Transcripts For CSPAN3 British Committee Hearing On Fake News 20180208

And return live with more coverage of the george washington, d. C. Field trip of house of commons on this socalled fake news. Again, live coverage here on cspan3. And for this to be joined by people who are leading the investigation and research into the issues that we were discussing in the first session. And not only question you directly, but through as the session goes on to welcome any immediate ob sservations on the Tech Companies, but i wanted to r start with david carroll. In the session with facebook, there was a reference made to an investigation that the u. K. Information commissions office is conducting and this is your case. So i thought that perhaps you could tell us something about it. My understanding is that you have made an application to Cambridge Analytica for the data they hold about you that was linked to the election period in america in 2016, and that because at some point that data must have been within the u. K. Jurisdiction, the u. K. Information Commission Office is looking into that. This is a very interesting information, and so i am sure twhae will be following up with the commission when we get back, but i would like the know if you have any insights on the case and what you are trying to achieve. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee and share information about the transatlantic investigation. So back in february of 2017, i was advised that i could make a subject access request under the u. K. Data act under Cambridge Analytica because of the reports they had been hired by the various campaigns in the 2016 campaign season, and that right affo affords you, if you have data that is being processed that it can be provided to you, and then i received the data from the Parent Company and the sco group at the end of march. I was, and it was accompanied by a letter indicating that they were compliant to, and trying to be compliant to the u. K. Data protection act, and some description of how the data was collected but nothing specific, and some kind of description of the kind of third Party Entities that the data would be shared with and nothing specific, and then an excel spread sheet that would contain Voter Registration information that is accurate, a tab of election returns relative to voting district and then a panel called modeled which was an id leological model that the tried to predict, and analyze my political beliefs. It comprised Ten Political topics that were ranked in order, and it also tried to compute my part sanship along with the registered partnership, and tried to compute my propensity to participate and so i decided to post this on tw twitter on the day they received it while redacting my personal information and then i soon was able to get a solicitor to represent me in the u. K. To challenge the come plips to the u. K. Data act, because we believe that that the disclosure is not complete, and may not be compliant, and also at the same ti time, i was advised to file with the Information Commissioners Office which i did on july 4th. 42717 which is poetic, and looking into the investigation of the post analytics with reference to their companies in the 2016 season, so there is at least one u. S. Citizen who has filed with the i. C. O. And we have received updates recently that the explanation is far r more complex than they had anticipated and they had hoped to provide a report last fall, and as they dug deeper into it, it was more and more complex, and so they are still working on it and we have received some word that the investigation is coming along and useful to provide this information also to the Senate Select commission on intelligence and others here in the u. S. Trying to figure out the companys role in 2016 elections, but the key idea is that the u. S. Voter data appears to have been processed in the United Kingdom and how this is unprecedented. What do you think that has happened, simply because of the construct of the Company Cambridge analytics and the group and the data has been processed outside of america, and the location of where the data is processed in respect to america . Interestingly, it does not seem like u. S. Law was potentially violated here and it ra really exposes how there are not any sufficient protections for the u. S. Voter data, and it expose exposes how the u. S. Has the data that has the same rights that the it iscitizens and the citizens can control to get the day the controllers to disclose the data the held on them when they are a data subject. So this experience has illuminated a lot of things, but one of the things that is most stark for us is that the u. S. Has inadequate protections in this regard. And this is data that is being held on you, and do you know where the data is acquired from, and what you will do when it is given access by you . There is no indication of where the data came from and we should know where they get the data, how they processed it, and what did they use it for and who did they share it with, and do we have a right to opt out of it and delete the data and stop process i processing hit in the future. You heard what facebook said in the earlier sessions about the right to request data deletion and whether or not you cease your facebook account and that Facebook Developers are required to give up any data they acquire from the facebook users who request that. In are reality, is that straight forward as that . Well, i have myself downloaded the facebook data and it is by no means a complete disclosure of the data that facebook has on the user, but i know that the company has pledged to try to be compliant with the general Data Protection regulations and will be lawn u h launching new controls for users to be compliant with the new privacy regime, and so i am looking forward to see if the users are going to be getting a complete profile when they download the data in the near future. If i could ask clay wardle as well before i bring in the colleagues, but you will have heard what was said in the Previous Panel and particularly what twitter said with regards to the policies on not what is fake information, but lies. Do you think that it is irresponsible for them to have that attitude. Surely if a major platform like twitter believes it has no obligation to take down dis disinformation, that is severe and inhibitor in the efforts to try to combat the spread of the issues like the disinformation that we all would regard as a social harm . Well sh, i mean, this is getg to the root of the question, and this is what you were saying, and it is interesting sitting back there with the american colleagues behind going 1st amendment which has not come up fir first in the discussionings, and the difficulty here is that the information is not true or false but somewhere on the spectrum. So we take specific examples and we want to say that is wrong and they have to be able to take that down, but the truth is that the scale of this and the ish ssue s around where many people dont believe there is a truth, how do we take that down, and if it is not 100 accurate, how do we know, and this is to question of the definition, and talking in the huge spectrum, we cant start thinking about the regulation and interventions if we dont actually are not clear about what we mean. So i think that this idea of what is misleading and this question of the hyperpart san as a british person, and much of the content of the press everyday that is published could be argued is misleading in some way, and so whilst it is hard to hear twitter r saying what they are saying, because from a particular example we want to say that seems opg wrong, we would be in dangerous territory to say this is clearly something to be taken down and this isnt, and who does that . I wish that we didnt live in that world, but we do. We go to the pub, and say different thing, and gossip and that is part of what makes humans humans. But where to go to start saying that we live in the world to the make those decision, and i dont want them to make those decisions. But there are times when there is demonstrable lies, and the debate looking at the disinformation of the fake news is quite clear that as you said, it is the analysis and the Academic Work of the different gradations and scales of what is particularly true and what is a lie. So with that information to be spread uncorrect ed or spread anonymously as well, and the courts are open for the u. K. To have a, have been facing a legal redress because of the retweets they have shared, but when people are using the protection of anonymity to spread lies about other people. It is comfortable in that way, and because twitter does not have a real name policy, it is making us feel uncomfortable, but at the same time, there are people who have good reasons for not use thaing their real name. Tw twitter talks about the selfcleaning oven, because many journalists they would argue would correct the lies quick ly and there is not a way to tag that to the original problematic piece of content, and so, what i would like to see is when journalists and factcheckers work on that and not flag it to say it is false, but instead, to have a way of alternative determination of that, the and so if we have a sense of true and false around that content, but at the moment, they are completely separated. That is what we need to look at from a technical point of view. And simon . Yes, for a moment. You said i dread to think where and when we were talking amongst ourselves where we start is where we are as far as the print broadcast media is, because there is establish ed norms of the people who have the power to determine the outcome of elections by what they choose to print or withhold, so what we are saying is, is there an argument out there, and a sustainable argument out there r are that explains why people who run the Online Platform considered themselves to be a very different place legally for those who run the offline platform, and at the ritz, we have not heard it yet. Yes, i agree with you, and my frustration is the battles of the definitions with us saying that you are a publisher, and no, this is a platform, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. A hybrid form of communication, and to be honest, i heard some of hit the morning, and it is that we would like to be part of the conversation of what new forms of regulation might look like, because i dont believe that we can take the broadcast model of broadcast and speech, and there is nothing in the space, but my frustration is that in all of the conversations, what is this new hybrid form of regulation get there and that is what we need to look at and we need to get there quite quick lly i would h argue. And from the arguments that we have heard from the tech academics is that the moment for selfregulation has passed and the social media platforms dont appear to be take it seriously as much as they take the commercial objectives. And so the only option is light touch. So do you believe that the net is now closing around them some they have caught on to that, but what i would like to have them say, and come out to say, here are the possible solutions that we are all behind, and can we start this conversation as opposed to sitting in the trenches saying that we are not publi publishers. I sit on the european fake news commission, and the conversations in europe are very different from the conversations in the u. S. , but we should not have state intervention that is kneejerk and not reactant to the realities and the challenges that come from the platforms and the scale that is hard to imagine. I want it to be hard of the conversation, and we never saw it coming in 2018 to be where we are today, and so they are not the only ones. And so that is all good stuff we agree, but did not see much of it in the details. And the indication of the thought process going on and surely this morning. And so i did not see them coming up with the potential solutions. And yes, on the comment on this . My question is more relating to the line that i was pursuing this morning on the electoral issues and regulation, and i was very interested in what facebook was saying about the different rules that they rare beginning o introduce, and i think that they kind of conceded that past elections had shown that there was a capacity for the law to be broken. And failing to disclose information. What was your reaction to those proposals so that they made, and how does it sit with for example electoral law. And so coming up, by definition, if we talk specifically about the elections, how do we define that . Are we talking about what candidates or campaigns push out . If we are looking at the interference of the russian elections in 2016, it was posts that had nothing to do with obvious plolitical issues, but cultural and social issues so if the we have a honest policy ads that all of the campaigns have to be transparent, but not look over here or the stuff that is causing the problems, so my theory is that we have created the boundaries that do nothing, because the problem is outside of the boundaries. And we are are talking about elections and political content. Talk talking about pinterest or antivaccination information it is not just politic, so that is something that we tro be careful about, but i was a little bit surprise surprised that they did admit in terms of the u. K. Can electoral law, they werek not looking at things that was shocking that they were looking for, and honest that people can lie about where their location s but the fact that they did not think this through earlier, and say, this is an ib shoe if people are buying advertising and we cant independently verify the location, that was surprising to me. And that is twitter in particular, because they have they dont have an address. And certainly in terms of the volume and the reach of twitter that really can have an impact. In the u. K. , we have as well as National Rules about no funders outside of the u. K. , and so to a amount of the local spenders is important, and that makes it more important. But on the basic level i could post now to facebook and say im in washington, d. C. , and i could override it and say, no, im in antarctica, and so the fact that i could make it up, and so there are other issues on the platform that we need to look, and the fact that i can override my location is problematic. What about the limitation of the ak stoesz day that the platforms have, and they seem to think that they were looking at a it, and they were putting the information out there, and it is quite sufficient, and my question to them is how was this policed and how are they complying with their own rules . Yes. No, we are absolutely and i would hope that they recognize that they need independent auditing of not just what is on the platform now, but on the steps that they are taking, and the factcheck tag that google has, there should be independent auditing of the data around it. There are ways to make the data anonymous, and they should have ways that we can sample data and sample the content in the same ways that the public broadcasters in Europe Commission the issuance of the output, and to me, that is a lowhanging fruit. For them, it is in their interest to have people to look, and in the moment the conversations that we are having is because of excellent journalists like those at buzzfeed or others, and it is for journalists going to platform to searching, and they have limited access to the data. Imagine what we could find if we have true access and that is why they dont want to give it up, but to me, we are past the point of believing that they will give us the information ourself, and we have to have access to that data i would argue. Thank you. Ms. Stevens. Claire wardle, i would like to go back to the points that i was raising this morning about the inherent algorithm biases, and looking at that against transparency and trust and the users understanding of what is happening when they are on the platforms. What do you believe is the solution or the balance between the two . Is there an obvious or simple solution . No, the question got to the heart of so many things that we are trying to discuss today. Most users dont understand this space so talking about the news and the literacy curricula, it has to include teaching of how to evaluate the algorithm and what you see on amazon or facebook develops an alg orithm and how is that developed and how the biases are shaped. For me, part of it is the teaching that we give to people. And also in terms of, in terms of the platforms themselves, there is excellent work on the platform itself, and the child center of columbia had in 2014 algorithmic transparency and what a formula would look like and what questions to ask the platform, and what are the metrics around that particular algorithm and how can we have more insight into the algorithm and how can we develop the framewo frameworks for that irrespective of the algorithm, but not only transparent, but transparent across these particulars aspect and elements, and i think that, thats the key. We keep talking about the a algorithms as the black box, and we need to ask how do we get into the black boxes in a consistent way. Isnt that against the whole ethos of the company, because the entire Business Model is based on secrecy. Yes, they would talk about the secret source, and we understand that there is a part of that, but when the secret source impacts the information that people are receiving there are ways to come up with a framework which is not really about them sharing the Co Competitive edge, but it is can we talk about why the algorithm is designed in the first place and what the metrics are, and what questions to ask, and yes, they are commercial companies, and we have to understand that, and the influence of how they have become the dominant source of information globally means that it has to be held to understand that information and all three Companies Says it is not one of my responsibilities. And over to the you, julian knight. What do you believe that the likes of google, facebook and twitter fear that pollymaker ic and not just in the u. S. , because of the bipartisan in this effect of the fake news and the impact of the 2016 president ial elections, but what do you mean by these as fear, and what is the most effective cause of action to get the acute problem under more control. What do they fear from you . And from our regulations . I think that it will fear that it is not what they process to be and not technology companies, but media company, nand are held tot account for the content that they say that they are merely facilitating and not producing. I think that the most poignant observation is that they have this strange powerful hybrid identity as the Media Companies that are also, and dont create any of the content and yet should be and must be in their own inadequate levels accept some responsibility for promulgating, and so what they fear the most is that they fear regulation, and they fear requirement to turn the data off, and they fear that there is a government regulator overseeing the businesses, and they will not be able to be the independent mega corporations with the mega revenue that they now jgenerate. Hmm. And what do you any is the most effective means by which you can get this under control . Well, conversations like this are very effective and they are feeling the heat in a powerful way, and they are also feeling the heat in a powerful way in the Journalistic Community and the Publishing Community and it is interesting to hear them talking about how they are working with the publishers to generate revenue, and well, talk to the publishers. What is very powerful and very prevalent now is to make this conversation as stark as it is, to put on the line what is on the line a informed or deformed Public Discourse and public process and whether these companies are contributing to or distracting from the Democratic Health that we value. And i think that first we cannot paint this in stark enough terms, and we have to bring them to the table, and invite them the table in ways that will lead the conversation and not just be dragged through it. Do you believe they have skin in the game in this respect . Some. Some. They have all gone to extraordinary lengths to hire more people to take a harder look at the social responsibility and the journalistic responsible way, but Many Companies and i have heard it from my friends and colleagues and many people that i know from the Journalism Community that what they will say is that this is a different culture and culture of engineers and technocrats and the idea of sort of the larger editorial social concerns is a sort of Foreign Language in many cases, and that is more than a minor point. Is there any panelists who want to the answer this in any are respect, but will there is a dichotomy that you mentioned the First Amendment, and so these are the American Companies that are acting op in a global scale and have their impactt on the Global Impact and from the british and the european perspective what we see is Large Companies who produce large profits, and large numbers of people in the United States impacting the very fabric of our society. And so that is deeply negative way and particularly in a way to have russia on the board of europe in that regard. Do you think that therefore effectively that dichotomy, is it therefore the situation that effectively if there is to be any form of regulation or any form of stepping up, and requirement to have things that are consumer of data such as in europe of facebook, google and tw twitter will have to effectively up the game globally because they still want to trade in those countries, and so this is almost for something that takes it away from the american evading in a way because they would have to do something. What is your thoughts . That is one of the Biggest Challenges is that the degree to which anything that happens in the Digital Space is global to this point, and where in the world would have had any different ways of view iing or t applying law to it, and at a legal session that was up at the abram center the up at yale and all of the folks at the legal per sp perspective, and so that is the greatest challenge of how we will figure out how many global approach to this, and that can cut across the boundaries burk it has to exist, and the content and the audience, and that is constantly going cross platform, and cross country, and cross the seas. It is the case here in the u. S. That one of the greatest tensions is between a very, very longstanding solid support for freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and if you compare it to 38 Different Countries that we survey, the u. S. In many areas of the freedom of egspression sits outside of that global media would be, and now americans are feeling that tension up against what is misinformation, and we have twothirds of the adults who agree that those blurred political lines are making up news around current events, and that is where the tension exists now. Whether it is regulation or any one of these solutions, we now have 9 in 10 u. S. Adults on the newsline are, and so anyway, it is more or less connected to the news on a basis of what is going on in current events, and more or less digitally savvy, and parse through the information they see, and who is more or less politically driven and m e motivated. Anything else . I just want to make a comment that briefly on this you said something that i dont want to talk about and it was a quite long question. You talked about the damage that this causes in societies. I do think that we need to be very careful here, because obviously, what is misinf misinformation what is Bad Information subversive information in one place is Vital Information in another. These remarkable platforms provide Vital Information, and not just in the sense of our politics, but in health and medicine and all kinds of things. And so i think that we just need to factor that in and define the terms which is so vitally important. Do you think therefore that is a really good point, but do you think that therefore we need to talk about less of the user experience, and that is the platform and talk more about consu Consumer Rights and approach it from that direction, and ownership from you as a individual, and a freedom right. And something with freedom in that respect s. That the way in which the effect that we can square this so to speak . Well, i think that any sper speckty is perspective is going to bring questions as claire talked about with the definitions, but if we put completely madeup news in perspective, one study that we did recently is a case study of stories linked to on twitter about immigration. 42 came from what we would be calling around this table you know identified News Organizations, and most of which were legacy and not a digital native and very few that identified with any outlet on the fake news list. And the same for if we looked at the the coverage of established News Organizations of the Trump Presidency of the first 100 days, and we saw very different assessments of the actions of the presidency based on the audience makeup of that particular outlet. And so there is a lot of different kinds can of mis ki mis misinformation and my right to one content versus another content can be complicated as well. And the regards to the consu Consumer Rights aspect is significant and we saw it play out with the russia investigation here in the u. S. And facebook and twitters response to the socalled information operation. Actually it came from in some ways citizens applying pressure no the companies pressure to the companies to disclose if they were pressured by propaganda can and so it was pressure in the committee hearings, will you tell the american citizens if they engaged with foreign propaganda that was impersonating their own citizen, and then therefore facebook and twitter have made some steps to tell people if they have been exposed to this. It debins to move us towards the direction of are we debating censorship or privacy rights or disclosure right, and who is to know about thing, and the ib shoe of w the issue of advertising and who is paying for the advertising and are we pushing the platforms to adopt the kind of the know your customer principles that are required in the finance industry to prevent things like money laundering, and do we have similar high stakes disclosure issues on the business and the consumer side just calls for further demands for transparency. And so basically to another question, what do the advertisers think of this debate right now, and what do the advertisers think of what they could bring to these companies in order to ensure that when they are paying the money over, they are going to get what they are actually paid for. And the advertisers have a significant economic incentive to be sold accurately in the metrics of the audiences they were buying, and so there is a are tremendous business pressure on the audiences to have an accurate audience measurement which is another force to weed out the bad actors in the system who are defrauding the advertising ecology by impersonating fake clicks or by amplifying the fake, to cheat the industry out of its own revenue. So there is a significant incentive there, but the question is why is that sufficient to eradicate this huge amount of fake accounts already, and the fact that Facebook Says it removes about a million accounts a day, and twitter is constantly rumoring the accounts, and the antifraud incentives are not even significant to eliminate this problem, and obviously, we need to do more. But if it is an ability to set up a facebook or twitter account. I wanted to use that account, and say, disseminate it out now to retweet, but as i said in the first hearing the premier league, soccer goal, breaking the copyright goals thax would be coming by in minutes and have any account deleted, et cetera, and i could write a horrendous lie about a person out there in the Public Domain and get another account going to reretweet it and try to get it going as much as possible, but it could stay out there ad infinitum and how is that fair some sir, the copyright issue is huge, and it was a great question to ask, and they did give a useful answer in that they have the technology the share, and we should createt a database of known contents, and so when you need those digital imprints, there is a arns of why they have moved so quickly, because as an individual, we are not going to sue as quickly as the premier league is going to sue. So going back to the advertising of the financial aspect of this question is one of the main motivations of making this kind of content, and if you talk to browns if they were here, and this is one of the challenges here of having the fair quality brand advertise against with one of the terrible sites, and again, we are are now in january, february 2018, and the factt that we have not seen significant shifts here that the brands are not going to trust what is poor quality, but it is astonishing and that the financial incentive would have put more pressure to stop it, and i have not seen it, so where we have tried to understand what is going to move the needle, and we will. And why hasnt finance done it . Are they not losing money . It is a hugely complex problem, and the stuff that is uploaded everyday, and the whack a mole element of the researcher who showed me a list of the urls that are created this week all over facebook, and the fact that we cant stop this stuff, and to get it started is scale that is iowa the tering and it is frustrating to not have a scale of this challenge and have the confrontational ability of scale. And so it is worth remembering to a certain extent that this is all new stuff. These were guys that were 25 years ago sitting in sheds to come up with this incredible platform that we now accept as eve everyday, and that there was a big sort of the mel gibson cry of freedom, and when they arrived, and suddenly, we have things like the arab spring happening, and so it gave every individual a voice and this kind can of thing, and i dont know about you, but i sat here and watched you blink inning the sunlight,ed and they were not expecting to be where they were to today, and this not where they came from. And so my impression is that, the very thought of oeditorial control, and the five basic tenets of journalism, truth, accuracy, independence, fairness, impartially are, humanity and accountable, and those things were not in the mind when they created because they are not media journalists, so we are to impose a journalistic regime upon them. And first of all, id like to get your impressions of what do you concur with me on, that and look forward today. And secondly, how do we regulate that . Where would you come from to start with, because they are not expecting it as far as i saw. Well, it is certainly the case that none of the social media platforms are with news in mind, and none of it started with news in mind, and even t t twitter was about conversing these thing, and so the news found its way to the platforms as people spent r more and more time there and the companies wanted to keep them there because over to the course of the day what people wanted was the news and what is going on, and so it is not the way that things were initially structured around being a news provider puper se. Well, it is interesting, because i was at cnn and virtually at cnn when aol was with time warner and imagining if people could get the weather when they wanted. Then we started to see some of the instant messaging, and the speed of this. And as it was with cnn and as it was krcreated with aol and the first platform, people had stars in their eyes, and they had no idea of the Critical Mass and the power of the sheer volume of correspondence and the impact that it has. And married to that was nowhere many this process was a journalistic mindset or set of principles imposed on the creation of that ecosystem. So in the right way, in journalism done the right way, it has gatekeepers and those gatekeepers open and shut the gate before information goes out and not after the information is out. Done right. Yeah. And so, there is a system of accountability, and there is a finite number of people and org chart and all of that which puts o order to it. There is norder to this social media process and i have always pushed back against those who have talked about the crowd sourcing and the citizen journalism. Citizen repoerters maybe, point ing a camera at something and saying this is what is happened and the true journalistic training and mindset is not something that just grows organically and that is part of the disconnect. We dont have a system of the checks and balances and gatekeepers and that is the Culture Shock i was talking about a moment ago. Absolutely. The question that springs to mind is what is the way forward and it occurred to me in discussions this week that the companies should be lin areking with linking with the academic world more and give them more guidelines and how would you fwid them . I completely agree with what you are saying, because the people who started the companies believed that technology would make the world a better place and often if they had spent more time at the pub with the journalists they would have realized that the world is a dark and messy place and being a journalist makes you requires you to make decisions everyday, and so we have not talked about threat modeling, and what is the wor worst Case Scenario here, and they are not sharing the data enough to think through what this is looking like and there is an element of yes, bringing in the academic, but we did not talk about today how so much of the same content travels across the same platforms, and they are sitting in the silos and we have to say that they should be sharing data with one another about how the same content is traveling across. So b we need them to get darker, and we need them to think about what is the worst that can happen and to actually do some what might happen and respond in real time and not two years later a number of inquiry, but we need to be ahead of the curve and the closed messaging app apps or the augmented reality and if we augment today what happened two years ago, we are in trouble and we need to be looking to the future. Finally, from what you saw today, do you think that they are going to become entrenched or up for the change from are the evidence that you saw earlier today . Very quickly, i think that they are up to change, but they dont know how do this because they are terrified and they have lawyers terrified about opening up up, and the idea that they are working together around terrorism and extremist content, and there are frameworks that they can Work Together on, but they are not sure how the take the step from where they are to where they need to be which is a huge step, a my fear is regulation gets in front of it, and i wish we could do it the other way around. And the journey of the shared. We have arrived here. Thank you. Thank you. Paul farrelly. I was wondering what steps we could take to have the social immedia Media Companies to open up as to how they are able to target people. I welcome the thoughts from the panel, and getting along with the panel of opening up the boxes as it were. I am not sure that i have exact exactly the same right answer for that based on the research. You know, one step that News Organizations have taken is definitely around transparency, and with the understanding that being more transparent with their readers, and with their audiences and with the users, their likelihood of gaining trust and respect and having them come back in creative relationships is going to be greater. And when the News Organization, and the other conferences that are happening a lot is around trust. The loss of trust that News Organizations feel, et cetera, and so in many of the k conversations, a lot of steps, those organizations are taking is around transparency and sharing what they know and dont know, and that does not speak to the transparency that we are speaking here, and it does go towards creating a relationship and a sense of trust with each other. Yes, in my experience pursuing my own voter data has shown me firsthand the importance of the british and the european idea of, the idea of a legal subject and legal controller which forms the data transparency and we heard that facebook is quick to acknowledge that it has to abide by the tata protech the shun act and as i mentioned is that the eus ggpr, and so i think that these models show how Consumer Rights can be expressed through Data Protection rules, and also shows how these rules apply transactionally. And so that means that i was able to take advantage of the british law in case, because my data was processed there and the requirements of the gpr forced the companies to abide by that. But even within that, the significance of being able to understand what your data that how does it shape your experience and how can it be an understandable piece of data with the algorithmic problem and related to the data transparency problem and how is my news feed being shaped by my behavior and how is my behavior on other web sites affecting the content that i am seeing. I dont think that consumers gave a strong understanding to the websites that you were using and what is attached to it. I saw that for example the Internet Research agency probably use this technique to retarget americans across platforms. And so we just dont have a general consumers dont have a clear understanding of how the d data is used in various ways, and sometimes against him. It is worth pointing out that i think that in all of it, it does place pressure on the consumers that we dont have a population that is as proactive as the data there. And just in terms of the privacy settings, people are allowed to set and being able to turn on and off certain thing, and what portion of the population is going to be taking advantage of doing those things, or taking the time to understand the data about themselves, and how it would be used. I am fond of saying that we are facing the information situation not unlike the food situation that we are facing. There is amazing amounts of food available to you and labeled, and people eat what they want to eat and we have a obesity problem in the world that is getting really bad, because they eat junk food, and we have brain food and junk food. If we consume this kind of thing too much, we have very, very serious consequences. So i this they consumers have si think that the consumers need to be engaged and this has the to to be builtin, and the social Companies Need to acknowledge that and develop a series of guidelines and many News Organizations have that, and they have the ethics codes and various practices that spell out specifically from a consumer perspective what the end result should be and lay out levels of accountabili accountability along the way, and they have played out, because they have lived it what happens when really bad things happen. That has not yet happened in social media, and we are on the verge with the immediamedia technologies, and i am sure that you seen them where i can take one of your sound bites and change your words and put out a piece of video and make it look like you are saying something that you never said. And now we are creating a whole new reality which is beyond the social Media Companies. So this is starting and not ending. So the first thing that we need to do is to create the partnership partnerships, and impose partnerships with some of the companies to be this thinking about these things in a detailed way and coupled with the research that pew and others are doing so that it can be brought into the corporate cultures. Claire . One of the best things to do is to say to somebody buy an ad on facebook and then they have to go through the process and see how you can target those ads. You will just see peoples eyes pop. As a kind of the Literacy Campaign to see how the data is used, we need the come up with those sorts of ways to get people to understand what is happening to them. I can understand that the companys default mindset would be that we are not charging this, and we give it atway for free, and if you dont like it, butt out. But that is not enough . Well, that is true, and people are not paying, because they are giving up data, and they dont understand that because you are not paying, but you are giving up the data and if people understood that properly, they could make a choice of whether they want to be there and what are the lo longterm implications of the companies having the personal data and the first year it is not damaging, but the older and older, the amount of data is put together in ways that are po penitentially damaging. That are potentially damaging. I wanted to touch on perhaps with this media background how much of the misinformation spread by social media sites is having a knockon effect on the convention sal broadcast and media in terms of the fact that it is teaching people not the trust anybody. So where do you go for the truth and what i would call the real bonafide journalists do to combat this . This was raised actually by Mark Thompson at the New York Times in particular. This is perhaps the most concerning thing of all is that we have created now a culture of doubt around any information wherever it comes from in the public. It is fed by politicians who point the finger and scream fake news. Again, we have to define the term s and be disciplined about that. And we have to refer to journalism as an enemy of the people. And not only is that going to be helpful, but it is damaging, and it has created both an echo chamber and copycat effect i am afraid of some areas of the traditional immediamedia. So we need to be very, very careful in talking about the traditional media. The word media is a plural word and very many and distinct difference differences, and so in the United States, i would make a distinction of talk tv and talk ra radio and certain other media where talk media and talk radio and the volume is loud, and so it is to drive kind of an opinion focused discussion that has the effect of using vast numb numbers of users and listeners as to distinction between the opinion and the information and what is correct and what is not. So we have seen a plummet, and you can talk about it, we can plummet and a further bifurcation along the ideological lines and the trust in media, and just in the last year. And so the real concern that you are having and how you should reach and inform the public and how they need to participate in a democratic process where they are called upon to decide thing elect you and make those decisions based on information and fact and not just propaganda. On the converse, i would also say because this has happened to me, a twitter storm was caused that was misrepresented and put out there, and my local press picked that up because it got so many hits and they didnt investigate what actually happened and they didnt check out the actual facts of the story, but they thought it was a story because of the hits that it had on social media and you could say where does this end . That is fake news theyre picking up and theyre reiterating it. It is very hard especially in the world of realtime news radio, television or some of these online things to ignore something that is happening and playing out in realtime in front of you even if its wrong, right . And then you have, its generating this much traffic and we have to correct the record and so you have a very distorted kind of view. So we need to perfect what i like to perfect the language of live to a very different place where we are telling people very explicitly what that tweet was, what the controversy is around it and that is an increasingly difficult thing to do in the rush to be first and fast and loud. Can i also ask, something that concerns me slightly is we have to be careful as you did refer to earlier, the legislature or the regulation system not to cause another problem because would it not be right that there will be other players waiting to come into the space, wanting to set up and wanting to play on fake news . That must be a danger as well across the world. Yeah, i mean, i think i was coming back to something julia knight said. Whatever we do in europe we can do it for the best of intentions. What it means is it will be a blueprint for all sorts of other parts of the world where there are not protections around free speech and free media. So we have to be very careful about our definition of what were trying to protect and it can act in a very different way in another context and we have to be careful to your point, too, about the media and one thing that were not talking about or not thinking through enough is if you are a disinformation agent what you want is amplification by the Mainstream Media and theyre targeting journalists and the Mainstream Media and they see debunks as a form of engagement and they are planting fake information that they will resuscitate now thats been around since 2014 and the point of what many disinformation agents are trying to do simply to cause confusions. Its not about one particular rumor and say we cant trust anybody anymore and my fear is were getting there pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. And we dont know how we come back from that, and we fact check a particular claim or rumor and its not about that. Its the much wider ecosystem. Thank you. Just very quick couple of questions here, when you got your request return, was the data accurate or the information accurate . So the Voter Registration was accurate. The information about the election returns in my district were mostly complete, but not fully complete and then the political model was subjective so do i think its accurate . There are aspects that are accurate and disturbingly accurate and there are aspects that are impossible to understand. So part of the legal challenge is the ico complaint is its important to be able to understand how this political model was generated so that i can understand, then, how it might have been used to target me for messages. When all four of you might choose to answer this, when this data is being collected because of our online activity. So this isnt just the Voter Registration data, for example. Is it an assumption that it is a fair refleshgz of who we are and what we do because it has been generated by our actions online and that makes it more accurate . Company says that it uses our commercial behavior data to link it to our voter file and then make these political models and so thats why it becomes so important to understand the sourcing because if it is, the websites we visit, the products we buy, the Television Shows we watch, et cetera that is then used to determine our likelihood to participate in election, the issues that we care about most, people dont understand that their commercial behavior is affecting their political life. Okay. Thank you. Be. Lets get followthrough. So the issue for me is how did Cambridge Analytic get that information . Because they said they wouldnt share the information with anybody. So from these platforms, how is it possible to extract the information if you dont have access to Facebook Accounts or twitter accounts or whatever . It is my understanding that the company could purchase commercial data from commercial data brokers and from Ad Tech Companies and from media ratings agencies and then use algorithms to reidentify and reconnect that commercial data back to voter profiles. So thats a thing that we are trying to ascertain through the ico and through legal challenge. More relevant to that, we know that the researchers at the university of cambridge who developed some of the modeling methodology and techniques did use facebook applications to gather data from users who signed up for their application and thats how they collected Facebook Likes and used Facebook Likes to predict personality and also things like political affiliation, gender, sexuality and whether their parents got divorced and whether they smoked, drink, used drugs, et cetera. So we have some understanding of how these are used, but we are looking for more transparency to figure out how it was actually used. Thank you. That concludes this panel and thank you very much for the evidence. Its been very informative. We look forward now to welcoming the final panel. I would like to welcome the witnesses and guests to the final panel for todays evidence session. The time stage of today is to discuss some of the issues with the Tech Companies, with the academic expert, as well to discuss this with people representing different aspects of the news media industry. If i can start off by asking that members of the panel, if they could give their view on an issue that gives us cause for concern as weve gone through this inquiry and that is public News Consumption is increasingly moving out of a curated news space with the news bulletin or edited newspaper or a news website and people are consuming these more in bitesized pieces that they discover and share via social media and increasing numbers of people get their news via social media and twothirds of people in this country get news from social media sites. So what does that give you about news from your organizations and also about the consumers point of view about getting a fair and balanced picture and if they are largely con suing a variety of different articles if they are on social media sites. Perhaps kenzie wilson, if you can start us off and give us a perspective from your News Organization . Sure. On the one hand, this is simply the reality of how people consume news and information. Its 24 hours a day, and all their waking hours, certainly in small ask large bits of news and as News Organizations we simply have to recognize that that is how people have become accustom to consuming news. You know, its one of the things that i think is often hard inside a News Organization to understand is that people dont come to what we do with the same kind of intention that they did in the past. I think we probably had naive notions as to how completely they absorbed and read the material that we wrote and how many articles they read and in fact, now we understand that it may be sufficient to read a sentence or two, if youre on the move sometimes and there are other times when people will go on their phone to read a 2,000, 3,000word story. Its highly variable. The times weve declared that we have to remain a destination for our readers and so while we use these platforms as a way to expose people to the kind of journalism that we do and attract newer audienc audiences been resolute to bring readers back to the times itself. Other organizations find it difficult to do that and consequently are much more dependent on how these platforms display their news and information and they have effectively come the equivalent of the front page for most individuals. So while News Organizations, traditional News Organizations are still composing the individual stories, theyre arranging and figuring out who sees what in what order and what kind of timeframe . To the earlier conversations, i think it makes it very difficult to determine whether they are in the publishing space or merely a purr i hav purveyor of other content that people have produced and theyre applying a level of judgment to what people see and that has a societal impact quite apart from the misinformation thats flowing through those platforms. How that gets regulated, and what the right approach to that is i think is difficult in part because there isnt a clear, bright line between what constitutes news and other types of information. Traditional News Organizations in this country are not licensed and there is no libel and defamation laws and no particular regulation that applies for us and theres a spectrum of information that has gone into the mix on these platforms and becomes very difficult to sort of separate it out. I think in the quiet counsels of their offices they would just as soon be out of the News Business if they could be and not have this kind of scrutiny. You asked what scares them . I think in addition to regulation and possible antitrust action, it is also the prospect of what they have built is to some extent getting out of their control and their reputation and, you know, if you look at how they score, generally google and facebook enjoy pretty good reputations, but thats taking a hit and there are all kinds of unintended consequences and theyre having difficulty getting around. Can your office of the New York Times is a global news brand in taking the transition away from being a printed newspaper into a Digital Media business. Looking at the breadth of members that you represent with the news media alliance, do you think we will see the consolidation of the news Media Business continue a pace with fewer titles in some parts of the country where theyll have limited local news altogether . I think there are several challenges. Certainly, there will be and will continue to be a consolidation in the News Business as peoples attention and the brands to which they attach that attention are necessarily somewhat limited, but that being said that the real fear and i think we talk about fake news as a National Story and our president has talked about fake news and we talked about various issues that a national scare of fake news and the future of fake news will be almost entirely a local phenomenon. You will have people will have curiosity and interest in their communities and there will be insufficient, reliable sources locally and so what will fill that curiosity about their communities is crazy bloggers and conspiracy theorists with the local school work. When you are looking into the future, one of the primary challenges of local news in the u. S. Is as we move into digital consumption of news through a greater and greater degree all of the time do the local News Organizations have the resources to build and optimize and connect with our audiences digitally and such that, you know, as compared to someone like the New York Times or other players that have great resources in great capacity to make this transition. Will local News Organizations have that same capacity . I think there is a lot of concern about that. Now, on the local news front, you could say that these people are very close to their communities and very attached to their communities so that should be an advantage and it is an advantage, but the question for the future can be capacity. Will they be able to make the investments to make this digital jump, and them then how will they have the relationship with their distributors . In the past when they have a printed news product you created it and you literally handed it to your audience. There is an ultimate direct relationship. This is now for using a tech term, the sources in which they will put out content and theres somebody in google and facebook who stands between the readers. In particularly, the u. S. , the News Business has not been regulated and its the great First Amendment thing we have, but i often say google and facebook are our regulators and their rules about the distribution and delivery impact our businesses every day and i think it will be a continuing challenge for local News Organizations in particular to figure out how to work their way through this intermediated delivery for want of a better term, and to really have the capacity to make this technological jump. Thank you. From a broadcasting point of view, there are two things that have been of interest to us in the various meetings weve had since weve been in america this last week. First, do you feel that actually the key issue is one of trust and augmented reality and giving people the Technical Capability to create fake story, but fake videos and fake films, and there is an opportunity for the traditional broadcasters to be the more trusted gatekeepers of property checked out and sourced information because there will be a lot more of the written stories and actually faked images, as well, and also do you feel that broadcasters need to do more to reach audiences online and we have a meeting in new york with now this in the media and facebookbased news channel with 2 billion viewers a month and you know, have they just been got lucky as an early adopter and is the model difficult to replicate as a traditional broadcaster . I think everyone on the panel will agree that the dividing lines that existed when i first entered this business in 1984 as a local newspaper reporter in amarillo, texas, theyve been blurred entirely. Cbsnews. Com is as important a news source as our broadcast programs cbs this morning and the cbs evening news and enormous breaks in content all day and all night. Every journalistic outfit large or small has tried to find a way to merge video, audio and publishing together to do it credibly and to some of the earlier questions, ive been in this business since 1984, and when i worked in a Community Newspaper it was the Community Talking to itself. Its value, its sense of perspective and there was one choice in that community to find your news, that was the newspaper and then the local television stations. The choices now are all over the place. We exist in a world where consumers, and i heard frank sesno say a few moments ago reading junk food. They dont think its junk food. They think its spinach. Theyre making a conscious decision to say, no, what i was being fed maybe from cbs, nbc, cnn or the New York Times was the junk food and what i am finding alternative is my good food. We have to acknowledge that that separation from our journalistic organizations that was probably built on a foundation of having limited choices, okay, has gone away and we have to now compete over credibility and trust and thats an hour by hour and daybyday pursuit. Now theres nothing that cbs news can do or nbc or abc about someone who mashes together video in a dishonest way except broadcasts that which is legitimate, but there is a slippery slope here and maybe thats not the right term and there is something media organizations have to take account for. When there is a hurricane or a tornado or a snowstorm, we will take content off facebook and twitter that people have shot themselves and well put it on the news. Why . Because we werent there and they were. We get it for free. We may put a teeny, microscopic line in there that credits the source, but were taking content, turning it into journalism at no cost. We dont have to pay for a crew. We dont have to pay for an assignment editor and any of the loaded costs we used to pay for to create our own, whollyowned broadcast product. We are part of this dynamic, and i think it behooves everyone in our industry to understand and own up to some of that, that we in certain ways are compromised commercially, but there are certain ways in which we profit or if not profit, gain from all this content that we then transmute into journalism, and i have a slogan i use all of the time on two of these points. One is content is content. Journalism is journalism. They are not interchangeable concepts. The other is, as far as news consumers, whenever i give speeches on this and people ask me what to believe and what not to believe, i leave them with this thought. If from the time you woke up to the time you lay down to go to sleep that night, everything you read and consumed in the news context leaves you pleased and happy and verified you are doing it wrong. I would echo that. Probably the greatest single concern i would have with all of the big plusses that have been identified with the increase in the availability of news and the sources of news and the variety of news is that it has enabled people to create their own media bubble in which they only get material which is consistent with their beliefs and that encourages fake news, frankly, because within that sphere, anything that is consistent with we dont like this guy or i heard this terrible thing or that terrible thing and it all gets thrown in there. My concern is that you dont get to read provocative things and you dont get to read things that you want to throw across the room because you disagree with them. You need to be exposed to other things other than what you and your friends think and the news and politics and i see this in the uk and the u. S. With things like brexit and its almost become like supporting a team, if you like and youre pretty much in one camp or the other and people are accused of not being a true supporter and youre not being devoted enough because they can actually see some aspect of the other persons argument, and its, like, how has it got to this . How how how did we get to the situation where you have to sign up for 25 Different Things because you broadly think either this or that . Most normal human beings dont do that, and i think its really unhealthy if we create a News Consumption environment where everything that comes in is consistent with, you know, weve got to get in or weve got to get out or whatever the particular argument might be, and i think of all of the concerns i may have thats probably one of the primary ones, that you made a point at the start of this which is also very important which is that faking stuff to look like really good stuff gets easier all of the time. The technology is much cheaper and the programming is much cheaper and it would be very easy for someone with pretty rudimentary skills to provide something that your average lay person wont know whether abc, cnn, nbc did it rather than a person in the room. If i can add one thought because its a rather gloomy topic and i want to identify something thats happened in our country with the proximity of people with their own cell phones that has revolutionized understanding of a certain issue in this country and fundamentally changed News Organizations relationship with that and thats Police Violence in this country. I was a Police Reporter for six years in three newspapers early in my career and if there was a policeinvolved shooting and i wasnt there i was dependent upon the orientation to the packs, circumstances, timing and evidence provided by the source most responsible and also most potentially liable, the local police department. The presence of citizens with their own, independent means by which to video what happened has transformed not only that conversation, but that relationship between what happened and what others who are not defensive, possibly, about what happened say happened and its fundamentally altered and i think in a very positive way, not just the communitys understanding of what happened, but journalists who are trying to figure out what happened and there are a lot of things that weve identified that are problematic with this and there are some areas in which things have interject have changed and changed for the better. If i can ask, on that point and the colleagues want to come in is there is another side to that, too, and the pressure being placed on News Organizations to get news out fast because citizen news is breaking all of the time. Right. We are seeing examples in our country where people got it wrong and thats not something you recognize. Oh, absolutely. I can give you a classic example of it. After the Boston Marathon bombing there was a tremendous amount of information provided by citizen journalists or those who were Monitoring Police scanners not only after the bombing itself, but on that very fateful friday night in which there was an effort and a successful one to find and apprehend the suspects, and things were appearing on social media based on what somebody heard on a Police Scanner and we were very cautious at cbs and other News Organizations were cautious, but it was out there, and when its out there then theres this deeply philosophical and highly pressurized conversation, what do we do with that . And are we close to verifying it . What is our standard of verification in this very heated environment, and i kept counseling my own network internally. Ive listened to Police Scanners. I did that for six years. Whatever you hear from one cop on the beat is relevant, but it is also a very thin understanding of whats going on in the totality and weve got to be careful, but these circumstances create enormous pressure and much greater pressure than i ever experienced in the early part of my career in broadcasting which i started at cnn in 2000 and part of the continuum of what is believable and what is hyperpressurized is the ability, philosophically to say im prepared as a News Organization to be second and right. I am never prepared to be first and wrong. Thank you. Thank you, chair. I am particularly interested in the interference with the elections and referenda of some of the disinformation campaigns that are both organized and not organized and it was very much what you were talking about, tony where people reinforce their own beliefs and they retweet and reinforced, youve all been in journalism a long time. What do you think has really changed in the last couple of years . Does it feel worse . Does the interference feel worse or is it that we know the interference is there and it was probably always there . What do you think . Let me just start with the reaction. One of the good things about the general consumption of the news is that you can consume a lot, right . When i was growing up we had the paper on the driveway and the halfhour news. That was the news. That was all your window into the world. Now you have access to so much and thats an absolute, good thing and also, listen, we all have crazy relatives that over the course of dinner have weird conspiracy theories and lies and men didnt go to the moon or whatever the theory was, but you knew that information was different than what landed on the driveway and it came from a different place and it had one professionals and one not professionals and one of the digital challenges is its all put into a blender and fed to you in very much similar ways and it puts a tremendous own us on the readers to differentiate, and i think there are insufficient indicators to readers about whats good stuff and whats not good stuff and we can talk about that, but i do think it provides a tremendous opportunity for people who want to manipulate the public. To use these big, digital pipes and by the way, the most powerful kind of fake news is not aliens have come down. Its something thats somewhat off that people wish were true, but that feeds their biases, right . Uhhuh. And they can feed a bunch of information that unless youre a really careful reader you dont understand that its coming from a bad place, and i think it has opened up an opportunity for people to manipulate the public much more than in the past and there are things you can do by getting back to indicating more whats Good Journalism and what isnt, but ill pause and let other folks respond. From my perspective the biggest concern is targeting and the lack of transparency. I think thats probably more problematic than the spectrum of information thats out there and the sheer volume of information. We dont have well, we have quite a good understanding on the commercial side of our business as to how powerful those tools are. We spend a lot of money on facebook. Its the most efficient way for us to acquire subscribers simply because of the enormous wealth of data they have and their ability to target and it can be used in a variety of ways and its important in these conversations to distinguish between whats showing up in peoples news feeds in search which is very much in the control as they try and tune the difference between social connection and authority versus the ability of those who pay on these platforms to target particular audiences and there, i think, as you got into the conversations about potential solutions. I think starting at the level of transparency data, individuals having control over their own data and perhaps data portability is certainly one important area to begin to start to unpack this because without without that, so long as these platforms are in complete proprietary control of that information, its actually, i think there is a risk that the regulation will have unintended consequences. I think to your point, its been a fascinating day listening to all of the key issues youve got and i dont envy you with trying to work your way through all of these different issues. If i would respectfully suggest from where i would sit i think nothing is more fundamental than the sanctity of elections and the idea that elections could be interfered with by third parties and that you do not have full and fair elections. Now having spent more than a dozen years at the bbc before i moved to cnn, i have quite a bit of experience with the uk and uk elections and from the outside when i was explaining the uk elections to my american colleagues a couple of things i point out, one is the representation of the peoples act, and that is not that formal in the u. S. And that has been able, for all of its flaws, a broadly fair template which broadcasters and other News Organizations will get through. Because of the number of constituencies. There are a lot of small majorities in the uk. Seriously, if you look at the number of con stitstituencies i uk there are a thousand or 1500 votes and those are enormously vulnerable. If people are following the election primarily via social media and people who have a desire for an outcome one way or another and decides to target that area, as you heard, its very difficult to get information and you can make sure the story hits all of your users in this constituency. You can make sure if its an immigration story and anybody who might have an interest in immigration in that area and this constituency gets hit with this wave of stories and there has to be some kind of defense to that. I think the Media Companies themselves are faced with enormous challenge, and the Media Companies call themselves tech company, i noticed, but whatever they may be, they do have big challenges here and theyve grown very, very quickly and im sympathetic to that challenge, but we know we have great geotargeting technology and part of this is a simple question of employing people and the idea that we cant tell whether this story is a legitimate news story or want, well, you can. If you hire some local journalists and a lot of newspaper journalists got laid off and if you hired them from an election you might check this story out and from the guardian or the opinion, in which case we should be taking it down, butta its almost worse making a priority in the election certainly in the u. S. The idea that russia interfered with the election is a profound issue. For all of the other stuff and all of the other chatter and stuff that goes on, you keep coming back and theyre concerned that that may have happened and thats where i would start, if you like, trying to get my arms around this. Two quick observations. One, means and motive. I think actors have long had motives to see if they could disturb or influence the american political process. The means is different and i have a lot of conversations and ive spent a lot of time at the white house with political actors and weve had this conversation because i try to remind them, weve given them the means by which to fulfill their motives by being so archly partisan against one another and we have created, i believe, in our dialogue in the last ten years in this country, a much wider opportunity for either fake news or propaganda or some things that divide us still more to have traction. Our own political discourse has created an opening that i dont believe existed before and one of the reckonings our own political system has come to is the way we talk about ourselves and the way we speak about differences of opinion, point one. Point two, i think we have to at least acknowledge the possibility that there will be behavioral adaptations to all of the things were talking about, and i use my three children as an example, 22, 21 and 17. All three in varying degrees have grown up in this telephone, digital world. They are already demonstrating signs of exhaustion, psychologically and otherwise, and i believe that there is a very real possibility that as those who grew up with this, adapt differently, they will begin to send signals to google, facebook and others about what they do believe is credible and its not credible and that possibility of them changing, quite separate from any Regulatory Regime that anyone might create, gives me some sense of optimism that we are all collectively, and especially the Younger Generation experienced this in no other reality, but i believe there is a reckoning coming about the underlying basis of shared news which is all of your thirdparty verifiers that you trust. That trust being reanalyzed and maybe being redirected in other way. Im optimistic about that. Perhaps that is unfounded optimism, but i see it in my own children and the behavior they express not only for themselves, but on behalf of their friends that they are looking at this world and Tech Companies and this whole process of how the world comes to them and the novelty has worn off, and i believe there is a great possibility of adaptation at the consumer level to all of these things we now look at and assume are always going to be the same. If we learned anything in the last ten to 15 years is that things will not always be the same. Thank you. A number of you have mentioned Fact Checking because one of the things im concerned about is that in this very fastpaced 24hour news thing, often on social media things are put out there that arent true and it was mentioned that the boston bombers, that there was information out there that was not true and people had been arrested over the last 12 to 18 months and one of the things that concerns me is with what i call traditional journalism with less people working on newspapers, particularly in local newspapers and less people working in the big Broadcasting Companies that the kind of urgency to get a story out there and that even some of the bigger concerns are not always checking and theyll take something and think thats all right. Ill get ahead of the game on this. What impact do you think thats having and do you think its something that the more traditional Media Outlets perhaps should be looking at again to go back to the basics to make sure things are correct before you put them out there . Ill go. I can see this changing now. Ive worked for cnn for 20 years, and when i first worked at cnn one of the things we always used to do in a big breaking news situation was if we were the first to break the news wed get a quick p. R. Campaign out saying cnn, its 11 38 said this story. We dont do that anymore. There are a couple of reasons why we dont do it anymore. One is primarily stories dont break on tv unless its our own investigation, and the time is irrelevant because its an original piece of journalism. In terms of natural disasters and crimes and whatever it might be that breaks first, it will break via social media. It will break via twitter or Something Like data minder which is a twitter, social mediabased tipoff service and there is no ive never even heard of that one. We have. Its the way it goes. And theyll be here next year, but the point is that so the privacy is going away, and i think youre seeing News Organizations who its also worth bearing in mind that any News Organization when you get something wrong and it does happen, it is awful. People think, oh, they got it wrong and its fake news and everything else. When a mistake is made its terrible. Everybody feels dreadful about it. There are full investigations, there are real consequences. Sometimes people lose their jobs, and its its a really bad, bad thing to happen, so people will do a lot and a great deal to avoid that, and i think as more and more sources of instant news become available, and people have established friends. For all of the frenzy that surrounded fake news and all thats gone on in the u. S. And whats worth bearing in mind that traditional News Organizations like cnn and like the New York Times have enjoyed improved fortunes and the amount of consumption of the products is on the rise, and it is significant that people put together their own portfolio of news and they might see something in social media and sometimes folks are quite savvy and ive seen that there, and it would be different again if i read it in the New York Times or Anderson Cooper if this was something i read on twitter. I do think the traditional media has a role, but that role is to be increasingly the source of trusted news. Thats inconsistent with trying to get everything out, you know, instantly or operating on an underresourced way. That way, theres no future in that. I mean, i think weve adapted in many cases. One of the conventions we use is we are very quick to tell people both what we know and what we dont know because these kind of breaking events occur in social media, you cant go dark until you confirm anything, necessarily, because people try to understand whats happening and what they believe and what shouldnt. Weve all adapted and understood and i think television was much better at it than newspapers because they operated in a live environment for years and they had to adjust to the changes in social media, but that, i think weve all learned pretty well how to act responsibly and its tougher in organizations that are thinly resourced, certainly. Yeah. Apologies. A couple of interesting trends. First of all, i think theres a view that just the absolute value of traffic. There has been this idea of more traffic, better, that that was based on the Digital Advertising models where we get more traffic and well expose advertising and more money from advertising. Google and facebook are now commanding the lion share and growing of all digital ad dollars and you are finding News Organizations, thinking about their future and very much the subscriptiondirect, economic relationship with the reader that i think is one of the enriching parts to that is really caring about longterm trusts and not wanting to get these things wrong. So i do think the impetus to get it now so we can grab the traffic is dissipating to some degree. Google and facebook are getting the ad dollar, but there is this renewed emphasis, i think, in subscription and direct relationship with readers. On the Fact Checking side, you know, journalists are the Fact Checkers. There are Fact Checking organizations that do good things, but at the end of the day the best Fact Checkers are paid, professional journalists and i still think there are insufficient indicators to when people are consuming news online as to whats coming from professional, paid journalists and whats coming from something else, and well need, and i certainly always encourage google and facebook in this regard. We need to get better about giving people indicators about whats coming from professional News Organizations and whats coming from something else. And to that point, in newsroom, five or six years ago, it was not at all uncommon to have a Large Flat Screen Television with click rates for every one story from that day when you were at the newspaper, i was at a magazine at the time, and back in that time which was not so long ago, in term of adaptation it was a while ago, stories would be updated and those updates would carry corrections and there was a kind of, for a while, i think, debasing informality between a correction and an update because this phenomenon of having clicks theoretically translated to ad dollars as the industry has become more accustom to consumer habit, its learned it needs a relationship and longer views and not just clicks in and out of stories in order to monetize that. So updates now are much more transparently disclosed if thats what they are. News organizations have become much more aggressive about distinguishing between the two, and much more transparent about that in order to reestablish that idea of a relationship so its not just clicks anymore that dominate what is or is not a successful story. What you need is a lot of credible stories that create a longterm relationship and longer term view of whatever your product is because thats actually in a very oldfashioned sense, how you monetize your journalism. And finally, i just want to, Major Garrett, the written evidence that you gave us, you last spoke, one sentence talks about credible journalism will always outlast incredible politician, but what we are dealing with here with all due respect. Incredible journalism, and not credible journalism impacting our political process. Sure. What are your thoughts on that . Well, that it has found commercial traction. Information that a segment of our society, your society finds either reaffirming or valuable has found a marketplace, has found a Business Model that will pursue it. That is a reality and i can only take not only professionally, but philosophically, the longview on that and that, that which is not only true today, but true tomorrow and a year from now will ever live in starker contrast to that which is not, and those who are responsible for that which was true, will gain perhaps incrementally, but steadily over time. If i didnt believe that i couldnt do what im doing and i certainly couldnt do it in the atmosphere im doing it in now. Thank you. Thank you. Brandon . Thank you, jim. Just a couple of questions. Over the past week weve heard quite a lot about the financial effect on the traditional mainstream mead why over the loss of circulation and advertising revenue and due to the sharp rise in social media, and please feel free to comment on that, and i would ask you for your thoughts and reflections on the longterm effect on the social and cultural wellbeing of the United States. And the influence of the Mainstream Media and the public sphere. Do you have concerns . I think we should have profound concerns and this in the Business Model for journalism has been disrupted for the past 21 years and essentially the ability for anybody to publish and the barriers in the Publishing Business have fallen and advertisers being able to go direct to audience and not needing media as an intermediary, these are a larger phenomena that goes past this current conversation and face poface facebook and google and its harder to unwind that. Were talking the u. S. About the emergence of news deserts where entire communities are largely devoid of sort of conventional coverage of institutions and courts and so forth that you could count on in the past and its not clear, as much as theyre trying that either established News Organizations or the many startups for profit and not for profit that have been funded over the years have as yet found a credible, sustainable model for that kind of local journalism and we are finding models at a global scale and on a National Scale certainly, and its clear that those that are succeeding, generally are succeeding on the strength of trust in connection to the readers and viewers and listeners, and by the quality of what they produce and there are issues of scale and local communities that leave real questions as to how the fundamental journalism is going to be funded, and how you maintain an informed society thats essential to democracy. A couple of comments. First of all, one of the central problems were wrestling with here all day and that certainly google, facebook and twitter are wrestling with and Major Garrett referred to it in his comments, news is a different kind of content even if you want to use content attached to it. Its important, and what i mean by that is, you know, a disappointing Television Show or cat video is just that. Its disappointing. Disappointing as in low quality or fake news can destroy Civil Society in a broad scale and certainly in a Community Level, okay . It is existential to our Civil Society that we have access to quality news and i dont think thats something certainly that the tech giants understood when they got into this world, and i think theyre trying to figure out and havent done that yet, but we are all wrestling with the fact that theres no such thing as a free News Business and we need quality news or else were not going to have Civil Society, and when you look at the local level the just take what i referred to before is the idea that they may move the subscription models and we are losing out on the advertising side to google and facebook and print advertising is declining and well go to subscription models and there are some fantastic examples of that including the gentleman right here and what the New York Times has been able to do with print and digital subscriptions and in particular its extraordinary, but you have to wonder at the Community Level what is the capacity of a community to pay subscriptions that will support real journalism in that community and if you dont have real journalism in that community, you quickly get to fake news world locally and the only example i can give is i was actually on the city council in my town of falls church, virginia, for several years. If he wasnt there i assure you there would have been a crazy blogger in the back room who had insisted that the school board was consistent of primarily aliens and they would get that information out. There will be people feeding curiosity about the community and, but if its not actual, professional reporters, it will be fake news which will have disastrous impacts on those communities. There is actually a great piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago about a fake news phenomenon in twin falls, idaho, that was brutally destruct testify the local Community Environment there. So i dont think there is a known answer right now for local and community news. We are struggling to help find the answer, but we will have to find it because news is important and if we lose it we will lose quite a bit. I commend the committees attention to the example, they possibly point to the future. One is the Texas Tribune which is supported on a nonprofit basis and its been in existence for quite some time. It predates the phenomenon that weve talked about and theres one that cropped up in las vegas, nevada. I was an employee many, many years ago at the Las Vegas Review journal, a website entirely, journalistic website, and the nevada independent that has built itself entirely on donations, nonprofit donations from the community and from the businesses within that community as an independent source of journalism. It has no offices. It has no printing press. It has no delivery trucks. It has journalists and laptops and a website, and it is beginning to work. That is one possible model of filling in this gap and as someone whose career started as a newspaper man in amarillo, las vegas and houston and all of which had three newspapers when i was there and have one struggling newspaper now and our country and i think anyone affected by these titanic shifts in the marketplace have to comprehend that journalism is a public trust and it has a Public Service and it has a public value, and if the Public Values it, then those esteemed citizens of said community have to figure out a way to support it. I can comment on that . And there are small examples of that beginning to emerge in our country that give me some optimism. Can i just there was a nevada independent . Yes. Okay. Thank you. One final question. An intentional consequence of this fake news phenomenon has been the loss of trust in any and all sources of news and that loss of the traditional gatekeeper and that is one of the most worrying aspects of anything weve come across. With respect, gentlemen, you were never trained and being able to combat the loss of all trust and this rise in fake news. So what are you doing or what are your organizations doing and how do you begin to rebuild that trust as we see diminishing by the day . I dont know if it is. I think theres always a balancing act, isnt there, of appearing arrogant and saying these things are having an impact and overreacting and saying the sky is falling, and i dont think the sky is falling. I think there has been a systematic, focused attempt to delegitimize traditional media because the stories that traditional media are reporting are helpful and you, therefore if you can delegitimize them you reduce the impact of the stories. There is a concerted focused, ongoing attempt to do that, and the way to respond to it is to double down on what it is that youre good at. You can make a very strong case that for the past year and a half, two years, its been something of a golden era in american journalism. If you look at the number of major stories that have been broken from traditional news outlets and certainly from the New York Times and Washington Post and organizations like my own, theres been one story after another which have been fundamental to the American People and the American Government and the way in which america works. So i am not going to give into the idea that somehow weve been delegitimized. Certainly, as a company ourselves, having been consistently attacked we do our own individual research and its extensive and its repetitive four times a year, seeing what impact its had on audiences and its had next to none is the information that weve had and it has ratings and revenues and everything else. So we would be foolish in the extreme not to recognize that these constant attacks do cut into the core of what we do, but we cannot panic for that. We shouldnt change what were doing. We should double down and reinforce the values of what we do and the evidence is that that is working for us. I would certainly agree with that. I mean, i think if you dig into the polling, theres no question that trust in media has been declining if you ask broadly about media as a category. You begin to ask about the particular publications and the people consume or local publications and so forth, and you get different signals and i saw a study yesterday from adelman that actually indicated that they were seeing a bit of an upswing in the trust in media and the decline in the trust in the platform. A lot of it is driven by whats going on and whats in the news. We certainly have absolutely doubled down on doing what we do best being as thorough and comprehensive as we can. We have, despite the economic measures on us, added to the newsroom, both in washington and beyond, and were seeing the results in terms of the number of people who are subscribing, and the traffic that we get to the times and even, frankly, the being able to sustain our print circulation in an environment where theres secular decline. So i do think theres very much there are two stories going on simultaneously which is things weve been talking about do erode Peoples Trust in a whole variety of different information sources, but theres also an appetite for something they can latch on to, cut through the noise, and actually trust. How often of that, though, is a polarization, the communities where each person is running, their preferred flag, is that what were seeing, you think . Theres certainly a fair amount of political polarization, to be sure. I dont know that people are simply gravitating to their preferred political choice. I mean, i think its complex. I think there are certainly you can find to horcohorts of peopl are doing that and attached to one political outlet. There are also people reading more broadly and have an appetite to really understand issues across the board. It feels to me a tremendous opportunity. I really mean that. For the last 20 years or so, this idea that theres something untrustworthy about the Mainstream Media has sort of gone unanswered. We have a now lively conversation in our country about what journalism is. What it isnt. Your presence here is indicative of a global interest in what is the foundational set of principles around credibility, journalism, trustworthy reportage. I tell my colleagues all the time, this is a very emotional time, it feels very heavy. But its also the best opportunity weve ever had in our careers. To do everything that tony just talked about and kinsley jutalk about, to lay it out, show what it is every single day because the audience mahas never been me interested a in what it actually is we do, how we go about doing it. There are market pressures, m t partisan pressures but there are enormous opportunities to do this right and show the way. Thank you. Were about to enter our seventh hour. Colleagues who want to come in. Well try to be reasonably efficient in the rest of the time we have. Ill try to be brief. Before my question, i think tonys point earlier on about where do you start, elections was well made. In my constituency of new castle, small world, tonys birthplace, with my magnificent majority of 30, thats just 30, im 1 of 11 members of what i less than affectionately call the under 100 club. So . You sway a few hundred votes, you change the government in the uk. Thats how tight it is. I want to preface my question, i was a journalist, myself. I believe a fair, accurate, free, responsible press is absolutely vital and, of course, the platforms or the new media, Digital Media, organizations e are perform a very useful role. They wouldnt be so popular if they didnt. But as far as your companies are concerned, theyre essenticerta grabbing your audience. Theyre taking large chunks of your revenue. Arguably going to grow in influence, as traditional outlets struggle. As we heard today, they take very little responsibility for some of the sadder aspects and absolutely no liability. So my question is, do you think thats right, do you think its fair, do you think its fair competition . Fair competition . Thats a first of all, its a reality. These are Amazing Products that give our news brands access to to many, many people. And they built amazing technologies. They people always say, are they publishers, are they Media Companies . Id apply any and all those labels to them. I primarily call them attention companies. They want to access as much of the publics attention as possible. They want more of it tomorrow than they had today. And that they do own responsibility for what theyre using to get your attention. Now, do i want a world in which google and facebook are editors and publishers and express editorial perspectives on whats on their platforms . No. But i think they can do a much better job of helping to separate helping the user to separate the wheat from the chaff and understand what information is coming from what sources with one indicators of credibility. So, the they can do much more to help resolve the quote unquote, fake news phenomenon. I think that the difficulty is as engineering and technology companies, they like engineering and technology solutions. This may be an area where they may have to do something crazy like hire people. So, but they do do they have some responsibility for what their users are exposed to . When theyre using those users to make money, yes, they do. The question is about the competition, whether its fair or not. I think its actuality important to distinguish between the platfo platforms, and i would include apple and amazon in this as well. There are those that behave more like walled gardens, apple and facebook, in particular, where theyre trying to keep their users in their environment and maximize the time spent there. And others like Facebook Like google and twitter, who are redirecting traffic back out. And i think in the latter instance, in the economics of media are tremendously complicated, but we at least have an opportunity to build our business if they are effectively acting as distribution platforms and common carriers, if you will, and not simply a walled garden. I mean, the argument weve made to them and to facebook, in particular, is either build a set of apis and a system that allows us to manage our business on your platform, or pay us for your for our content. One of the oar the other. Give us the tools to allow us to build a business there are treat it as a closed cable system or something and actually pay us for the content. You know, they their size is such that we dont have a huge amount of leverage, even the New York Times doesnt have an enormous amount of leverage to make a lot of progress on that front, but i think it lumping them together is not necessarily always helpful, particularly when trying to understand the economics of the ecosystem. Tony, you can read the question whichever way you like. Just a few thoughts, really. I agree with david, theyre going to have to hire some people. You cant solve everything with an algorithm. They have to traerealize that. I also think ittheres been a positive. I think cnn in many ways is one of the original drubt eisrupter. No one had done a news model like cnn. Once cnn did that, everything in the news changed. This is the next iteration of that. There was an argument we were maybe due for a shakeup. Theres been much soul searching inside the News Business, both in the uk and the u. S. Why did we miss brexit, why did we miss trump . If we spent more time looking at conversations taking place outside of traditional media, we might have been more alive to what was going on there. So i do think theres a salutary lesson in that, and as a general principle,s i cant be too specific in this, but no matter what business youre in, it cant be a principle that we dont care about the truth. Whatever it is you do, you cant say the truth isnt important and say if its a lie, well live with it. I dont know how you get around that, but that cant be a basis of a business. A couple of real quick answers. I mentioned i was in the newspaper business early in my career. Back then, most newspapers you worked for, even small ones, clock eed about 12 to 11 prof every year. Why . They sell classified advertising. Classified advertising was an embedded financial part of the Business Model that never went away. People say did the internet kill newspapering . Newspapering isnt dead. It wounded it, but not the internet. Craigslist and ebay wounded american newspapering. Okay . Because it gave everyone who used to go down that their local newspaper and paid 15 for 3 lines of type to sell their geraniums or their puppies or their golf clubs, an alternative place to send that money. That took 40 to 35 out of every newspaper in america. Within the course of about two years. I ask you, what Business Model can sustain 30 to 40 loss of revenue in 2 years, find no means by which to replace it and maintain the same standards, size, and scope . The answer is zero. Okay . So thats a business reality, a competitive reality, none of us can do anything about. But it is real. That created smaller newsrooms, fewer ambitions, more openings because the conversation in the communities around the country was becoming less robust. And as was mentioned earlier, when theres no coverage of your local community, everything masquerades as an issue at the partisan level. I guarantee you theres no republican or Democrat National orientation to whether or not a bond is let in your community to fix the water pipes. But if theres no local journalist there to tell you about that, it feels like it. And so this loss of revenue, ambition, and scope at the local level, was filled in by some of the phenomena were talking about. Second point i made earlier about adaptation. Google and facebook and other these Large Companies have for a long time created a false, i believe, a false impression about the relationship with their user. My children have already figured this out. The relationship with me isnt really about me. Its about you. What you learn about me, and then what you sell about me. The great future for journalism is to say our relationship with you is completely different. You subscribe to us, well tell you about your world. Thats it. Thats it. You subscribe to us, well tell you about your world. Whether thats the Balloon Festival in the springtime in your local community, or about a civil war in syria thats in its seventh year. You subscribe to us, well tell you about your world. And thats it. Were not going to mine you for the rest of your lives and sell everything youve ever purchased, every thought you ever had, music youve ever downloaded and give it to 17 other consumers. Well tell you about your world. And the sooner we get to that place, and the sooner we get to that relationship in this adapted world, the stronger well be, the better off well be and the more well be able to push back against all these other fake news phenomena. Thank you. Yes. Jo stevens. Thank you, jeff. I was smiling about how can lies be a basis of a business . Thats effect ively what we head from twitter in their evidence this morning. Theyre quite happy to have lies owen their platform and business to be running sustained on the basis of that. My question was to david. You mentioned indicators a couple of times to help users understand what has come from professional journalism and what hasnt. So trying to be positive and looking ahead at potential solutions, one of the things that has been suggested to us inle some the meetings this week that weve had, i understand here you have a sort of its called an information consumer report. Its a bit like a magazine in the uk. Its an independent Rating Agency. So, do you think the idea of an independent Rating Agency for information and news outlets, so that, you know, it would show facts against it would measure facts against fiction, reporting against opinion, have some ownership identity information. The equivalent of like a nutrition label on a packet of food. Do you think thats something that would work . So that if outlets have poor ratings, it would influence them to change their behavior . Yeah, i would start with something simpler then get to that. The simpler thing would be de dealing with brand suppression. Which is the brands that are attached to news stories get minimized and, frankly, with the scraping and theft of data, the brands get very confusing to users who arent working really hard at figuring things out. So both the platforms could very easily work on making brands more prominent and have more brand equity with the users. Then you get to should there be a capacity to determine the wheat from the chaff in terms of professional News Organizations . I think there should. While its often described as some impossible task, i dont think its an impossible task. I think that first of all, theres already line drawing in h the journalism business. There are journalists who get credentials to do some things and organizations who cant get journalistskcredentials to get other things. You could have pretty basic and pretty encompassing standards that relate to, for example, do you actually hire and pay journalists . You know, what is your ability to respond and do you respond to comments and corrections . Yeah, there are there are a number of Different Things that could be developed that would not be very difficult, particularly for companies with the resources of google and facebook, to apply to determine professional News Organizations from the not professional ones. And, again, you could be pretty encompassing. Right . Frankly, just paying journalists is a big one. Okay . Without the element of independence, can we trust those platforms to do that, you think, based on their behavior . Well, and there are various decisions about how this could theres a group called the trust project out there, theres other folks looking at quality. I mean, i think there are a lot of ways you could get to that, but that i would then give extra credit in the algorithm to folks who are professional journalistic organizations and that wouldnt mean getting rid of the garbage or censoring, but it would give more opportunity for readers to get reliable journalism. Okay. Did anyone else google is actively working with us and with other News Organizations to try and attach signals that essentially give a sense of authority to a story as well as looking at the relevance of the actual information that somebody queried. Whether that and theyre willing to open source it and make it more widely available to other platforms. Whether that works in a social environment where its really about the connection between individuals and has less to do with surfacing a particular piece of information, i think is an open question. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Rebecca powell . Thank you very much, chair. There are only very short points, really. As a former journalist, broadcaster here, that youre so optimistic there is a future for journalism and good reporting. Although, ive got to say on the converse, i mean, the whole reason why a lot of it has gone downhill is because there simply isnt the appetizing to put into the newspapers and to provide the backing. The advertising have all been drawn on social media as weve been hearing all week, 20 of worldwide advertising is now on social media. How are you going to tackle that, just briefly, mr. Maddox . Me alone. You want to finish . I think what weve seen is the ability of the social Media Companies to provide advertisers with incredible detail to allow them to target in a way which weve never seen before, is a major game changer. I can i just interrupt in i meant to add to that, of course, the advertising has gone on to social media and the advertisers want to advertise there because so many people are looking at it, and so many people are looking at what weve heard on the sites that get the most hits, which tends to be, not always, the least reliable and have the most potential to be fake. I think one of well, this this is changing very quickly. I think lots and lots of hits isnt one of the counterintuitive things, hits can be actually the beginning of an entirely new session. Why company at the moment, time warner, which owns cnn, is in the case of trying to merge with at t. One of the primary reasons why the two Big Companies are trying to do that, theyre trying to combine the data one has and the content that the other hat s to put together a kind of offering along the same lines of the soefs social Media Companies. At the highest levels of these companies, they realize we have to try and provide some kind of similar kind of metrics. This is completely the opposite, and to local tv question, this is about how Corporate America responds to this major shift in the Advertising Industry and how that will work out is that Massive Companies will be prepared to merge and Work Together and reinvent themselves in order to respond to that shift within the business. And thats a big pompous answer, but thats really where the answer starts and it will break down from there. And my suggestion to sum up, which, perhaps we can put to the gentleman from the New York Times, is answered, alluded to, is that all you journalists link up with facebook, twitter, and google and you provide this really highpowered, highprofile journalistic content for the engineers. I mean, there are, on the advertising side, there are efforts under a trade Organization Called Digital Content next, to put together something called trustx which basically aggregates quality publishers into an advertising exchange. And that commands higher cost per thousands, rates per thousand, than you typically get on programatic advertising and things like that. At the end of the day, it is about scale, so whether its broadcast organizations, combining with mobile carriers and so forth, or other News Organizations, trying to pull together to create an ad market of their own, that provides perhaps a partial answer. I think were probably we just did our Earnings Call today and announced that we now have a billion in subscription revenue on a company that is 1. 5 billion. Two t twothirds of our revenue is coming through subscription. So thats, at least in certain quarters, thats part of the solution as well, i think. There have to be alternative sources of revenue thats the relationship i was talking about. Thats a relationship model. For the future of journalism. Id make two points, quickly. First of all, the yes, Digital Advertising would be a whole other seven hoursplus of hearings. If you think the News Business not today. If you think the News Business has been disrupted, you should talk to people on the buy side of advertising and see how their world is different than it was 15, 20 years ago. The piece that where you can build optimism about news and journalism is the audience is bigger than ever. There are more people consuming more news than ever. Period. And they do it because they can. You have access to so much more. Thats something to build around. And ultimately, there is a lot of work and thought being put into subscription models, thats a big part of why weve been asking google and facebook to facilitate subscription through their platforms, which theyre experimenting with but have not yet delivered on. That could go a long way, by the way, instead of getting in the way, disaggregating this relationship with the reader, help solidify it. The people do want news, they do value it. I think there are some positive things, again, you being a primary example. I think we have to all express a lot of concern about the future for local and community news. The relationship with the reader will be there. The capacity to pay is, i think, going to be an open question for a while. Thank you. Thank you very much. I thought i very much agree with what you said, tony, about the models of the established Media Businesses changes to respond to the power of the tech platforms we talk about today. Separate inquiry, evident session, but something of interest to the committee and things like the disney fox sky deal reflects the same phenomenon. Two more members who want to get in. Chairman, if i could yeah. Forgive me. I am a working journalist. I have a deadline. I need to ask your forgiveness. Vy i have to leave to get back to the white house. Thats all right. Thank you for your time. Forgive me. A couple of short questions that hopefully we wont go much longer. Thank you very much, major. Im going to be brief, i was interested in what you said, tony, about the merger, because one of the things that strikes me about this is the monopoly situation that we effectively have with facebook and having 60 facebook and google have 60 of u. S. Digital spend and 20 of total global ad spend in the present time. I think someone earlier on very briefly mentioned antitrust, and how is it this monopoly situation has been allowed to develop . Im going to pass on that. I mean, have a court case on it. Is okay. Thats fair. I think, so its all about data, right . And the question is, is if youre in a data business, is does that lead to potential natural monopoly, meaning if you have a little bit more date that than the other guy, does that give you huge advantages in attracting ad dollars . Is there a natural monopoly there . I think theres a lot of academics doing research on that. It would there are a lot of analysises to whether traditional views of antitrust which are usually consumer, benefit, particularly in the u. S. , consumer benefit views, apply in a datacentric market. I dont know where that will end up, ultimately, but it is true when your advantage is data, if you have a little bit more than the other person, you have a lot more and thats always going to be true. I think theres theres something in the question of data without portability, you tend to get into a situation of lockin where the biggest established players simply cant be dislodged and theres no room for competitors to gain a foot hold. If i cant take my information and move it to a better service, and instead i have to wait for all of my friends and everybody else to gradually adopt that service, the chances that its going to take hold and present some sort of competition to these largest players is minimi minimized, so i dont i get quickly out of my depth as to whether, you know, these things are better dealt with through eig antitrust or not. There are differences in european and american views of antitrust and so forth but the data issue, not simply their command of it, but what you know, who owns it, whether or not its portable, i think is at the heart of a lot of this. Thank you. Thank you. Chris . Just a brief one, again, and its more of a general one, and to an extent, youve addressed this, but do you see that overall desire for news and information thats grown . David, was it you, you felt in defense, it had. Is it optimism that the overall desire for quality journalism as opposed to other forms of news, is growing . And can you demarcate any of that by demographics within society . We have some data, we have a town townizatifoundation foundation, American Press institute. You know, what is clear is, you know, there used to be tropes about people dont consume news anymore, young people dont consume news. You dont hear any of that now because its so patently ridiculous. Part of that is whats happening in the world and peoples focus on National News stories, u. S. Presidency, other things. But i think it is a wide recognition that people will always remain curious about whats happening in their world and their communities and theres a lot of data that because so much news and information is available, it is consumed a lot. Now, its consumed differently, for example, with millennials, its consumed differently than we consumed it as young people, right . It may come in a facebook feed with beach selfie, cat video, and Syrian Civil War all on your news feed. People at all ages consume massive amounts of news and that is a fundamentally good thing and fundamentally something you can build, potentially build a future on. This is not a business where were lack ing customers. This is a this is a business in which how you made money from creating quality journalism has been incredibly disrupted and broken and we have to rebuild from the ground up what the future looks like. I agree with that. I think if youre going to spend your life in the News Business, you have to be optimistic. Theres certainly no this job will wear you out, otherwise. I think theres a lot of grounds for optimism. I think in terms of News Consumption, i certainly think in terms of people entering the business, the quality of people we have coming into the News Business now, the people who want to get jobs, the variety of jobs that we have. The diversity of people who are trying to get into the News Business. These are all enormously encouraging trends. I also think its reemphasized to big brands that the importance of what your brand can be, investing in journalism, investing in quality journalism, thats resonated. Its proved its good for all kinds of reasons but also proved, as you heard, a good Business Model as well. Theres a lot of good things happening right now and i think News Consumption is higher than its ever been. I think, you know, sitting here, if i look out here, people think of the New York Times as a newspaper and cnn has a 24hour tv news service. Behind me, i think these things are viewed as digital propositions and theyre pretty much platform agnostic in terms of how theyre consumed. But the key thing is that they are being consumed, and in greater levels than ever before and i think that is a great cause for optimism. I would agree with that, and just briefly say that it because theres such a bleed between news and other forms of information, because the cat videos are thrown in with headlines and so forth, and because this is actually a point that richard has made in other settings that a lot of factbased information that used to reside in newspapers, sports scores and weather and things you knew to be demonstrably true are no longer there. Theres an enormous obligation on us to actually explain what we do, and help people understand the difference between how different types of information are gathered, how the profession works. So weve been working very hard being much more transparent about that and give people a sense of how we go about our jobs and why its important and not simply assume that thats well understood. Great. Thank you very much. I think thats concludes our questions this afternoon. I thank you very much for your evidence. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Coming up a little bit later today here on c spn 3, journalists who covered the watergate scandal on its legacy and its Impact Todays political climate. That discussion hosted by slate is slated to begin at 6 40 p. M. Eastern. You can see it live here on cspan3. Also online at cspan. Org and listen with the free cspan radio app. The house and senate have until midnight tonight to extend government funding. Today, lawmakers have been working to extend funding through march 23rd, and a twoyear budget agreement. Follow the house and Senate Floor Debates on cspan and cspan2 and our networks will also have briefings, interviews and events. And you can watch all of our coverage any time on cspan. Org. This weekend on American History tv on cspan3, sunday at 10 00 a. M. Eastern, from the west point center for oral history, graduate Kenneth Carlson talks about growing up in a military family and his service in vietnam. We go out to this bunker, and it had an actual viewpoint where you could see what was going on over the combat base. And were watching the rockets coming in, and miss arkansas on one side, miss new jersey on other side. These women are scared to death. Miss arkansas said that looks like the fourth of july. I said, no, it doesnt. She said, what do you mean . She sa people are dying when those things land. That doesnt happen on the fourth of july. She started crying. With the upcoming Winter Olympics were featuring the 1953 film rebirth of soul and 1960 film on the viii Winter Olympics in california. The United States team is causing plenty of unexpected excitement here. They were pregame underdogs and now theyve upset all predictions by winning this game with the russians. Their play earning them the first gold medal ever won by a u. S. Team in hockey. And at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on the the presidency collschola compare the relationships during the end of the cold war. When you look back at 1989 when bush comes in and look at bush and gorbachev in 91s is, from gorbachevs pint of view, bush is not watch American History tv every weekend on cspan3