I will be the moderator. It is tough. I like to talk a lot, but i will hold back. We have a distinguished panel which i will introduce in a bit. Very quickly, we just came from and all morning session with experts in the private sector, academica, and the public sector, talking about the issues of populism in global politics. The objective there was to do some, basically, conceptual gardening or we didnt or weeding. What is populism . What are we seeing in the world . Is what we are seeing similar or different . And what are the applications for policy, business, and outcomes were generally . This afternoon, we are going to look at the same things, but with a reduced crew. Before we do that, what i want to do, what were going to do in two parts ben smith will be introduced in a second and give a quick keynote. And then he will sit down as one of the panelists and will go in, and i will throw up a couple of softballs that everyone is prepared for initially. We will have a back and forth. We will list a bit. I like living. Bit, and thenf a open up to a general discussion. Hopefully, it will be rich this afternoon. Very quickly, my name is cliff young. I wear two hats right now. On the one hand, i am an adjunct professor here. I teach a course that is going on the fifth year around Public Opinion and Decision Makers. On the other san other hand, i am a professional pollster and president of ipsos public affairs, the thirdlargest polling outfit in the world. We have boots on the ground in 90 countries and we are pulling everywhere here, u. K. , brexit, in europe, very interesting. I will be the moderator. Our keynote talk will be ben smith, editor in chief of buzz feed. He has a long bio, but a quick note. He is one of the most talented mongers in the game. I do not think i have to go into too much detail. Buzz feed is in the thick of it in the politics of the u. S. And abroad, because they are reporting on things outside the u. S. Now as they expand globally. He will kick it off by talking about journalism, the role of journalism, politics, and populism, which i believe he has entitled journalistic populism. Without much more introduction, ben smith. [applause] ben thanks, cliff. , but you did not give me a heads up on the softball questions. Ask for having me. If i wanted to talk broadly about populism, and i thought that was a dangerous they before i know what are talking about in that regard. I am just a reporter. I know a little bit about a lot. But the things that i do i have been spending a lot of time thinking about how you do reporting in this moment, and the thing that prompted this, my thoughts on this buzz feed was recently accused of practicing journalistic populism. It came up after we published a dossier of unverified claims about donald trump in russia, which we presented as unverified, with clear errors, and what we knew about its source. And a column in the post took us to task for this and described it as journalistic populism, the notion that the beltwaymanhattan cocktail set should not keep information away from the american people. Which i think actually echoes some of the antielitism that people find disturbing and populism, globally, the sense of the people versus this shadowy elite. But it is also, i think, what we certainly believe. And in this moment, when there is this real crisis of trust in theory of this, which i think is not the same as a lot of others, is that the way you get that trust back is to think about how you get closer to your audience, how you can persuade accurately persuade your audience that you are on their side of whatever perceived divide this is, rather than sort of standing above them as gatekeepers. Simplest level, that means we do know a lot more about our audience, and what they are interested in, and what they want him and then we ever did all this data people are probably tired of hearing about. Think the kind of transparency the post is talking about is really crucial to that, to winning back that trust, the promise that we are not keeping secrets from you, that we do not pretend to be part of a journalistic priesthood or , and we do not fundamentally see our role as gatekeepers. I thought i would talk for a couple of minutes on what we in this populist moment see as journalistic populism, and what it is. I will not go on for too long, so people will be, why will this panel just shut up. Facingly, the media is the same crisis of institutional competence i know you have all talked about at length, and. Tudied the numbers in gallup are at an alltime low interest in the media. And the question of what the media is is very confusing. President obama and trump, certainly trump, the list a lot directly themselves on video, on twitter. And audiences have segregated themselves into these filter bubbles, where they read what they want to read, which feeds their biases. I think the reaction for a lot of legacy media has been too kind of retreat and look backward, to say, to look back to an era when they were the gatekeepers, to say, we have these trusted brands. Trust us. Go back to these brands. We are going to put these dark slogans on our brands. And trust us because you trust our brand. There is an argument to this. It makes sense in this chaos for readers and viewers to turn to things they are familiar with and names they trust, which are largely serving them behind payrolls paywalls. I think that has been broadly great for journalism, the revival of the Washington Post, be great story of the last few years in media. It is something everybody is excited about. Their Israel Energy at cnn that is broadly incredibly exciting. Think it fully addresses the vast majority of the country who are not watching cable news and subscribing to publications behind payrolls. Feed news, we do not have the luxury of saying, trust brand. Old read the buzz feed news your parents and grandparents read. We feel like the path toward winning Peoples Trust in this chaotic environment, this fromted environment, comes transparency and fighting for our audience on issues they care about. The first thing is that transparency has been a disaster for media in many ways. In the old days, when there was a crime or breaking news stories, if you were in a newsroom, as i was, it would be a total mess. You would be sending reporters to the wrong house, have the wrong name, have the details of the crime wrong, but once you went to publication a few hours later, you would mostly have straightened it out. Now, all that happens in public. The audience says, these people are under idiots. Of course, we were always idiots. It is that now it is more evident. But that theyre seeing that mess in real time, i think, has made it harder to maintain this idea that journalists are this separate class, with this specialized set of skills that allow them to detect the truth in a means you do not have. Newso i think a lot of organizations are wrestling with the idea, what do you do in that situation . Andou try to help navigate engage this chaotic, messy information coming out of a breaking news story, or do you stay silent and wait until you have got it nailed down . I think different organizations take different approaches to that. For us, we know our audience is living in this social media space, where there is constant as soon as something explodes, there is things we know that are true, things we know that are false, stories kicking around that we do not know which are which. And the thing we find useful is to do our best to help them navigate that space, to say to them, we know this thing is false. We know this thing is true. This is a widely repeated claim. Here is what we know about where it comes from. And we will guide you through this story. And i think that is true on nonbreaking stories. Spending time on twitter and facebook, there is an enormous amount of garbage and false stories. In 2016, it was a lot about Hillary Clinton. Now, a lot of you are seeing nonsense about donald trump and russia in your feeds, along with carefully reported true stories. And i think we have always thought that the way to engage and win the trust of our readers is to help them navigate the stuff they are seeing, not to try to keep our hands clean. Thisled us to stories like group of macedonian teenagers who are filling the internet with false stories about Hillary Clinton last year. It was a crazy story. And i do think that when we think about journalistic populism, it is about that you do not have a special knowledge that sets you apart from your audience. And then the other thing, when we think about what kind of populist journalism wins Peoples Trust i think it will not ultimately be about politics. There is no more poisoned and partisan space. The stuff where we feel like we have the deepest connection with our audience are things like a big investigation of a Mental Hospital chain with hundreds of thousands of people. Thoseen they connect with stories, when they see something exposed that touches their lives and feels real and apart from the social media screaming match that is where we sort of find trust. I think there are two other things that this populism is not. In thisthat also, moment when journalism is changing as much as politics one is telling people what they want to hear, regardless of the truth. It is obviously a huge opportunity, and a kind of sugar high. We are hopeful by holding back from those, by deep by debunking things people want to be true, that you win longterm credibility and they feel like you are serving them. The other is really abandoning the idea of professionalism entirely. The criticism of us in publishing the russia dossier was that we would publish any tip, any piece of information that came. A document, that was affecting Decision Makers at the highest level of power, and the subject of a real debate. Note, onne final editor i admire who runs a major global news organization, said he expects journalists to suspend their citizenship to be journalists, because they need to pull back from whatever country they happen to be from in order to follow an abstract set of journalistic values. And i feel like that is, particularly in this moment, but probably always, sort of a trap. American journalism is always basically very patriotic as a business. And we think the audience , and expects reporting as a factor of improving on imperfect country. I think reporters should not be afraid to say that. Ask for letting me share those thoughts. I look forward to having them debunked by experts. [applause] cliff thank you, ben. And by the way, we are being livestream to. And we are being taped by cspan, which will be on tape delay. We will take some of those frames later on. I think we are going to debate the role of the media in todays world. Low levels of trust in media we just showed a global poll that on average in 25 countries, 27 of global Citizens Trust the media. That is even lower right now then donald trump. He has Higher Credibility ratings than the media does. Ultimately, can we think of institutions, in this case journalism or media, as having a populist strategy to attract readers and users . We talked about that a lot this morning. Introduce a panel. I will ask a couple questions. We are going to riff on that. Ben smith, already introduced. Isting next to been gonzales, professor of latin american studies at john hopkins. He is an expert on latin america and will bring that sort of perspective. We have some people from the private sector, some experts from academia, different regions of the world. We can kind of mix it up to have a good and interesting perspective on the issue of populism. Sitting next to francisco is sh professor of Political Science at columbia university. Her expertise is europe. She has written a lot on issues of populism and politics there. She will bring us that sort of perspective. All of them had wonderful comments this morning. Hopefully, we will glean that out this afternoon. Finally, our last panelist is christopher garman, managing director at Eurasia Group. It is country analysis, emerging markets. He is an elite analyst on brazil. He works with sector clients. He is a practitioner, as is ben. Interestingg emergingmarket and practitioner perspective as it comes to the issues of populism. Let me do the following. Let me kind of initially throw out i do not know if they are softballs. I thought they were. I will throw out some general questions, and we will go from there. Listen we were surprised by the u. S. Election. Im a professional pollster. We thought there was a probability of trump winning, but it surprised us. The question is, is what we are seeing in the u. S. , in europe, brexit, Continental Europe perhaps with france is this new . Is this Something Different . Are we entering a new era of politics and drivers of politics . Or is this just more of the same . It is more of an empirical question. Im a pollster. I want people to comment on that. New. Ink it is something it walks like a duck. It like a duck. Maybe it is a duck. Maybe it is Something Different. Thecept of populism term populism has been thrown out a lot by journalists to explain what is going on. We think it is a duck. It walks like a duck. It talks like a duck. But we are not quite sure what it is. If we are really seeing emerging different, drivers in terms of politics, is that populism . More specifically, what is populism . I would like to try this afternoon to nail down those points. What is populism on the one hand . And is what we are seeing new and different . We will kind of work backward. We will start with chris. We will let everyone talk first, and then we will go from there and see where we are. Chris . Chris thank you, cliff. First of all, i want to thank the opportunity to be on this panel. It is great to participate with such a prescient and highly relevant discussion, given what is going on in the world. Cliff highlighted, i work at Eurasia Group. We are a advisory firm. In the interface between speaking with policymakers on the one hand, and business, and elites, and Fund Managers on the other. I have been at Eurasia Group for this deal. Avigating i will say at the get go that i have never, in my 12 years at the firm, had a sense in which the political establishments are so uneasy on the terrain at which they are stepping on. We see this on multiple levels. Obviously, we had one moment, which was we had a very favorable Global Economic environment, leading up to the Global Financial crisis in 2008, 2009. We had tremendous uncertainty over the sanctity of the eurozone project, and a lot of our clients were asking us, and towere on the hook anticipate whether or not we were headed toward a breakup of the eurozone. Our view at the time was markets underestimated the appreciation of political elites, and political elites were running the game. But what we are seeing here today is something entirely different. I would say, to answer your softball question are we seeing something new, Something Different in terms of underlying Voter Sentiment . I think the answer is unequivocally yes. We have very good Public Opinion data. We have got fantastic data. We did not coordinate that before the event. Discontent toward the political establishment, distrust one Political Institutions, distrust with international institutions, be it the European Union or the imf , distrust with big business has never been running as high as it is today. Look at some of the global and cliphas done, already highlighted some of the data points on the media. 20 of those surveys in Something Like 35 countries said they actually trust the media. But you will range from issues do you believe that traditional parties and politicians do not care about people like me . 64 agree with that statement, that the economy is rigged to the advantage of rich people. 68 agree with that statement. A strong leader to take it back from the rich and powerful, 64 . The demand and distrust with established institutions, demand for antiestablishment candidates, is running inordinately high. Fodder for creating political entrepreneurs to tap into that discontent. What we at the Eurasia Group spend a lot of time is, to think, what are the repercussions of this . The repercussions are profound. There is a debate in the beltway over whether the Trump Administration will represent a radical shift with traditional republican parties, and the constraints you can have in pushing through legislation at congress and there are large constraints. There is a withdrawal from multilateral commitments. We are seeing a breakdown of the institutions that emerge after the Second World War on the multilateral security frameworks , multilateral economic frameworks, the European Union slowly chipping away. We are having a realignment of Political Parties across the board. I think an important debate that we only to tackle is, understand the nature of that discontent. What is driving it . Is it economic applications . Something about Technological Advancements in globalization that is driving discontent . Is that discontent going to continue to grow or not . I think it is transformative. I shoe to drop may be the emerging markets and if you look at the level of discontent we have a big elections calendar coming up. In a lot of emerging markets, including latin america, next year. I think latin america will be part of the debate in this time in about a year from now. Let me see if i can briefly address some of your questions and recap some of the stuff we discussed this morning about the question of populism actually is. We spend a lot of time discussing it this morning. The group i was part of basically emphasized two characteristics of populism that we felt needed to be stressed. That first most obvious one is inherent in the term of the idea of the people and th