, we are all for it and we advocate for that. We are advocating that. Thats why we talk about the safe space of newsrooms. Reporters can speak up and say, why did you only take the Police Version of that story . I hear from the committed Something Else is going on. The idea of getting into journalism is as i have been for 50 years or more, is yes, change the world through facts and information. We are providing the information and let somebody else decide what we do with the information. How do we make changes in society as a result of what you have told us as journalist . I think there is an Important Role for journalism schools. We want that impulse, we want that advocacy. I literally started journalism the fifth grade all long during that time, ive always thought about if i making a difference in the world. At the same time, im not telling people what to do. Back in that time, it was that time of journalism when it was an advocating thing, i forgot. Andrew i dont know. Leonard it was a movement for a while were not only do you report on the controversy over the stadium coming in and whether its worth taxpayer money, you advocate on the front page. This is not worth the money to build the stadium