 You're watching live coverage of the 2020 Night Media Forum where journalism, technology, philanthropy, and community activism meet in Miami to explore ways to strengthen local news coverage and our nation's democracy. I have the pleasure of welcome to the broadcast our friend and colleague, Judy Woodruff. Judy is the anchor and managing editor of PBS NewsHour and this morning you were here for a couple of things. I think you probably flew in late last night. Actually early this morning. Early this morning. Really early. That's just how Judy Woodruff rolls. So what did you find interesting? There was one more panel before the one that you did. We could talk about that too. Well, I just got here and I got in just a few minutes before our panel began. But for me, it was the chance to talk to two people who are deeply engaged in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, namely the White House, efforts to get their message across, to talk about the issues that matter to them, and how that works through all forms of media, but in particular, social media. And that led to, as you probably heard, a conversation about whether social media and democracy can coexist is my shorthand. Because everybody knows there's so many questions now about information, disinformation, lack of facts, lack of fact checking, and manipulation, frankly, of media. Especially we're in the middle right now of a presidential campaign and we're looking at candidates doing things with social media we've never seen before. We thought we'd seen it all in 2016 and 2018, but here we are. But it was a good discussion. It was Teddy Goff, who ran Obama's digital campaign, and Erie Renate, who runs the White House digital strategy. Were you surprised with any of the things that they were talking about? Well, I guess what surprised me, and maybe it shouldn't have, Hari, is that they both agree that there's no clear solution right now for what to do in terms of exerting some kind of responsibility, accountability, on the part of the big social media, the big digital giants in our country, the tech giants, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. But these are now companies, places that have taken on this outsized giant role in the sharing of information and in. Shaping of reality. Shaping of reality in our political campaigns, in our lives, we know that. We're sharing personal information. But when it comes to talking about our system of government, electing a new president, and one candidate or another or one campaign or another has the ability to, in the views of some, to manipulate, to buy. I mean, right now, I think the Bloomberg campaign has spent 400 million and growing on media overall. And a huge chunk of that has gone into social media and memes and the use of Twitter and extra new accounts. And it's all we can do as journalists to try to understand it, much less to report on it. You've covered several presidential cycles. It's a pretty common place for campaigns to represent their team as the righteous path forward. The other guy, and it's usually been guys. The other guy doesn't have the right solutions. How have you seen that evolve? Because it seemed like we had a couple of elections ago, it was the campaign of emails. And then it was the campaign of Facebook. And then it was Twitter and so forth. But how do those very simple ideas of making sure that your team gets the most votes get impacted by these technologies now? I think impacted enormously. I mean, I started out so long ago, Hori. It was long before you existed. I covered the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976 when there were three television broadcast networks. There was radio. There were newspapers. And of course, we still have television. We still have radio and newspapers. But what swallowed up the rest of everything else is social media, is Twitter. These campaigns, they have to be getting their messages out now on Facebook, on Twitter. And it's how they do it and how much money they spend and how they multiply the message and how do they combine that with what they call what we call earned media, unearned media, talking to journalists like me to reporters and then paid media. And it's a transformed election landscape. I think it's much harder for me. I know it's much harder for me as a reporter to keep up with it, to understand. The campaigns don't like to tell you where they're advertising. You've got to go around and talk to media outlets and companies that follow these things in all 50 states to find out who's advertising where. And what are they saying in that ad? And is the ad they're running in South Carolina different from the ad they're running in California, which votes three days later? And to subcategories, right? If I just want to advertise to women in California, a totally different message. Or to the Latina community. Or to even the Asian community. I mean, the possibilities for micro-targeting are enormous. You're going to see much more of it in the general election once we know who the Democratic nominee for president is. And that person is facing President Trump the opportunity to literally target small groups of women between the ages of 30 and 35 who earn between $50,000 and $60,000 a year. Or people who are a fan of the Duke Blue Devils, perhaps. Exactly, mentioning my alma mater. You were in New Hampshire. You got a chance to get out. And did you see any of this stuff playing out? Meaning that the sort of accelerated or compressed timeline of how some event that you were witnessing in person, how that was being interpreted, misinterpreted, or reinterpreted on social media, how it started to show up on your cable networks while you're out there standing saying, how did that thing that I just saw turn into the other southern thing? I think it's hard to see that maybe surprisingly when you're in the middle of it, when you're going from. I was trying to see as many candidate events as I could. And I was watching not just the candidate and the voters. I was watching how reporters were covering these events and watching how much of it was Twitter and how much of it. I mean, everybody may be tweeting in the moment, but they're also filing for whatever their next deadline is. And you have to be thinking. Somebody's sitting at home in, I don't know, Los Angeles or San Francisco on the other coast. And they're watching this rally. I mean, I was tweeting when I went to Pete Buttigieg's rally late on the night before the voting, the Tuesday of voting. And surprise, this young man who's there to introduce Pete Buttigieg, who happens to be transgender. And he's saying, you know, Pete Buttigieg. He said, and now it's my great honor to introduce Kevin Costner, who's going to then introduce the candidate. So we're all the, we and the press are going, what? And so these candidates have to constantly come up with ways to keep our interest as voters and keep our interest as journalists. It's been a pretty active debate cycle. You've been watching them, I'm sure, at night. I know you've been tweeting about some of them. We moderated the NewsHour, moderated the debate in December. And how different is this cycle now? I mean, we had a field of a huge number of candidates that were taking on President Trump before he became the nominee. How different is it this time on the left? I've never seen anything like it. I mean, here we are, February the 26th, if my calendar is functioning, with this many still viable candidates in the race coming up to South Carolina this weekend. Who knows who's going to emerge from South Carolina, who's going to emerge from Super Tuesday? As you know, 14 states are voting. And so we may see some of these seven candidates who were on the stage last night in South Carolina may not make it. But it's hard for voters when there are this many candidates at this point, because they're looking at them. And I hear voters were saying to me, well, so-and-so makes a lot of sense. And then so-and-so, I spoke to a family member of mine last night. He said, you know, I'd like to take something from each one of these six or seven. And I said, well, you can't really do that. You're going to have to pick which one you like. All right, Judy Wooder, thanks so much for joining us. It's great to see you, Hari.