Good afternoon. Good afternoon, and id like to personally welcome you to the texas book festival in austin, texas. The greatest book festival inn the united states. [applause] my name is brian sweeney. Im a proud board member of the texas book festival so you couln totally trust me when i say that. [laughing] an esteem panel of two writers. I very much admire for a panel called falsehood, forgery and fake news. I often think that the times person of your this very well may be fake news. Fake news he so ingrained in every aspect of our lives in terms of how we consume our media and understanding our political discord in the large decisions we make as a country going id like to introduce our panel today. What is an esteemed writer andou poet kevin young. [applause] , hes the author of several books in 10 volumes of poetry with the latest we will discuss today called bunk. How can you not want to read that . Kevin also just started on wednesday as the new poetry editor of the new yorker. Very little going on. Welcome to austin. At the far end is another writer i admire greatly both a Political Writer and nonobvious named jared makes sexton. [applause]. In his book is called people will rise upon the waters of your sure. Terrific words, jared. Jareds work has appeared in the new york times, new republic salon and hes currently crater of writing professor at Georgia Southern university. Please welcome jerry and kevin. [applause]. Gentlemen its a pleasure to have you here and in reading your books it reminded me of why i enjoyed books like this so much because of the deep story telling and smart analysis and it was nice to read them together intend him because kevin takes us back through years and years going back to the 19th century of American Culture and how we reveal things like forgeries and humbug and fake news and then jared gives us a more kind of up the minute approach based on what he saw during the 26 election and how it carried forward into our everyday discourse and i will tell you jared is not shy on twitter if you have checked out his twitter account. Out to start with kevin and say going back to the beginning of your book he talks about a wonderful american character, fascinating american character in the name of pt barnum, one of the things i feel like i know a bit about, but once you diamond the book you realize how much you didnt know and how much important that person is an barnums time in what you identified as the pain he papers , penny press and how much it reminded you of the modernday internet and its workings, so when you start with you. Can you take us back to that moment in American History and how does it look a little bit like today . Absolutely. Thank you for having me a thank you for coming out. Very much i was interested in that start that he gives of the hoax, his first big hoaxes in 1835 when he exhibited a woman named joyce have an joyce heck was he claimed George Washingtons nursemaid which would have made her 161 years old. [laughter] he advertised as fact and had experts to clear her, but what it provided people and the penny press was a big part of that was access to the first president s, one of our Founding Fathers and so people literally would touch her and they argued whether she was real, not just 161, but whether she was flesh and blood or made of rubber or, a lot of sort of things that to us are strange, but also barnums reach and power. Also, at the time she was a slave and so there was this real question there that the penny papers is one of the places that he did so and around the same time there was a new hoax in the penny papers which pretended someone had spotted people more like biped beavers and various things on the moon and i think the penny papers are like the internet in the sense that they promise this democratic world where access to it for the people and often also relied on advertisements in ways we do, that people read that penny press papers for this kind of excitement, something a little bit different and i think the internet functions much the same way and also spread the hoax widely and fast. At the time other papers were 5 cents, so it was five times as much and people picked their penny papers like we pick her news today, so theres a lot of relation to it and i trace the origin, the hoax to that moment and is there something american about the hoax, is there something we need to know that is told there and i think barnum offered us the kind of chance to be an expert, to be in this democratic process of choosing whether something was real or not and that sort of is still with us, but i think it also changed quite a bit. And i think that is one of the things that we want to talk about is that internet and democratizing tools and also tremendous pit calls it has when everyone is their own publisher and their is no value and is a former journalist myself there is real value and not having filters and being able to have access, but we also see the downside. I wonder, could you jump a sport about 150 years and you are driving up to iowa to cover the caucuses in one of the things i was struck by i told jarrett in the back for my now hes a real writer because part of the reason he took on political writing and because he was trying to put off fish finishing a novel, so theres nothing like a writer putting off one project by taking on another one, but went to iowa and spent time watching the caucuses candidates from both parties in one of the things you found their was this really intense anger. The electric was really a great order if you could set the tone for your arrival and what you saw. Sure. I was in the middle of writing a novel that had just ballooned out of control. It was like frankensteins monster that had gone beyond anything i could do and so in true writer fraction i procrastinated and decided i would cover the 2016 election, which i thought would be incredibly boring. [laughter] i thought it would come down to Hillary Clinton and jeb bush and i thought i would do this as a hobby, but then i started noticing the trunk campaign and started going to these rallies and the thing that really shocked me was i started to see that the Trump Movement at its heart was beating fueled by people like my family. My family is a working class family from Southern Indiana and a lot of the things i would hear the trump rallies, a lot of the drum piece of anger and paranoia and authoritarianism or things my family would say and so i actually started covering the Trump Campaign because i didnt want that in the american discourse. I let my family, but agent want them to be the people at the levers of power. [laughter] so i started noticing this anger they had, which people have now started to use this phrase left behind or economic anxiety and so my family is industrial stuff, factories, mine worker in Prison Guards things like that. They are angry about the state of their lives, but they were also manipulated by larger power doubts basically appealed to their absolute worst instinct and i started to see that like my family who started posting white supremacist means and racist stories and now, we have learned propaganda came from russia and other places. I started to realize the Trump Movement was powered by that. Do you have a sense in terms of coming through that election where you see the really good examples of reporting and discourse, balance by terrible examples of reporting and discourse . I mean, how would you rate the quality of what we saw because i think part of the dynamic has been this unbelievable us versus them dynamic that part of the country is wanting to mislead joint not tell you the truth while the other side says the rest of the country is trying to mislead you not tell the truth or did you see anything that inspired you and at the same time you saw things that really disappointed you . Well, i have been on the book tour for the book now and the things people keep asking is what is the hope and the hope is that when i talk to people i dont agree with politically and when we have a conversation human to human and they learn a Little Something about me and i learn something about them we confine Common Ground ground and begin to build trust, but i can tell you that the people of the Trump Movement which is roughly 30 of the country are inoculated at this point. They do not trust regular media. They do not trust trusted voices or could they have been walled off and that will be one of the harder things to do. I guess the thing that interests me at least i came to believe in my book that fake news weather in the penny press or wherever always started with race. It always was linked with questions of race in the hoax itself became a function of race, so also race itself is kind of built on the notion that its fall, so how these things go together and how do they become intertwined and can we untangle them and my book tries to understand sort of the origins of that and so the hope you are talking about i wonder about because its a century halfback and there is this connection. Absolutely right. Whatever the central progress we make or whatever breakthroughs we have technologically theres always a downside to it and you are saying that because we have carried this sort of racial undercurrent throughout our entire American Experience there is no way to escape it Going Forward . Well, i was just going to say i completely agree with kevin. That you clearly with my family and this is an intimate thing we are talking about. My family has a lot of racism, but they are in total denial of the racism. Right . These are the people that will say im not racist, but. One of the biggest strength of the Trump Campaign in the way they harm it harnessed the movement was they gave that excuse saying youre not racist. You see the world as it is and it gave them that excuse. I think at the heart of all of this is this really really disgusting strain of racism that has been allowed that has allowed this fake news and propaganda to come in. I think that the hoax depends on race which is one of the things i suspected, but as i began researching and writing the book i realized how pervasive it was in the term fake news becomes this weird thing where describes something true, propaganda or you know fake ads or fake news as ads, but then its also an accusation , you know. As you said, sort of challenges other truth and it becomes quickly fake news is just news i dont like, which cannot a lot of news, but you get to call it fake because you dont like it. Theres also this incredible power to the fake news because one of the things we are talking about with the rise of trump is the fake news that people like my family were getting. It told them they werent racist and they would have to actually the cognitive distance is a credible hard to defeat because for you to understand news as it is you have to understand you have an inherit racial privilege, which changes the entire nature of a persons like like all of a sudden you have to realize the world is different than you thought and do so its so much easier to accept fake news even while you know its fake like deep down you have to have the instinct its fake and i think thats why its been so powerful. Jared, in terms of this you say its personal. What is your familys response and what are those sort of oneonone i can only imagine the holidays. [laughter] what are those conversations like, has accreted distance. On the weirdo in my family. Hello, everyone watching at home. Yeah, they have always looked at me as, you know the outsider. Ive always had these conversations with them and even as i started to cover this thing like i would get Death Threats from my reporting and then i would go home and my family would have a trump thing out front and i would go in and id be like people are threatening to kill me and they be like oh, fake news. [laughter] so, to then very odd, but i feel like because i been able to talk to them and curb some of their worst instincts, but at the same time they are weary of me. A word sort weird sort of cultural gap there. Seems to that my sense is that ultimately the currency of that term is going to die out at some point; right . That its trying to be used as this shield to not just news thats truly fake as we saw during the 2016 election in different forms, but also news you just dont like that you sort of throw that up as the shield. With you we talked about this happening on the rights through this, but of course is it the exclusive ownership of only one side and when you look back through history are there out there examples that jump out to you that felt then as it feels now this critical or vital to the National Discussion . I think whats fascinating is the way hoaxes crop up at different times, citing very much boredom and the others were capturing eight moment of where the us was trying to understand its history and connect to a path and sometimes having to invented as great or however they wanted to think of it, so in a way i look at things a much a continuum now, people trying to understand and im not sure i think of it as political and the deepest sense, its about power, connection and who can hoax first in way some time, but its very much this disconnection between hoax and races of it i came to understand is really an intimate thing. It isnt just about why we deceive, but why we believe something and sort of trying to understand that gap you are talking about and why do people believe that white girl from Orange County is a southcentral gang member and sell sold her memoir in 2008, why did james frey, so trillions of copies of his book what is so obviously not real if you step back and i think the hoax tells us Something Interesting and as soon as it disappears or is debunked, which i think gets harder and harder to do or Something Like pizza gate. We want to believe this stuff, kind of the worst things about each other. 911 in new york . s are, let continue, please. Thank you. We will continue. I apologize for that disruption. There is a lot of things that are hard to debunk and once we do it tells us Something Interesting about what we believe and i use the term way because i think we all have a stake in it. Understand the side or anything, im trying to understand why there is this constant belief. Like fake news just came to our panel so i appreciate you. I assumed that was one of your family members. Uncle billy. Uncle billy, come back. Its always good to catch up. [laughter] i think its fascinating now as we talk about this idea of like pizza gate, which is so absurd and laughable and lead to a person to show up that whole thing and again this goes back to cognitive dissident and confirmation bias so we are in this polarized time in the country where this divide and what people is so great that we have people who sit here and talk about like liberals as if they are all criminals and satanists and evil evil people and that is confirmation bias at its heart. If you are up here and you talk about liberal ideas or fake news then you are pedophile or something, like that is how deep this is now. It can lead to things like pizza gate and thank god no one died there but, i mean, we are looking at a ticking time bomb when it comes to that and who knows how far that goes. Another example for me that was powerful was rachel, the person who was like the head of the naacp because she painted her skin and you know did her hair, a lot of people said quite well. [laughter] respect people gave her, but she troubled me and then a week later there was that murders and i tried to understand and theres a part of the book that consider this the connection between the two, which wasnt just to me accident of chronology, but they both misunderstand blackness in a certain way. As the kind of tragic thing rachel as i went to take that on as a figure of trauma, but then also dylann roof im sorry, meant not to say his name allowed, praying with people and then not being able to kind of put together that they are praying with him and accepting him, which i found very common in my church in kansas where i went to church and with linda brown, brown v board was the piano teacher and this was where the heart of civil rights came in desegregation and they accepted him in the church and then he shot them all, so that kind of cognitive dissonance to me is that play in the hoax because the hoax of race affected them each, dole is all in roof in different ways, but also brought them to the kind of central trauma affiliated with blackness and that really troubled me and should trouble us at all because we misunderstand each other, but the hoax always makes use of the deep divisions in our culture. Im glad you brought up the charleston tragedy because i think it america we are bad at putting things in context. Like a tragedy will happen and then we forget about it a couple weeks later. Of the myrtles in charleston are so being to what we going through now appeared dylann roof and i hate to say his name but we have to understand the heart of this thing, he was completely radicalized by fake news and when he read his manifesto and read the writings he left behind he had educated himself. This was a person who had gone online and found fake academics, fake studies, fake websites and hes been so inundated that he wrote he had to do this. It was all because he had been radicalized i this date news and we lost track of that like when we talk about things like charlottesville and these deaths we have had we forget that the people of charleston were murdered because of this and this does not stop in 2016, 2017th. It goes back a long time and will go forward a long time to weep at that in of how dangerous it actually is. Seems to me when you think of those tragedies that we are all directly affected by it. A lot of this a lot of us are able to see through this and i want to make there on the left in the right that i think the real danger which has been pointed out time and time again that those people that exist on the margins of our society who are particularly folder a ball for whatever ranging from Mental Illness to a global hopelessness, the actions of one person can be profoundly tragic for its in people around them and i think that is where the danger is that when we see these people sort of act out in that way beyond just what its done to our discourse and ultimately that erosion of trust we havent summary of our institutions that i think we desperately need a fully functioning government. We desperately need a fully functioning First Amendment and press. We need these things and i think that we i think every time its chipped away even if it seems like a little bit here and there and every time its chipped away i worry we lose something we wont recover. I was a journalist for 20 years here in austin and love my job and loved covering it, but it seemed particularly with the rise of the internet that every story we did it was harder and harder to break through a certain veil that my wife would say you all worked so hard on certain stories are certain issues that seemingly are nonpolitical and at that very moment commoners coming and hijack it. I remember reading from the from the dallas morning loot news literally about the weather that evolved into a discussion about president obama. He did not make it rain and that was the problem. But that sort of craziness you realize its sitting right beside us and we begin to lose our abilities to reason for jared i like what you said which when we feel ourselves off either through twitter accounts or social media where we are only with likeminded people whatever that means we lose the sense of the person sitting next to us who is a good and decent person even if they dont share our beliefs. I think well, i think both things are true which i didnt journalism has been really important in say and covering Sexual Assault recently making people aware of things they mightve been aware of that now have these consequences, so i hate to say we are in this tragic moment of journalism, but at the same time theres a kind of perhaps it goes even further, what is objectivity coming kind of talk about this in the book because it ends up affecting how we think about things and i argue we should have accuracy as our goal as opposed to sometimes objectivity means what do you think about slavery, was okay, you know. It sort of becomes a strange thing weathers a debate about the weather as you put it or the changing of the weather, so i think we have to step back a bit and not just think about, g its journalism or the internet because we made the internet and we got the internet we deserved or at least some of us deserved, but at the same time i think the penny press when you look back at some of the same problems. I think there was a more interesting 1970 kind of selfawareness. You knew you were being a little bit entertained. There was an awareness looking at barnum merck mermaid where he said it was a mermaid and you go in and it was monkey so to a fishtail and you are like okay and part of what you reacted to his houck could i be so foolish not just i was fooled, but i dont think that second part happens as much. Instead of barnums promise that we are all experts that anyone could be a next dirt, that was part of i think that appeal and now there are no experts. Knowing to be an expert in anything. To be a doctor or scientist is to be a fool now and i think that is the thing we have to think about less the media or medium that it comes to us at. I was on a plane a couple weeks ago and the pilots got on and said there was a dent in the tale that would not allow him to fly and people on the plane started screaming at him to try and fly the plane. [laughter] that is a large part of whats happening here. Did you fly . No. I got off. [laughter] so, we have this thing now and i think weve actually been in denial of the difference between objectivity and subjectivity and in this country i think we now have two with the internet and our phones where we can now create our own reality and i think that impulse has always been there, but i also think our media has done us a disservice because for the longest time the media has pretended as if objectivity was their goal. We do not live in times where objective journalism exists. To tell the truth now is a partisan thing. We are now dealing with an ex essential crisis where we call it anything other than what it is we are lying in the name of objectivity. I think for the longest time trump was treated like an actual politician when in fact he should have been treated as a disease. I will actually say going back to the book when i started going to these trump rallies i was watching on tv and all they would do is put a camera up and show him speak and that was it. For like an hour and a half or two hours however long he wanted to go. No one was talking about what was going on in these rallies in the moment i stepped into them was racial slurs and all of this was billing up underneath the service, but no one wanted to talk about it because the news wanted to pretend to be objective and at the end of the day we are living in a timer subjectivity is everything in a timely pretend its not i think we are doing a disservice to reality. We are here with caret get kevin young and Jared Yates Sexton and if you have questions i would like you to begin to think about those. We have microphones. To ask one last question to wrap up and then we will go to that. Also, both offer authors will sign at the author signing tent to tent down immediately afterwards and i hope you will buy their books and meet them in person and have them sign. I will throw this had to either kevin or jarrod and then we will turn it over to the audience. Often times what we see a National Election is the reaction to the election before its even when you have an incumbent in the office to some degree which is what we presumably will have an 2020. Do you have a sense that the tone, dialog conversation will change as a result of what we saw in 2016 or are we on course for more of the same . No. [laughter] i think 2018 and 2020 are just going to be bar brawls. I think its going to be really repulsive and my hope is by the time we are done with 20 that the electorate will be tired of this nonsense. Thats my hope. Kevin . People asked me or i ask myself is there something hopeful. There is a line that starts my book thats a quote that was a merit what American People want is a tragedy with a happy ending so i was tracing the hoax as a tragedy, but looking for this happy ending and thinking about is the hoax getting more frequent and i came to think yes and its getting worse and i absolutely think so. Whats funny is it treat seems more true now than when i was writing it three years ago, so maybe Something Else could be more true in a few years, but i also think there is a breaking point or tipping points where we start to think again as critical receivers of whether it is news or even just autobiographical stories and i would love it if we fell back in love with arts as fiction, fiction as a place where you can explore some ideas , but they arent pretending to be real and thats the other damage is that it hurts people, the hoax. It hurts our notion of truth and our notion of art and what art can do. I will also add that i think one of the biggest dangers in this country is thinking this will spontaneously get better because of a narrative that this idea that america will heal itself, this fake news subjective reality authoritarianism creepiness is not going to get fixed until we take education seriously in this country. Any notion that it will automatically correct itself is exactly what people like donald trump hope the American People believe because we have to be active and take this thing seriously or it will be here forever. We have some people in line for questions and the only thing i ask is try to speak clearly and try to keep the questions as direct as possible. I was wondering if you think maybe its time for journalism to change because i think maybe journalism is falling short now. When you have the press secretary of the executive branch come out and layer lie upon my upon my to cover and run interference for her boss layers lie upon my upon my daily and no one you never hear anyone say that they like, i mean, you never hear anyone take them on, you know . I think there is a gap in the fact check cycle. You get a fake story and people run and try to, you know, decipher it and analyze it and reject it, but it takes hours and that is the gap people work in. It becomes very hard and that realization, i think, is the way fake news becomes a polite name for propaganda. In my book i say i liked it better when it was called propaganda. I dont know, jared would probably i think there are two ways the news can combat this. Number one we need to stop tiptoeing around the fact we are in a crisis. Stop having stories and segments on the news where we talk about it and we want the audience to fill in the blank like its not just that we have a president that people dont like. We have a president undermining [inaudible] number two, went to know who people are getting their money from. I think on the news every time someone comes on we should know who their donors are and because that is the context that we are not getting. People even though they are inclined to believe it like my family if they say who you get money from they can smell it. I think those are the things we need to do. Thank you for your question. Question for kevin. You talked about the role of the penny papers helping disseminate hoaxes in the day. What was the Mainstream Media of its time doing and what was their take on these hoaxes then . How does that compare to how Mainstream Media is covering these sorts of things today . Two things, won the penny press quickly became mainstream and quickly became quite popular the circulation rose dramatically from zero to 40000 copies and lots of readers, but i also think that the Mainstream Media did a little bit of what it does today which was responded to the story and so they would often recount the hoax, is it a hoax. They were as interesting interested ed reproducing a reprinted because they wanted readers also set up saying this is why its bunk. Thats why its interesting in the way the hoax becomes contagious and as much as people reprinted it they were also trying to gain readers and also kind of say i dont know and not debunk it as quickly as we might wish. Damn, i was hoping it was better in the good old days. Yes maam, please . Has anyone suggested that the repeated use of the words fake news, fake news, fake news were done deliberately in the event the russian connection was discovered because then that would be discounted . Im a lot of people ask me is donald trump stupid or brilliance and i think a lot of this was done institutionally like i want to say it was right after the election that he had his First Press Conference where he took over control of that term fake news. I think no one understands the power of that term more than donald trump and what hes done with his followers is he needs to give them a counter story, thats it and they will take it and run with it. All they have to do to every scandal and problem is give another story and they go with it and fake news, him coopting that phrase was one of his most brilliant moves. I think the news is worse, which is that in a way and a book retraces the idea of how he emerged specifically which we know now was a hoax or maybe we all knew always, but that was admittedly a hoax. It still has its traction and i think thats the harder thing happening now is someone asked me as internet making these things worse and i dont know if it makes it worse. These things the spread quite well before but i think its harder to get rid of them. The internet becomes a semipermanent place where you can find what you want to find and then i think is the harder part. There is still risk among us, but we cant discount the fact of connection of race and hoaxes what propelled the National Stage for trump and others all along. That is a good point, not to jump in, but that notion earlier that he said americans ultimately what tragedy with a happy ending. I think this cuts across are lines or at least i hope so a lot of us think that to perpetrate that sort of hoax and save president obama was not born in the us that there would open ultimately a price paid for having done that once its proven it is in fact false and i think one of the things that was really troubling about the cycle is it seemed there were few prices to be paid for Something Like that, but that feels more new to me then what we had previously. Used to be in the past you got caught in a lie and you admitted it was a lie and now donald trump overloaded the system. He wont admit a lie and everyones like i dont know what to do now and is that shamelessness. For the longest time political spin existed until you were caught in the news that im sorry it took a punishment. Jared, i was wondering when you are on the campaign trail were you able to form an opinion about why these people are such hardcore followers and unshakable despite the fact it seems his policy dont help their lives get better . Its not about donald trump. Its not about who he is. Is not about policies or principles, which there are neither. Hes an avatar, like being a sports fan saying im a trump person says something about you personally. If you say im a trump person it means entire worldview in opposition of liberals and political correctness. I dont think it matters what he does on a policy level doesnt matter what he says because they are so tied into it like a sports franchise. If you like out of the Baltimore Ravens and ray rice gets arrested for doing awful things that doesnt change how you feel about the Baltimore Ravens. He is their mascot, their avatar and as long as he is that i dont think they will abandon him, unfortunately. I think our last question, unfortunately. I was wondering how has it as a consumer of news best ensure we dont fall victim to some of this news that isnt correct and secondarily, how do you or can you argue with someone who is claiming fake news . Is there a way to refute that after you found the facts . You can start. I think the antidote to fake news is more time spent with the news. One reason we had the proliferation is we live in times where we won every thing given to us and now every time i read an article and i went to consider it i have like two to three extra minutes looking around to make sure other places have this. About is part of it. Talking with someone else, forming a personal connection. If they see you as a human and they recognize your humanity they will talk to you and you will find they will make concession, but as soon as you start with the news and disagreement it doesnt work. Show them you are person and go from there. Dont you think we start with social media some kind now . I mean, you get your news from twitter or wherever so going beyond that, going beyond the initial story is helpful, thinking critically and to what you said earlier, i mean, we all need six lessons. I love the classes when i was a kid and white arent they vary more, like jim went, art went and now civics so we need the outlet for understanding how the government even works, but my book is mainly about hoaxes and the fake of that and how we can kind of get past that. Thank you very much. Out like to to thank you all for being here and i would like to thank kevin young and Jared Yates Sexton. I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival and please remember to go by the author book signing tent and they will be there thank you again. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. All right. Good evening. It should hardly come as a surprise to anyone in this room that colleges and universities have come flashpoint for the most heated cultural or conflicts of the day. Universities are now