 to what is essentially an experiment to bring together students and faculty from journalism schools all across the country. I'm grateful to the deans of the Carnegie night schools for collaborating at this critical moment in our history. We all recognize that we're facing a crisis in our information environment, which in turn is an emergency for democracy, just at the moment when the hard public mission of journalism has never been more important. Large parts of the public have lost faith in the press and other institutions. And so the point of our conversation today is to explore some of the reasons and address some of the hard, urgent questions of mission and method that we all are contending with every day. So I couldn't be happier to have such a terrific group of colleagues to explore these questions than them to take your questions. With me today are Meredith Artley, Senior Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of CNN Digital Worldwide, Wes Lowry, correspondent for 60 Minutes, CBS News, and Sul Chan, the editorial page editor of the Authenticulous Times. Hello everyone. I'd like to start with some definitions and how today's convening even came into being. The deans of all of your schools were meeting back in the fall and one of the interesting parts of that conversation was a sense that among faculty and students that the word objectivity had become a radioactive word. When many senior leaders of these schools in the newsrooms viewed it as a core journalistic value. And this was unsettling and confusing to many faculty members and newsroom leaders who define objectivity as fairness, as approaching reporting with an open mind, letting the reporting guide you wherever it leads. And so I thought, well, we should start today because I think all of us have heard about this critically important debate over that word and what it means for us. So let's start with defining terms. And I wonder if each of you could define what you think objectivity means or how you think about it and how you approach your work. Meredith, why don't you go first? I'll say about objectivity. And hi, Nancy, thanks for having me. To the degree that it's defined as being factual, fair and representative of many voices, that's how I think about the spirit of it. But I do hear and it sounds like we're gonna dive into this, but I do hear and have been really listening and thinking about the concerns raised by Wesley and lots of other journalists, especially journalists of color that it has been misused as a concept. So I think for me in my daily practice at CNN in our news meetings, objectivity is not a word that you'll hear us use. You'll hear us talk about things like avoiding false equivalency. You'll hear us use words like facts and clarity, but we don't really use the term objectivity so much anymore. Wes, you certainly brought this debate right to the center of every newsroom and a lot of your, the tweet that launched a thousand all-bed columns. So I'd love to hear how you now, having had a chance to live with the conversation you helped launch about how you're thinking about it. You, Andrew. Yes, as I've warned my fellow panelists, our household has a pandemic puppy who gets very jealous when attention is at Zoom and not at him. So he'll be biting my arm throughout. But, you know, I did learn the lesson to never write an op-ed or else you'll never get to stop talking about it. The, you know, I think there's a really important conversation to be had here. And as the op-ed that I wrote in the Times noted, the term objectivity or the concept of journalism objectivity as intended, as founded, I think is largely inoffensive to most journalists, most young journalists, you know, that I actually don't think there is a large, you know, generational divide among young journalists and older journalists as it relates to what objectivity is supposed to be. Fairness that we're out seeking facts and we're trying to report objective truth, not subjective opinion in our news report. But I do think that very often in our newsrooms and in our journalists of conversation more broadly, we've allowed this to become a kitchen table term, which is what prompts such a backlash from younger people, younger journalists, that this is a term that no longer means telling the truth as we find it, but often means things like balance. It means things like neutrality. Well, the truth is very rarely neutral. The sky is blue. It is not purple. You should not walk away from my piece unclear about which thing is true. There are, you should not walk away from my piece about a murder, you can unclear about whether or not the murder was a bad thing. We try to be synonymous with objectivity and it doesn't matter what they think about it. That balance is not necessarily synonymous with objective. And so I think that when we look at the actual application, hey buddy, calm down, the actual application of race on issues of gender is the decision making of when we are allowed to break the fourth wall and tell a truth, how we're allowed to frame things is being made by subjective decision makers, decision makers that very rarely are reflective of our readership, much less our country, much less our world. And so on issues of race, we've got mass tents full of white guys deciding, it was interesting, Collin from Benton Smith of the New York Times not long ago where he pulled on these issues. And what was interesting to me was that almost the same percentage of people who said they do not want to know the journalists more when their journalists are transparent, that there is baked into this idea and to the way we police social media and other places, this idea that people will trust us more if we are news robots who they know nothing about. What I would suggest is that there are probably just as many people who would trust us just as much if not more, if they felt we were being honest and transparent with them about who we are, about where we come from and about our processes. And so I think all of that's really important. So you come at this from the opinion side of the ledger, although you have long experience on the editorial side too. And so I wonder how your thinking about this has. I don't think being on the opinion side actually affects my thinking. I would say if I had to quantify that I agree with 90% of what Wesley has to say and I'll then explain the 10%. Look, I think the debate has at times been caricatured between a more old art establishment mainstream journalism that uses objectivity to think about a method for approaching the truth, as Tom Rosenstiel puts it. The other side of it, Wesley meant younger, more diverse, more digital, more digitally native journalists talking about moral clarity. In truth, I think in 90 to 95% of the cases, although the differences abstractly sound profound, in practice, I don't actually think they're all that, they're all, they're that giant divide. And I look forward to being contradicted. But I actually think in practice, we're mostly talking about similar things. I think Wesley has really raised an essential conversation about who we meant when we meant objective. We all know that there's no neutral observer, right? This goes back to Rawls and political theory. We can't leave ourselves, our genders, class, background, region, origin, language, national service, military service, class, immigrant, national origin. We can't sexuality, gender origin, we can't leave those things. We can't pretend that we're just kind of, these kind of bodyless minds that completely exist outside of social reality. And I think that's a crucially important point because frankly, the era of objectivity, which kind of began with Walter Littman's urging of objectivity as a concept, it really did come to be conflated with a certain kind of white mainstream, eventually more corporate journalism, and not necessarily with the voices of dissidents and abolitionists, I think about like Elijah Lovejoy, the first martyr to press freedom, a white guy, abolitionist who lost his life, his printing press, and his life because of his anti-slavery writings. So the term, look, I would say in practice, objectivity, I'm unwilling to reject the term. I like to contextualize it though, with terms like fairness, independence, accuracy, context, and compassion. Because I think that we should stop centering the moral core of journalism, which needs to be interrogating power. And by the way, not just government power, but also corporate power and other kinds of power. So I think ultimately, I'm hoping that this conversation actually is a step toward reaching a consensus on this. Because again, if we caricature each side, it's gonna be easy to come to blows. But I actually think that in 95% of the cases, the values are very, very aligned. When I read, as there has been a great deal of in the last few years criticism about both sides of them and that we've had just an epidemic of both sides of them in journalism. I wonder if there's a tension among journalists between a concern about fairness and a concern about the perception of fairness. So that in writing for a journalist who write about climate, I think we're at the point where they don't feel like they need to interview climate change deniers in order to appear fair. Can I quickly make a point on this? Many of the great values and institutions of American journalism, including CNN, 60 Minutes, LA Times, came out of this post-war era, 1945 to let's say the 1970s, when the American middle class was strong, the civil rights movement obviously was at least progressing. It didn't mean it was nearly quickly enough, but it was moving forward. The middle class was strong and the polarization was less than it is now. So I think that a lot of mainstream journalists coming of age, and this was also an age of great institutions as David Halberstam wrote about, right? And so I think the fairness came from that, that the assumption was that America good, let's say Soviet communism bad, and that yes, we had a lot of problems in this country, but we had a narrative of progress and we had to be fair to talking to both Democrats and Republicans who frankly at the time weren't all that far apart ideologically, at least certainly not 1950 to the late 1960s. What has happened over the last 40 years is rising inequality, increasing geographic sorting of where we even live, who we have interacted with, are we even willing to have our kids marry someone from an opposite party? So the polarization is stretching and also the extremism is growing and a lot of false information. So of course we would never quote a climate denier now, but I would argue that the cases, Wesley, where the moral clarity thesis is hardest to apply is the how. You're an idiot if you don't acknowledge the white supremacy is real and a cancer in our society and a cancer that's lasted centuries. The question of how to address that cancer, that's less clear. Well, let me apply that question and I'm curious Wesley and Meredith how you would address this, where to keep with the climate analogy that is it both sidesism somehow if you, when you confront the fact that there's tremendous disagreement about the trade-offs involved in addressing the climate crisis and even a lot of environmental groups have changed their position on nuclear power and there were real debates around the how of this issue even if you're not disputing the fact that it's a problem that needs to be addressed. And I wonder sometimes if the charges about objectivity, fairness, balance versus both sidesism has gone as far as making it harder for us to debate solutions to problems or ways we think about them. Is that, have those completed a bit? Wesley, you wanna go first? Sure, I mean, I guess I would say it would be lovely if most journalism was about debating solutions to problems. The reality is most of what's happening is about quote from politician said this crazy thing and here is a, you know, like I don't think anyone would complain about more contextualized reporting that dives deeper into pieces. And in fact, I think the instances in which people push back are when that is absent is when we are using the journalistic voice of God to launder official narratives or political talking points into our coverage without interrogation, without context, without and we're doing so because the president said it. So of course we have to put it in the newspaper or how could we not quote this Republican lying about a thing in response to a thing AOC said, right? That we're creating an equivalence where there is none or we are declining to contextualize and interrogate. Always bad journalism, the same way suggesting that the sky is not blue and murder is not bad was always bad journalism. I think a lot of it was always bad journalism. I mean, I don't think there was ever some glory days of journalism. I know that separates me from some of my colleagues but I would love to point me to a date to go back to and I'm sure the journalism was terrible. At least for people who live where I live in the town and the people who look like me. So I don't let mythologize like if only the newspapers could be like the 40s, like certainly not please let's not go back to that. And so like I think that they're, and so I do think as was noted, right? One of these big issues and where this comes up time and time again at least in my beats and what I cover is when we launder official government police narratives as factual matters into our news coverage without interrogation. The cops say this thing happened last night. And so now it's the headline of our story as if the cops are a third party removed observer and not a character in the story that we run more single source police narrative than any other type of thing in journalism and it would be wildly unacceptable by any other measure. One activist says, this is what happened last night. Throw it in a banner headline. We would never do it. But if the cops say it, it must be true. Even as we're in an era in which we are seeing over and over and over and over again videos showing us the things the police said were wildly inaccurate based on what had happened that we as journalists have to be smart enough to have skepticism and independence. And I think that that is what people are calling out in response is that they want us to live our values. They want us not to say the police said this thing. They want us to figure out if that thing happened. They don't want us to say the Bush administration says there are weapons of mass destruction. They want us to figure out if there are weapons of mass destruction so that we don't go to a war we shouldn't go into. So Meredith, this poses, I would think just the hardest constant 24 hour problem for CNN where who do you put on the air? And if they are a significant actor in a significant news story, but they are not telling the truth, they're committing any of these crimes against veracity. How is the thinking at CNN evolved in these last years where we have seen a willingness to blatantly lie and distort become much more common and shameless? I think than our institutions are engineered to cope with. Yeah, yeah, it is a constant challenge and it's a constant conversation. You know, when we talk about, there'll be a couple of thoughts here, when you talk about making sure you're not giving false equivalency, that's what I think of when you say, well, let's make sure we talk to the climate deniers. Nine times out of 10, you don't need to talk to the climate deniers. The science and the fact is it's there. Now, you can still do a story, and this one on one hand and on the other hand with the climate crisis and the climate deniers, but you can say there are people who believe that climate change is not urgent and the facts and the science are not with them. And then you break that down and you give it context. So you don't ignore it. And when you do that, you're doing that in the hope that you're actually giving context to the debate as all of our stories and pieces of our stories and whatever format they take, your news stories, analysis, opinion, text, video, et cetera, as all of that gets atomized throughout the internet, that you have that context with it. So you're doing the best job you can not to ignore the aspects, the people who are amplifying the things that are wrong or believing the things that are wrong. So you're being very clear in saying, listen, there are people who say there are two sides to this debate. There are not two sides to this debate. This is the facts, this is the truth, this is what we know. That I think is really important to be, it's definitely not the voice of God and it's definitely not both sidesism, but it is acknowledging when we're in the territory where we are doing a story where there can be misinformation or straight-up lies that are spread, that we're acknowledging that that is a phenomenon that we are facing and that we're leading with the facts and not amplifying the misinformation. Just making sure that you get that line exactly right is a daily, daily challenge because you really don't want to amplify, you don't want to amplify the falsehoods. Totally agree with me. But you can't ignore it because then you're not going to be working for the overall act of clarity and truth that we need to make sure as journalists we get that we spread at a time like this of such great polarization. I agree with Meredith, you can't ignore the denialism, but look, in California, this is real. Apocalyptic weather, wildfires. I look to our environmental journalists that as an example of how to do this, right? Because sometimes there are two sides and not the two sides you think. It's not about denialism versus accepting reality. That's like a 20 years ago debate. Right now, a big debate is mitigation versus adaptation. So climate change is real, but some people think that there's still a possibility of global action to get us to under the 2.5 centigrade. Other people think it's way too late. Similarly, there are two sides about who should bear the cost. We did, not that two at the LA Times is horn, but my colleagues in our newsroom did a whole project on coastal erosion last year. And to illustrate the trade-offs, who bears the cost? How much should it be the government versus landowners? How much should we try to be trying to shore up these coastal communities with seawalls as opposed to acknowledging that some of them might be underwater and we move them in land? To illustrate those trade-offs, actually we had a designer construct an interactive game that would let readers try to understand the trade-offs themselves, just as policymakers have to. It was a finalist for the full surprise and I mentioned it because it was an example of the, yeah, there are two sides, but it's actually a deeper and a more complex two sides than a superficial examination would suggest. All right, so let me push back on a different version of that, which is the debate over which positions in an argument over an issue deserve a hearing. And we saw this erupt most conspicuously this summer around Tom Cotton's op-ed about how to address the protests all around the country after George Floyd's killing. And the debate over who should be given a platform, whether it's so that their opinion can be interrogated and aired and subject to debate or whether that is simply a form of amplification, it feels as though that debate too has moved significantly. There have always been ideas in a Holocaust denial, no one's gonna say, well, we need to give that a platform in order to interrogate Holocaust denial. But it feels as though one of the things we've watched this year is a real movement in which points of view even deserve a hearing, including if it's coming from someone in a position of power. So I speak to that because I used to work on the New York Times op-ed page and I try not to speak about any former employers, but I did tweet after the Tom Cotton op-ed ran a string, a thread arguing that it was a lousy op-ed. And I did think that happening at a very, very volatile time as it did that it could have been that it was reckless and irresponsible. Now, when I made that argument, not because I'm saying not that conservative Republican Senator shouldn't be listened to, but that's certainly not what my argument was. My argument was that op-ed in particular was poorly supported. It's not martial evidence in persuasive support of an argument. We knew that the president ultimately has authority to call in the troops if there's like a civil war going on. That's not the question. The question was whether those criteria had been met and had Senator Cotton used evidence, including perhaps his own expertise as a former combat veteran, to advance the argument that the president should use troops. I think it would have been a very powerful op-ed, but that's not what happened. So here again, there's some court picturing here. People like me did not call for Senator Cotton to be silenced. We did not, certainly did not call, I certainly did not call for the dismissal of people involved in the production of that op-ed. That would be very presumptuous and I don't know the fact. So I certainly had no position on that. But I think again, it's been caricatured as this cancel culture. And you're saying that some points of view aren't even acceptable. I was just trying to say, it was a crappy op-ed. Here's how you could have asked some tough questions to try to get them to strengthen it. Well, I think that that's so much of it here. I think that's so important. We can have a theoretical conversation about a theoretical op-ed that was well written and well edited, but that's not what this was. Here in a remarkably incendiary moment where people are in the streets, being tear gassed, assaulted by police officers, were watching it every single day in these videos. We allowed, of New York Times, we collected. West, we lost you again. Well, good. Maybe that was, maybe I was getting too worked up. No, I'm very eager to hear your answer to this. And maybe I would ask in the idealized, let's make it a harder question, because a crappy op-ed on any subject, arguably editor's job is to say, this isn't good enough. We're not gonna run it. It doesn't make an interesting or supported argument. But where and how would you imagine drawing the boundaries on arguments being made that are inbound versus out of bounds if they are supported by the evidence, if it doesn't fail the evidentiary test? What do you mean by evidence, Nancy? If someone in 1905 wanted to introduce the protocols of the elders of Zion as evidence for their argument that, there's a global Jewish capitalist conspiracy reign, controlling different nations, I mean, this is absurd. Like we need to call out things like that that aren't really, look, there is a lot that's indisputable, right? If you deny the importance of democracy, human rights, the rule of law and pluralism, which means having people of profoundly different positions, but working civilly in a democracy to try to reach political consensus if possible. I mean, those are the unarguables, right? I guess I would need to know the specific case of what you mean. Like you mean, do you mean like an op-ed that would call for like toppling our democracy and replacing it with a monarchy? Like I'm, give me an example. Well, here's an interesting one that you're dealing with a version of in real time, which is, and it goes back to Meredith's point about context is we're seeing state legislatures all around the country passing legislation whose effect, if not intent, is gonna be voter suppression. Well, and they are saying, in many cases, this is because so many people believe that our elections are not secure. And it is factual if you go to the polling about what percentage of people actually believe that our elections are not secure, that is true. And yet we know that there is a lie at the heart of those beliefs and the action now that is being taken and debated on top of those beliefs. So how do you disentangle that? That is such a great example. There's a big lie at the heart of these efforts, which is that the election was stolen and it was stolen because people who weren't eligible to vote voted. That's the big lie. But my argument would be look at the 160 odd measures state by state, look at proposal by proposal, which are completely just based on unsubstantiated fear mongering and even race spading. But are there some that actually might be ones that have nonpartisan support? It's not like our elections in this country are completely that everyone has confidence in them. And we only need to look back to 2010, 2016 to see where the other side thought our election machinery had giant problems. So I think this is where the details matter. We have to call out the big lie. This election was not stolen. But I would argue if I were in a state house in Ohio, what I want to look at is proposal by proposal. Are there any of the election lawyers and election experts consider legit? And are there others in contrast that are simply intended to suppress African-American voting? I agree with Sewell. I think you start, the answer to that is you start with reporting. You start with what is happening on the ground and you articulate that as clearly as you possibly can. And then you think about the language that we use and we're describing this, we were just talking about climate. A lot of news organizations are not saying climate change anymore. They're saying climate crisis because that is more accurate and it's just the truth. And so this is not about voting rights. This is about voter suppression. By and large. Now, again, maybe there's some cases out there as we dig in that there might be a couple of things that really are more focused on voting rights. The reporting needs to bear that out and that's what you start with. You start with the facts and you start with laying that out as clearly as you possibly can. And I think that to build off that question though, if I don't cut out again, right? I think that the issue here is an op-ed on something like this. I would be very interested in an op-ed or a conversation where someone says, look, there is this remarkable deficit of trust. What do we do to rebuild it? However, that distrust is not, but as an editor that piece has to include the caveats and the reality that that trust is not based in reality. So it's not, here you go Tom Cotton, here you go Ted Cruz, spin your conspiracy theory for 2000 words in my newspaper because theoretically distrust is true. The writer, someone who I commissioned as a writer has to be willing to grapple with the truth in the piece. And otherwise, I don't think we should be granting our space to them, especially because we've got here from the Tom Cotton op-ed, especially if there's a someone who independently has platform. Tom Cotton can go to the floor of the Senate and say whatever he wants to say. There is no need, Tom Cotton's voice and opinion will not be unheard if it doesn't appear in the New York Times. And it is a privilege to allow an elected official to publish their work without the back and forth of a reporter asking them questions. Totally different for the New York Times to say, have prime real estate in our newspaper. Every subscriber will see what you have to say. And we don't need to ask you any questions. You don't have to provide any pushback. You trust that? I mean, that doesn't suit you. In fairness, just very, 10 seconds. In fairness, op-ed editors do want influential people because they'll make headlines. And I'm not ashamed of that as an op-ed editor. They got their headlines. But, well, no, no, they could say things that are interesting. But it has to come with fact-checking. It has to come with context. It has to come with editing. I edited a very prominent Republican governor arguing about the need to be strong religious exemptions with respect to services related to same-sex marriage. This is before the Baker case. I'm an openly gay man. I think that, you know, my own, but my position wasn't relevant. My, the task at hand was to make this Republican governor's argument as strong as possible, and an argument grounded in first amendment protections of religious freedom, not grounds in homophobia. And that's exactly what we did. And I'm proud of that essay. I want to bring the students into this conversation. So starting with Nicole Shin, who's a junior at the Clark State School at ASU. Nicole. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. So my question for you all was kind of addressed earlier, but I'd like a more specific response is by what processes has objectivity become conflated with both sidesism and balance as opposed to the original notions of accuracy and fairness? Hey, Nicole, let me give you a specific example from CNN. So to the point that objectivity has become used as a voice of a largely white neutrality, we at CNN, we did something that a lot of news organizations did over the summer. We decided that we were going to uppercase the B in black. And then we also decided, unlike most other news organizations, that we were going to uppercase the W in white. And the reason that we decided that we were going to uppercase the W in white was because if you leave a lower case, aren't you reinforcing the notion that white is the neutral, the default, the normative voice that doesn't deserve an uppercase? So it was one of those small things that was also a big thing and had a lot of discussion internally about it. But in the end, I really think we made the right decision on that. So I know that's a little bit of a counter angle to your question, but I wanted to answer it with that example. Okay, so then my follow-up to this is, how do we kind of remedy what objectivity has become with respect to both sides? And how do we refocus it to consistency and accuracy? West, do you want to say that? Oh, yeah, go ahead, Wesley, yeah. Sure, I mean, I think two things. The first is that, if you'll note, the New York Times Up that I wrote was a call to hire black people. A lot of people wanted to make it about a bunch of different things, but the thrust of the piece was about the way we get here is because when we cover issues of race, we have rooms full of white people making these subjective decisions about where these lines are. And so suddenly you have major papers in the South that ignore the entire civil rights movement, never cover it. And so the reality is our users have to have the same diversity and complication of our country and of our world so that we have in these subjective processes different types of people weighing in and balancing each other out. I think that's extremely important secondarily. As I also know it in that piece, there's a difference between pursuing objectivity, fairness, and pursuing the perception of objectivity. We want Republicans to like us is different than we want to tell the truth. And I think there's a massive conflation between those two things. And I think that that's in a time when half of the country believes the sky is purple, we have to make a choice. Are we gonna say the sky is blue or are we gonna seek to have 40% of the purple people think that we're fair? Thanks, Nicole. Next up is Faith Castle who's a senior at UT Austin. Hello, thank you so much for having me. So besides hosting diversity panels and workshops for journalists and newsrooms in your opinion, what are some initiatives newsrooms can take to train journalists and gain trust in communities of color? Great question. Yeah. I think first of all, just a few very good points. I think by listening, I think that I oversee our letters to the editor and I've been having, I've been leading a debate discussion about what is mean to write a letter in 2021. People's reactions are more likely to be on Twitter or Facebook or there are still people sending in letters by email mostly, but they tend to be older or more print oriented readers. And so I think first of all, our audience engagement teams can be an amazing way to listen to the social conversation. And by listening, I also don't just mean passively taking notes, I mean also acting. If a segment of our readers are offended or we've done something wrong or we didn't get something right, we need to address that because that's accountability and it's happening in real time. Number two, I think we can do a lot more events where we're actually, look, journalism has become much more transparent, much more humble. We're not trying to dominate society or dictate what it should think. We're trying to represent authentically, honestly and morally the communities that we seek to serve. So if we have that community orientation, that's awesome and have more public events and more ways of community folks understanding what we do, that'll help too. But the final thing I'd say is, you know, what's the point? We need a newsroom that looks like America. We need a new, we'll need newsrooms that are international, that look like the world. And the only point I would add to that though, we have to be careful here because I want, in my ideal world, we've got black reporters covering the White House and white reporters covering disadvantaged Native American communities and Latino reporters who are fluent in Chinese, covering Asian American communities. Like it's not a point isn't that you cover the community or background you're from. The point is that your society looks, your newsroom looks like your society and therefore you get a variety of inputs. Thank you and thank you, Faith. I want to, because our time is short, ask Tricia Amit from a graduate student at the University of Maryland. Yeah, hi, thank you so much for being here today. So at the University of Maryland, over the last year and a half, there's been a big debate among the students about how transparent we should or shouldn't be about our personal beliefs and backgrounds on social media. Veteran journalists and faculty leaders at our school have even urged students in the last year to stay away from exposing our beliefs on social media. So last summer, for example, we were asked to not post things like Black Lives Matter on social media. What would you say to our faculty leaders about this issue? Do you think they have a point? Do you think that there is a different approach that they could adopt instead? Great question. I'll jump on that one. I think journalists should not hide who they are. I think one thing that we talked about years ago, I was on the Knight Commissions with the Aspen Institute, the Knight Commission for Trust in Media and Democracy. And one of the recommendations that came out of the report that we submitted was a commitment of what we called radical transparency, was to be as open as we possibly can with the people who we are doing the work for about who we are in our beliefs. Now, I will say that it is my personal belief that social media isn't always the best place to do that. I think we need to think as journalists and in all of our newsrooms about, we have to be very intentional about the work that we are doing on someone else's turf that where they do not share the same values and the same regard and respect for trust that we share. So it's a question to me of not if you do it, but where you do it. And I would argue that social media may not be the best place to do it, but journalists should not hide who they are. And so are you, where exactly do you think would be the best place to do it? I think for, I think news organizations should own it on their own properties. I think that's where we should be having this conversation with our audiences. We seeded a lot of us. We certainly did some of this at CNN. It certainly happened across the industry. We seeded the relationships that we have with our audiences a decade-ish ago to a lot of the social media companies. And now we are learning every day in our reporting that they're fine to let lies and misinformation and hate spread. So how are we thinking about the work that we do when we want to be transparent and truthful? Are we giving that to the platforms and are they respecting that or not? And currently it doesn't look like they are. So I think we should do that on our own and operated properties. Great, thank you. Next up is Ruth Samuel, who's a senior from Rossman School at University of Carolina Channel. Excellent, thank you for having me. So following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and several other black Americans this past summer, several newsrooms, such as the Los Angeles Times, put it upon themselves to conduct studies on their quote, reckoning with racism. Two months later, the Times devoted an entire page to lettering from Trump supporters, which garnered angry reactions on social media. So you justified it by saying, quote, it's imperative to listen to other views, close quote. So what do you believe is the responsibility of... The last part just got cut off. Can you repeat that last part? Yes, absolutely. So, Sue, you justified the public... Yeah, what do you believe is the part I missed? Right, so what do you believe is a responsibility of journalists to analyze what they are putting into the world? I'm really, really glad you asked that because I put a lot of thought and work into both of the actions that you described. I worked, I'm very proud to work on our, be part of a team working on our reckoning with racism. And yes, I did direct the publication of a page of Trump letters. And I'd like a chance to explain that action. I made that decision after the election was called. So in other words, first of all, like the election results have been decided. Second, there are six million Trump voters in California. It's a huge, there are more Trump voters in this state alone just because of the size of the state than in a whole bunch of other states went for Trump. So even though this is a mostly liberal state, there's a giant community here, Trump supporters. The most important thing is that these were letters that we fact-checked. If someone had just been a Trump voter and they're saying crazy things, we wouldn't have run those letters. And believe me, we get those letters. Believe me, we get those letters. And I get personal letters that are abusive or whatever. We don't run those letters. We ran letters from people who live in the community, not all of whom were white, by the way, not all of whom were Christian and not all of whom were male, who supported Trump for whatever reason. It was an African-American entrepreneur who once lowered taxes. We did that because we wanted to reflect the community here. Look, I'm just gonna be really honest. I abhor a lot of what he stands for. I'm an opinionator, I'm just gonna say that. But I don't, if I start abhorring all of the 75 million people who voted for him, I don't think that gets me to a productive place. I may not approve of their decision. I may not agree with their decision. But I can't personally abhor that many people because I know that motivations, especially something like voting, end up being extremely complex. Right. And so with respect to my follow-up, we've seen kind of broadly speaking that the amplification and sanitization of white supremacy and white nationalist rhetoric often results in the harm against marginalized communities. In 2019, we saw a record increase in hate crimes. So my question is how, under the guise of objectivity, can journalists be cognizant of which groups they're empowering and who they are truly serving? Well, right. So let me go back to the letters for one moment. I got a lot of criticism saying by publishing these letters, you're platforming, you're legitimizing, and yes, you're even empowering these people who voted for Trump. I hear that criticism. I don't personally agree with it because I think given all that's out there on social media, these folks have plenty of ways of reaching the public if they want to. And we were using our platform to take for one day a sampling of the many, many people in this state who voted for Trump and hear out the point of view. But that does not in any way obviate that it doesn't deny the legitimacy of your question. We've got to be on it with these hate crimes and our publication has been. Being Asian-American especially, I'm horrified by the recent violence. I do blame it on the xenophobia, the China bashing and all that other stuff that happens. So it's a fair point, but I would just say, look at us in the context of what we do. 90% of the letters that we publish are from people who are pretty anti-Trump. For me to take a day to listen to those who supported him and try to understand their reasons, to me was a legitimate use of our platform. But I respect that people disagree. Thank you. Thank you, Ruth. Next up is Libby Selene who's a senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Hi, it's great to be here. In the past 24 hours, the Vatican has announced that it cannot bless gay marriage, but this news obviously has detrimental effects on the population because while it's writing a message of hate, that will particularly affect gay youth. Is there a way to report news like this in a responsible way that doesn't inflict any damage? Beth, do you wanna take that? Sure. I mean, I think news has to be reported, right? I think it's important that we write down things that have happened, right? It is important historically for us to know that yesterday was the day that the Vatican did this because one day we'll be writing a book about the Catholic Church and gay marriage and we're just gonna need to know what day this thing happened, right? I think that is important. But I think anytime we're talking about a sensitive issue, I think the best reporters and the best outlets do so do the best journalism when they're contextualizing, when we're bringing in context and different voices and thinking about what happens. I think a lot of the best journalism is done in the follow-up, not necessarily in the reporting of the news and also when we cover these things as stories that have real people in them and not news events, a flashing headline that this thing just happened and then we move on to the next, right? That I think the more time and care we give to issues, easier is for us to navigate these faces. But it is important that we report the true things that happened because somewhere yesterday there was a child who saw that news and had dedicated their life to changing it. And I think that that is important, right? That we, by providing an accurate mirror to what the world is, we allow people to address the things in that mirror they don't like. Absolutely. And with that in mind, I mean, after writing any story, how can the journalists take responsibility for what they're reporting and what they're saying as they're collecting information as they're writing the story? You know, I think the first part is making, one, making sure things are accurate, making sure things are correct, making sure they're properly contextualized, making sure we've taken the time to gain the expertise we need on the thing we're writing about. I think that one of the things that goes unspoken often in these conversations is how much journalism is produced done to our head with five seconds so we file. Well, as it turns out, that is not a good method of doing good and thoughtful work. But I would suggest that the vast majority of published journalism is done on deadline as things are moving. Even on the most complicated and difficult issues, it is unsurprising that that leads to coverage that harms our trust from readers or that offends people or harms people, right? That so often we don't have the time to exhale, to take a second to call another person to think, is this the right person to be talking to about this or is it not? And I think that that's just something we have to think about. And so many people who do the best journalism do so outside of the confines of those types of deadlines. And I don't think that's a coincidence. Thanks, Libby. Next up is Alyssa Jackson, a senior at the University of Missouri. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me today. So I want to kind of go off with Trisha's question from earlier about social media and saying Black Lives Matter in your bio and how different schools and other hiring or other places of work are trying to say that's not the appropriate medium to do so. Back in last summer when the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd protests were going on, I know a lot of Black journalists were kind of torn between do I participate in these protests on my day off and also continue to report on what's happening? Is that objective? So how would you say that specifically for Black journalists, we navigate having to make that decision? And is it an issue with objectivity if we decide to do both? You know, I think that, I think that's a great question. It's a question I get a lot from students because I think this generation of students and rising journalists is extremely thoughtful. It's really grappling with a lot of these difficult questions in ways that are really important. One of the things I always say in response to this in part is that because I spend so much time covering protests on the job, I could never fathom a world in which I wanted to go to one off the job. And so sometimes I have a, now I can imagine how that might be different where I still on a campus and things were, but as an adult, it's like, if I'm covering a protest Monday through Friday the last, you know what I'm not doing on Saturday, going to a protest. That said, I do think that there is, I do think that journalistically there is importance to independence, right? That I don't necessarily think we should cover things we are personally involved in. Now, involvement and interest, involvement and having an opinion on a thing are different things. I, my friend Nicole Hannah Jones always says the only things she's objective about her thing, she hasn't taken time to learn anything about, right? We all do have individual thoughts about what's going on. But what I would suggest for up and coming journalists, I don't think there's an easy answer to any of this, by the way. I think to upcoming journalists, if what's important to you is doing journalism and using your voice in this way, then yeah, go to the protest and take a notebook and interview some babies and talk to them, right? That we have a role we play in this democracy. That look, I care a lot about injustice, I care a lot about issues of race and I've never attended a protest as a protester but I've attended hundreds of them as a journalist and I like to think that journalism has made a difference. And so I think that there is a, again, and I think it's especially hard for college students because you're also college students, you're members of the community, you're not, as much as we treat college journalists as professional journalists and college journalists insist upon that, we're also college students in the community, living life, figuring out the difference between your personal Instagram and your professional. And so I do think that I understand there's difficulties in what I always say to folks is, yeah, go to the protest, but we're at me, I take my camera, I take my notebook, I'd interview people and I'd talk to people because if the role you wanna play in our democracy is to be a storyteller, to be a journalist, what better time to get that practice and to make a difference than right now? Right. Now I know, thank you for that. Nancy, earlier you brought up the both side, side-ism and how that kind of plays a role in a lot of the stories that we cover. I know a lot of black journalists when they cover stories on race, they're told, you can't say that, like you can't say this is racist, you can't say that this is discrimination. How do we navigate having to have those conversations when, especially we have a lived experience and we know that we wanna call a spade a spade? How do we have those conversations and how do we make those decisions on whether or not we call it out or we don't? It's a really important question and one that has been much debated about particularly words that have the power that that is racist or that is a lie, there are those words who have that power for a reason and so they're deployed carefully. I think one thing is to fall back on the eternal journalistic rule about showing rather than telling. And I think this involves both trusting truth and trusting readers, that if you describe an action or a quotation or a statement that is plainly racist than needing to say and that was a racist statement, you may have already done the work without needing to use the language in a way that is more powerful. But any of the rest of you have a, come to what I have your tools about when you can and can. I think that's an exact example of where there is a clash here though. Right that history tells us that if you provide platform to racist sentiments, your insert white reader isn't gonna go, oh, that's racist. They're gonna go, oh, the terrible thing I think in my head is allowed to be published in the newspaper. It must not be that bad. That I do think there's a difficulty that the only way you can ever deal with racism in a newspaper is if at that moment someone happens to walk past you and say something comically racist. What I would also know as it relates to trust very specifically is when you have people who are on the victimized end of this, that is not a way to gain trust. If I'm attacked in a hate crime and you're unwilling to say that that was racist, I don't trust you, right? Why would I ever trust you if you're unwilling to tell the truth? And I think that, but what I would also say is this is a space where these are subjective decisions. Whether send or back is something you can call racist or not is a subjective decision and 10 different newsrooms could make 10 different decisions. And what I would ask is, who are in the rooms when those decisions are made? And what I would suggest is, chances are it's a majority white set of people deciding what is racist and what is not. And I think that speaks for itself about why often there is a big gulf between what our legacy news organizations do and what readers of color expect. Because when it's me and five black journalists together, yeah, that thing's racist. But suddenly we get 900 of our white editors together and it's, well, is it really and what can we, that our experiences are shaped by who we are and that if we're going to make sweeping decisions about what is racist or isn't, perhaps that shouldn't be made by white people. Daniel Lempress is a master's student at UC Berkeley. Thanks, Nancy. Thanks for being here, everyone. So earlier, Meredith talked a little bit about how reporters shouldn't have to hide who they are and about how publication should be as transparent as possible with readers. So I'm wondering, what should readers know about reporters or about opinion writers, especially related to things that could be perceived as coloring their coverage or coloring their take? I'm trying to think of like a good example I could give you, Daniel. Listen, I'm trying to think of something that would go too far. And I really think it's important to close the gap between journalists and the people we do all this for. There's still too much distance. There's not enough connection. There's not enough dialogue. There's not enough engagement. And it's not just up to the audience engagement teams and the SEO teams and the social teams and the off-platform teams to bear that work. It's on the reporters, the writers, the editors, the interns, the editors and chief. It needs to be thought of throughout the organization of how close can we get to our audience? How can we have a dialogue with them? How can we have an exchange with them? And I believe this is critical right now because if we don't do this, then we're gonna continue to see the disturbing growth in the lack of trust in news organizations. We'll just continue to see more of that. So it gets into a question of logistics for me about what are you doing on site with your bios? How are you using social media in ways that are not playing on someone else's turf by somebody else's rules, but are ways that you can engage audiences, let them know who you are, attract audiences to work that you're doing. That to me is the work to be done. It's not really about constant tweeting in your stream. It is really more about thinking about what do audiences need to know about me as a journalist and where can I get that out as broadly as possible and how can I have a dialogue with them on a regular basis? Thanks a lot. And our last student is Bill Rosen, who's a grad student at USC Annenberg. Hi, Bill. Hi, my question today with the great political division that we have, the type of news people consume is different and the type of journalists people follow is different. Can you discuss how journalists should move through the push and pull between advocacy and reporting and perhaps how these two things can be reconciled in a way that doesn't invite an audience perception of one-sidedness? I think a lot of us have had to make the choice in life. Did we wanna be an observer of events or a participant in them? And I know that sometimes that distinction is not always easy to follow. I have myself found in the last few years, very, very challenged at times to kind of remain dispassionate. I think ultimately though, if you're gonna become a journalist, it's because you've accepted the role of chronicler, storyteller, bearer of truths and bearing witness, and that you're not a direct participant in events. And I actually do think that's appropriate. But I think, I wanna just address something that's come up several times in this conversation. Black humanity, equality and dignity is not anything that there can be two sides about. My personal view, the statement that black lives matter is something that is indisputable. Now, how do we address the persistent racial inequality? That you may have some disagreement on. Should reparations be considered versus universal policies that disproportionately benefit low and middle income people who may also be disproportionately colored? That's another issue. But the assertion of black equality, the assertion of human dignity, that's something that we all have to stand by. I don't think you need to be an advocate though, or an activist to do that. I think you can do that through the work that you do as a journalist, to dignify and to humanize and bear witness to, and tell the stories of people who may not be empowered as you are to tell their own stories. I so wish that we had the rest of the day because we have touched on so many critically important and highly relevant urgent issues. So thank you to Wes Lowry, Sue Wolf-Chan, Meredith Artley. Thank you to the Knight Foundation for hosting us and the Carnegie Knight Deans for assembling such a talented group of students to interrogate us. I hope this has been useful, provocative, giving you something to think about, work on, and take out into the world with you. Good luck to all of you and thank you for joining us. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you, Nancy.