 And this predates the election and any conversation in a journalism school before the election. Some of you might have heard this, is about where the job's going to be. There's no economics to the media industry anymore, in part because of the loss of revenue for print newspapers, with Craigslist kind of changed the economic dynamics of what newspapers do. Online sites have great reporters and a lot of great stuff, but it's not clear how you fund it. And we saw many institutions, this is the problem we're looking at on your phone. Two more classics. One, a fifth issue is always about public policy. A lot of the authors in my book talk about the importance of public policy decisions, like eliminating the fairness doctrine in 1987, which at least created pressure on putting different sides of an issue if you were going to cover any issue, how changes in public policy right now might affect what's going on in the next few years of the news. That can go anywhere from policies dealing with competition and regulation to policies dealing with regulations on the dissemination of news. And finally, one last smaller thing but important is funding long-term reporting. I think I hear this from a lot of reporters that there is just not a lot of money anymore for investigative reporting or kind of long-term ongoing coverage of stories, which was so fundamental back in the 1960s and 70s to some of the best journalism that came out. There's some places like ProPublica that still are working on this kind of journalism, but they're far a few between. So those are some thoughts that I have about what's going on. But maybe we can open it up, I guess, with the basic question that's on many people's mind. What is the response of a good journalist in an era now only a week plus in when there is immense hostility coming from the White House toward both the profession, toward the organization of news? Maybe I'll open it up with you, Brian. We have to call it what it is. It's a systemic effort to tear down what we think of as the press. To not avoid it, to not deny it, to not pretend it's not happening, to not minimize what the president and what his aides are doing. And I think go a step further and talk about the worst-case scenarios. What we've heard so far from the president are words, abusive, bully words. We should think about what actions he could take and what actions his government could take. Not assume that he will take them, but think about what they could be and we can look to history for guidance on what those actions can be. How to use the government in order to punish news outlets and punish critics. I think it's a moment to be wide-eyed about it. Not to have a failure of imagination the way you regard it or was before Election Day. It's a moment to be very hyper aware of what the government can do to suppress the news. I don't think it'll succeed, but we should be aware of those possibilities. Given that even today in an alleged event to celebrate Black History Month, the president focused on this hatred of CNN and his feelings about fake news that he does as he calls it, and his celebration of Fox News. That is, you know, not something we've seen before. So we've got to call what it is, identify it, and not get worn down by it. I don't know about you all, I'm getting kind of worn down by it already. It's been 12 days. To not get worn down by that daily drumming of attempts to de-legitimize the press is something that I'm kind of thinking about and personally I'm finding myself looking much more to past decades and lessons we can learn from history about this, whether it's Nixon's attempts to tend on the press or for many decades prior. Because we can't call on the Bushiers of the Obama years as measures of this. This is something wholly different. One of the Nixon, one of the things he did is not just go after the news with an enemy's list or with agnew statements. One of the interesting things is cable television part was deregulated because Nixon's hatred of the networks was so great, part of the strategy a guy named Clay Whitehead in the Office of Technology Assessment opens up the regulations that stifled cable. Part of that was an effort to get new sources on the air and open up competition because of these fears that he had. So I'm supposed to thank the Nixon administration. Thanks. That's where it started. Nina, how from from your perspective as a reporter you came to Newsweek about a year before or as the election was taken over a year before the election took place what's going on in whatever the newsroom is this day in this day and age in thinking about not simply the war on the press but how you covered this particular president. What's the need you're going to do with someone like it? Okay, first of all I want to I just want to take issue with one thing about the notion that there is no investigative journalism going on. There really is. I mean we've got amazing people working at Newsweek and other places at the times and you know bus feet. Yes, bus feet is bus and stories. Our guy I have to I have to put us correct and all this breaking news on Trump all summer on. So it's a let's not you know send it to the graveyard yet. As far as the newsroom well I can just give you an example of our case over what into 12 days about the seventh day or the sixth day all right. I got a tip that the Trump White House top staffers were using an R&C each Q.org server. The same server that Bush and his and Rove and Cheney lost 22 million emails on in the OO's right around the beginning of the of the Rockwood. I had written about that and that's why somebody tipped me off and it we had screenshots of Bannon had one Cushier had one Kellyanne so sorry so we I wrote the story and you know I wrote the story I didn't tip them off to the fact that we had the screenshots right away but I wrote the story did a lot of interviews and then I called them and said we're about to put this you know we're looking into this and dead silence for 24 hours so after 24 hours I felt that maybe it's transition they're having you know they're not reading I'm not getting to them so I tried everyone's email that I had from the transition um in addition to the White House the people I knew were the White House they didn't get back to me we made a decision to run with it and put a note in second graph you know when the White House was they haven't responded when they was finally updated well so the first thing that happened was the RNC guys call and it said I get an email and it says you have to take your story down it's a lie and I said well it's not true and I said I emailed back and I said but it is true because we've seen the screenshots dead silence then I get an email saying can I talk to you off the record so that was the RNC we have a nice talk they give me he puts his it guy in the room and he explains this is crazy sort of what's a shaggy dog my homework story where they had oh they were just not a distribution list and they never used these emails and it really wasn't real and um they never used so okay they said are you going to be on the record can you give me a comment we'll send you a comment later so they emailed me a comment when we updated it's still no word from the White House eight o'clock in the morning the next day I'm at home eating my corn flakes and I'm hardly awake and the phone rings and it's a 202 and I think okay it must be done following and this guy gets on the phone I don't know who he is he says I am going to drive a freight train through your fake news you fool you're so stupid and I said who are you I'm Michael Short the White House and I'm going to drive a freight train you need to take that thing down right now and it was it went on he called me all these names and finally I said you know what you cannot call me names it's early in the morning so anyhow long story short we didn't take it down but the the bullying tactic I've never had I've covered the White House before I've never had that such an undignified amateurish call from a White House number we didn't even believe nothing whether he was in the White House or not he gave me his name I googled him later he's he was an RNC rapid response dude who they moved over there but anyhow that's that's the you know so he they tried to bully us they lied they tried to bully us and you just have to stand up to them we had I had my managing editor got on the phone with him after I wasn't going to talk to him and we left the story out and we said give you give us a comment give us a comment you know calmly and of course they took the emails down immediately we could see it my IT guy could see access to it so anyway that's that's what we're doing with bullying I'm so jealous that Michael Shore was on the record when he told you no yes I wish I hadn't agreed with Sean Spicer called the bully me that I had agreed to go off the record and I regret it yeah he tried he said you can tell that story is really valuable he said um can we talk off the record and I said no what happened he'd started to bully me and then he said you want to talk off the record my editor actually thought should we update it with his abusive phone and I thought you know what's the point I mean this is how they operate and that's just the way it's going to be what's the point we already made the story was that they were already using the RNC HQ org hiding place for their emails so the follow-up on that was shiny that one of the big stories last week was when the New York Times had two headlines I think it was sequentially one saying that the administration said a falsehood and I believe the second was when he met with the bipartisan group of leaders and said he won the popular vote and they said he tells him told the lie and I know they were conversations and debates among some journalists was that the right thing to do and what do you call this and what are the ethics of what you do we are you or how do you see that from the perspective of your work at Buzzfeed in terms of how do you deal with this which will be ongoing for sure uh yeah well we have a um we have a list Buzzfeed's known for lists we have a list applies another bullshit um from the top of the tradition and I think you know from our perspective you have that high bar a lie is it's really hard to know for certain that the person who's telling you false information it knows that information I think that is the bar that we are all trying to work with to some extent you're never going to know what's inside of Trump's brain um thankfully maybe or actually okay I didn't know um and you know to some extent you have to sort of think about okay well like how likely is it that they knew that the inauguration crowd was significantly smaller pretty likely based on facts and figures and photographs and comparisons to previous to you know uh to Obama's inauguration so from our perspective that was a fairly straightforward lie there are other views that they say that's like maybe they didn't know maybe they're just you know that's bullshit rather than a lie um and then you categorize me that um so that's a good answer that's very same thing I like to have a category for dealing with it um do you think I mean is it is it a different kind of challenge for uh an online site like Buzzfeed in terms of handling this kind of news and it would be for television on CNN or more standard webzine or is this challenge the same across platforms I uh yes and no I mean I think you know long before we had the honor of being called the failing problem garbage by the president um we had we had not had access to a long period of time during the campaign due to reporting that we have done uh on Trump by some some report reporting by me k-pop fans on Trump and you know before he decided that he was going to run um speaking fully of Trump called the case why it's ugly after you know after the story came out because he didn't like the story you know it's like that kind of thing was happening um and so from our perspective very early on we did not have access to Trump they wait they go awful they waiver they eventually let us in they kicked us off the next day and then they put back on the list and since then since complete the campaign we've been given some access we're now in the White House one of our reporters Adrian Trasquillo is in is in the White House and the White House has corresponded but um I think so to that end you know now we all have a similar level of access but they fully they seek to divide news organizations against each other and so we all are sort of facing the same challenges so now we turn to uh Emily let me switch if we let's see if we can switch from President Trump even for a minute his name seems to emerge and so it's like bubbling up uh but the the next issue that I think is important to talk about is is is what journalism is in 2017 and what are some of the emerging responses economically professionally to this era of digital journalism of kind of multi table television I don't know what what what the answers are I had a I taught a class on media and journalism it's funny I had a group of brave reporters came on was talking about Buzzfeed and one of the students made a joke about the cat videos and loving it but then they said what was interesting is they said actually Buzzfeed just figured out a way to replicate uh some of the kind of advertising newspapers used to have and use that money to fund really good journalists right now so uh it kind of as we were speaking that brings me to this area so you you are working on digital journalism at the J school and think about this what what's going on with digital where has this gone where where are we emerging now well I was hoping we would not get to the t-word but it's going to come up right in the second word that's right he says it all first in fact so actually come moments like this um for the first time in quite a long time um I was at the AIB at the weekend which is the interactive advertising bureau in a massive conference full of advertisers uh and the first um keynote which was the head of marketing at Proctor Campbell who's a pretty important character guy who talked about the real importance of veracity of information of having an information ecosystem that people can trust this is not normal advertiser this is pointless um and then I was on stage with um uh the media media gossip who is and um uh shameless from cash from the um washington post and when they describe what they've been doing what they've found modern day at the washington post like a room of kind of like a thousand advertising first into spontaneous applause now you know kawamio journalism school you have not seen a different applications kind of much to the sort of the idea that journalism is fading away or um and and actually kind of the trump bump which everyone with a k-wall or a membership offering has seen is you know um somebody said to me at the weekend you know every time he says new york time you know the failing new york times another 10 000 people sign up for anyone so so actually kind of there is this thing about you know the the the crises of um uh democracy are good for the press they have to be good for the press um and you know kind of if you're a journalist stories which are now kind of like lying on the floor waiting to be picked up or extraordinary um but the problem is that we don't have uh the deep pockets that we once had i mean i completely agree that this idea that there is no great investigative journalism i'm old enough um to remember like what journalism was like in the old days it really wasn't that great you know there is a myth that like the gold and the age of the message of journalism it was just much less of it and we remember the good bits and we don't remember the shit bits and i come from the british press and believe me you know but brick doesn't have a fake news problem because the tabloid culture is fake news so you know it is it is exactly that so so so don't sort of you know come um the big issue though for me is you know there is a transfer on the serious side there's a transfer of power there's a transfer of wealth from the um individual press institutions to the large technology companies um i wrote about this in the cgl today saying that you know quite influence is my energy it doesn't kind of you can't destroy it but it is it's transferred it it's transferred from one place to the other and actually you know kind of like i think when we talk about the crisis economic crisis in the press um the crisis of kind of confidence in the press and we cover Trump but a lot of that is a proxy for a crisis of influence which is we are doing great reporting and nothing is happening and i think that we need to kind of aggregation or sort of undergirding of what's now the economic driver and the influence driver which is the google's and the facebook's and the twitter's to really actually step up and say we are part of this ecosystem we are responsible for its health we are responsible for its wealth and we are responsible for exercising influence responsibly and kind of you know they don't know how to do that i'm not saying that and they're kind of a derogatory fashion they come from a place where we are all about how do we exercise our influence responsibly they kind of have tried to say well we you know we don't know how we've got this sort of power now and we don't really know what to do with it so i think that that on the on the kind of you can't solve the business crisis in journalism um without i think people directly funding it um i don't think sort of paywalls are the whole answer because i don't think you want to press which is depends on your ability to pay whether you ever want that um and i think if advertising is going to support it then it has to be done in coalition with the technocrats the there's a not hawking the book but there's two really great chapters one is written by a woman named kathryn the garb starting at the wisconsin journalism school and it's a fantastic journal a piece about the washington press score in the 40s and 50s kind of the high point but it's about the inside world of washington the social club the lunch clubs and captures how insular the world of reporting was and how a lot of the views were incredibly limited because they literally were working and socializing with a very narrow framework and an effective reporting on the cold war it puts certain ideas outside the parameters of legitimate i think your warning about the nostalgia uh is is well taken up uh brian uh you kind of are in the cable news uh business and uh there's been a lot of talk obviously uh about the economics of cable news as opposed to print or online you cover a you have a store a show that focuses on journalism how do you see the state of cable television is critics there's food stickers and what's your take on where this is going in the next couple of years how's the industry going to go that is the primary difference between uh television news and every other form of news it's a cinematography it is it is the difference between that and the times and all of the other cable walls the difference being that you all of your favorite cable pay for cnn pay for fox news fun to the journalism without ever thinking about it and i you know i think there's maybe good reasons to remind the audience of that maybe the reason is not to uh but you think about the subscriber fees for cnn and fox news and actually now for abc news and mbc news and cbs news those are coming through retransmission fees and forms of gravity um it leads me down a path to a fantasy that will never happen which i will bring them unless which is in your wireless bill uh whatever it is a dollar a month that goes to grow local papers it goes to your local radio and it was like it happened but it's my fantasy and the reason i bring it up is because we're seeing it already works through cable that most americans pay for cable bus they fund cnn and another big question becomes what do we do with that money right and cnn this week announced the 25 person investigated uh there were already investigative reporters but they're being brought all under the same umbrella for the first time uh that's the kind of thing i think people in this audience want to see done with cnn subscriber fees uh what i always say about cable news though these places are really really big and for every time you can point to a ridiculous segment that was awful i can point to two three really impressive segments uh the that it gets to however this broader breakdown of trust with the audience that that some people on twitter and facebook will point to me only to the embarrassing segments only to the worst of cable news be it on cnn or anywhere else for that matter i had not to what else has went on what journals have been produced with those sub fees that breakdown and trust uh that is so profound talking about influence of media and we if we're doing all this very reporting wise and i have an impact even that even that framework would be rejected by a lot of voters the idea that i talked about worst-case scenarios what trump could do to truly crush news organizations which is within his power that would be celebrated by some of his voters and uh if we don't do more to address that breakdown and by the way the answer is to do that wouldn't be here i think i would create a new news organization right now and to address those trust breakdowns is probably the underlying tension here uh throughout these conversations i don't know how to get folks to pay for newspapers if they believe donald trump's claims that it's all fake news i don't know how to get them to to uh to recognize the value of uh not even the republica but their local version of republica if they think that we're all of what was it was it failing powers of garbage garbage and i had forgotten the data insulting the case wife there's so many examples of those that i need to remember anyway that's my worry is that the trust issue is the fundamental one whether it's for cable news or or news papers or websites but i would just have one more thing which is uh yes trust is an issue and i'm not going to say this to brad the ratings of the room and and i'll just never see an end right now i mean that for the times that the atlantic's and the buzz feeds uh and the blossom clothes uh and the blossom yesterday blossom globe ever ever ever traffic and the times and all of these news outlets including television news seeing huge surges in traffic right now viewership of traffic which tells me there is a huge audience for what we're doing even if some of them don't necessarily trust it even if they're all going to pay for it i'm harrowing by the fact that the audience is with us in this tense moment so i gotta just say something about trust which is i've never been trusted like that happen again historically i said the book that have always been like levels of trust in the press and i think again you can read that a number of ways which is i haven't explained the gala of all numbers with going down down down so i think this is really interesting like you know academics always say all more research is needed but i really do think that more research is needed you know i again i come from a partisan press background i used to work for guardian um and i sort of still sit sit on the board there and every year our trust numbers among our readership very high trust of the in the day of mail zero um in the daily mail which is a kind of now an entertainment show this website um trust for their own readers very high trusting the guardian zero we're now consuming lots of kind of differentiate so far i actually said to you brian brian do you trust the press you would have difficulty answering that question because what is the press it's like not monolithic anymore than the public is monolithic so i'm not saying that press isn't trusted but people believe what they want to believe and we have more sources which allow you to believe what you want to believe and so i kind of when that's the underlying tension yeah and i'm like yeah trust well lack of agreement on the comments exactly exactly and i think that kind of all of that is it is in flux right and in some ways that's a beneficial thing that we have to use but but the other thing is that environments change right and so a story which doesn't work on one day can actually like be like a grenade on the next day i wonder if the better phrase then is what to do about the report the portion of the audience is opted out of journalism because those folks who have opted out of journalism who are mostly on the right or non-target on the right mostly Trump supporters and non-target supporters uh they're consuming things that are news like substances or not really news whether that's a radio talk show or a not a fake news website but a bs site what to do about those audiences and what to do to bring them into journalism would be an interesting struggle a topic that i think about it doesn't directly relate to your cable news question going but i think it's it's that it's that underlying issue i think i mean i i i do think the best journalism often does flourish in moments of crisis intentions so obviously the 1970s ever remembers it it didn't come just smoothly uh because journalism was working so well and worked even better part of it with response to problems in journalism so you know the history of the vietnam war coverage was for the first four years the reporters are just listening to Lyndon johnson's and the military sources no one was questioning anything almost and gradually that started to break apart and uh the coverage of nixon was in part a response to really laxadaisical coverage of conflict of interest and go back to the progressive era it's another kind of period where the corruption and the things that weren't sad or looked at uh become sources of generating good media so uh this could be a moment like that and i wonder what it means to shine if you run you're one of the leaders of one of the most interesting newsrooms in the country what does it mean for you and your staff to be uh for you know for your next 10 years to be living through this whole and i haven't thought about that myself either as a as a 31 in the middle of the newsroom that's that's experiencing this incredible story but i wonder what it means for a generation of millennials for for coming to the journalists who are living through this story who are calling bsbs i wonder how that's going to trickle out to coverage 10 20 years from now well you know we've been eating work for a relatively small staff here we've got about your journalists around the world um so small compared to time small compared to semen um but you know people meeting with our reporters and helping them figure out you know how do you think you're spotting and one of the things that we've been saying defense and i didn't say to our teams have been you know write the story that you feel right right now um you know sometimes you want to escape you want to write that long form piece about you know a Japanese artist or whatever but like you know actually we need to be focusing on the ways in which or be whether it's entertainment television politics business science you know intersects with the current administration um i think that's the place that we thrive really shown has been when we just report the hell out of whatever it's like right from us it's all it's not just millennials though it's i mean i i know a white house correspondent very well back with the election that was totally despondent and she said i don't know what i want to do anymore in terms of power and my response was this is the story of a lifetime what's about to happen in Washington what's happening and i think that might be some of the yeah i mean you know the day after the election you know we were all exhausted and also you know people were sort of surprised and shocked and it was like you know now it's going to be like we work to do like we have so much like we're so glad to be in this room with all of you in this moment i'm so much working on this i want to leave time for q and a for everybody but i want to ask you to back maybe too but more generally the big question in this election for a lot of people if you speak to people out of journalism a lot of people are really angry with the media or the way i'm sure some in this room and maybe some on this panel in terms of how the election is coming some who argue trump won because of the media or others say this body who works what happened in the left whatever you know the arguments i'm curious from your perspective how did the media and i hate to use that term how did journalists different journalists come to this election what's your assessment from what happened well um boy i'm gonna have to take um Brian to task here on this cable news comments his his program is great um but there we were almost going to do and have considered doing a story on toxic tv and what if we waited too long to deal with it but the it's never too late i know it's but it was much more obvious during the campaign what was happening um i think that print media print i shouldn't say print words on screens um words on screens uh did a did a hell of a job of um covering and predicting what was going on um again i go back to kurd i can walk because he was busting these stories on on um trunks business deals and nobody was paying attention to them um i mean they were getting a lot of attention probably you were paying attention to news were aware of them but they weren't getting wide play um and i remember one night he was going to be on he busted the story about how trump broke the embargo with cuba and um he was going to be on the cables for for four hours he had all these shows lined up and that night this week went dark our little website just disappeared gone for hours it was a dbos attack so he's on tv and his story wasn't up there anymore and it's they did they did research and found out that they yes it identified that it was russian they thought that it came from some russian hackers but in any case back to your answering your question i really think that that um uh the tv um method that you know the way that news is covered um with the uh the question and answers the way you would see juliani being asked questions then he would get the last word and they would go oh we have to go now and he would tell a lie and then they would move and then you have the chiro and the chiro was emails emails emails emails emails emails i'll walk into the office i don't want you at home and you see ms me see emails emails emails emails all day long and that is the wallpaper tv is the wallpaper for people i don't care i interviewed people who just got their news from fake news when i was at the republican national convention in cleveland i met people who had made life decisions based on news that they were going to be thrown into thema camps and that olama was imminently going to uh call for martial law and then their guns were going to be taken away i don't know where they got this information now i do but when i started first started hearing i'm really getting this so they're getting their information from somewhere else we've already talked about that but the wallpaper is there for everyone all the time that you have to choose to read kerb i do all the story you don't choose to see you're in a bar and you if they're not sports bars you're seeing the chiro emails emails emails or you're seeing rudy juliani telling massive lie and even my former colleague who i john dickerson i used to work with time it's not cbs i respect him greatly even he would not be able to speak because now you know the the system the way the question and answer method of our journalism the way tv journalists practice it is to say okay now we have to go you get the last word and now we have to go and i think bbc doesn't do that i think they're much more like you know we have to take the television reporters and you take the they have a huge responsibility as wallpaper more you know we do too we have responsibility to dig into the stories but sorry to take it but it's not your show it's not your stuff anyway did i answer i'm sorry before we get to tonight would anyone out bryan or others or you like the question i agree with you and in some ways this system of you think of live tv interviews as live journalists you're seeing us do the interview that normally we would tape record and then pick with us soundbites you're seeing it live on the air that's hard and that's really really really hard it also requires the interviewer to know what they're doing i've had interviews i've been really proud of interviews and they're really embarrassed by you're based on a lot of journalism i do think trumps are in particular have posed a unique challenge and uh that just needed a preparation maybe it's longer segments uh you know there's a lot of ways to respond to it but it's a unique challenge you do see people like jay tapper around i think sometimes standing up to them you know my starting response by emails is you shouldn't have said a private email server and that's a starting response but there's a truth to it and the coverage of trump was incredibly skeptical toward the end and i would love to go back to october and study that to go back to the meaningful research and understand if any of it broke through at all including curt stories i wonder how much of this this game was baked so many months before election yeah i mean there's a fascinating when you look at the practice as well of the participants of so you know the twitter audience is tiny like we're all on it we don't know each other on it but it's a tiny audience but it's embedded everywhere you know it's a kind of like a platform of influence and what's interesting is when you sort of study this that some of those things like precotailery emails health um there was actually kind of like a pretty organized campaign to have some to have those um subjects trending and to make people feel as if they were repetitive and they were always there and then when something happens however minor and however kind of proportionate you want to be as a journalist it feels like oh it's a story about hillary's health and you see almost kind of like does it really merit the coverage it was given people go but everyone was concerned about hillary's health are they um well he says so on twitter you know it's kind of like i just think that sort of you know journalists have to understand way more about the amazing reporting that craig silvern did on fake news you know journalists have to understand way more about the actual kind of ecosystem of how stories develop and how we follow them and what and how we commission stories it's like there wasn't a lack of information about candidate before election day but the most cover they went to the most cover in history but the if regime system is just completely upside down at this point yeah yeah i think i i had a question about this is another talk i i mean i had a different someone's asking did cnn elect donald trump like another voters election donald trump and cable and the media is often being used as an explanation for something that a lot of people don't understand uh that's how i feel sometimes i did there's always problems in the media i can't think of an election right can't point to fundamental problems there's a book on 1988 election and and it's all about horse race coverage and uh the great news week and time and the new york time we're kind of falling for this shallow coverage uh who's up who's down what's the gap uh and there were critics then too we should remember that you know the car the year is all all the writing is about how this obsession with objectivity in fact let politicians say whatever they wanted and it would be printed on the front page and there was no coverage and so uh i i do think we have to be cautious in putting too much blame which many people do uh on on the media's the main causal factor i don't know there was a lot of different reporting on on stations and i think part you know david farrell the washington post was beating the drug on time for just say something really quickly as a european though which is this is not isolated to the states this is kind of like and actually what we talk about you know the media elite i'm somebody you know up till now has benefited from kind of globalization being able to work around the world with all beneficiaries there are lots of people in america and in like the noughties where i come from and in you know france who are not beneficiaries of that and you know the fact is that there is a fundamental clash of belief systems which say on the one hand say globalization you know kind of is a good thing and on the other hand said i don't care i want my life to be better i see people kind of in tech and in media with jobs living great lives and my life has got worse and worse and worse so there is to some extent you know come didn't the media cover that story um i think is a really sort of critical and interesting question and if they weren't going to cover it you know it really does involve saying you know we do believe that climate change is a bad thing it shouldn't be open coal mines and it shouldn't have you know so that's that's what i do think you know we should be saying that to them to the coal buyers we as journalists well they're not we as journalists but i'm saying that there are you know people who are in our audience at well i've got my university but i'm not going to write for the guardians so yeah you know people in our audiences um will march you know in washington to uphold kind of for its rights and have some people who say well actually i'm on you know i want the coal mines opening how do we how do we balance that coverage you know it's i think that's kind of a a an interesting question at why we will see more alternative certainly come out that's the point rising over the next four years so i want to open it up to people uh is it uh is there a mic or people just yelling which there's a mic coming please keep your questions to sink and uh no statements that's my only request and please say if it's for someone in particular identify uh who it's for okay yeah yes i appreciate it the above levels on the edge where they see it because um i think the term fake news is corrosive and curious if you think that it's been very successful in sort of spending an ideology that evident in the last couple of weeks particular some curious if you think it's the duty of journalists to refer to fake news or something else either to spin it or either to separate falsehoods okay yeah we can we blame craig silberman and bust me for the term fake news that's a little terrible though yeah i think the second the fake news the term entered the zeitgeist it was immediately co-opted as news i don't like um and so you know it is what it is it was a useful academic term though to describe the profit motives yeah the profit handle motives a certain kind of website but i'm not angry that the term we've lost the term that's so to real journalists have lost the term fake news and uh i mean we're much better off saying hoaxes saying lies saying yeah i had a hard time with this last week on cnn strong spicer came to the microphone's he said the president does believe three to five million people were illegally and i was sitting on set when any of my term just got off about it uh that is fake news by the way three to five million that's a great example of a fake news story the fake news sites are propagated however calling that fake news is impossible uh so instead i said this is crazy you know i was like oh this is crazy i knew i was gonna get some flak for saying it but i'm and i think julie you're going through this all as well when you're on camera trying to figure out how to communicate to the audience to break through the misuse of language the exploitation of a term like fake news try to figure out how to best reach the viewer and get through and it may not be to say this is crazy that they actually alienate yours but i think as folks on tv we're wrestling with what is the right way to communicate that that's bs that that's a false i had a way out for responsibility i'm running out of ways to say fact check already and it's only been 12 days yeah so i was the interview the other day on carol castella show and they had a clip of the guy who president trump is using to legitimate that claim he has a phone app or something yeah so then the conversation said someone else was a very good journalist was the other gasp said cynically well i'm waiting to see uh you know the data that this person has to support that and that's kind of and i just read it said we don't really need to wait for the data it's not true it's just not really a story other than the president is talking about this but we can't now have a debate about his winning the popular vote and five million fraudulent votes and but it's hard it's hard to think of what we're to use responsibly but i do think it poses a challenge i think it's pushing journalists to offer a kind of clarity on the spot or in print that i don't i don't know what the answers are but that was my gut then to say that and if people haven't seen correct silverman's i really recommend it he's every time he comes up with a new way to evolve the beat that i shake my fist at i guess i didn't think of it first but he's he's coming up with ways to really rebuke this stuff he is and he's he's obsessed right now with connections and how the new how fake news how hoax is you know that's originally that's what we were calling those hoaxes how they propagate and you know you found some sites in you know Eastern Europe and they would just be just completely made up and yet we're thriving in the face of the ecosystem and so just thinking about the ways that these these stories evolve and travel for you know a year a year and a half to to the president's mouth you know it's fascinating next yeah great thank you everyone for being here um sorry to be a little bit critical but i i need to be in my field like having heard this conversation right so we all depend on the foreign state as a critical institution to to help mediate the dialogue between the citizenry and those in power and it's clear that all institutions of power losing trust the court will say personally for most months and perhaps this election showed that this conversation here has been troubling to me and i hear kind of a circling of the wagons the defense of well why what we're doing as the status quo is legitimate and how it's necessary that is understandable but clearly the dialogue in the country has changed the rules have changed the nature of the discussion we're having as a country doesn't look the same as it did two years ago and that's manifest i haven't heard anything about how do you guys think your institutions need to change their way of practicing and behaving to be a better reflection of the dialogue that's happening in this country right now that's not an endorsement of any positions of that group but you guys seem out of touch and the opposition in the white house is playing a different game than you seem to be playing yeah i just i have this i have been pointing out that you know the tv situation they have to completely reconsider the way they interview people on camera when it's live um i've been pointing out i think the the change i agree with you that you know that the the election and what's happening now in an auto autocrat taking over and um shaking our uh democracy or all shaking everything and not following the rules not following the law is a huge challenge to journalists i think everybody takes it very seriously as a challenge it was a shock uh to the uh to the system and i've been in this business for a long long time and i feel like i'm not sure that all of my training um has prepared me for this moment but i do know that it is what i'm supposed to be doing and i know i think i know what i'm supposed to be doing and that's speaking truths to power and when somebody from the white house calls up an unprecedented behavior bullying behavior and i expected to get much worse actually that we all have to be able to stand up and ask spine and continue to ask the questions and um i get we're all i think all of us are uh are asking ourselves these questions yeah i was going to say you know we we just two weeks ago we were having spirited discussions between mostly and cnn on this topic on this topic around publishing the the dossier uh that was circulating circling in the highest levels of government in the intelligence intelligence community um and from our perspective we were doing exactly what you said which was thinking about what are the rules are the rules the same to be made by the same rules we describe in a kind of roundabout way what the story is do we trust our reader to read this document that we contextualized as not fully verified and make what they will and i think that was a really clear example of the different ways that organizations are are uh i mean you were very nice about saying you disagree with this it was very important but i would actually push back on you a bit you said you know the press needs to change to mediate the conversation between people in the country in power i mean i think someone who thinks that people need um the press or journalists to mediate what they think or what they say to power is also out of touch you know they're actually kind of everybody now has a voice you know and and and actually that's one of the ways in which rules have changed um but to directly answer your point which is what are we doing um i think that kind of you have to think all the time about how the really massive sys systemic changes in the world in all sorts of ways are reported so you know technology actually is a beach should be about human rights and business you know you should have kind of like every organization is a meeting organization how you come up with that the idea that you can't know how information reaches people because it's concentrated in two or three companies as far as i know google is covered like uh you know it's not covered by the nation's name which is what it should be covered cover that um i think you need to know i do i seriously think you know you need to rethink your beats bust it's not a great bust beats not a great job of rethinking beats because whether a billion daily active users well there's been billion daily active users you know and and so so you know how do you kind of reconstruct some relevance for journalism you have to tell people things that they don't know um about systems which affect their lives and you have to keep doing that the moment that actually it really affects them they will they will see the information and you have to make sure that it's right you have to make sure that it's informed if i can defend the question though uh for a moment we do live in a world with two sets of people with two sets of facts two alternate realities and in some ways that's always been true but i think to a lot of folks in that first step when we think of the real facts it's scary right now and i don't think users necessarily necessarily have um collectively fought through the consequences of it i i think there was some soul searching after the election for sure i'm not sure it lasted long enough i'm not sure i went deep enough uh to think about the consequences and i would just say one more thing on that which is if someone says they're at war with you and you say no we're not at war don't you lose it isn't that how it doesn't the pacifist lose doesn't the pacifist lose the war hey art alternatively maybe you turn it around you say we're not at war with you we're against the people that are telling false sense but i do think we you know we've got to grapple with what it means to have this man saying he is uh we are enemies of this that's different uh and it's it's different from nixon because it's different we're in a different media ecosystem now where he can reinforce his messages differently and he can rally his supporters differently um so i i think you're on to something that i'm wrestling with in my head as much as i think newsrooms are meeting the moment journalistically by covering this presidency aggressively and uh holding the truth to power there are some underlying issues that newsroom leaders don't always want to have to address when it comes to this and that more analogy does concern me a lot i do think one small comment you do also have to be careful that reporters and journalists don't throw everything out because of an election and well i'm in academics and journals and the great thing about academics which i didn't appreciate always was that slowly doesn't really respond to anything almost anything but there's a benefit to that because the people in the institution might actually over the long term be thinking the problems in the right ways and uh kind of uh continue with practices that are important and i do think there's parts of journalism that are doing well and are actually i would i would this isn't the place but i don't agree with all the premise of what you're saying parts of it is bad parts of it are doing well and i think there's a especially with a president who declares war on you as the first war he declares meaning the media there's a danger in going too fast and overthrowing things and overhauling practices some of which are good and need to be continued that's what i would say another question i think we have one or two hi um thank you so much for uh sharing your perspectives with us tonight and also for the work that you do as journalists one of the things that was really interesting about the 2016 election was that there were organized groups indeed uh fake news farmers but also trolls um who were nurturing narratives in places like reddit assembly bell pointed out that were then available so they were kind of gaming the algorithms in places like google or youtube to make those things available and also i think gaming journalistic values like balance neutrality and objectivity uh just a few days ago uh lu Wallace who worked for marketplace in American public media was uh resigned over a blog post that was called uh objectivity is dead and i'm okay with it so i'd love to hear from the panel about your practices journalists and what we can do as members of the public to interact with journalists and editors to think about journalistic values how we can support you in the work you do and how those kinds of values of balance objectivity neutrality do those change going forward i would like to start to take that i would say give them money uh because they because you know i'm cpj and acl you and i you know kind of there's a there's a direct thing that you can do um to support sort of you know the ecosystem of journalism um and i think to engage i think you know actually for everybody but everybody has a voice then you're absolutely right everyone has a voice so kind of when actually everybody engages in you know what what is right and the issue of trials is a really interesting one um because it grows out of this um you know actually which was quite ideological crap in a way it started off saying we want to be like we you know it is free press in the 21st century um and there is uh you know to the point of academics thinking about things very slowly over a long time um this idea that kind of free speech is kind of never making any interventions or regulation or adjustment um what you went up with you could argue you know what you went up with when you have completely open free platforms is a kind of sort of you know populist fascist dictatorship where the strongest voices and those who you know historically have power which are sorry guys largely white men um actually do sort of dominate and chill and you know one thing that's disturbing me most is the number of email journalists who say i don't think they're like doing this anymore i don't feel like being a public figure um i don't feel like kind of the habit like when when katie ter was was singled out by um donald trump she had to be escorted from the um arena with security and has had you know kind of a cajillion death threats and the platforms have to step up it they can solve this problem but they can't solve it by saying we don't really want to get involved because we're we're afraid that we might other fellows i might not have a sorrow question about what is the press going to do and reassess their approach to covering the current situation doesn't it seem to you all that maybe you have to start picking the fights you want to have more selectively than you have to now uh you report on every stupid tweet you report on every slur every uh every nasty thing that these people say and after a while it kind of numbens you um just another comment on cnn it strikes me that cnn which i'm addicted to is a variable factory of what fake news because it has all of these people reporting the beating from spokespeople and our spokespeople might report it that way and why would anybody know what the right hand part what the what the news really is can i um might as well that your your first part in your question is is really important and it's something that um we talk about uh in our discussions on how we're going to cover this we um you know in the very beginning um when the election happened i had a really hard time focusing on what i was supposed to be doing because the craziness and the flurry and you know hi he's just i started one project and then he's he's just you know juliani might be secretary of state sorry if you're coming back to him but that that uh you know trying to turn and do something else and after a few weeks i i said to the editors you know i need to i focus on three things i'm working on it's three long term things i am not jumping at every twitter and we were talking about this in this weekend you know are we like pablox dogs to the the twitter machine and a lot of what they're doing is smoke screen and they're they you know they do things and then there's something else going on so we're very much thinking about this and um you know we're we're living in it and to your question about what you can do i mean we really are living in a period where we're we are confronted with these these bullies i mean we're we're in the book we're in the schoolyard and so what you can do is you know if we get carted off help us out because i think they're going to start doing it i think they're going to start they you know they single out people like katie they have doxxed meggy paperman um you know i mean it is happening and it's a scary thing and yeah women are women are on the front line of this too and and the trolling women online um and that's why i said step back and wanted you to answer it because it really is about google and uh twitter and these platforms and and that's that's one of the places where things have been able to change but you can't ignore this i mean this isn't someone tweeting this is the president of the united states and it is important that journalists think about what's a distraction or what might the president be doing but this is a powerful platform and even if he says something that's nasty or ridiculous it's now coming from the white house and it has to be covered i think it has to be covered because it has a big effect briefly briefly i've already seen kind of a reduction in how much we can ignore it though i mean you kind of you know the point where you know what he's going to say you know you know you know an active size my concern is newsrooms of all these facts and we don't always even share we fact check his tweet we say oh screw that we're not gonna waste our time actually no we need to show people why he was wrong and give people that link to share there with their friends so that the folks who believe trumps tweet actually if they choose to can have the truth the bad way to cover it is to go in the air for hours just talk about right there's a good way to do it and there's a proportional way i love my editors who are being much more proportional about it now when i was doxxed and the my address was published twitter was very responsive very quickly and my worry is that uh they're not as responsive to any individual online it doesn't happen to know twitter but you are you know twitter knows how to respond to these things facebook knows how to respond to these trolls but they're not doing it even when you cross the board and so i agree that the pressure needs to be on what you're describing emily about uh folding these platforms accountable for the communications they're allowed it's important also that the coverage doesn't take away from other kinds of more boring covers so there is an executive order right now which basically is uh removing all kinds of regulations regulations on on manufacturing that was one of the first ones he passed uh it's a kind of very powerful thing that he just did which is at the heart of his and it barely got any coverage important wasn't just tweets it was the refugee executive order but i do think it's going to be important for the media to really i wrote about it good the deregulation yeah yeah they hardly got any clicks but it's because it's such a boring topic but it's an incredibly big and it's a hard regulated everything right the basic pesticide now right so i i do think that's going to be a response and they're just in the journals for the producer then you have to keep you have to be telling that i do think this is so important i mean i worked at the garden where nick dave has covered hacking for three years he could not get anybody to pay any attention to get anyone to cover the story um and suddenly something changed and that's the thing like when you see incredible stories and journals go you know but it got no attention etc so it doesn't matter just keep doing well what's the plan we gotta we gotta wrap it up we'll have a little time