Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion On Public Trust In Media 20220905

Form that explored the Publics Trust in media among the topics discussed were media bias and social media this is about an hour, 40 minutes. I am Steve Clemons of semafor. We are thrilled to have you here with us this morning for a major event for us. Today we are going to be speaking today we will be speaking with commentators on the contemporary battle and whether news can operate in a highly polarized landscape. Our event is going to be live streamed. Hello to everyone online joining us on twitter and youtube. You can follow us and use semafornews to join the conversation. I want to say a major word of thanks to jim clifton, john clifton and gallo for being not only our venue partner today, but our very good friend and we are going to be partnering on many other things that my friend justin smith, the founder of semafor will share in a moment. I want to thank the Knight Foundation for its support not only of this conversation but other conversations down the road on what we need to do about the nature of news. Without further ado, welcome justin smith. [applause] good morning everybody. So excited for today as apparently people on twitter are excited as well. We are really looking forward to a vibrant and unusual conversation because i do not think many media organizations today in america actually could convene this type of discussion. That is very much the point. I am justin, cofounder of semafor, a new 21st century born global news brand. We will Start Publishing later this fall. We are aiming for october. That timeframe to begin our first journalism. We have got a bunch of the early team, 15 or 16 fulltime staff, incredible journalists and publishers from around the industry. My partner ben smith, who will be leading the conversation, and i both left our positions at bloomberg and the New York Times after both of us, several decades building different News Organizations from the economist to buzzfeed to the atlantic. We have really been in the trenches of global news media. When you are in the trenches building and trying to innovate, you realize the existing global journalism business was really built decades and even centuries ago for a very different time. The design and the architecture of this news environment was very much created before the remarkable and as extensional changes of the media world that has it is only 16 years old. A big part of why we are excited to invent and create something new. Most critically, in 2022, newsreaders all around the world are overwhelmed by too many choices, too many options, information overload, and no longer sure of what to trust. The news trust deficit, as our friends have chronicled, is at an alltime low. The combination of this older system and very concerned news consumers, for us, we believe this is a moment that calls for a new platform to be built from the ground up and one that employs the best talents and most innovative, forward thinking editorial ideas to ensure new types of transparency in journalism, accelerate insight in this avalanche of content we all struggle with every day, elevate individual talents, and importantly in a multipolar world where the u. S. Is no longer as dominant, to explore on a consistent basis, competing global perspectives. As steve mentioned, today marks our first public event here. This is part of the foundational Strategic Partnership that we are so grateful for having with the gallup organization. We are willing to work across a number of organ it a number of areas and we are complementary. Gallup is so respected, an incredible data source. Our journalists will be able to partner with that data in incredible ways and we will bring it to a live format like this. Thank you, jim and john for your belief in us. To build this together. Lastly, but importantly, this event really has been made possible by the Knight Foundation. Jim brady is going to talk to us. Thank you for your support. Your mission is very much aligned with ours and we are grateful to do this with you. Good morning, welcome and thank you. [applause] this is so much fun. I am going to bring up our stage our partner who supported todays program, jim brady. We were commenting that jim brady who was the Vice President of journalism at the Knight Foundation, he and i were on a panel years ago with john segan dollar and we were talking about trust in news. We have been at this for a long while. Give a hand to jim brady, thank you for sponsoring this series. [applause] thank you. You guys are innovating from the start with an 8 00 a. M. Start time for a journalism conference. [laughter] for more than half a century, our foundation has been supporting local news efforts around the country. We have a special interest in communities. We are always happy to see new players on the team. We wish you the best of luck. These are trying times. Tensions are as intense as any time i can remember. We remain steadfast in supporting journalism. Semafor has assembled an influential line of speakers. We will ask tough questions. These discussions will generate disagreement and probably discomfort. That is fine. The issue of trust and polarization in news cannot be solved inside ideological bubbles. The opportunity to hold powerful people accountable. Our sponsorship of this series is just one of the many ways we are shaping the future of news. Since 2002, we havent across the field of journalism to navigate the changes that have come with the digital age. We are the largest founding funder of the american journalist project which is helping across the country. We invested 5 million in report for america, which helps irrigate news deserts. We have been longtime supporters of nonprofit news and provide more than 700 News Organizations transformative training and knowledge. Just this year, we granted 3. 2 Million Dollars to create the knight lma lab which is helping iconic publishers make the transition to digital on a technical and financial way. Last year, the news match program we created raised more than 42 Million Dollars to support 275 nonprofits around the united states. We have also supported organizations around the globe whose work keeps journalist safe such as the committee to protect journalists and the International Center for journalists. We support free speech and the Reporters Committee for freedom of the press. Bottom line, we are committed to exploring all possible animals avenues to provide a futile future for journalism. Democracy needs to be healthier. I look forward to listening and learning. [applause] thank you. We are going to keep at this and our goal is not comfortable conversations, but the uncomfortable ones. I think we are going to have a great conversation today. Our first guest is taylor lorentz, columnist at the Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Prior to joining, taylor was a Technology Reporter at the New York Times. Joining her on stage is ben smith, cofounder and our founding editorinchief of semafor. [applause] good morning. When he said uncomfortable, he did not say the thank you all for coming. We are excited about this and you have probably heard the intro. The intro was about uncomfortable conversations, so be warned. Taylor and i were colleagues at the New York Times, which is uncomfortable conversation central. I was widely viewed as a spy and got thrown out of all of the internal and taylor started a quarantine flak where people could talk to me. Which im grateful. It was great. I want to start with something we basically agree on, but it makes a lot of journalists uncomfortable. This idea that individual reporters are brands. Sometimes the words creators, influencers get used. I think a lot of journalists feel nauseous when they hear those words. Why do you think that is . There is a stigma around certain words like influencer and brand because they are tightly tied with consumerism and commodified in yourself. We are not supposed to do that, we are supposed to be above that is journalists, traditionally. Journalists have always had brands and if you consider the word rand, basically reputation. We have had hugely famous journalists in the past. I think the difference now is those journalists control the brand. They have more autonomy over their own brand versus the institution. You get on cbs news. You have been the most associated with making the case for the rest of us that you should suck it up and be in influencer like everyone else. Do you feel you are Winning People over . I dont need to win people over. This is just the nature of the media landscape it is the crux of what i cover. I cover technology, but its really about how technology is disrupting media through the influencer world and everything getting were distributed. I think the notion that in every field, in sports and politics, for better and for worse, power and attention are gone from institutions to individuals. That is the world we live in. Ash semafor, we are certainly thinking about that and to some degree saying we are going to yoke our branch to yours. We like to build around great journalists. You work for the Washington Post, a rather wellknown brand does not necessarily like, no ones ever heard of us, we have to hitch our wagon to taylor lorenz. I am curious, how do you think, particularly when it comes to trust, in some sense when you say reputation, you are saying trust as a journalist, trust my voice. The Washington Post is a classic institution that is saying, ignore who is writing it. Ignore all the atmosphere. Trust the Washington Post. How do you think about the relationship between those things . I would push back on that in the sense i do not think that has been my experience at the post. Woodward and bernstein and plenty of my colleague has a strong brand. I think the post has been good about incubating talent. Of course i am honored to work for a brand, but in terms of establishing trust, you can see people establish trust as individuals so you need to be accountable in that way. It is obviously a dance. I tend to focus on my authority to buy feed. Nobody would trust me going off and covering, i dont know, cars . You live in l. A. True, but i stick to my authority, stick to my beat, i dont try to compete to be the authority on everything. Do you feel the tension between asking people to trust you and steering people toward, just trust the post . We have standards, we have editors, that is really the promise of the post. I am not saying from the perspective of management or how this operates, but more from the audience perspective. I think we see these tensions play out a lot of tiein time in the creator economy. I guess that tension does not manifest so much because it kind of depends story by story. People come to me for my stories. If they trust the post election counter coverage, it is not my job to establish that, i am shoring up trust on a specific beach. We know the post is good on covering influencers because we have taylor lorentz. Do you worry if you make mistakes you are burning the Washington Posts trust . In some ways you have to be more conservative at a institution like the post . It is a two way street. Not only do i have to be cautious of the posts credibility, but the post, and any Mainstream Media institution , has to protect their reporters. That has something we have seen a lot of traditional media struggled to do. The post has been great, but we are sort of in this world now where we operate in concert with each other. I think on this Bigger Picture question, i think i sort of embrace as a reality that people connect individuals to journalists, rather than to primarily a brand. Arent we fundamentally in this to tell other peoples stories . Not our own . Its funny, i do not put myself in my stories at all. My stories resonate because of the content i am covering, but people dont know anything about me personally. I am not necessarily doing that. Not to say theres not amazing reporters doing that. Is in a lot of her stories but uses her experience to tell amazing tales. I feel like that is a fluid thing. Do you think you can draw sharp lines . You are probably the most extremely Online Reporter in america, or one of them, between the way you essentially tell your own story on social media then downed in a news article. It seems to me a lot of readers see both. Is there a hardline . Look at how content creators operate. Theres content, what you produce, then there is you as an authority or personality. In traditional media, this way the way this plays out is maybe i read your article on politico, then i see you give commentary on cnn. Its you, just two different products. I think of my journalism as one product, i guess. As a fellow content creator. [laughter] lets move to something in this space that we disagree on. You talked about the institutions standing by them. I think you, certainly, a lot of women face atrocious harassment that often crosses lines. But also, really heated disagreements. Something i have seen you tweet, and i searched your twitter this morning. [laughter] you use the phrase bad faith. 15 or 16 times into lastly did your tweets. How do you know who is in bad faith . What is my faith . You are looking into peoples hearts and saying, this person who disagrees missed they are not mad at me because i got something wrong or that i am too liberal, they are fundamentally in bad faith. You can tell the difference between someone who disagrees with you when somebody who is not operating in good faith based on the nature of their question. If they are coming to you in an honest capacity and saying hey, i noticed xyz. Ok, i will take your feedback. I hear this all the time, on every story, i hear lots of different perspectives. Especially trending stories. If somebody is making personal attacks or misrepresenting you, actively participating in harassment in the sense that you see them retreating retweeting other people who are not there for constructive kit criticism. Can you tell between constructive criticism and nonconstructive criticism . You can make a guess. A lot of these people say maybe i was angry, but im not in bad faith. You are just a liberal hack. [laughter] and having those conversations, being open, i am a huge blocker on twitter. If someone is annoying me, locke. Also, no worries, sorry about the mistake. Lets hear it out. It is also so much of these types of tensions that come out on social media, you have to think about the incentive structure and whether people are just there for the retweets or they are there for their own crowd. I tried to respond to every person that asks me a legitimate question. Especially trending stories, the ones that people trending stories . Like, ok boomer. People want to share their feedback and i love that because it gives me more story ideas. I think this thing that bugs me about bad faith is that you are basically guessing, right . I think how could you know . How could you purport to know . I think it is quite obvious. It is somewhat of a guess, but it is not a heart guesstimate. Of course if people are drunk, sure. If somebody is i dont want to revisit the details of this, but there was a Washington Post story, the person who the error was about was furious and being not behaving at their best, i would say. Is that bad faith . Lets consider that persons history and the role they played in gamer gauge. But you made an error. Of course they are mad. There was an error in the story. But why not just say, you are not in bad faith. Absolutely. If you read my emails, thats exactly what we did. Exactly. What you guys did in public, you did the thing i think is just defend, defend. I wonder if there is there was a full 24 hours where i said, how can i help . The only thing i said about that was after i had been it was very clear that it was bad faith. Did i anticipate that guy was not coming in good faith . Certainly. I thought, this is an obvious thing i can correct right away. When it became clear he was doing his live streams and i dont want to relitigate it. Hes just another content creator . I work with content creators for a living. I deal with that kind of drama. Thats what was interesting to me. 24 7, somebody is making a reaction video about my stories. But that one was on twitter. Because media people are on twitter only. As we know. The crossover of tiktok culture and twitter culture. There is many people i would say, even people that have harassed me in the past i will let this go in a second. You can see you can say this guy is being horrible and overreacting its not just overreacting. That he is capitalizing in various ways, but how do you know it is in his heart that he is mad or not . He says he wants to go to war with the media and destroy the Washington Post. Thats probably half the people in this room. [laughter] it goes back to judgment. We use judgment every single day. All i can do is respond to people in good faith, say hey, i want to work with you. I want to correct that. If you come back with that, with this Crazy Campaign and that continues for days, i am going to assume you are not there. What i shut him down . No. I want to hear people out. I have dealt with it for over a decade. This is not my first rodeo. I guess i see the term bad faith mostly gets dashed to rightwingers. Youre seeing this on this twitter, tiktok spectrum, but the critics of Mainstream Media are mostly to the right, do you think that is mostly a primarily a rightwing phenomenon . You feel sometimes when people who love your work are sharing it they are in bad faith . Anyone can be in bad faith. Anyone can be a troll. I think obviously a lot more extreme figures on the right lay into that a lot. I get criticism from all different kite all different types of people, depending on the story. You have to have faith in your reporting. I agree that bad faith is not the best term but i have not come up with a better one. It makes me nervous that you are looking into somebodys head and their heart. I always give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I appreciate that. I feel like there was a moment where you asked, is he in bad faith . No. [laughter] the fact that you are willing to have a conversation with me shows me that you are not. Do you think that aspect of the blindness of those of us who live on twitter, to the larger, primarily American Culture of these other platforms is a . Yes. I am on twitter all day. I am not bashing journalists for being on twitter, it is a useful tool. [indiscernible] i was off it for five months. I go off and on. I think that is where these narratives emerge and i wish that people spent a little more time on youtube and tiktok because i think they would have a better understanding. Do you hear that . Spend more time on tiktok. [laughter] there was a great story about how the Mainstream Media totally missed rarely roots of the recent mania that was on tiktok. There is one other twitter related question i wanted to ask about. You tweet things and people ask about them. You and i probably have somewhat different perceptions of in ways that make no sense for us to debate for this audience. You tweeted commit dont listen to the blue checked doctors on twitter and shared an article who consistently downplay consistently downplay long covid or the viruss devastating longterm effects. You shared an article from a magazine i shared two atlantic articles in that thread. A former colleague at the atlantic is an example of a great person and i also shared eric topol and other doctors. You shared an article as well from a fairly academic on this, described as poorly sourced hyperbolic bullshit. By the way, i totally agreed with and i actually shared the breakdown of that let me ask the question. I think you have a somewhat different belief about how scary long covid is from a lot of the establishment. Journalists just spent the last two years pursuing pushing social platforms to listen to blue check doctors. Do you think there ought to be somebody looking at tweets and saying, that should we delete taylors account . Who ought to make that decision . I do not why a i do not know why me tweeting an article from another journalist would come on me. A lot of journalists spent a lot of time pointing to people who might have had insane views about covid early on who are sharing sources and a lot of them got there accounts deleted. There is a huge wave of coverage of journalists, nonjournalists, nonexperts who were sharing Alex Berenson type people misinformation. Things experts thought were misleading. If you share that, should there be a twitter executive making a call about you . Theres a difference between sharing a link to a respected News Organization it was random. Random to some people. Among canadian media, it is well known. I retweet probably hundreds of articles a day. Someone said, this article as we all do doesnt really meet the bar for certain things. But i think it speaks to certain covid things. I am extremely high risk for covid. I do not want to get my get into my medical background, but big conversations around return to work have been journalists such as myself, and there are many within these newsrooms being left out of the conversation. That is also the stories we tell and whose stories we tell. Ed yong has done an amazing job walking that line. I am not a Health Reporter but somebody who has great expertise in chronic illness, i am not looking to debate the substance of your perceptions or views, but i guess i wonder, do you worry that we went too far in saying social media platforms ought to enforce this Scientific Consensus . I have certainly never said that. Are you suspicious of there was a huge taken of angies threads. But there is debate. Early in covid, twitter employees deleted peoples accounts who debated. I dont work for twitter. You and i are experts on twitter. R. O. I. Will share links to a mainstream news article. A lot of my friends are Health Reporters, i talked to them all the time. The fellow Health Reporter who has expertise in things related to the article and i say, what do you think . They are covering that stuff all day. I retweet 100 news articles a day. It is interesting that when i retweet things, that is a new cycle. Whereas another blue check journalists does the same thing. The blessing and the curse of being a brand. Exactly. Thank you for circling that with me. [laughter] [applause] taylor, my colleagues want to buy you lunch someday so we can get a lot of other ben smith stories. Thank you so much, taylor. Ben is going to stay with us for the next conversation. I welcome to the stage john harris, editorial chairman of politico. Politico changed the landscape of news and we are pleased to have him here. John spent 21 years at the Washington Post covering politics at the white house. Over to you. Good morning. [applause] can we shake hands . Thank you for joining us. Thanks for contributing. I was not a founder of politico, i was an employee very early on. When we started, john hired me into thousand seven. When all of the washington bloggers turned him down turn me down, he had to hire me. You get a quote somewhere that politico was going to be a needle in the vein of political junkies. It was considered racy at the time to say that. I wonder looking back to 2007, also there was a throng of journalists like me who are literally on the stand at a horse race, holding pads, taking notes. I am curious if you think in retrospect we have some numbers we can put up about trust in media because i believe only congress is less trusted at this point. Do you feel like we have some responsibility for turning politics into a game . I dont mean to sound complacent, but not really. Defend yourself. Those numbers if you want to be popular in media, media is the wrong profession. I was trying to and i i think weight. I do not think it is a privilege question. We did view politics partly as sports, partly as entertainment, but not only entertainment or only sport. I had been at the Washington Post for 20 years and i did it not because i thought it was i think journalism is a serious enterprise. That is what i believed. The context of the time, its not like those were great times. We were in the middle of the iraq war. We had the most serious recession since the great depression. But, i do not think that we thought we that there was something existential about the whole political system. And whether it was trembling. It does seem frivolous now to be covering politics as primarily sport. To be honest, a lot of people do engage with politics the same way they engage in sports. Whether it is throwing stuff at the screen. We dont use drug metaphors anymore, our advertisers did not like it. [laughter] but to be honest, if you watch modern political culture, it obviously is an almost narcotic reaction that gets people so consumed and spending 12 to 15 hours a day on their phone, popping off about this or that. Your conversation with taylor, i think she could speak to the mania that people bring to this, in my view is not a healthy way to live. Maybe we were reflecting market opportunities, i do not think it is at the i dont not feel culpability about contributing to the decline of the culture. We have a lot of people accusing us with declining to you can condescend about politico, or cabletv chatter, i dont Pay Attention to cabletv chatter. Except our whole team lived on it. Ed now that socalled cabletv chatter, i would say much for verse, basically is not chatter, it is the whole arena, one of the principal arenas of our politics. You wrote a perspective piece about a month or two ago about a turn in Mainstream Media. There is a model of lowkey technocratic kind of older style of leadership. If you look across the media, the new president of cnn, fred ryan at the Washington Post, justin and i talked about this sense of when everybody lost their minds over the last several years and we want to find a way to return to a more neutral, to a less hyped up tone , do you think that is a realistic possibility or is it a false summer before trumps return . There is a lot there. I will take the first. What i was writing about in that column i thought was interesting. Youve got people atop the Washington Post, wall street journal, who fundamentally are institutional creatures. They represent the same sort of model of career achievement and success that you would that would have led to achievement and success 50 or 60 years ago, but they are fundamentally institutional creatures, in a good way. Ref reflecting the value in the e throughs i would see you as fundamentally a product of entrepreneurial values rather than institutional values. I thought it was interesting that in this wildly disruptive age, these institutions were all returning to these classic organization woman models if you remember the famous book in the 1950s about the organization man. The reason for it is basically they are doing pretty well but they want to keep doing well. They do not want to rock the boat. I do not think it reflects a turn to taking the journalism back. Taking it back to a 1970s you could do it if you want, but i do not think many people want but it institutionally it was, can we just get some stability and move away from in our newsroom . Make sure our Business Model maybe it is a parallel. You hear people talk about also we want to get all of these maniacs off twitter, get me and taylor off twitter, pulled the journalism back as well. Do you think that is realistic . I am not in daily management anywhere, anymore. But everybody there knows that is not attainable. The minimum they can do is just not cause an International Uproar on twitter. [laughter] but it is not the Washington Post demonstrated, ultimately they are not without levers to enforce that, but they are pretty severe. Do you expect is there a pass toward removing those numbers we saw, or somewhere in that newsroom leadership, management shaping is there any thing through that or are these things disconnected . Honorable institutions, established ones like the Washington Post or the New York Times, things that are sort of a hybrid of old and new, which is true of politico right now my day in and day out you can have people do good conscientious work and no matter what, people hurling expletives. There is a respect and credibility that is built up over time. To be honest, the media or whatever, but Something Big happens and you are going to want to go to a respected source. You just are. So, i dont totally believe all of the and looking back, those numbers on gallup are simply a reflection of what has happened to every institution in society. Whether it is a 50 years. The only partial exception to that is uniformed military. Every other institution in society has lost respect. Interesting, lost a lot of power. In the old days, there those handful of institutions set the agenda. The number of people really making decisions about what americans would learn about politics and Public Affairs could easily fit in this room. People get angry, but media power for any individual institution or individual journalist it individuals have a fair amount of power. Institutions have had a relative decline in power. Right now i think people like to blame social media for the decline in trust. We launched at the end of the probably single most important trust in media which was the horrible coverage in the runup to the iraq war. In retrospect, the disastrous Media Coverage of the years after 9 11. I think this would have been controversial at the time and now it is totally uncontroversial. Donald trump would say it, joe biden would say had committed the media after 9 11 beat a series of terrible choices. The rack were, but many others. The media cheer them on and covered them uncritically, informant driven fbi arrests of young muslim men and women. I wonder, and this i dont know, i am slightly nervous asking this when you see the treatment of january 6 right now where there has been a deliberate effort take the lessons of 9 11, to learn the lessons of the 9 11 commission, do you worry that the media is there anything for the media to learn from how badly we missed handled the 9 11 aftermath . What 9 11 did was create this core of really angry people who loathed the media and made that the cornerstone of their worldview. You are not talking about al qaeda . [laughter] if you were going to get an email that said fu, it was going to come from the right in the first 15 years of my career. And it was a little bit at the end of the clinton years, you were seeing this in bush v gore, but the bush presidency and 9 11 meant there was an equally energized group of people on the left. They were correct, in retrospect. It was a very valid critique but i do not see people selfconsciously looking back to the lessons of those years. Most of the journalists in your newsroom are going to be younger. As a group of editorial leaders, people our age reference point. Do you think the lessons of a horrible hit the aftermath of a horrible terrorist attack apply to this moment . The lessons of skepticism and putting curiosity and inquiry at the center of what we do, rather than superficial judgment, that is a lesson for any time and is easy to forget. I do not feel strongly about this, but i would into her some of those lessons put in practice in january are more stylistic in adjectives as opposed to the real substance of it. We will now say trump is lying. Fine, but i have never yet found a person that said, i was inclined to believe trump but i read in the New York Times they called him a liar. They would never use that language unless they were certain, so i should reassess my opinion. Theres not a single person. So why do journalists spend so much time worried about that . I dont. [laughter] there is a which is more of a stylistic thing. Calling it like it is is really doing the hard work of reporting and skepticism even of your own preconceptions. The one we are talking about is kind of harmless but i do not think people should be putting a star on their forehead for doing it. That was our traditional way of congratulating ourselves. I have one last piece of advice to ask of you, as somebody who started a great newsroom here in washington, how do you cover washington without being corrupt . Tell me what you mean . [indiscernible] [talking over each other] im talking about the bubble that is washington, the limited range of perspectives. That kind of corruption if your job is to cover the minnesota twins. Spending days on the road with people. I think that is where the responsibility of editors i dont know. If youre talking broad psychic corruption, you could walk around him be a pompous jerk just like the pompous jerks we are covering. [indiscernible] the access to power, access to the inside story. I wonder if you think about it. Maybe this is related. I am often struck by the banality of political conversations. You get invited to one of these big conferences, davos is an example, these masters of the universe are going to be there, you would think they are going to have profound insights into power and the way the world really works. And then you have these conversations with them and it is the most conventional there just talking about twitter. I think biden is going to to the left. Dont you think aoc is threatening to lose the center . Like, this is the insights you get by being master of the universe . [laughter] you put your nose up against the glass and realize you didnt want to come in. Maybe i will close with this story. The great story the last time they met in person was january of 2020, these masters of the universe meeting is to look forward to the day. I thought that was the most important thing. In retrospect, it was this Incredible Movement of no one knows anything. Thank you so much for taking the time out. I am the d. C. Cocktail party guy. My good friend, lover like kelly said i have been into this for half an hour. Polarization and trust in news is foundational to a foundation about democracy. We have to see if this is a highstakes consequence. Thank you for the guidance there. We will have a very fascinating panel. We have west larry, loved his work. She is phenomenal and the former washington executive editor of the wall street journal and our moderator for this session is my star colleague. A really quick lightning round. Journalistic objectivity. What is it . Does it matter . Do we actually care . Thank you for doing this. I am glad to be here. Start by saying i dont think it would objectivity is. Everybody has those. You have to be the tough umpire on the Playing Field who wanted to call that any and all sides. This is the standard you should aim for. This is not possible. That may be true objectivity, who were the people sharing the story . There is no such thing as an impartial observer. We are beginning our leadership here. It is impossible to make ourselves impartial. We can about to be fair. We can have all of the relevant information. We will go back to littman who does the writing, the critiquing of the New York Times. He concludes that too much of the journalism is the world as the editors and writers wished it would be. He writes that the journalism is to much reflecting the biases of the powerful people running. I love you ben and justin wherever you are. What he argues for is a process of objectivity. That can be replicated. It does not matter who the reporter is. But we have seen happen is journalism has all of the exact same problems. No one can bother to check what the government says. We lie to our readers for a week about what happened in uvalde because no one bothers to check with the police had happened. George floyd had a medical incident on the Street Corner because no one could be bothered to go to the Street Corner. So we all perform. It is nonsense. We created a pr apparatus instead of doing journalism on the way we were supposed to be in the first place. Do audiences care . Yes, they do care. They will tell you. Listen to your readers, they will tell you that they do care. If you say objectivity is not possible, you are admitting defeat and i think there is great peril down there. You will guarantee polymerization. We are admitting defeat at an incomparable task. It is impossible for any individual to be objective. Do you really think that people dont know what reporters think . It is fairly clear in their writing. Even if they go on social media, you kind of understand where most reporters are. I can tell on hot button issues. When i read the local newspaper as a black person, i can tell it was not written by someone in my neighborhood. Quickly average state straight News Coverage reflects a set of values and a set of what questions you ask on the wall as you walk in here. If you dont ask the right questions, you dont get anymore. For any number of people excluded from mainstream News Organizations, we all read the straight News Coverage and we say that stuff is dripping with bias. Rippling with bias. We need to stop starting a relationship with our leaders by lying to them. The New York Times said if our reporters are perceived as bias, people will not trust our journalism but you reporters are biased. So we are saying if our leaders know the truth, they wont trust our journalism. Out of our journalism is perceived as bias or unfair. If our individual reporters are perceived as being human, our readers wont trust it. You said that being black or lgbtq is a political position because of how you see it. Where is the line you withdraw . If i was between soandso candidate and i thought this should i be able to cover that person . Because i dont think that is a real issue that ever happened. Yes, sure. If you tweet that donald trump is the antichrist, you probably should not be on donald trump. But if the sportswear Sports Reporter tweets that, i dont really care. , put my political views on social media ever. I am asked in articles very often what we think about this. We are asking other women what they thought about roe v. Wade. I said today, i am doing that story. I cannot do that. I am not going to give my opinion. I am a journalist covering the story. I hold myself back, i felt about all of my political opinion my social media. Some of them, you can probably tell but i am not deliberately putting them at the because i thought my responsibility is regardless of where they fall politically, i want people to feel comfortable, that they can talk to me. They have not gone through my twitter and my tiktok, my instagram and decided she is this or that. I am coming prepared for that. I dont want to be able to tell my social is not about me. To your point when it is about the objectivity, we are in a world now where we all agree that trust is transferring to individuals away from organization. It is one thing to say the Washington Post or the wall street journal as rigorous profit. If you work there, we should trust it. How do i know unless i put in the real effort . That is the story that an individual has. There is so much disaggregated. It is aggregation from the organization that you work for. How do i know we can trust your process over the wall street journal process . What i am writing is being published. I am not publishing adjust on the internet but i think that again, to go back to an earlier point, i think that it is important. I think with the readers have told us is they want rigorous and fair journalism. They want to be treated like adults. In journalism much less deliver institutions, the average piece of content i received, i will go to facebook right now and click on the first 10 articles i see. The first eight of them are garbage. They are an aggregation of an aggregation, they politically skewed overstatements, taken out of context. We get into these rooms and this is rigorous. There is an issue in our industry will be done talk about the state in the book of our field by the average consumer is not receiving quality journalism. That speaks to the erosion of standards across the board. I think there is a call. I think our institutions have to acknowledge the fact that their processes and histories have not always been tendered across the board. There are massive communities that have never trusted them because they had never been trustworthy to those communities. When i walk into a community, whether it be in baltimore or chicago and other places, i did not even know what that was. Probably because i spoke the language. I was bringing a level of trust to the employer. She has access to all types of people that no one else in that newsroom has access to because of her reputation and background. The second thing i want to say is it is important for us to think about trust and whether people trust us. Our job is to write down things that are true. Im not going to swear but i dont care what those people want to do. If you are saying you want to destroy the Washington Post and the New York Times didnt screw you. I am not changing my journalism to try to appease you, someone who is not interested in a Public Square and not interested in factbased journalism. We spent so much time in our industry trying to appease lunatics and stead of just telling the truth. I will come back in a second. The insanity of social media is that you are attacked constantly by people who dont know what they are attacking you about. Have you read the article . That should be the standard response. Those people are not media critics, they are basically people looking for reasons to vent and they are finding it every day. I think what we can and should do is become more transparent about what we do. You asked how you engender trust and i think there has been too much in my career as a journalist too much has been shrouded in secrecy. It has been it has been done in a dark, back room. I think we need to be more transparent about how we do what we do, what resources are, where information comes from and what the composition of our newsroom really is and is not. If we are asking for transparency in the institutions we cover, we have to practice transparency in the government. I have thought about this topic over the last few years and try to think about the questions you pose which is what can we do . I think we need to be fair and objective that we also need to be transparent and we have not been very transparent in my business during my time. That is 45 years in the business. We are Getting Better but we are not there yet. An example of transparency, there is a huge twist on Boris Johnson getting blue boos and as they replayed it, the audience said that they noticed the jeers. I think i know your view on that. What they had done is they replayed the video, the anchor had spoken at the top of it and then the video drops. People were saying we were there, we heard it. The bbc did a thread and explained to technically what was happening to the general public. This was not bill gates. They took time on twitter to explain that. That is transparency that i have not seen, i have not seen that level of transparency from the bbc before. Does it make a difference except at the margins . Lets say we are much more open, do you think we would win back when back people . Do you think we would win back people . Would we see numbers move the other way . Everything happens at the margins. You start somewhere. I think we need to win back trust but i think we are also in an environment that is difficult right now. We are an easy target to attack. Part of the problem is i dont think people can distinguish the media environment between serious journalism and frivolous not serious journalism. I think in the long run, i think the kind of journalism we are all talking about, we may have different terminology but what we are all talking about will win out in the end. I think quality will win out in the end. I think peoples desire to have journalism they can trust will win in the end. In the end, they take a while because we are sorting through environment where people can even distinguish what we are talking about and what a lot of people think is journalism and i think we have to have faith. I think we have enough confidence that what we do will win out in the end and keep doing it until that becomes reality and maybe i am being naive but that is what i think. Lets publish the back and data. Lets let people run the analysis. That was something that we had to talk about. I think the post and other places have done a really good job with that. Publishing transcripts and interview notes and letting people want to see that it is important to acknowledge that all of this conversation is happening. I think transparency can be helpful in the margins. This is all in the context of our political and social environment. It is asymmetrical. Unquestionably, that is massive. I can win a Pulitzer Prize and be hyper transparent. At the beginning, everyone is mad about it. By the end, the cops are using our numbers because they are the best available numbers. But none of that matters when Tucker Colson goes on air. He would save his people are flooding all of my inboxes and we have these this powerful Propaganda Organization in our country. The ability to speak to millions of without any contest or fairness. You take something that is rigorous, hardened, fought where we dump all the things we are supposed to do but that does not how bench appear are Tucker Colson Tucker Colson that is not how bench appear a ben shapiro and Tucker Carlson describe it. We can say that social had anything to do with it. I am just saying that trust in media is slowing. 60 of the population there voted for the dictator ousted years ago. The question really is he made the point that people dont want to listen. It is the problem of the country. What should we as an industry do . Should we sit and write up all of that . The purpose of journalism we are not trying to build community with the nazis. We are complaining to the boss about it. The point of journalism is to record a few things. It has become nationalized and politically nationalized. I think we have to rebuild our trust in our communities, reengaging the public. I think it matters much more if there is a local newspaper i think what is extremely important is the fact that for so many americans, they no longer have a communal relationship with the news and the institution of news. The best thing we can do to earn trust is be trustworthy. What i would suggest is that a lot of the distrust is earned. I do think that oddly, i think the decline of local news is a contributing factor here and a significant one. We are talking about urban, rural, a flyover country that dont have any local journalism. They dont have any experience in reading journalism that explains the community in which they live. They dont have any sense of trust in media that does not exist for them. I just wanted to point out that this mistrust of the media is more prevalent among republicans but it is not only among republicans. They did a survey for the institute of politics at the institute of chicago recently and they asked when consuming news, do you believe the people who created this, are they trying to present the facts with as little bias as possible . Are they trying to get their own viewpoint across . 30 of the people surveyed said trying to prevent facts with little bias, 48 to get their own viewpoint across. 67 of republicans but also 52 of independents and 32 of democrats said they are trying to get their own personal viewpoint across. Those are not encouraging numbers. We have to be aware of this reality and push back against it but also i think we need to recognize that we are dealing with some structural problems that will take time to address. Much of this conversation is built around the u. S. How relevant is this discussion to the rest of the world . The idea of all of this being optional, this happening around the world before it came to the u. S. , really experienced. It is interesting to see how other regions deal with politicians. So what can we do . What are we solving . Just a minute each. What do we do . We can tell the truth and be transparent about our process. We can help the Community Journalism and be accountable to those communities. And we can recommit ourselves to a level of rigor and fairness. One of the unspoken secrets of most of journalism is most of us work in publications would it be well sourced enough . There is a massive golf, our work would be more trustworthy. Engage with them, listen to them. That is the hard bit because you have to filter. You are working collaboratively. You are just presenting their story. You are amplifying their story. Three things, be fair and impartial but also be seen as fair and impartial. Secondly, i think be transparent. And third, i think listen to our viewers and readers, listen to them. We are having a oneway conversation too much. It does not mean that everything every reader says is valid and every criticism is worth listening to, sometimes they are crazy but we are already listening to people that our customers and those are the people that actually consume the news and listen to them because i have learned over the years that there is some wisdom. That kind of set up where you are seeking a level of objectivity, we agree broadly on this. Adding the perception of objectivity and then also trying to be transparent. Hasnt that largely been the working model of journalism for the last 100 decades . What would you say to the argument that that is what we have been doing . The regime of editors have been part of american journalism for the last century. That was the aspiration. I would say we failed. Or fell short. I would not say we failed. We were not even attempting to be transparent for a time. I think those are still the right aspirational goals. Good we have solved everything. Lets take a note so that we know what the solutions are. We will keep these kinds of conversations going. Thank you all so much. Now to close out this event, i would like to call back to the stage my colleague, ann smith and he will be speaking with Tucker Colson, the host of Tucker Colson tonight on fox news. He is joining us remotely from new york. Good luck, ben. Quick thank you. I am glad you agreed to join us. Someone just texted me and said you were pretty tough with taylor. Which i am heartened to hear. I am hoping that you will just let me ask questions and not steamroll me because you are professional. But i have been watching your show a lot. He spent a lot of time laughing about labels that are thrown at you, racist, white supremacist, you host the most racist joke in Cable Television and i would actually like to not ask about labels and give you an opportunity to talk about what you believe and to begin with if you believe white people are superior to other races. Of course not. Do you think that white people have more say in america . Have more of a claim on america . Of course not. I am a christian and i think that god made everyone the same. The idea that i harbor some animus, a lot of the criticisms you could level at me, i get nasty, you have been on the receiving end of that. But the idea that if you were to look at my text or listen to my personal conversations or read my mind, you would find no instant where i say i am mad at by people. 100 of the people i am mad at our well educated white liberals. In my mind, the person i dont like is a 38yearold female white lawyer with a barren personal life. What are you talking about . Let me show you why people react this way. I think we have a clip. This policy is called the great replacement or replacement of legacy americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. What is a legacy american . People who were born here. Black people, white people, hispanic people, asian people. People who are citizens, people who participate in our system and a lot of them dont find the program by the program of the Democratic Party because it does not serve them. I am not guessing, they talk about it constantly. It is to bring in new people who will vote for them. This is not something i made up were found on the internet. This is something that democrats, including the fathers left victory have talked about in great lakes. This is not some crackpot analogy. You talk about generational investment. People who live here now. Do you have any empathy for someone who sees that clip whose parents are from india or china and say i dont like that clip . I dont agree with that clip . No. I dont have any empathy for people if i could finish. I have no empathy for people who derive their judgments about anything from 32nd eclipse on media matters. I do one hour life every single night. If you want to know what i think, i dont know that there is anyone more transparent than i am. Not all my views are correct or attractive. I believe that people are not the sum total of their genetics. I see that constantly. I mean it. I kind of by the dr. Seuss version of race understanding which is judge a person by what he does, not by how he looks. I believe that. I grew up in california in the 70s and i see it constantly. You have one hour every night. I want to ask some other questions. You are misunderstood in your view a lot. Are you curious why you have been flypaper for White Supremacists . Deep breath. I have never had a whats premises work for me. I dont think i have ever talked to a white supremacist. Please let me finish. I am not sure what that means. I know that it is the worst thing one can be. I dont really understand. I believe that people are not defined by their race, black, white, asian, pick a race. People people are defined by what they do and the choices they make. They have agency. They are not part of some bigger group, there individuals. I say that every night. If you dont hear that and for whatever reason want to claim i am some racist, i am stating my sincere views as clearly as i can. Do you feel that in your own career you have been discriminated against as a white supremacist . You said that roger ailes had a preference for Irish Catholic people and that it held you back. I can say this sincerely, i have never in my life been unhappy except because of selfpity. I am speaking for myself. Selfpity is the root of misery. I have had a wonderful life. I live where i want, i say what i want. I am blessed. Unlike a lot of journalists who are leading miserable lives. But i do believe in fairness and i dont think you should ever hire someone on the basis of race or sex. It is grotesque to me. We are going to bring people from around the world, they may look different or be from different background but we will treat them all the same. On the basis of their ability and virtue. On the choices they make, not on the genes they have. Let me ask you about a different subject which is january 6. I kind of like the subject, youre not responding me. I am not responding to you. I am interviewing you. You just said im white supremacist. Yes, i found that clip disturbing. The language of replacement theory is specifically the language used by whats premises to bring people to their cause. It is then it has been a phrase used by masters. This is why you are it is a phrase that has been used by mass shooters. I asked you how you felt about it. I would like to ask something. I think it is evident to any fair person watching. I guess im trying to give you an opportunity to respond to these things said about you. Does this sound like racist ideology . Are you being serious . Lets talk about something more common. The fbi cause aggressive use of informants. I wonder and the media often picks up these charges and they go right to the story about terror charges and the acquittals dont get that kind of play. You focused a lot on that and i wonder if it has caused you to rethink the fbi treatment of those after 9 11. Yes. And the patriot act and the iraq war. To go back a couple feet, it is really important when you make a mistake to acknowledge it and try to learn from it. This is a process. All of our functional institutions do this. The military issues after action reports. The patriot act, the rush to eliminate core historic Civil Liberties after 9 11 has not been examined and the depth it requires and i dont think it has been enough of a mea culpa. I supported the iraq war. I have apologized very apologized for it, my support of the patriot act. Due process is not just something we have as an added feature, it is central to maintaining a free country and when you get rid of it, you become you move a lot closer. I dont mean this as a gotcha but i think there is still a muslim in jail. These are often people who created stuff on social media and then were recruited by an informant. That should not be allowed. The decision was pretty clear. If your inciting the 1967 freespeech case, i know organizations dont take advantage of it but mine does. We actually have free speech at fox. It is really clear. If you are hurting someone to commit violence, that is not protected. Every thing else is. The idea that hate speech is a real category or it should become criminally prosecutable is insane to me. I think we all feel some commercial restraints. At fox, could you go negative on trump in a really sustained way . Could you support someone else without your audience turning off . When you and everybody else in the American Media we are cheering on a new war with syria and iran for some other insane neocon quagmire that you guys push constantly and trump fell forward and i went after him directly, multiple times on that. You dont have to clear that up. I dont clear anything with anybody. It is just so interesting to me. That is everyone at the New York Times, the Washington Post. I am not trying to silence you but a little bit in this particular bit. But i guess i am curious about your ambitions. These are friends of yours that you still have in washington who are talking about your running for president in 2024 and i am curious what your thought process is around that. I have zero ambition not just politically but in life. My ambition is to write my script and im not just saying that. Anyone who works with me and knows me, i have never wanted power. I am annoyed by things, i want them to change but i had never been motivated by a desire to control people. My instincts are almost all libertarian and if that is true you are not running . I am not running. I enjoy my job. What a blessing it is to say what you really think. Only women can get pregnant. I dare you to say that. I can say that. You did an interview recently with megyn kelly where you talked about your concern about potential civil conflict in this country. To begin with, do you feel that these numbers that gallup has around trump declining in the media, in all institutions, would you feel that you are doing anything to restore that . To push those numbers back up . Yes. I am trying my very hardest to tell the truth. And when i screwed up, i correct it immediately if it is a factual ever with my views on things change, i say so. I dont pretend i used to think that. It is hard for me to lie about it anyway. But i really try my hardest to tell the truth. I mean it. Youre not going to catch me lying. You definitely cast me making mistakes. I do five hours live every week but you will never catch me lying. If you can find an example, threw it at me but i will say everything that i think. There are a lot of truths. I dont tell them all. When i get angry, i do tend to overstate. But i dont lie. I feel that a lot of people live. That is a total lie. You have another tonight. I think the word you used was vulcanization. I watch your show and i think maybe i am wrong but that your audience enjoys it when you pour gasoline on those fires, not when you try to put them out and i wonder if the nature of cable news the rating ratings driven business of cable news, i mean this seriously, i wonder if it makes it impossible to do anything else. I love this. I have been in tv for 27 years. I dont know how to read or write his chart. As anyone who has worked with me. I never look at the rate is, i am not on the rate is email. I dont know what my ratings are. I dont own a tv, that is true. So i am never thinking about this. You know your audience likes. To point out what the people in charge who have all the people to say they are doing wrong and that is pouring gasoline on the fire, for example, the Biden Administration is draining the Strategic Petroleum reserves. They are selling some of it to china. If it is pouring gasoline on the fire to point that out no, it is called journalism. It is every journalists cost job to do to tell the truth. Is there anything you should do . Yes. I will tell you what it is. I am most curious how you think about yourself. That is d racialized things. The scariest thing that can happen to america is to wind up in a country that cleaves along racial lines. We know were that ends and identity politics is the root there. There are people left and right who see you doing that. The most important thing we can do and we should do is d racialized the conversation. The Democratic Party say it is white people and white members as everybody else. That is not true. I have been highlighting is not because i want to help the republican party. I dont ever want to defend the republican party. That does not represent me. I want to point out the divisions are not fundamentally racial. Look at bidens approval numbers. I think it is 24 . You can say that is good news for the republicans. It is good news for america that what is not happening is white people over 50 versus everybody else. You dont want that. That is an unsolvable divide. What you are seeing now is people lining up on the basis of their actual interests. Most economic interests against the people who are hurting them which are the people in charge. We are out of time. I appreciate i am glad you could join us. Thank you. That was fun. Ben smith, thank you, Tucker Colson. I do want to say that these are conversations where some are committed to talking to the whole range of people about this. This is about the solvency of the news industry, we are so pleased to be partnered today, thank you so much jim and john for hosting us, i want to thank all of you for joining us. Thank you to all of you online. Thank you to all of our speakers. Thank you all, a big round of applause for our team. Thank you. And thank you justin smith. Give you a front row seat to democracy. Today President Biden campaigns for the pennsylvania nominees for the u. S. Senate and governor. At a labor day event at a United Steelworkers Union hall in west pennsylvania. Coverage begins at 5 30 eastern on cspan. Cspans washington journal. Everyday we are taking your call, live, on the air on the news of the day and we discussed politics the impact you. Dave leventhal talks about the Ongoing Investigation of potential conflicts of interest. And a look and what is ahead on capitol hill with midterm elections the editorinchief. Watch washington journal cspan live on cspan, cspan now, our live our mobile video app