It is like covering the white house in washington politics. This is just under one hour. Story, that is the next the host of cnns reliable sources, Brian Stelter. Brian thank you very much. There is a lot to talk about, even in reaction to what Kellyanne Conway with a in just a minute ago. With Carrie Budoff brown, next to her, david kirkpatrick, author of the facebook effect, next to me is cecilia vega of abc, senior White House Correspondent of abc, covering the trump administration, joined abc six years ago. Sicilia, Kellyanne Conway said the press is presumptively negative about the man u cover every day. Are you presumptively negative y . Cecilia i am presumptively skeptical. I think we have to both given this administrations relationship with the truth and how tough it is for us to get at that right now. Io we start our day think i can speak for all of us since im in a Briefing Room every day, in a negative manner, absolutely not, but that is not the tone, from my perspective, isour coverage, but my sense this perception that there is an adversarial relationship, much more comes from the white house than it does from our end of the Briefing Room. An adversarial relationship, or they perceive it to be the case. We are just doing our job. I do not think the complaints they have are any different than what the Obama Administration has had about negativity than the Bush Administration or any administration before that. That is the nature of defeat. Brian you say be same defeats but they are louder about it . Cecilia i think so. What about kellyanne was saying what about Jeff Sessions at the border. That was ignored by a lot of outlets. Im not sure why she said it was not covered. What is your perception about that complaint about lack of policy. I covered the Obama White House in 2007 and 2008, and i can guarantee you that i heard the exact same thing from the Obama White House, that politico in particular did not cover policy for her to i was actually a policy reporter covering health care back then, and i would go to them, and i guess i would basically hear the same thing, and sean spicer said this this morning, that they want us to cover policy and not the palace intrigue. The challenge is that the white onse itself is very focused palace intrigue and who is up and who is down. It is not just the press that is engaged in this. Say, like sicilia said, this is a longstanding complaint. We do cover policy at politico itself. We have 125 editors that cover policy alone. All the agencies and departments, that is a Huge Investment and what is going on in this town, and we do that, we give and play, and i would give palacepoint in that the intrigue stories typically do pretty darn well. People are really interested in it knowing what goes on inside this white house, as they were inside the Obama White House. The difference is that this white house really engages with our reporters to talk about what is going on in the white house, and even when spicer and some tryrs really push back and to internally say dont talk to a reporters. Brian is that a euphemism for backstab each other, leaking. Carrie yeah, they say dont talk to reporters, they say it privately, and yeah, dont leak. Talking about the strategy at 100 days. That is a remarkable level of people leaking and talking to us. I do typically ask to all the sources are. Always fascinated jon karl, my colleague at the white house, and i talk about lot. A is seems like every story, the number of sources reported are getting bigger and bigger. Upe Washington Post leaked to 18 sources. It is a sign of how much people are talking. You talk about policy versus palace intrigue, i would say until syria last week, thoroughly percent is out there, 80 , 70 of the content that gets asked about and discussed in these white house briefings is the press corps asking about who is doing what to whom inside the white house and or can you clarify something that the president tweeted about. Self generateds that we are not talking about policy. Brian one more question about this before we talk about the future of news more broadly. The president s media tactic, or earlier, but i want to ask you about you alls perspective, what has the action been like, carrie, with the event them, has it hurt us with our audiences or not . Carrie it has created a more challenging environment. Brian you are talking about the pages. Our people trusting what your reporting . Carrie i dont have the data on that. I definitely feel the pressure of the divided environment, and i setponse to that is how the tone for a newsroom and how we report in reminding our reporters and editors that the rules, the basic rules of journalism still apply, even in an environment where it does not feel normal, it is still absolutely imperative that we conduct ourselves just as journalists would in any era. You verify information, try to get as many sources as possible, you try to be transparent about how we got the information. I believe doing that and adhering to what the basic rules of journalism are, giving people engagingto respond, with them, that does not change. If we do our jobs, as we always are supposed to do, i think that is our best insurance for the longterm. It is a longterm play. We are in a weird environment right now. It may not be like this and 5, 10 years, but what i can do is make sure my newsroom is living up to the standards of journalism that i learned 20, 25 years ago. I think getting as many sources as possible, that is sort of, eight sources, six sources, you want a preponderance of evidence to feel completely confident about what you are putting out. We are under a lot of scrutiny that requires us to respond and be as airtight as possible. Aian a divided world, also connected world, that is the title of the session, wrapping up in morning. View, i wonder how you facebook and other social media impact on the first 100 days. I can setup you are and say the tweets do not matter, that the tweets only matter when abc, cnn, and others d report them. I can also make the case that facebook and twitter allow him to go around the media. How do you see a . Idt . Is thethe bigger point landscape created around facebook and twitter changes everything. This very wellprograms morning started very right not only with a Pulitzer Prize winner but some of you who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting using social media to include his sources i mean, including his audience as his source, and to crie kind of create an elective process. The phenomenal difference of a collective world and my thing is. Hat the participant has aged everything he wants to his fate, and everybody will participate whether you like it or not. Every person in this room has one of these come and when they are on it, they are not just receiving, they are also broadcasting. That changes the landscape. I think trumps tweets matter a lot. The thing that was said in a Journalists Panel about how trumps tweets cannot be responded to, you cannot follow up like you could in a press conference, that is a legitimate complaint in a sense, but on the other hand, if you look at what happened with farenthold, when he used trumps handle in a tweet about his philanthropy, and then trump called him immediately that is you can actually direct a comment to the president in a way that you never could before, and i might argue that is a counterbalancing factor. Regarding Facebook Forces twitter, and you and i have talked about this a little bit it is easy ink washington in particular, and given that we have a president who is so twittercentric to forget that the primary way most people get their information is through facebook, and oddly not just in the united states, increasingly and premuch definitively now on a global level, the primary source of information for people is facebook and all but, like, three or four countries, right . Changet is a big, big that is going to continue to change the landscape, and there a lot more we can say to follow that up. Brian you are saying facebook is the internet and facebook is the news to a degree we may not appreciate. David it is a place where people receive the news, and because it is a twoway medium, it creates a context that is fundamentally new i am a baby boomer. In my lifetime, it is fundamentally new to have the basic ability to react in a position where you formally were just a passive recipient. Reporting that he tweets worry, hot mess, do you you think he double thinks before he tweets . Doubt. without a it goes back to how we started this conversation. The pressure is on all of us now more than ever to not screw up, to get everything right, and twitter as a medium for me is no different than going on the air on world news or nightline or gma, you cannot screw up on twitter, you cannot screw up on air, i cannot screw up on my reporting online. There is no differentiation anymore between the outlet that any of us are on. I wanted to go back to what you were talking about right now, in terms of how the social media. Mpacts us in realtime. Just yesterday in the press briefing when im sure all of us are aware in here, sean spicer made a comment about the holocaust and syria that has rightfully so he made it, it kind of landed in the press briefing. None of us sort of knew what to do with it. It took about five minutes or so. I am looking on my phone, and suddenly, we are seeing on twitter, we are seeing from our news desk that this thing is blowing up, and so we came back around and said, hey, sean, do you want to respond to this . Press in real time at the briefing that that comment was gaining traction, and we gave him the opportunity to respond, and he ended up doing an apology tour all night, it did not do well to him. 0 for him. This white house is struggling with how to deal with this, and it affects our reporting on a second by second basis. That is a fascinating example. We have heard quite a few times this morning that the , by Ari Fleischer in particular. Fox news is the number one cable channel, right . Breitbart. We cannot as i become us as we have without breitbart being included. We are in it was new landscape were there is a broader range of voices in the media generally, and it is because of the internet that has made that possible in general, fox notwithstanding. So that anecdote goes to show the tail is wagging the dog at little bit, as i said. The world is much bigger than the press, and i think the internet has brought in the range of voices dramatically and included literally everybody. Just one final point. There is a professor at harvard who did a study of the media landscape on the internet, and actually, the landscape of the right is bigger than the landscape in the center and on the left. One of the other scary things in the analysis he did was that basically there was almost no communication across the divide, just doing a mathematical analysis, which is very disturbing. Brian is that the biggest story of all . The biggest story is those two alternative realities. Is there anything facebook or other companies can do to heal that because that is a profound wound . A gaping wound. Theyrehat is what asking themselves. Anybody who has read and if you have not read, you should read, Mark Zuckerberg six ordinary 58word essay about a month ago, five weeks ago, where , i think and rightly, egg knowledge that this was a problem brian before we go there, we remind us about november . David i was interviewing him, and he said it is a crazy idea that fake news affected the election, which he has now essentially retracted. Brian so you have seen him him all in the span of a few months . David he involved. I have a lot of respect for Mark Zuckerberg, which is why i wrote a book about him. The guy is extorted married her and there are a lot of extremely conscientious people at facebook or asking themselves what does it mean that we are the fundamental landscape of information dissemination, and what is our responsibility . I think it is healthy that their asking that question, but it is scary for society for all of my respect for the company, that a commercial enterprises in the position of having to make many of the decisions that they are going to have to make about how they prioritize public dialogue, and it is truly a global issue. Just to throw in one data point, there was a great story in the guardian about a week and a half ago about how this fake news problem is in almost every country in germany alone, there are 500 people working for facebook in berlin just combating fake news in german. Brian they are required to buy certain laws, right . David in taiwan, the taiwanese government is worried about what facebook is doing. Im not sure a company should do it, but that is the position we are in. Brian we invited them to be here today, and facebook declined. You are articulated a pretty rapidly evolving position. Ast summer, we do not have responsibility, and now they are starting to think they do have a responsibility. David isi i said, they are very responsible people, and Mark Zuckerberg brian david, they let me post lies, innuendo, and spam whatever i want on facebook. They did not have to do that. It is not that easy to police all 2 billion people in realtime you have to keep that in mind. The platforms should be put on us because we are making them that by using the. Whose fault is anything . Facebook takes the role very seriously. I do not think they have the answers yet for many of the problems. Brian carrie, does an outlet like politico think about writing stories for folks who are in an alternate reality, where pizzagate is real or the pope did endorse donald trump . Carrie did he not endorse and . Him . [laughter] brian too soon. The need toeel report on the facts, and on pizzagate, or if its donald trump claiming he created 600,000 jobs on his watch, writing the story, providing the context on that, that is what we intend to do. We try to set that as our sole mission, but when we are presented with glaring factual inaccuracies, i think we have an obligation to make that clear in the course of our writing and reporting on something. Cecilia it is interesting to watch the evolution of this over the course of the campaign into now, 89tever we are on or something come up Donald Trumps candidacy and presidency, and how we as a media have struggled to correct the record. Brian have we struggled . Do you think it has been cecilia i think it has been. Lets take between on wiretapping, for example brian do we have to . [laughter] cecilia do we have to . At what point, do we say in our story, digital, broadcast, or otherwise, this is not true . Outright this is not true. I think we are at that point where we are doing that. I think it took is a well to get there because there was a sense of is that our job as a media to be Fact Checking every single can we possibly fact check every single thing that we are reporting on . I dont know that we can, but i do think we are doing it much more than we were. Brian it goes from Fact Checking to, like, narrative checking, when he says he created 600,000 jobs, what is he really saying . Carrie for he is going to repeal the law yeah. Brian you could make the case this white house has been pretty conventional. We have heard that word couple of times. Has not been doing live, daily, Facebook Live shows with the president , has not been creating a new form of media through social networks in a way that has been all but disruptive. Would you describe that idea that we have seen some experimentation, but the world has not been flipped on its head in the past 12 weeks . Carrie i agree with that. I think the air are a lot of tools that the white house can be using that the Obama Administration used, reaching out to folks through different platforms, using the white house videos andatus to do their own sort of newsfocused projects. I have not seen that yet trade we are only three months then, it is early going, but we saw i think a more nimble media team under the Obama White House just in terms of using all the possible tools at their disposal. See the typical twitter the fact that sean spicer does do media briefings every day, i think that is a good thing. I support that. But that was something he threatens not to do at the beginning, and he is doing it, i think, because i thought at the time, he threatens not to do that, you get in there, and you realize the power of being able to command an audience for 45 minutes, an hour, and he does he is changing the way that he does he reads off a lot of prepared remarks at the beginning of his briefing to get they aresage, and using that. When the president decided to bomb syria last week, the value of the prestel was real. It was 10 30, 11 a lot and i 11 00e had a prestel at night, and he had a press pool to broadcast what he does. Brian was there anything to learn about night of live coverage, shoddy audio when he did speak, but the cameras were ready . Cecilia which not was this . Brian the night of the syria strikes. Cecilia in terms of technology . Nothing that comes to mind. Brian i was disappointed, the Audio Quality was sort of cecilia certainly brian there were issues with the rushed nature of it. Cecilia i dont know i guess i will give them a little bit of slack on that one, right, it is the first time anything like this is happened, he was at maralago. Yeah, they have got to get the technology together. That is not the biggest offense in the world. I think just in terms of coverage, this white houses policy, when it comes to military action, we will tell you about it after the fact, essentially. I think that will be a struggle Going Forward in terms of our reporting. News, writfuture of large come at the white house and beyond, david, what , andctions do you share what we see happen between now and, say, 2020, when we are all talking about reelections . , aid i think anybody politician with a head on her shoulders, should be emulating donald trump as much as they can is forces twitter and social media presence. It has served him well. It is a major differentiator from anybody who came before him, obviously, that he tweets so much, and as Kellyanne Conway said khamenei has a direct pipeline, channel to his audience. Frankly, Group Leaders should do that from now on. One of the ironies about the Obama Administration that many of us in the tech world were critical of, but he got elected because of social media, and then once he got in office, basically there was not in evidence to speak of. He did not use it to govern, he did not use it to marshal a community of support for his policies once he was in office, and trump is definitely doing that. Whatever you say about the briefing, which is totally not my world, which has been discussed a lot up here today, what happens in the white house Briefing Room, it is a little bit beside the fact that this point because there is another andof channels that exists, ultimately, media is going to have to operate more in those channels than in the old one. I really do think there has been especially when i heard paul Ari Fleischer talk, it is very sentimental. Brian were you in the Briefing Room . Carrie yes and no. As a reporter from the journalistic perspective, we need that Briefing Room, and there is a huge value for both sides of this. Sure, the president can circumvent the media as much as viawants to be a twitter twitter, but you cannot get a and 140 on syria characters maybe he will do it now and prove me wrong, but i want to say in terms of us Going Forward, to me, the mission in terms of reporting in this administration and beyond is no different than it was when i started my career, and for all of my colleagues that came before me, it is the truth, it it matters now more than ever, and we just cannot screw up trying to get there. It is stay in your lane and do your job and it is no than it wasw 20, 30, 40 years ago. Brian if you say it is no different, that means you think it is enough, reporting the truth, being clear on air is enough . Cecilia as opposed to what . What is the alternative . David it is not an alternative, but in addition is celebrating and including the diversity of voices that now exist that were not available before. Truth is all fine and good, and i believe in it, believe me, but it is a new landscape, and if you do not recognize that and operate accordingly, and farenthold is the opera ultimate proof point of you will not do that well. Carrie, how is politico changing to adapt to what we are talking about regular . Carrie it is an intensive all the stories, a impact, we are looking for new audiences, new forms of storytelling, new platforms to get that message out, thinking about the diversity of my newsroom, not only racial and gender diversity but geographic diversity, political diversity. That was important as well. And i think there is is also a time when i have spent a lot of time talking with reporters about how they are doing. Owners and folks have gotten threats and things mailed to they are in ad very difficult time doing their job, and that can wear on a newsroom, and i have to be conscious of that and make sure iat as an editor come am also an apologist for some folks and monitoring the room to see how people are doing. It is a different environment than the white house i covered, and they are doing their important work. It can be adversarial, but there stories of the white house is that is a good thing. We have got to stick to the principles, be above board. We are nonpartisan. What youre describing is evolution, not revolution. It doesnt sound like any revolutionary changes. I sort of agree with cecilia. Wrap myays trying to brain to think what more we can be doing and having those i cansations, seeing how do the journalism we do in this environment. Behind are not getting in some way. I think we are all grappling with that. Bret cecilia, i wanted to wrap up to go back to the title of the event this morning. The First Amendment is invoked right in the title. I think we could make the case that there has not been the illegal and other kinds of threats against press freedom that some may have feared before inauguration day. Right, not yet. Know that they will come or that they wont come, but there were threats before, and he was very clear. Somebody tweeted on my facebook trump i was president would carry out with his threats to improve the libel laws in this country and kick you out of the white house. Look bret you dont reply, do you . No, its why i dont check my facebook. It could happen, it may. I dont know that it will. Part of my job is to hold the president accountable for the things he has said early on in his campaign that got him into office. I think the breitbart reporter that was on the stage earlier raises one of the most important points of covering his presidency. There is a huge swath of this country that elected donald trump because they want libel laws to be strengthened, a border wall to be built. We have to hold him accountable and ask questions about those promises as well as the ones he is making now and not following on. We will see, i guess. I have given up predicting. Kerry, as a First Amendment lawyer, im sure you talked about some of these issues before inauguration day. Maybe more on alert than in the past. Is there anything to say so far about how things have gone . Theres a lot of awareness of leak investigations. Theres a lot of education going aboutd my top editors, more leakility of investigations, and preparing now for how we can protect ourselves and our sources. How you talk to sources, what you agree to do. A lot of offensive discussions about how we can protect with the now assumptions we receive more leak investigations out of this white house. That is what we are hearing. Bret there are Technological Solutions proposed for leak investigations. New software that people are using that are perhaps safer. Some of these secretive, highly encrypted messaging systems. Tools that can be used to evade a lot of things these days. Bret are we more divided or more connected in this world . I think we are more connected. Political division is a function think, atedness and, i function of the proliferation of voices. Voices have come to the surface that were suppressed before. That part of what trump himself is saying and breitbart is saying. In the long run, i think that is healthy even though i dont agree with those voices. Bret the president and the press have in common reckoning with the ability to hear from everybody at all times. To the panel, thank you very much. Thank you for being here, and thank you all. [applause] that was great. To close out this great morning, we turn to one of the wise men of washington journalism. Just has he closed out face the common r bottle thoughtful commenting. He shares thoughts on where we go from here and how we might knew better. A special treat to welcome him back to the museum. Ands a cbs news contributor has spoken to the nation for decades about what is happening and how to make sense of it. He has been thinking a lot recently about the future of news, and that is the topic of his fifth book entitled overload, finding the truth in news, that will be published this fall. Is a pleasure to welcome bob back. [applause] thank you so much. Thank you also much for being here. I want to congratulate you on your bladder control. [applause] i understand a lot of you have been here since 8 30 this morning. I am greatly honored thats that there is still somebody there. Good advice is like news. Is where you happen to find it. I want to start this talk with some of the best advice i ever got. I did not get it in my 60 years as a reporter on the job. I did not get it at a journalism school. I got it at an art school, second only to my love of journalism is my love of art. Back in the day when i was struggling to find my artistic style, and art instructor gave me some of the best advice i ever got on anything. He said, look, stop worrying about your style. Just find an artist that you really like and copy him. Copy everything he does. If you do that, you will understand how he resolved the problems, and your own style will evolve out of that. So i went to tell you this morning, if there are any aspiring reporters, News Executives who are wondering, what is it that a reporter is supposed to do . What is the role of the journalist . I say this. Get the story that David Baron Paul wrote about how he covered the campaign and copy every single thing that he did. If you do that, you will be just fine. That is the best advice i can give you this morning. I really enjoyed the discussion. I thought the Previous Panel was one of the most pertinent of the morning. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Brian Stelter and his crew. It was quite good. I have been asked to try to put all of this in some context. 14th president ial campaign. I will say this, it was not like the others. [laughter] normally, a campaign has some slogan that always comes to mind when you think of a campaign or that reminds you of a campaign. Nixon is the all the way with lbj. What i remember from this came campaign was, have you ever . And i will say no. I have never seen anything like this campaign. I said so often during the campaign that it became a tricky game among my younger colleagues drinking game among my younger colleagues at cbs. We had a lot of designated drivers. [laughter] this was truly a Campaign Like no other. Theas a campaign where, for first time in a long time, money didnt seem to matter. Just ask jeb bush about that. For the first time in modern history, the two parties nominated candidates that a majority of people neither liked nor trusted. That parts got more attention than Foreign Policy and attitude often counted more than facts with voters. Campaign that provoked the former speaker of the house ted cruzner to brand. Lucifer in the flesh the devil worshiper society challenge that and said not true, he is not one of us. [laughter] is true, you can look that up. This was, in my opinion, the Worst Campaign i ever covered, and perhaps the first of my life the worst of my life. The biggest winner was this massive Cottage Industry that has grown up around our political campaigns. Once again this year, a lot of people made a whole lot of money. I dont know what the voters got out of it, but they did very well. Some of us were pleased with the outcome, some were cast in despair, but i think the overall emotion felt by most people on Election Night was one of surprise, even among the trump people, who i am told on Good Authority that their own pollsters gave them a 20 chance of winning. They were surprised, too. Inse of us in the prize the press were roundly criticized. We should always take criticism seriously and learn from it. There were lessons to be learned this time. We must also keep in mind that this is nothing new. All thempaign has its fault of the media phase. We were the pointyheaded intellectuals who couldnt park our bicycles straight when George Wallace ran, and this year they hung some less clever but really nasty names on us. This is all part of the job. It is something that we all know about and expect. Is not to be taken seriously. As talk about this years criticism. For the press was accused of electing trump because we gave him so much exposure. Then we were accused of missing the story because we did not taken seriously. We were said to not really make much difference because trump used social media to go around us. Can picks said, you your own adventure here, but all three of those things simply cannot be true. And they are not. , opinion clearly stated, is that trump won because he played by new rules, broke all the old rules, and his opponent played by the old rules. This is sort of obvious in retrospect, but as Sherlock Holmes said, most things are , heous in retrospect understood that if he offered himself to enough television programs, he would be invited to be on some of them. That is precisely what happened. Saysagree with those who that hosts didnt push back. , butpushed back many times he was going on so many programs exposurethat the overwhelmed the pushback. While people were pushing back on something he said yesterday, he was already on another program laying out new allegations. Whether he knew it or not, he was practicing the political strategy that was first identified by an australian political consultant. He called it the dead cap theory the dead cat theory. No matter what conversation people are having at a dinner party, if you throw a dead cat in the middle of the table, the conversation immediately turns to the dead cat. Donald trump through cats dead and alive on the table every time the narration went this way, and suddenly the attention back on what he was talking about, and was on him. I think it contrast, the campaign of his opponent hillary ,linton did it the old way concentrated on fundraising and controlling the narrative. In other words, never leave your candidate in a position of having to answer a question that does not fit the theme of the day. Limit live interviews, respond to old questions with well rehearsed focus group tested answers. After trump had been on morning joe a number of times, i called him up and asked, why dont you ever had Hillary Clinton on . She said, getting an interview with Hillary Clinton is like getting an interview with mother teresa. In a way, that sums up this whole campaign and what happened. That was the story of the campaign. By the time the other candidates understood what was happening, it was simply too late. People were disgusted with the gridlock, with politics as usual, with both parties. The number of people who know it is as democrats and republicans is at an alltime low. People didnt like the choice, but they want to change. Maybe it was no more complicated than what former first lady hadara bush had used mused early in 2015 when she was urging her son just not to run. She said that people r were people were tired of kennedys and clintons and bushes. I found no one who said they needed more information before deciding which one to vote for or against. In that sense, and i believe that is some evidence that perhaps that those of us in the press did our jobs. Really, there are some serious lessons to be learned here. I think too much information made its way on the national conversation. Once it got there, it was difficult to remove. We have to be quicker from now on and more vigorous in challenging what we all came to know as fake news. Only now are we beginning to understand the danger that it poses, and only now are the big Distribution Companies we heard aboutpanies, we heard facebook, only now they are recognizing many to take some responsibility to what the information is they are distributing. They are news media companies, just like cbs news and the Washington Post and the New York Times. They are going to have to find a better way to do that, too. In an effort to show ballots, show balance, i think too many strategists made their way onto television and were given pharma credibility given far more credibility than they deserved. I saw someone on television say republican or democratic strategist. What does that mean . They put out yard signs in the Previous Campaign . Didnt take long to listen to the to understand they had no understanding and no contact with either of the candidates, but there they were. I think for whatever reason, perhaps to add drama to increase rates, we tended to make too much of slight changes in the polls. We talked about one candidate or another leading by a single point, when in fact the shifts in those polls were well within the margin of error. There is no such thing as a onepoint lead in any poll. I think we also placed too much faith in general in polling. The truth is, pulling is simply not as good as it once was, where respondents were once honored to be a part of polls. Now people want nothing to do with pollsters. Artan, fewer than 10 of people polled now are willing to actually talk to a pollster on the phone. That raises really serious questions. I dont care how you write these polls. What did the 90 of people who refused to talk to a pollster, how do you determine what it is they had to say . The harvard historian who writes for the new yorker told me something i found fascinating. She said we are tending to look on poll data as some sort of higher truth. She brought up and stretching point she brought up an interesting point. With so many closing News Organizations with shrinking staffs, too many times we are replacing the reporting and met on the street interviewing as News Organizations dont have the people to do it anymore with polling data. We are replacing it with what many News Organizations used to do. It go to the local pta meeting, the local bar, talk to people and say, how do you feel about this . 20 really think about it . Surprisingly, the dean of of pollingrica agreesica said that he with what she said. He told me that we have started thinking in statistics and dynamics and analytics, and that just doesnt work because analytics will tell you certain things. They will tell you where people shop, what movies they like, but they dont tell you what is in peoples hearts. That is something that i think we in the media need to take to heart. When you to get back to knocking on doors and asking people how they feel. Yes, we want polling to back it up. But we need face to face dissipation facetoface participation and checking on people within these communities. What really complicated this whole situation was that all of thisbeing played out campaign, which was the most unusual i can recall, in midst of a technical revolution that has had a profound effect not only on how we get news, but on our entire culture. The web gives us access to more information than any people who have ever lived on this earth at any one time had ever had access to. But are we just overwhelmed with information, so much we cant process it . Or are we wiser . I think at this point we are probably just overwhelmed with so much information we can deal with it. The web gives us this unbelievable access, but there are some downsides. For one thing, the nets can all find each other now. [applause] the nuts can all find each other now. [laughter] what your attitude is coming you can find someone out there who agrees with what youre thinking. Of it false bye design, can go around the world in a millisecond. And it is simply going to have to be dealt with. Alsooming of digital has thrown local newspapers into a downward economic spiral from which many are not going to recover. We lost 126 newspapers in this country over the last 10 years. Other newspapers are down so thin that your water bill is probably thicker than the local newspaper some people are getting in their communities. This has had a huge impact on politics, how politicians campaign, how people are finding out who is running. I think, unless we find some do whathat can somehow we have always expected of local newspapers, we are going to have irruption in this country not just in politics, but corruption in general in a letter we have never seen in this country. This is the great crisis in journalism right now. Is that some of the bigger News Organizations, especially the New York Times and the washing the Washington Post are finding ways to exist in this new landscape. They are no longer just newspapers publishing a paper every day. 24 7have become multiplatform News Organizations that provide breaking news, video coverage, running ,ommentary, websites newsletters, podcasts. They are looking for more and more ways to reach people. The good news is, this is working. While circulation of the paper newspapers is down, during november of this last year, both the times and the post in one month reaching as many as 70 million viewers. 70 Million People were reading or finding some contact with those News Organizations. Organizationss executives will tell you that while this technology is giving them great reach, their viability will still depend on whether they are giving news that people need to improve their lives. , if you cano that make your News Organization relevant by providing information that people have to have, then they will survive. There must be new concentration on that by all News Organizations as we go forward. At the local level, many of the things that these big newspapers have figured out how to do, they can be a pattern for News Organizations at the local level. At cbs news, for example, we now have inaugurated a 24 hour all News Streaming Network that you get on your phone or laptop or computer. You dont get it on your Television Set unless you go through hulu or one of those organizations like that. Duringh killed both political conventions last summer, we would sometimes have more people looking at that that were watching cbs news on the television network. Ways, and we will find a way to accommodate. Now were a place here the world was after the invention of the printing press. Martin luther said it was gods extremist, greatest gift. But it took a while for the world to work its way through that. There were also 30 years of religious wars after the invention of the printing press. Eventually, equilibrium was reached. We are in another period much like that. Equilibrium has not yet been reached, but we have to recognize where we are. A lot to close by talking up close bya lot to talking about news in this very different world. What is the role of the individual journalist . It is what it has always been. ,e are not the Opposition Party as someone have you believe, nor do we believe we are, nor is it our place to sit down and shut up and let the world pass by, as some have wished that we would do. , governmentans officials, and journalists all have very different roles. The politicians are there to run the campaigns, government officials there to run the government. They are there to deliver a message. Our job is simply to check out the message, determine if it is true, and if so, what will be its impact on the government . In a metallic aryan society, there is only one source of news in a totalitarian society, there is only one source of news, the government. In our society, and independent press others information and provided to the citizens, and they can take that information, compare it to the government version of events, and then decide what to do about it. Those who would underline our are, quite honestly, undermining the foundations of this country and what it was founded on. Remember, and never hold ourselves out to be the exclusive source of wisdom or morale of the. We are not or morale at the. Or morality. We are not. Nor are we the most popular people in the room. But that is what the founders intended. Is as vital to our form of government as the right to vote. I have been a reporter for 60 years, and i have never been prouder of my profession that i am today. Thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up sunday morning, former ambassador to morocco and mideast advisor to president willr might ginsburg examine the trump administrations policy towards syria and tensions with russia. Dean chang of the Heritage Foundations Asian Studies Center joins us to talk about the rising tensions with north korea over its nuclear program. And David Wasserman will discuss growing partisan outcome among congressional districts at the president ial level and preview the battle for the house in 2018. Be sure to watch cspans washington journal, line at 7 00 a. M. Eastern sunday morning. Join the discussion. Announcer cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Tonight on cspan, a look at recent discoveries outside our solar system. Then, a discussion on genetically modified foods. And later, a rally from earlier today and washington, d. C. On President Trump to release his tax returns. Earlier this year, nasa announced the discovery of seven distant planets, some of which showed lifesustaining characteristics. , scientists from the space agency should ever next, scientists from the space agency share their findings. Felicia good afternoon. We are live at nasa headquarters. We have some exciting