 Hello, and welcome to Domena Nicelius Library at Fairfield University. First requisite reminder to turn off your cell phones, if you haven't done that already. My name is Jeremiah Mercurio, I'm the Senior Reference Librarian and Instruction Coordinator here. And the library is grateful for the opportunity to host this event today and to welcome such a large crowd interested in the topic of fake news. Having looked for other spaces on campus in which to hold this event, we know how many congruent events are running today. So we're especially grateful that you've chosen to join this conversation. I'm especially gratified to be holding the event here in the library because the issue of fake news and alternative facts strikes at the very heart of what librarians do. While historically viewed as gatekeepers of information, we as a profession have shifted much attention to teaching our communities how to evaluate and understand an ever-expanding and increasing complex information ecosystem that exists beyond the library. We aim to give users tools for understanding information, not just to deliver it. But this aim rests on assumptions about truth and objectivity that are being undermined by the phenomenon of fake news and its growing use by politicians as a term to describe any news that's displeasing or that challenges one's ideology. This concern about the threat posed by fake news is shared not just by those on the left. Many voices from the right have spoken up about their concerns. Notable among these is Charlie Sykes, a conservative former radio talk show host who recently decried his role in delegitimizing mainstream news, and in his words, destroying much of the right's immunity to false information. The new editor of the weekly standard, Stephen F. Hayes, has also called this skepticism about universal truth, perhaps understatedly, a problem for our democracy. Forming a bulwark against this threat to our democracy are not just librarians, but also professional journalists, teachers, and scholars, and we're fortunate to be joined by a panel of these experts from the various sectors I mentioned today. And they're graciously going to share with us their insights about what this problem is and think through some possible solutions to the problem. Many people have contributed in putting this event together. The library would like to thank our co-sponsors, Fairfield Center for Faith and Public Life, the Communication Department, the Digital Journalism Program within the English Department, and the Politics Department. The university's marketing and communication team has provided invaluable assistance in facilitating this event, and I extend special thanks to Jennifer Anderson, to Susan Sipolaro, Alison Wade, Eric Meyerhofer, and Alistair Hyatt, also to Casey Timoney for helping us with the filming, among the library staff to whom I'd like to express my deep gratitude are my co-organizers, Jackie Kramer, Barbara Gallardi, and Matt Bernstein, also to Matt Blaine and Robert Hoyt for promotional and technical support, as well as to our director Brent May and the rest of the library staff. Lastly, I'm grateful to our panelists for their participation, to David Gutalunas for moderating, and to Jesse Erickson for providing introductions. We're streaming this event live on the university's Facebook page. For those on Twitter, we're using the hashtag DNL fake news or just hashtag fake news. We also welcome the Connecticut television network to us today, who is also broadcasting the event. After Jesse's introductions, Professor Gutalunas will kick off our conversation with questions for the panel. At approximately five o'clock, we're going to field questions from our in-person audience. Matt and Barbara will be running around the room with handheld mics and from Facebook live. It is now my pleasure to introduce Jesse Erickson, who is editor-in-chief of the emeritus now of the student newspaper, The Mirror, has helped increase the newspaper's online presence, and she's a senior marketing major currently looking for jobs in business to business marketing firms in the Boston area, Hentent. Thank you so much. All right, so as he said, my name is Jesse Erickson. I'm the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Fairfield Mirror, and today I have the pleasure of introducing our panelists as well as our moderator. Okay, so our first panelist here is Abang Udama. He is WSHU's senior political reporter. He regularly contributes spot news to NPR and has worked at the NPR national news desk as a part of NPR's diversity initiative. Abang has covered presidential visits and high-profile political races. He has also reported on several state and municipal corruption trials in Connecticut, including one that led to the resignation of former Governor John Rowland. He keenly follows developments with Native American tribes in Connecticut and has produced an award-winning feature in the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. He recently returned from his native country of Nigeria, where he spent a year helping to establish the International Media Network. During his time there, he trained and managed local reporters and covered major stories, such as the presidential election in Nigeria and the government's offensive against Boko Aram. Prior to joining WSHU in 1994, he was an award-winning reporter with the Connecticut Post. Next we have Dr. Gayle Alberta. She joined Fairfield University in 2016 as an assistant professor of politics and public administration. She teaches undergraduate American political science courses and graduate courses in public administration. She has worked on numerous campaigns, including State House, City Council, Governor, President, and U.S. Senate races in multiple states. She often serves as a political analyst for the media. She comments on local, state, and national politics and elections for local, regional, national, and international print and broadcast media. She has appeared in the Washington Post, Al Jazeera America, Bloomberg, Voice of America, Associated Press Radio, Des Moines Register, and many others. Next panelist is Matt Tullis. He is an assistant professor of English and digital journalism at Fairfield University. His areas of focus are narrative journalism as well as convergent journalism entrepreneurial journalism. He previously worked as a daily newspaper reporter for ten years, culminating in time at the Columbus Dispatch as an enterprise reporter and features writer. He is the host and producer of Gang Reed the Podcast, which focuses on narrative journalism and the reporters who write it. His book, Running with Ghost, a Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer, will be available later this summer. Next is Melissa Zimdarz. She is an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College. She primarily researches television programming, communication policies, and global media industries. Recently, she began working with a team of librarians and computer programs to create tools for navigating fake news and other news websites to the Open Sources Project. Additionally, she is working on a co-edited anthology titled Fake News, which brings together scholars who study media literacy, big data, and technology, cultural studies, political science, and psychology in order to examine the history and contemporary realities of fake misleading, propagandistic, and conspiratorial news. And now we have our moderator, and I'll get his name right, David Gutalunez. He is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication Arts and Media. His research focuses on emerging media technology and communication industries. And now I'd like to turn this over to him. Great. Thank you all. And I promise we're going to hear from the panelists. And then I want to get into some interactive conversation with you all out there. If we play our cards right, we can get a mean tweet from the president by then to tonight. I'm also, you know, the library staff, they're really great, and they put together a list of questions for me to start with. And you know the library staff put together questions because they sourced everything. There's links, there's references, so I'm not going to get to all of that, but trust me when I say this is a well-prepared document. You know, I wanted to start in asking the panel, and we'll start with Yvonne and kind of just go down the line. You know, I was reading Dana Boyd, the Internet scholar, recently argued that we're in an information war, you know. And fake news is just one part of this larger battle that we're engaged in against misinformation and really disinformation. I was thinking, and I was talking earlier, the not-for-profit first draft has developed a model of seven different types of myths and disinformation. Satire and parody, misleading content, imposter content, fabricated content, that makes false connections, false context, or manipulated content. Fake news at various times refers to any or all of these types of myths and disinformation. So to start with, I want you to sort of define the train of what you consider fake news, right, how it's used, and how it affects particularly your areas. It's interesting to me, we have a panel here of practicing journalists and former practicing journalists and political operatives and media scholars. So how you understand fake news and how it sort of affects your work. Well, disinformation and misinformation has always been there. We've always had to deal with that. The term fake news seems to have received a lot of prominence because of the last presidential election. It was actually used by one of the candidates over and over again. And I had the good fortune to be at some of his rallies where he was actually pointing to the press. And of course, we were all penned in behind the audience and saying that's the lying press, you know. And I interacted with some of the people who went to the rallies. And there was that hostility. Yeah, you're lying press, you're not going to say what's actually going on here. Even when I tried to interview people, it took a while for them to calm down and actually talk to me right off the bat. As soon as they saw my microphone, it was like fake media and lying press. So that's something that I think has been highlighted because of the campaign. However, there's always been. We've always had to deal with disinformation and starting out as a reporter. One of the first things that you realize is that everyone that talks to you has an agenda. And you have to try and figure out what that agenda is and how much credibility you can give to the source based on their agenda. Because every single day I get people soliciting me and everyone has an agenda. There's nothing wrong with that. That is how journalism is practiced. People want to get certain things out in the media all the time. And you have to have a very healthy level of skepticism when you're dealing with everyone from government officials to... I could tell you some stories about being misled by government officials, including the governor of the state. But we could get into that some other time. So I come at it from a vastly different angle. I'm not a reporter. I was that person who wrote things for people in politics. So I would say that fake news, we've seen it with any sort of political campaign. We can trace it back to the late 19th, early 20th century, where England fabricated photos to kind of endorse their colonialism and expansion into the Middle East. We can look back at the race between Jefferson and Adams and all the misinformation or disinformation there. So as far as that, we're going to see that in politics. Their candidate's job is to get you to vote for them. And the party's job is to get you to like that party. Now, the question becomes, what's the relationship between the media, them as the candidates or the party, and then you as a voter? Where does that fall? So for me, fake news, in reality, it's been around for quite a while. The terminology we're using today stems in large part from the very old tracings back to when others got involved with overthrowing governments and meddling with our elections. And that's kind of where the term Trump is using today and why it's coming up so much. And it probably doesn't help with everything else that's surrounding the election in general with Russia and all of those of the hearings that are going on. So as far as we have the fake news, which is really false news, like the real stuff, and then we have fake news, which is stuff that, like our first speaker said, is that news that we throw away because it doesn't line up with our ideals, our values. It goes against what we want. So to throw it, I think that's where the problem comes in in a democracy is when we discredit the person writing it, whether it's the reporter or the actual entity. The New York Times, for instance, or the press as an industry, right, that Fourth Estate. We dismiss that in general, and now everyone is tarnished, right? So we get at the source of the credibility and that affects legitimacy. So I'd say there's two different kinds of fake news that we need to keep in mind. So first off, I don't really like the term fake news. It's an oxymoron because, to me, news is nonfiction. It's journalism, and fake means it's fabricated. So it's like saying this novel is, or this piece of non, this memoir is fictionalized nonfiction, which, you know, so as a term like that, I don't necessarily like the term. I know why it has resonated is because it is two syllables and you can fit it in a lower third on CNN and MSNBC and you can tweet it. I don't know how many, eight characters, how many times is divided by 140, can you? So it's very digestible, but I think damaging to actual news and actually reported good journalism because immediately it's being lumped in together, in a way. When I think of what I view as fake news, it's obviously, to me and my mindset, it is deliberate fabrications meant to mislead or stoke or whatever, you know, a certain base of believers. And they're not typically done by what you consider media entities, it's, you know, they're not loanless, but they're people who are kind of making money on their own by creating these fictional accounts that then benefit political parties. So I don't necessarily see the political parties as being behind them like they may have been, you know, 100 years ago. Maybe they are, who knows. But they are things that then the political parties are able to piggyback on and jump on and utilize. And so, I mean, that's kind of what I think of when I think of the term. And I wish we could come up with another two-syllable term, but I don't know if, I think it's too late. I can start something with the term. And so when a media literacy document I made went very viral in the fall, I was speaking to a lot of journalists and eventually I started saying in interviews, like, please don't call it a fake news list because that's not what it was. And the journalists would be like, well, what should we call it? And I was like, you should call it continuum of information. And I was like two sentences long and they were like, well, that's not gonna happen. And so it was weird thinking about the ways in which, you know, journalists helped sort of use that partially because it makes a good headline. But what I find interesting about fake news, like, up until very recently, if you searched a library database like Communication and Mass Media Complete for fake news, you would get books about satire and the Daily Show and the Onion, or you might get stuff about Hearst in the early 1900s, you know, planting false information to create sensational news stories and start wars and all this stuff. And so I think that's part of the problem now. And I find fake news useful as long as we can remember that it encapsulates all of these different kinds of information and even the way that it's often used as a way to discredit credible sources of information. So we have to remember that it's very fraught with problems but that it can, you know, demonstrate this continuum that we have to pay attention to. President Trump at a February 28th interview with Fox and Friends said that Twitter, quote, does allow me to go around dishonest media. And we know that Trump has certainly used Twitter as a way to sort of circumvent traditional gatekeepers in media, right? And in some ways, I think this is exciting, right? This is in some ways an ideal situation that our elected officials can communicate directly with their constituents, right? At the same time, we look at social media as problematic in that more people have access to distribution platforms, to share information. I think my question has to do with how has social media affected the journalistic enterprise? How has social media changed the role of journalists and what journalists do in a democracy? Well, the main thing here is that with social media and the news comes to you, you don't have to go out looking for it. And it comes to you in a steady stream. And with aggregators, the news that you like is the news you will get. So when I was in Nigeria a couple of years ago, last year, last January, there was a part of the media organization I was working for had to do with online. And a lot of the stories were sourced from different places. And if the original source did not vet the story, it just kept going. And I had an example, that's what I wanted to put on the projection, but it had to do with every career. And in January, 2016, there was a story that just spread like wildfire. And the reason why these stories spread is that they fit into our pre-disposed to accepting certain things. And if it fits into it, it's going to have a lot of legs. And it was a hoax that had to do with polygamy in Eritrea. There was a story that came out that the Eritrean government had ordered that because there was a shortage of men, that women, men had to, by law, marry at least two women. And believe it or not, this false rumor that men in Eritrea would be legally obliged to marry at least two women originated in Iraq. And it was a social media event that ended up being carried by credible news outlets all over Africa because there was a document attached to it. There was purportedly an official Eritrean government document. And it was posted and it kept being carried. And the person who was in charge of editing our online presence was going to go with the story because we subscribed to a number of other news outlets that had published this. And he said, well, you know, it's credible because we got it from them. And I was like, no, you have to check this out. And there has to be a very healthy level of skepticism with everything that comes to you on digital media. And it is so pervasive. As a matter of fact, most of the world, that's how they get the news today. So as a practicing journalist, your reputation is all you have. And so I've come to the conclusion that it's not... There's a lot of pressure to get it out first, but it's always better to get it outright. And I don't know any other way that people can... You just have to have skepticism, everything that you see and read these days. Even the New York Times in the Gulf War, leading up to the Gulf War, was used as an avenue to put out some disinformation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So we're all vulnerable to this and we always have to have our guard up. I was gonna say, but it's important. I don't know if we're gonna go... No, anybody can jump in, please. Because I think, yeah, skepticism is important, but what I've been finding in talking a lot at libraries with my classes is that that's really become cynicism. And so one of the ways in which social media definitely changes journalism is the fact that it's often harder to tell, assess the content when it appears on a social media page. It's not always clear that it's an opinion piece and you see this flashy headline and people are like, oh, we'll see bias. I was like, well, this is editorial. And so that's not always clear. We have pressures of immediacy and often we share things because we trust whoever shared it previously without actually reading them ourselves. And I even, I always use the anecdote, like I'm a professor of media and I was duped by a fake news story about Aaron Rogers because I wanted to believe it and I'm a Packers fan. And so it's harder to assess and yeah. I would jump in on that for a second. I think what, an extension of that is accountability, right? And in a democracy, we can hold people accountable. Like that's the inherent nature of democracy. We hold our elected officials accountable through elections or recalls and stuff on those lines. But how do we hold the media accountable? And part of that initially was by readership and stuff along those lines, circulation and having the two source rule and stuff along those lines. And with social media now, I mean, you're old enough to figure out how to set up a Facebook account, a Twitter account, or an Instagram account and boom, you're a citizen journalist, you know? I'm, so, and by the way, that's like getting younger and younger, right? As to who can do that? I mean, I just now got a Twitter account. But so then you have that, the retweeting and it's like who I trust you and we're friends and so now that leads, you know, some, you know, credibility. So of course I'm gonna trust the story only to find out that it's not true. And so I think, you know, to kind of tie both of what they were saying together, the onus of responsibility falls on us as the citizens. Like if we want to be an informed electorate, which is at the very heart of a democracy, it's up to us to go back and make sure that these sources are in fact credible and the stories are in fact true. So we can make informed decisions about our government. Yeah, I was thinking that in many ways, I kind of feel like the traditional media, especially in the ways they first started using social media like Facebook and maybe Twitter, but I'm thinking more of Facebook than anything, helped kind of pave the way for how fake news could get a toehold. Partly because as soon as the, like the legacy media realized that people were not gonna go to their own pages anymore, they weren't gonna go and look at their website. Like they picked up the New York Times in the morning and look at each page. They changed the way they write headlines. And so they had to start writing headlines that would A, get Google to notice them, and that B would also convince people to click on them on social media and then share them, which leads to headlines like one The Washington Post just put out two hours ago that says Ivanka Trump once encouraged women to state their job titles, now she won't share hers. Which is this type of, it's a headline that is set up to create an immediate conflict because conflict gives us story, story gives us interest, and interest results in a click. And so headlines like that, which are so, I mean, the information's there, but it is much less formal than the headlines of your, and which led perfectly to the type of headlines you would see in the fake news stories. Like Hillary Clinton is running a sex slave operation at a pizza joint, and... Wow, professor creates fake news lists. You won't believe what happens next. Right, exactly. It's actually a Boston Globe headline, but yeah. Yeah, but I mean, so those like, those less formal headlines that Washington Post and other media organizations started using completely paved the way for people to get used to seeing yet even crazier headlines, and think, well, this looks exactly like the Washington Post Facebook page, and maybe, you know, maybe that doesn't necessarily mean have to say Washington Post on it, but it looks that, you know, I can't even think of some of the ones that may put out the craziest stuff, but it looks like the same as the Washington Post Post on Facebook, so it must have some legitimacy. But now that we've gone down that road, we're not coming back. So how do we deal with it? Because I have, it's always been a problem for me because I've had to deal with some breaking news stories, some of the biggest stories, like what happened at Sandy Hook, and most of what we put out the first day was false. It came from a zealously depressed, came from other outlets, but they were false. I still remember after the first day, I got there the next day, and the state police had their first news conference. And pretty much it seemed as if they were talking about a totally different event. And all the time we had been seen stories that were sourced by law enforcement sources. Without naming anybody. And it was, as a working journalist, and these are the sources that you, because you can't be everywhere, we subscribe to the associated price, for instance. And none of the stories panned out, you know? And it was over and over again that way with the Boston Marathon bombing, a lot of the tweets that went out were false. And this was from credible news sources, like CNN got caught up in that. So it's, sometimes I think it's so difficult, how, when people say you have no credibility for me to say, oh hey, wait a minute, we do have credibility and that will be thrown up. And Donald Trump has done that very successfully with the removal of the bust of Martin Luther King from the White House, which did not happen. And it was carried by a lot of legacy news outlets. And so it makes everything so murky. How do we navigate that and maintain some credibility? I definitely wanna get to sort of next steps or solutions certainly for audiences and things like this. What I'm interested in hearing from folks, it strikes me, and I guess a lot of people out there had a similar reaction through this last election cycle. It felt at times like journalism and our media ecosystem had failed us in some ways. And then there were times, maybe after the election or maybe during the election, where I felt our media ecosystem was never doing a better job at sort of getting to truth, crusading. It felt like you're waking up and saying the time is battling the post for scoops and then it was like Hearst versus Pulitzer or something, these glory days of journalism. And so I know it's a tough question, but I imagine a lot of folks out there have a similar sort of unease if our, not just journalism, but entire information ecosystem is in a healthy place right now or a dangerously unhealthy place right now. Sorry, Melissa, maybe this is firmly in your area. Yeah, totally, I always answer both, because so I know, right, it's when we always- That's not the answer I expect from our political operative Gail Nett. Not the media scholar. I'm going with both too, by the way. The new Gail one. So with all new technologies, we always think about their utopian and dystopian potentials and that's why I'm teaching my students. And one of the ways media scholars talked about the internet was now we can have citizen journalists covering the stories that are getting ignored by mainstream media outlets, whether it's just because the local newspaper folded so no one's covering them or whatever it may be, right? So you have all these possibilities, but then with all of the really good alternative information that we have access to you, of course there's going to be the flip side. And I found myself, I canceled my newspaper subscriptions during the primaries because I was just like, what's the point? And then during the election I renewed them again because the coverage was good and I kept maxing out on free articles. And so I feel, but at the same time I renewed them, I also got to watch, started keeping track of folk stories, so I read a really great piece about analyzing Donald Trump's one tax return that came out a while ago or a snippet. And then a day later apparently CNN accidentally airs pornography in Boston, never happened. Everybody was citing even Boston area media. They were citing a UK source and it was all based on a tweet. So things like that emerge while there's great stuff happening. And a Washington Post typically does great stuff but then proper not was a total disaster. So I guess I'm willing to take the bad with the good knowing that the intent of journalists isn't to mislead and that normally we find out that they're fake or that there are mistakes. Not at the same rate that those mistakes circulate but that gives me hope, right? So there's corrections, retractions, we do need to work on accountability more so which is really hard in this era of immediacy but I guess I'm not willing to be like journalism is done. Well, one of the problems in terms of accountability is there's immediate accountability for everything because anybody who reads it online, especially if they want to try to find something to nitpick at it, they immediately go into that. So accountability is, we need accountability and we need good accountability but we also have all this other pseudo accountability, hammering at anything that anybody disagrees with in any way, shape, or form. For instance, I actually had a friend on Facebook tell me that fact checkers are biased. Yes, I hear that all the time. And that you can't believe a word a fact checker says and at that point in time, I blocked him so I wouldn't have to see him anymore for a little while because I couldn't. It hurt your head. It really did. So yeah, so that's one thing but also I think there's, in the media world, they're in the, I hate to use them term media in the traditional journalism world and especially with regard to newspapers, there are 10,000 fewer reporters, newspaper reporters in the country in 2015 versus 2010. And that's a lot of people. And so, and a lot of those are at smaller newspapers which is where so many people get at least their community information. And when you gut newsrooms like that has happened, if you're in small town Ohio and you're reading The Daily Record which is my first newspaper that I worked at and when I worked there we had 15 reporters and they have like six now still trying to cover the same area. They make so many mistakes that then the people who read that paper say, oh look, all journalists suck, The Daily Record can't get anything right and they kind of transpose that to virtually everything else that they read. And so I have no idea if I'm answering the question at all but I think it's a difficult situation and hopefully we're seeing more interest in journalism now. I know we're getting more interest in the digital journalism major, which is phenomenal. And so, and newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post and even local papers are seeing subscription spikes. So hopefully that results then in getting more reporters back and trying to inch back to where we were. I'm gonna go the completely other direction. Go figure, right? Both, first of all. And second of all, if we look at what happened prior to I think the climax being Trump's election, during the primary even before that most of our news focused on things like the horse race, right? We wanted those quick sound bites. I mean, even as a political strategist I wanted to make sure the news got those sound bites and it's about structuring things in such a way that you get that seven seconds of air time or something that can be retweeted as easily as fake news, right? So in a way, part of I think the issue lied in, we weren't talking about policy, right? It's hard, it's complex. Who wants to sit there and listen to anybody talk about the budget, right? Or taxes or healthcare policy or education policy. It's just not something we do know. We like things like, now. And that's, and not only that but we've grown really to become more polarized right now, only as a nation. And as far as our elected officials go, now there's tons of studies that will debunk what I just said and that's okay. But the media too, right? I'm a conservative, therefore I go to Fox News. I'm a liberal, therefore I go to MSNBC. We want something that backs up our values. We don't want to be told we're wrong, right? Nobody likes that. Now on the flip side, we can say that after the election, part of what happened and maybe the change in journalism or the change in coverage or this rebirth of journalism is due in large part because of who won. I would ask the question, would we be seeing the same, we'll be having this conversation today about fake news if Clinton had won, okay? Trump had a very adversarial relationship with the press going into it. I mean, he kind of made his whole debut into politics over a very adversarial issue. He challenged the legitimacy of our 44th president and his birthright. And so, you know, it's in, by the way, Trump is the only one who's been an adversary to the press or viewed the press as an enemy. Nixon famously said the press is the enemy, right? He's the reason they are where they are in the White House now and that was to give him more privacy and to corral them. And so, you know, LBJ avoided the press for, you know, during Vietnam. He literally dodged them. Clinton lied to the press, Bill, not Hillary. When he was president, you know, we could argue that GW did as well. So, we have this and Trump is more overt with it. He's not afraid to come right out and say, you know, that reporter is a so-called reporter or the failing New York Times or LA Times or what have you. So, and they're not also afraid to invite certain, you know, media outlets into the briefing room and deny others, right, during these conferences. So, I think it's more of now all of a sudden the media is labeled the enemy in a different way than maybe they've been before or at least probably since the Nixon era. And now, of course, we have to challenge that, right? And we want to, I mean, who likes having an enemy, right? Let's take them down. I mean, that's our mentality. I mean, I don't like the Pats and anytime they lose, I'm like, yay. I'm also not from around here, don't hate me. But that's how it is. And so I think in that way, it's both. And again, I would say the onus falls on us. You know, what is it that we want from our media outlets and what we demand is what they give us. And our practicing journalist. There's a lot going on there. You know, the way I look at it, I can tell you what happened on election night. I had a bunch of young reporters who were pretty distraught because they felt that that was the end for journalism and that was the end for their careers. And I had to tell them, look, you know, you're gonna have some very exciting stories. And it's how many months into the presidency of Donald Trump and they have never been busier. And our listenership has never been higher. So whenever there's that controversy and confrontation, people pay a lot more attention. So even though we have all this so-called disinformation out there, people are paying more attention to what's going on. A lot more attention than they were a year ago or two years ago. And I'll tell you, as far as elections are concerned, elections have never been about policy. It's always been about emotion. I've covered elections in other countries as well. And it's an emotional thing. And we have a lot of psychologists who come up with these messages for the politicians and to try and make those emotional connections. And Donald Trump was able to do it. And he was able to do it without all the so-called professionals who would have analyzed it for him. He figured it out himself and he was able to do it. He got enough people to get him to where he wanted to go figure. So I am not distraught at all. I feel that people are paying attention and when people pay attention, they'll be able to figure out very often what is actually going on because they're paying attention. So I don't know, as a working journalist, that's the way I feel. I feel that journalism is in a very good position right now. It's at a time people are paying attention and if you do some good work, you'll get the recognition. And I'm sure people are going to make quite a name for themselves during this period of time. I wanna eventually, I know the audience has a lot of questions. I wanna sort of start to wrap up our discussion here. I think about, a lot of you probably read some of our students out there, I know have read in my classes, W. Lance Bennett famously says that the real, we think about bias all the time, our media bias to the left or the right or these sorts of things. And Bennett tells us, the real bias is against democracy. Media is biased against democracy and that's the real problem. And so the question I wanna ask, and you can answer this in terms of any possible different audiences, whether it be media journalists or audiences or what's one thing we can do? And again, the we here might be journalists or media organizations or people out there reading the newspaper or watching TV. What's one thing we can do to better serve democracy in terms of journalism? That's a heavy question. Yeah. It's like the graduate sub portion of it. Yeah, I'll feel that one first. Yes, we can argue that the media is bias and in particular, maybe against democracy. And but that's where I would come back and say it's on us, right? The media's job is to deliver us information, right? So that we as a public can go out and make informed, hopefully intelligent, decisions about our members of government, whether they're appointed or elected and those who serve really us. And if we, if the media is failing with that, which I wouldn't argue that they necessarily are, but with the advent of social media and this whole fake news, are they really, are we serving the public good in the way that the public good should be served, right? And yeah, it's just, I think it's crucial for us and you need to get involved, you need to get invested. You can't have a democracy without the citizens, right? It is your, it is your job to not only go vote but to ask good questions and come to events like this and become informed. Go to your town halls and your town committee meetings and write your state legislators and attend a protest or a march or what have you. Those are your fundamental rights and that's how we get involved. That's how you gain information as well. There's nothing more, I think, enlightening than being able to sit down with an elected official over coffee and they do the coffee hours and be like, hey, I heard you did X, Y, or Z, what's up with that? And have that conversation. They can tell you, no, I didn't actually do that or yes, I did. Now tell me why that's so horrible in your opinion and have that dialogue. And the interesting part is they're willing. Most elected officials love nothing more than to sit down with their constituents and engage in that kind of dialogue and not this bashing dialogue. I should make that very clear, not coming in and going, I hate you, you suck, right? But actually coming in and going, okay, you made this, I don't like it, here's why I don't like it. Tell me your thought process behind that. And actually having constructive dialogue and I think that's where we can see democracy improve. So media literacy, right? So there is an aspect of it's on us but I would take more, I guess, of a structural position. So part of it for me is this profit imperative, this pressures of immediacy. And if we think the media sources I turn to most often tend to be public media sources, nonprofit, international sources. And I think there's contradictory sort of goals that are one of the main reasons why we have, when something is terrible, Sandy Hook happens and everybody's flooding information and it's part of it is to be the first to pop up on that phone, the first to post to social media. Obviously to circulate information that people want but also that generates revenue. And so if we can reduce that as much from the equation as possible, I mean, I'm very pro that. And I also think when I talk about structures, we have technology companies. After the election, the number one Google news item for the popular vote was by a website called 70news.wordpress.com saying that Hillary Clinton won the election. So technologically that does not help us, that does not help journalism, credible journalism sort of break through to audiences, to citizens that are trying, yeah. I tend to think that the onus falls to educators strictly with making sure media literacy is taught, not just at the collegiate level but I think at the high school level and even down into the elementary level now because we have never lived in an age with so much information that's available. And you have to be teaching the idea of critical thinking and what you're reading and looking at it and trying to engage with it. I think colleges do a good job of that usually but I don't know how much that's being done at levels beyond that. Or if you're at a school that now has a rotating librarian once a week, like, you know, because I agree but then we don't have the systems, the infrastructure supporting that kind of thought. Yeah, so, yeah, I tend to think that almost has to be something that is a grassroots level. You have to take that to your school boards and you have to take that to your local, whatever, your town hall meetings and that type of thing but it's gonna have to come from a groundswell for sure because it's not gonna happen otherwise. And that is something other countries do is teach, they're in grade school and high school they teach their kids, their students how to determine what's real, what's not in a new setting. Well, I have always, I guess that's why I'm a journalist I've always been very skeptical. And I remember at a very young age, my father would go through about four or five different papers and I think that's where I got it from. So put the papers down and I'd go look at them and start with the cartoons of course. But I got that, I got into that habit of looking at different news sources and trying to figure out where each one was coming from. And so I've always had that healthy skepticism and I don't know how you can teach that but I think now that we have so many sources people should have an idea that they have to try and analyze a lot of this stuff themselves and try to figure out what's going on that no one's gonna be able to smooth feed you the truth. I have one final question and then I want everyone out there who's watching and sitting with us here in the library to be thinking of your questions and really briefly from the panel. If you had to predict what our media ecosystem looks like at the end of let's assume Trump makes it through these four years, what changes? What changes in terms of what we think about fake news or what we think about journalism or what we think about media that becomes a sort of, I don't know if it's a lasting change or a momentary change but what do you think will change? I think there'll be more nonprofit journalistic enterprises that are gonna spring up that are focused on less on accessibility journalism and more on investigative journalism and I think that and if that happens that would be a very good thing I think. I would be a very rich man if I could predict. There was a time that we saw newsrooms beefing up their staff and then for the past decade and a half I've been a state capital reporter and there was a time you couldn't find a desk in the newsroom and gradually a place emptied out and there was a time that being a blogger wasn't considered to be a journalist. Well half the newsroom is a blogger to be a journalist, well half the newsroom in Hartford right now at the state capital is bloggers. In fact, the most credible state news source, the most prolific state news source that we have right now is a blog. So it's definitely the digital age is going, we're going to get, we're moving more and more into the digital platforms and that means that with a lot less resources than we used to have, we can do a credible job and if we have enough people who are willing to support that and there's some pretty wealthy people who decided that they're going to do that, that might be where we will go but I have no clue. If I did, I probably would be sitting back and relaxing in a Caribbean island somewhere and counting my money. Okay, no second. Oh, I don't know. I mean, I guess I agree. I think we're going to see a shift toward more nonprofit investigative journalism or that's my hope. I also think that increasingly Google and Facebook are more willing to accept the fact they're media companies and I think you're seeing some really positive changes in the way, at least we can flag information even if some of their tools for bettering journalism actually scare me a little bit. Like you can report the news faster and like, no, that's not what we need. I think we're seeing that. I think you're going to see, already I've been privy to a lot of conversations between tech developers, journalists developing, even systems for journalists and holding themselves accountable to address a lot of what does contribute to public skepticism, which is okay, but also public cynicism. So I'm very hopeful but I again, I don't think fake news isn't going to go away. Propaganda especially is not going to go away and hopefully we'll just develop a lot better tools for dealing with them. All right, so from a political perspective, I think we're going to continue to see trust decline in our fourth estate. It's already kind of at an all-time low. It's been declining since about 2007. The amount of which it declines varies actually by party. So Republicans are the lowest and then the Dems have the highest level of trust and there's about a 37% gap between the two. But they're still both under 50%. So it's not good. So I don't necessarily see that rebounding anytime soon. Then again, it's better than Congress's trust rating right now and likely our presidents. But my hope would be, if I can end on that note, my hope would be that this hopefully will initiate some sort of reemergence of investigative journalism of maybe less polarization and partisan journalism that we start, truth is in the eye to be holder, I get that. But hopefully we can get back to some of those more hardcore stories and not see an end going, oh my gosh, did you see that Trump tweeted this the other day? That's not news. Tell me about what the House did or if the Senate did or what Trump's executive order is dotted. And I'm not saying they don't get to that, but that sensationalism that we have, I'm hoping that continues to die down because to be honest with you, it's a distraction. And it's a good political tool to use to get us not to think about the things that are actually happening in government. Whether or not that is the intent of our current president or anybody else who utilizes that, but it is, it's a political distraction. So I hope to see kind of us going back to the other kind of journalism. I wanna hear from you all out there. In the audience who are with us on Facebook Live, we have a great panel of experience and intellect up here combined. So gotta be some questions out there. And we do have folks with microphones who are gonna come find you just so we can make sure we get the audio and things like this. Dr. Rugg in the back. Hi, so I'm assistant professor in communication. And right now I'm teaching mass media and society class where I've been grappling with these issues with my students. And kind of going off what Melissa said near the end there, my question is about the media companies that sort of most enable the spread and dissemination of fake news. What do you guys think are the obligations and responsibilities of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube to combat fake news? Do they have an obligation or is this something that they're not obligated to? It's always a slippery slope when you start putting people in charge of policing what goes out. And that's the problem that the Facebooks and the Googles have faced because a lot of people are very skeptical about having some censoring body that filters out what goes. So the way our system is set up, you can actually, you can go to the courts and you can sue people for putting out wrong information about you. And so for libel and defamation. And but the problem is that you have to have a lot of money to be able to do it. So you have an outfit like Gorka going out of business because a billionaire goes after them using the laws that we have on the books right now. So it would be nice if we could trust that we would have somebody who'd be the filter. But it's tough. I don't know how that would be regulated where people would trust that Google will be able to filter what is going out or Facebook would, I mean look at the amount of blowback they get whenever they try to do anything like that. I would beg the question is what you were getting at? Should they be the ones responsible for it? And why would we put our trust in that entity? And in the flip side, some people writing these fake news stories, they're companies that are making money off it. It's capitalism, you know? So maybe we should just stop subscribing, right? And then they won't be getting the money for it. I mean there's other alternatives I think than just a company like Facebook, Google or anything else censoring our news. There's other things we can do. I think one of the, I think it would be great if we had a better way to monitor that. For Facebook or Google to do anything like that, it's going to result on an algorithm created by humans who also have their own- It depends on what the algorithm is. So, and again, it just gets back to the question who created the algorithm? What are the decisions the algorithm is making? Why is this happening? So it opens up another can of worms that really will then go and just confuse people even more and then- I know someone who was taken off Facebook for a year and a half, a journalist from Zimbabwe who was doing stories about child sex trafficking. And it took her a year and a half to try and I don't even know if she has full privileges yet to get back on Google. So she tried to explain that she was a journalist and the algorithm flagged her and that was it. Yeah, so I don't think they're obligated necessarily but I think that there are ethical decisions that they should be making I guess to think about how information is being sent to us. So they're not government entities, they're not necessarily censoring and we already are placing a huge amount of trust into them because they're the primary circulators of information and where we are getting news, news and fake news from. And so I think that we have to acknowledge that they are already doing a lot of the things that we're fearful of. Like I like dozens of news organizations on Facebook and I only see the Atlantic, like one article and now I see every single one, right? And so part of the reason Facebook got so much flack for fake news is because they fired all of their trending news team because of perceptions of bias and then that's what really opened the floodgates for misinformation circulating, kind of removing the outwardly facing human element and of course humans create algorithms, right? They don't exist on their own but that actually that without us being involved led to even more misinformation circulating. So yes, I think Twitter and Facebook have an ethical responsibility to make sure that like hateful and sightful, violent content is in circulating that people can easily flag content that is false or slanderous or whatever. Does that necessarily mean that they should be preventing people from posting it? I don't think I would go that far but I think that they should, and we have to proceed with caution, right? With all of this but I do think that there should be more and cross-platform, right? So Facebook is developing tools, Twitter is developing tools but what's happening across all of them and coordinating information that shared cross-platform and right now there's nothing besides third-party apps. Who else has a question? Just show ahead, right over here. Thank you. If you could stand so we can see. Oh, thank you. Thank you. All right, well first of all, thank you, panel for being here. This is a fascinating topic and I'm gonna try to make this as brief a question as possible. After the election results were in, it seems like mainstream media took a big hit in terms of trust and that was the first time it really pulled me up short because nobody really predicted, nobody really entertained the idea of a Trump win. That's how it felt and the morning after was almost more interesting to me than anything I'd ever watched before. People like Morning Joe trying to address this. My question to you is after that I was struggling to look for who to trust and the question I have is really about trust which you've spoken to a little bit. Back in the day, when I turned on the news, I'd see Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor and all these people are probably before a lot of people remember and the issue of trust was never there because you thought they were giving you the news. Now I find I'm struggling, I'm looking in places like YouTube, I'm looking all over for a face I can trust. Do you think, speaking to what you said before about the future, the landscape of the young digital journalists, is this a great opportunity for certain people to actually go back in time a little bit and be the people who can not give me the news I wanna hear but actually sort of synthesize what's really going on. Is this gonna be a great time for journalists who really come to the fore and can do that and how is that gonna be delivered? Is it going to be through Facebook or YouTube? Is the mainstream media really crumbling as some people say it is? Well, to start off with, I've never believed in the good old days because we had the Gulf of Tonkin when we had the three major networks and they never told us that that was fabricated. So, yes, I am very optimistic about the future. There are a lot of young people who are doing things differently from the way we did it. And people are gonna come up with ways to create media outlets that will just do investigative journalism. There's an outfit called VICE in Brooklyn. That's all they do. That's, they don't do anything else but investigative journalism. Some of it takes a while to do but whenever it's ready, they put it out. So, I am not pessimistic about the future at all. I feel that technology cuts both ways and you can't expect technology to be the panacea that's gonna solve everything. It's just gonna make us able to do things a bit differently. And it's because of technology that we have such outreach and we can all over the world, people can follow us and keep up with what we're doing. And I feel that these discussions like this are very good because it's making us think about what it is, the atmosphere in which we're living and what it is we can do ourselves to try and better understand what's going on around us. So, I'm not pessimistic at all. And I feel that this era, having the type of president we have in Donald Trump has sharpened a lot of people's minds and I think that's a good thing. I wanna go to your trust thing real quick. I wanna back up a little bit. In 2007 is when we started to see the decline. I am with trust in general in the fourth estate. And then probably I could hedge my bet on what part of year you're with, affiliate with. I used to do it for a living, it's okay. I could probably name everybody's in here. But in 2008 when Barack Obama got elected, a lot of Republicans went and asked a similar question about trust. They're gonna feel the same way. I think part of the big issue with the 2016 election was we're all kind of at that point now. And the polling in particular that forecasted something. That's a whole other conversation we get into. We'd love to talk to you one on one about that. But that also wasn't helpful in the sense of, we need to kind of retool some of the things that we were doing polling wise. But it was more of a shock to the system, right? Even for some of the Republicans that came out against Trump, it's still a shock to the system when he won because his path to victory was so narrow. So do I think that it's something new? No, absolutely not. It's been a trend that's going. Who Trump is talking to when he talks about the fake news are the individuals who tend to affiliate Republican, who feel left out of the conversation, who feel like the political system isn't working for them. And so when he comes out and says the New York Times, the LA Times or whomever is not an accurate newspaper, they're fake, they're giving you false information. The story is fake. That's the crowd that he's speaking to. He's not necessarily speaking to people like you or I or any of the other individuals in this room who can sift through information and decipher to feel part of the inclusion in democracy who are actively involved and engaged. So it's a two-part problem really if we think about it and it's a lot to kind of unpack. But I wanna tell you that it's been something that's been going on and it doesn't feel good now, but like my colleague up here said, I think it's gonna get better. And I think millennials who are usually we tend to bash our millennials because they're of that age where they don't vote yet and all of that, right? But I really think as they come into their own and by 2028 they're gonna be the largest voting cohort and they're gonna outdo baby boomers, but I think we're gonna start, they're already skeptical. They came up through the great recession and through the Bush era with the Iraq war and the weapons of mass destruction scandal and 9-11 and they're already kind of like, not too sure about this. So my guess would be is our future journalists that we're gonna be turning to in that sense, what you're looking for is probably gonna be someone like that who's already going, I don't like what's going on, let me change it, here's what I'm gonna do and provide that information to you. That would be my guess. Yeah, you mentioned the polls and I think that's one reason that there was so much disbelief on that Wednesday was because the polling was wrong, but also the reporting had been solely, so much focus on foreign journalism. Based on those polls, the same thing that happened with Brexit. The reporting was based on the polls and the polling got it wrong, so the reporting was wrong. And it happened in the Philippines, it happened in Italy's race in the referenda in Columbia. I mean, it's a global issue right now. Yeah, and I think hopefully the journalistic media organizations, I hope that they learned something out of that and that they have to be, just like we do as news consumers, that the journalists themselves have to be more cognizant of polling issues, but also and not just straight up report the horse race, that you have to find a way to report on the issues in a way that will still encourage viewers and readers and news consumers to consume. Well, I can tell you, covering both the Trump and the Clinton campaigns and their rallies, I could have told you where the enthusiasm was just from covering those rallies. The Trump audience was self-motivated. They were there to hear the greatest hits. And if he didn't get to the hits, it was just like a rock concert. If he didn't get to the hits, then shout it out for him to get to. So if he didn't get to build a wall, then shout it out. And then shout the refrain. They knew word for word. And these were things that he had tested out over time. Covering the Hillary Clinton events, it seemed as if the supporting acts got more of a rise out of the audience than the main act. And so you could see right there on ground, and this is a blue state, you know. So for a Hillary Clinton rally to not have as much energy as a Trump rally. Then I covered several Trump rallies. I covered a Trump rally in Hartford, in Waterbury, and in Bridgeport. And I was also surprised at who showed up. I mean, there were more expensive SUVs coming in to those rallies than I had expected to see. And so there definitely was something going on there beyond the polling. Of course he didn't win in Connecticut, but he had tapped into something. There was no doubt about that. And it seemed to a large extent that the Clinton campaign was just going through the motions. I was gonna say, I mean, honestly, I feel like as a millennial, my trust is very low. And I feel like I was very hopeful. You know, so I sort of resonate, like I'm not really sure where to turn, because in my experience, I've seen a lot of credible news sources reporting very inaccurate information even about me. And then I've been very much on center stage in a media sphere with writers who have purposely manipulated information to smear me. And I've even tried, well, I'll engage with them. And then I'm like, asked questions about how I was able to manipulate Google algorithms to circulate my Google documents. And I've received kind of an insane amount of hate mail for creating a media literacy resource. And it's definitely made me more and more cynical and distrustful just of everything. And so that's why I'm always like, both, I don't know. But I hope I'm wrong. We have a question down here, a question over there. Yeah, and we also have a Facebook Live question that we wanted to bring up too. Yeah, we'll take that. Yeah, let's take that first. So I'm reading for someone who is asking, what is the role of capitalism in the rise of fake news? Do you think the prevalence of branded content and advertorials and readers sometimes inability to distinguish them from real journalism has played a role in the public's receptiveness to accusations against the press? Yes, right? And part of that, so we think about how fake news is an extension of journalism and exploiting some of the worst practices in journalism. I always pick on Forbes, but Forbes has community posts and it's not clear. But people who post under that banner go through no fact checking and there's no editorial oversight. But when that shows up on Facebook, it's Forbes and you like trust it as a source. And this happened a lot. Like, I like to think it was partially because of me, but now the New Yorker labels Andy Borowitz, like not news. So there's been greater efforts, I think, to label. And I think part of that stems to exactly that question. Sorry, you seem to be gonna jump in too. No, you said exactly what I was gonna say. Nothing else to add. Good job. We have a question down here. You've talked a lot about fake news on the internet. Touched on newspapers a little bit. But you've ignored the elephant in the room, which is Fox News. And granted, we know it leans right, but it also leans fake quite often. Most recent example being that British intelligence was spying on Donald Trump. And of course, their audience, their uncritical audience tends to believe that sort of stuff. So I'd like to hear some opinions about Fox News. And maybe, as well as just Fox News objectivity. I don't wanna talk about Fox News per se, but I'll tell you, in England, people know exactly where the news sources are coming. The news, the media is coming from because they're very clear-cut ideological vents for the different newspapers and the different TV. So if you're reading the mail or if you're reading the London Times, you know exactly or you're reading the Guardian. You know the Guardian is left. You know the mail is right. You know the same thing with the London Times, which is also owned by Murdoch. Or the Sun or any of those papers. You know exactly, but we have a tradition in the United States where we have this thing called mainstream media. They don't have mainstream media in England. Everything is ideological. We didn't always have it here either, right? I mean, historically our press was very partisan. No, and that's how it started until the 30s when we started having some type of standardization to media and people to get credibility, put out the fact that they were actually going to get different sources and try to be middle of the road. But Pamphleteer's, you know, when they started, everyone had their opinion and it was their opinion they were putting out there. So part of it, it goes back even relating to the other question. So you mentioned advertisers. So part of the reason a lot of news organizations became objective was for advertising, right? When it's sort of the era of mass appeal you don't want to offend. And we have Fox News and other cable channels coming around at the same time that we were starting narrow casting and niche targeting. And so I feel like I'm afraid to pick on Fox News because I don't want to unleash another round of harassment. But I feel like if we think about bias, right? So we have to talk about political bias. Well, there's also medium bias. So cable news leads to particular ways of telling stories. And oftentimes punditry and journalism is blurred in ways that can be very unclear. But you have to realize with Fox News, you're dealing with Rupert Murdoch who started this in Australia, which was a very, he started it in Australia and it was a very partisan media market. And he took that to England, which was already a partisan media market and perfected it in England before bringing up, doing the same thing here. And the reason why he was able to do it here was I believe before cable news, the FCC had a lot of controls over broadcast media which were relaxed in the late 1980s. Like the fairness structure was thrown out and so you didn't have to have, if you put out a political story, you didn't have to have it balanced by having an opportunity for the other side to respond. But that didn't so much cover cable networks as it did broadcast television through the public airwaves. Yeah, but even for broadcast, it was in the late 1980s, they got rid of the fairness structure. And that did a lot to open up the airways to talk radio where you could have someone have only one opinion all day. We may get rid of the FCC, that's what I'm saying. Don't give them any answers. You know, just to, on that, if Fox isn't doing a credible job, then don't go to Fox for your news. If MSNBC isn't doing a credible job, don't go to MSNBC, right? If the New York Times isn't, don't go to them. So I think part of that would lie in, it's not that, you know, Fox News is all of a sudden a fake news outlet. It's very partisan. I can stand by that, absolutely. But it becomes a question of then, is it their job to regulate the truth? Or is it our job to decipher what they tell us in such a way that we can make, you know, that choice for us, for ourselves and what we want to hear? So I would, you know, that's where I would go with that is it's not necessarily that Fox News or MSNBC or any of these other outlets that are more partisan than others are bad or fake. It's just a matter of, and then do they do the correction too, right? That's I think a credibility thing. If they are airing something that is false, do they come back and say, you know, by the way that story was, you know, we made an error right the way that we see in print, you know, the correction. And as long as I think, you know, we do that, it's good. So when we start to do that, that I would worry. Yeah, it's not just that it's partisan though, right? So partisan press or partisan news isn't inherently problematic if like the integrity of the information is maintained to support a particular point of view. It's when that information is twisted or decontextualized and when it starts becoming more propagandistic. And so it's, because I mean, I read partisan publications on the right and the left and they're very reliable, right? So it's when it gets to the point where it becomes manipulated. And so I mean, we can definitely, I mean, some of those bias fact checkers have definitely pointed out instances where Fox has done that as of many other sort of, you know, partisan outlets that may or may not always traffic in integrity. And I think the problem with Fox News as an example is the percentage of actual news versus commentary is way out of whack. And yet, if you go to watch it, if you're a regular watcher and you see Bill O'Reilly talking about whatever it is he's talking about and it's on Fox News, now you see Bill O'Reilly's a journalist. And so that's what you think of as a journalist. But he'll tell you, the first to tell you he's not a journalist, he's an entertainer. Right? That's what he says. And I think when we keep talking about trust and media on this panel, and I think it's important to think about the Pew studies that support that show that trust levels vary substantially by age and by news outlet. So Fox News is actually very trusted among a segment of the population and not trusted at all by others. And then that flips depending on one's politics and with millennials trusting nothing, of course. I wanna thank our panels. You know, Fairfield University only validates parking for 90 minutes. I know, so are you parked on campus. Which may be true for what we know. But I really wanna thank our panelists. This is an exciting conversation that can continue inevitably. So thank you so much to our panelists. I also wanna thank especially our organizers for tonight's event, the staff. So fair, I've been here for 13 years and I'm gonna say the name of the library wrong. The Dementa Nislius, is that right? 13 years, I'm embarrassed. Library, and everybody there. Matt Bernstein, Barbara Gelardi, Jackie Cramer, Jeremiah Mercurio, as well as the supporters for tonight's event, the Center for Faith and Public Life, the Department of Communication, Department of Politics, the program in digital journalism. Thank you all so much for coming out. And again, special thank you to our panelists for coming out tonight. And thank you. Thank you.