 Good afternoon, and welcome to this week's Informed and Engaged. I'm LaSharp Bunting, Director of Journalism at I Foundation. The White House Beat, many would agree, is the beat with one of the highest profiles. And traditionally, the press corps has not reflected the diversity and texture of America. But that has been changing. For today's show, we will talk about the importance of equity in the White House press corps and its role in elevating the public conversation and strengthening the journalism and our communities. Today, re-joined by three women currently covering the White House. Ouija Zhang of CBS News, Rachel Scott of ABC News, and Yamiche Alcindor of PBS NewsHour. This will be a great discussion. For those watching, please submit your questions in the chat, and please use the hashtag Night Live. We hope to get to a few of your questions toward the end. So thank you so much. First, I want to personally thank each of you for taking the time for this important discussion. Being here with you, three fierce women of color who are covering news of such high national importance is quite frankly just a moment to be recognized. So thank you. Thanks for having us. Of course. So this will be a conversation, right? And I just want to jump right in. So many believe that a more diverse newsroom provides better, more nuanced coverage, right? Which will then reach even more communities. How do you believe your presence in the White House Corps has made the difference in the coverage? And Yamiche, I'm going to start with you. Well, again, thanks so much for having me, Lushar. It's great to talk to you in this form. I feel like I call you all the time for advice. So it's nice to talk to you here. I would say that I used to think diversity was a nice thing that newsrooms should do. It was the moral thing to do. It was the right thing to do. After I covered Ferguson in 2014 in the protest air, I realized how critical it was just to get the stories right and to understand what it means when you have diversity of thought in minds of the journalism. As you said, it's a lot better and it's stronger and it's more representative of America. I think as being a black woman in the White House, I think for me, I'm constantly thinking about race and constantly thinking about justice and that makes its way into my coverage. I'm thinking about the way that I craft questions. I have questions all about news of day stuff, the coronavirus, all sorts of things that are going on. Who's the last person to get fired? What's going on with mail and voting? But I always have questions on race and social justice on my list. It doesn't mean that I always ask them because sometimes there are things that I have to ask about testing or about other things. But I think that probably, I would say what makes my journalism different is that it's constantly as part of my life experience as a child of immigrants. I'm constantly thinking about vulnerable populations and the people who will never make it into the White House. I'm not saying that my other colleagues might not be doing that, but I know I can say with my journalism, I'm thinking, what are my cousins in Miami thinking? What's my mom thinking? What are the immigrants who are just coming to this country? What are the challenges they're facing and how is this administration representing all Americans equally and fairly? I love that. I love that. Weisha, I'd love for you to weigh in here as well. Yeah, you know, I have thought about this a lot, especially as of late. And I realized that when I was starting out in my career and I was a young journalist, I was so self-conscious about being a minority that I tried not to lean into that because I wanted people to respect my work for what it was. And I really tried not to highlight the fact that I was different because I wanted people to judge me on the merit of my work and not my ethnicity. But I have now realized over the years especially and now more than ever before that we don't have diversity in a newsroom for diversity's sake. You know, we don't have that so we all look different. We have that so we can bring our personal perspective to our reporting and make it richer and better and more inclusive. And that's the value of having diversity. And so I encourage, you know, whether you are a woman of color, whether you're a white man to use your personal experiences to help shape what you are asking, what you are reporting. And I think that is what ultimately can offer some sort of balance. And so for me, you know, especially now, it really helps as Yamisha mentioned to craft my questions. And I think that's where the most important piece of what we do really comes to light because we're asking questions on behalf of all of those people who don't have the opportunity to do that. And that includes especially right now communities of color who are being impacted disproportionately. And so for us to understand what our family and friends are going through and to be able to use that to ask the right questions, then we can get some answers or at least try our best. That's great. So Rachel, I know you very recently was promoted to the White House, but have a career, a long career in politics. So I'd love for you to weigh in as well here. Yeah, I'm the new kid on the black, but taking my cues from these two who I have long watched and learned from just by watching. So it's just a privilege to even just be on a panel here with the both of them and to be with all of you. So thank you. And you know, I think going back to the questions, right? Even this past weekend, you know, at the president's press conference in Bedminster, New Jersey, I was there. And when I was thinking about what question I was gonna ask the president as he was taking his executive actions, I was thinking of the people that I talked to that have been affected by this pandemic. I was thinking of spending some time, you know, in the two hardest sections of Washington, DC hit by the pandemic where the blackest and poorest residents were disproportionately dying from coronavirus just right across the river, just miles away from where the White House stood. I was thinking of a woman I met, Ms. Beatrice, who doesn't even have internet access and was trying to learn about how to get information about this pandemic. I think about the people that I met that were traveling miles just to get a test and then waiting days to get the results and contending with the fact that they had to put food on the table for their family. I was thinking about the undocumented immigrants that I've interviewed, where it's really a choice between if they have the virus, you know, being out of work and having no money and trying to provide for their families. And so I also try and think about those people and those are the people that pop in my head when I'm drafting my questions and when the president this past weekend was announcing these executive actions, my biggest question to him was, well, when are Americans going to see that relief? Because there are 30 million Americans that are out of work right now. There are 30 million Americans that are struggling and they needed that money yesterday. They needed that relief yesterday. And so I think bringing that perspective and asking those questions is so important, but also having the diverse experience of covering these different stories, right? I was out covering the protests right in front of the White House, listening to the demands, listening to what people were saying, what message they wanted to get across to not only the president, but also other lawmakers. And so having the privilege to also expand out in our storytelling and talk to those that are affected, I think that really helps inform the type of questions that we could be asking the administration as well. So let me sort of go a little higher, right? With this conversation, how do you think news organizations really as a whole can better reach the communities? Each of you really talked about the need to craft questions and to bring that part of yourselves to how you cover and how you view these stories, but how do you think news organizations can better reach these communities that often aren't watching or reading or just plain missing from the conversation? So I'll put that out to whomever wants to answer that. It's tough in these times because a lot of things are virtual and it's scary because everyone's trying not to get the virus, but I think boots on the ground and reporting is the way to do it. When I think about my role as a White House correspondent, I'm obviously honored to be in the building and to be at the White House covering the president, but to me, the most important part of my job is still being out in people's living rooms and it's going out. I was just out in Southeast talking to people, this is a part of DC that has seen the majority of deaths in the city. And what you see is people that are worried about being evicted, they're going to jobs as grocery store workers, they're construction workers, they're people who simply cannot work from home. We talk about social distancing as if it's something that people can do. I just interviewed a woman who's living in a home, two bedroom apartment with seven people. There's no such thing as social distancing in her. She literally can't do it, so it's a privilege she doesn't have. So I think part of this is that newsrooms have to think about who are we interviewing, how are we continuing to have regular, everyday people's lives be part of our coverage because it's easy to get caught up in the bickering back and forth of the Capitol Hill and the White House and who's getting what and what the light is offered. But stuck in the middle are Americans who have lost their wages, who have already since last week had extra $600 that is now taken out of their pockets because two sides can't decide on a deal and can't get it together. I also think that I think about all the people who are so terrified of a virus that killed members in their family and then don't want to get it themselves and are still kind of trying to figure out how the federal government's going to work out for them how to stop this thing. I think about all of the medical experts that I've talked to because I'm certainly not a medical expert. So I had to get the idea of interviewing people to put in perspective the fact that the United States is literally an anomaly when it comes to industrialized countries and how we've handled this virus. It's one thing to say, oh, the president's rhetoric, he isn't taking it seriously. It's another thing to talk to a medical expert who kind of gives you the information that you need to be able to report. No, really, the United States objectively without politics, we are completely different than any other country. I think if you don't do the boots on the ground and don't put people on the ground to talk to people, you lose the pulse of America. Yeah, I was gonna say that. Oh, you agree. Yeah, go ahead, Isha. No, I was just, I mean, boots on the ground is at the core of what we do. And sometimes it's limiting when we're covering the White House because we have to be at the White House and that's why it's so important for the producers and the heads of the shows in my case is we're broadcast to really think about, okay, where else are we going? Where are we sending our national correspondence? They have to be at the heart of these communities that are really suffering the worst, that are seeing a lack of testing, that are seeing over capacity in their hospitals. We have to be in those places to find people who are willing to share their experiences with us because it's not just that one or two persons experience. They are representing what's happening to so many people around them. And so we always say we have to hear from the real people, the real people, and we can't say that enough, especially when we're having two parallel crises unfold before our eyes, we have to understand how it's impacting people's daily lives and how they're struggling. Otherwise, we won't be able to help find a solution. And I do think that that is a big part of our job is to just try to help people get through their daily lives by giving them the best information that we can to try to cut the noise and give them the facts. And it's not only on broadcast, but I think we have a huge responsibility on social media because I think it's easy to dismiss something like Twitter as, oh, it's nothing but an echo chamber for people in DC and New York to just boost each other's thoughts. No, that's not true. There are real people who rely on social media who will check in with people that they trust to see their feeds and to try to get some facts. And so everything that we put out there, no matter what platform we are using, it comes with a huge responsibility to try to give people what they need to make those decisions that impact their lives. Yeah, and I was just gonna say, I think real investment in communities is so important. You just can't parachute in and expect to just find and connect and find people to be vulnerable with you. And I think as news organizations, we also have to get to a point where we're checking ourselves. I talked about being over across the river in Southeast and interviewing residents that don't even have internet access. We'll just think about how many Zoom interviews we do with people that are suffering. There are people in this country that don't have internet. They're relying on news bulletins and churches for information and churches are closed in most parts of this country right now. So I think we also have to get to a point too where we're not just relying on what's convenient and what's easy because what's easy sometimes does not always strike at the heart of what's actually happening for a large swath of this country. And we have to talk to each other. I think one thing that I've seen at least in our newsroom and I have read about it in others is that we are finally having these really tough conversations and it's not just people of color having them. Our white colleagues have to sit at the table too. They can't just remove themselves from the conversation because they don't think they have something to contribute because they aren't someone who's gone through this experience because their experience and their thoughts are important as well because this is one big conversation that the country is having. And so within our organizations, we have to have them as well to understand how we can do better. And this isn't something new. We've talked about the value of diversity for decades now but I do feel like this is a shift in a different moment where people are okay with being real and to really say, when you said this, this is how it made me feel and how people in my community responded to it and that's why we need to make some progress and talk about why did you say that? What can we learn from that? And we are always doing the work too. We're not perfect and we have to evolve along with our audience and our communities. We have to do better too. And I really think that's happening in newsrooms now which will only enrich our work. And if I could jump in, I would say what Weija just said is so critical. This idea of white reporters being able to feel like they need to cover these stories too. I think a lot of times it's great that we're getting these new beasts focused on race, focused on covering kind of the conversation that people are having. But I think it would be too easy to say, okay, well this team covers race like everybody and everyone else doesn't have to do that. Any beef that I've been on which is education, transportation, obituaries, I've covered all sorts of crates in this. Race has always been part of my beat. And it wasn't hard because literally race is part of the fabric of America. They're always gonna be whatever story you're covering. There's a racial element because that's the way that the country was founded. So I think it could be making it critical that your tech reporter needs to be writing about this too. Like your tech reporter shouldn't also, your tech reporter, your Silicon Valley reporter, your international reporter, they should all be thinking about race and justice in this country. The other thing I'll say is we talk about diversity of course, talking about race and ethnicity but I think of geographic diversity being so important. I'm tried and through an East coaster. I'm from Miami, then I moved to New York and then I'm in DC. I've never lived anywhere that's really like a rural community. My husband on the other hand, he spent time living where my in-laws live in a rural community without broadband. Having people that are from different parts of this country who can say, I'm from the Midwest, I'm from this small town, I'm from this big city. It's so critical when you go to report stories out because I think a lot of times we go to the big cities because that's where the airports are, that's where it's easy as Rachel said, it's easy sometimes to get to the big cities but being able to say, you know what, I had to drive three hours to get to the story. There's jewels in being able to have people say, I know this small town in South Carolina, we need to go there when we're writing about primaries. I think that that's critical too. Absolutely, so Knight recently released a report with Gallup just last week that shows that nearly three quarters of Americans see too much bias in news as a major problem, right? And each of you really touched on this, but how do we move the needle on that? Three fourths of Americans, that is a lot. So how do we move from there to a place of deeper conversation and discourse? We shall start with you. You know, I think even before COVID surfaced, one thing that I did, you know, see as a problem was that people went to certain outlets, not for information, but for validation or confirmation of things that they already thought. And that can't be what we do. That's not what we do. We're not here to, you know, play into any previous, you know, conceptions about our government or about what's happening. We're here, and it sounds so simple, but we are here to give the facts. And, you know, that sounds maybe naive and like, you know, we could do better, but at the end of the day, that's really it. And so the problem is that people are now perceiving facts as bias. And I used to say before, if you saw something in print or on the news, on broadcast, you took it to be true until for some reason, it, you know, it was proven false. There's a huge section of the country now that takes the information to be false until it is proven true by the government. And that is so backwards from what journalism is. And so I think the way we combat that is just doing the best by, you know, every day reporting out what we can, offering as much detail in terms of sourcing that we can without revealing people and just trying to make that product, you know, 100% foolproof and bulletproof when it comes to the facts. Because again, there is, you know, a war on information now. And I think it's because it goes hand in hand with the political climate that just continues to get hotter as COVID and as racial tensions continue. And so we have to just do our best to show people through our reporting that we're giving you the facts. Yeah, I would say like a commitment to the facts is absolutely essential right now. And we're seeing this information spread so easily. I remember being on the ground for the president's rally in Oklahoma in Tulsa where for some people wearing a mask was such a political issue. And I remember talking to some people there that feared, you know, wearing a mask outside that they were making this political statement instead of, you know, making a statement about wanting to protect not only their health but also the health of others around them, right? And I think when I'm out covering the president's rallies on the campaign trail when they were happening frequently, but specifically in Tulsa, Oklahoma and then down in New Hampshire before that rally was called off. You know, you meet some people that do not believe the virus is real. And you're having to in real time present those facts of those that have died, those that are still suffering. And I think, you know, our jobs are just to stay committed to those facts and trying to present that information. But it is definitely an issue right now. We are seeing disinformation spread so rapidly. And it's our jobs to do the best that we can to try and confront that and curb it. Yeah, and on the issue of disinformation, I mean, just Friday we learned that the national security apparatus in this country has named at least three countries, Russia, China and Iran, that are actively trying to spread disinformation when it comes to the election and comes to the political institutions in this country. So I think there's something to be said about the bias that's being perceived. But there's also this idea that we have to think about the fact that there's a whole machine behind people wanting people not to believe the news and the facts as we present them. I also think that really as a reporter I agree with both of these women and that is that I'm so focused on the work that I can't be, at least for me, I can't be so worried about whether or not people think when I fact check the president that I'm being adversarial. I think that I'm here to kind of do what I was taught to do in journalism school with all my mentors, watching women, like Gwen Eiffel, like Diane Sawyer, like Barbara Walters, like so many people that came before us, like Gail, like so many other people to show us that it's just present yourself, do your job well and in some ways to me it's like let everybody think what they may because at the end of the day we also are living in a polarized society where even if they watch people watch the exact same information and it's true, it might also depend on what they make of that reporter and if that reporter's body language tells them something. So I think as reporters, especially reporters on TV we're doing our best to prevent the information but I think there is also this viewer that is living in a polarized society that's allowing them and forcing them to think of things in the shade that they perceive the world politically. Yeah, and to Yamisha's point, I think one thing that we have learned that is surprising to me at least is that we prepare a lot for these briefings. We put a lot of time as a team into crafting the questions and a lot of times we wanna fact check the president with his own quotes. And then all of a sudden, you know, whether it's the president or another administration official or being told I never said that or that's not true but or they are reacting in a negative way when we are simply presenting them a quote that they said before. And I think that's the best way that we can arm ourselves is with information and with facts and with quotes in order to do our jobs because again, you know, someone can perceive that as a bias but really it's just, you know, it's just a fact that we're trying to check. And so that has been alarming to me that when we do that because, you know, that quote or that statement was questionable that, you know, then we are attacked with accusations that we're trying to stir up, you know, trouble when we're really just trying to get some clarity on something that wasn't true. So to that point, you know, what's all acknowledged, right? The White House beat is a very tough beat period. And there have been some high profile incidents where journalists of color, including yourselves have been targeted and attacked. Some would say that there's a greater burden we put on, you know, journalists of color, women of color who are reporting at this time. How are you handling these challenges? I'm handling them by thinking of all the people that came before me that allowed me to have this job at the White House. So to me, every day that I walk in the White House, I think, man, I am the child of Haitian immigrants who came here in the 70s and my grandparents literally would not have believed that their granddaughter would be a White House correspondent. So the responsibility that I feel to the American people to do my job well to me is the biggest, I wouldn't call it a burden, I call it a privilege that I have in this job. So I'm not overly concerned with being attacked or being targeted or even in the moment when I'm feeling a little shaky if someone's trying to snatch a microphone out of my hand because at the end of the day, I'm here as a representation of all the people who one will never walk into the White House and to the people who, for my family, came here so that I could live my wildest dreams and my wildest dreams are to be a White House correspondent. So I think of that, I also think on a personal note, I'm spending a lot of time zooming with my friends, spending a lot of time drinking wine with my husband, working out, doing things that keep me healthy as a person. And I'll say that I would have taken mental health days if I feel overwhelmed, I take a day off. I think maybe when I was first starting out, especially it was work seven days a week, don't never take a day off. I'm sure maybe Rachel, maybe you're newer than this than me, then maybe you're feeling in that mode. I'm in the mode where it's like, I need to take care of myself. So if I feel like I don't wanna go to work today because I just wanna lay in bed and I just need a minute, take a beat, then I'm gonna take a beat. The week that George Floyd was killed was a really, really tough week for me personally. I think I'm doing this job as a hit in a Black body and sometimes I forget it because I'm muscling through and doing the work and not wanting to really be shown as any different than any of my colleagues. But the reality is that I'm married to an African-American man who's six one who could easily have been George Floyd or any of the other Black men, I could myself be targeted. So I think that when I feel that or when I have to be real with myself and say, okay, let's take a beat and do something different today and then you'll come back and you'll be a White House correspondent tomorrow and you'll come back with all of the rested mind and all of the fierceness that you wanna bring to the job. Yeah, I think there are challenges that you just experienced by being a person of color in this country period, right? Take the reporter out of it. At the end of the day, I walk outside, I'm still a Black woman in America. And so those transfer over, I mean, I remember being mistaken as a maid that I was covering the president once back in Florida, staying at a nice hotel because most of the people that were people of color were there working at the hotel. Someone asked me for towels. I mean, those things happen, right? People don't see that on the 6 p.m. news when I'm live. Those moments happen, you get called different things, especially by some at campaign rallies, colored or whatever. But I think that I also think about the sense of ownership that I feel to pick up where the others that came before me left off, right? And when I got promoted to this role, I mean, all I could think about was like Alice, Alice and Doug again, who was the first female Black reporter to have a press cast and to think that like 75 years ago, someone that looked like me did not have a seat in that White House. And I refer back to her book, her autobiography, over and over again, because even though so much time has passed, I still feel the same things that she was feeling at that time. It took two years for her to be even be called on at a press conference with the president. Like she was skipped, she was overlooked, she would raise her hands. Her white male colleagues would joke that she should save her strength and she persisted on. And she had to deal with so many other hurdles that I don't have to deal with because she paved the way and because there's been so many others, including these two women that I share I'm sharing the screen with, right? That I've paved the way for the future of other journalists that are gonna come through that press briefing room. So I always fall back on that of just feeling so incredibly grateful to just have that White House pass. And before I leave almost every week when I am at the White House, I try and look out and before, for pre-COVID, there are a bunch of visitors that come and they stand on the other side of the gates. And to me, there's always that moment that gives me chills when you're looking out and there are people that are just trying to get a glimpse in. People that are like, just wanna see something on the other side. And to think that you have a press pass that is accessed into this White House, it's remarkable and it's just a remarkable sense of privilege. And I don't take that for granted any time that I get the opportunity to step through those gates. Yeah, and for me, I think almost every day still when I do step through and I start walking down the driveway to get to the press quarters, you see the American flag and I still try to take a moment and it never gets old because I was born in China and for my parents to immigrate here and us to completely relocate and to have all places, West Virginia. I certainly had my own challenges growing up and becoming part of this country but it's the only home that I've ever known. And so when I am on the grounds and I think about the huge responsibility weighing on me to represent every single American, it is a heavy burden. And back to your question about how we do that as a minority, I think that burden is felt, it is harder, it is stronger because we understand that we represent a lot of voices who might not have the opportunity that we have to bring these issues to light. And I guess for me, because of the way the pandemic has really completely shifted and changed the relationship between US and China, it's impossible not to tell stories from the Asian American community about how they are impacted, about how they are targeted and the sort of hate that they are receiving. And I've experienced that myself. And so just to touch back on what we talked about before is having that perspective is critical in shaping the kinds of questions that we've posed to the administration. And I will say it's not just me and it's not just women of color. There's one example in my mind that stands out and it was after President Trump referred to the virus as the Kung Flu and I was pressing the press secretary about it. And after that, because we didn't get a satisfactory answer, three more reporters including Yamiche also pressed her about it and the other two reporters were white women. So it's not about to Yamiche's point earlier just because you aren't a minority doesn't mean you can't be a critical part of the conversation because at the end of the day, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, no matter who your family is, if you see an injustice, it is our job to call that out and to hold those in power to account. And so that's what happened in that particular instance and I was, you know, I just remember that very clearly because it's not just me being biased as a Chinese American and that's why I'm asking the question. It's because, you know, people identify that as something that deserved an answer and so that's why it received so much attention. We're gonna transition to Q&A from the audience. I have a ton of really great questions. Some of which we've covered just even in this past question but we have some really good questions here. So let's see, I have one from a gentleman from Montana that I thought was really interesting. Are there significant generational barriers in your work? In other words, do older reporters, producers, et cetera, resist the unique perspective of younger reporters? I have found the opposite actually. You know, I'm a very young reporter and especially covering the protests, the racial unrest. I have found that my voice has been so valued because most of the people that are leading this charge are around my age. They look like me, but it's also very diverse, right? Generations are getting more and more diverse in this country. And so I have found that, you know, my perspective, people are coming to me and asking, you know, those conversations in the office are happening where people wanna understand what is happening and what is going on and I don't feel that way at all actually. I feel like people are also looking at the younger generation and wondering what they're seeing and wanting that to be folded into our coverage. Okay, so here's another question from a viewer. More than ever, students need to practice media literacy skills and whatever learning platform they will engage in. What is one suggestion you would make to educators to engage their students sort of in this challenge, in this coverage and getting them more as part of these conversations? I would say recommend different mediums. So even though I'm a TV reporter, so maybe this is a little sacrilegious for me to say, I love, love, love radio. I love listening to the news. NPR has always been one of my favorite things to listen to. So to me, I feel like if it's being online, if it's a newspaper, then read your news. If watching TV is a thing you wanna do, then of course watch the news hour, watch CBS, watch ABC. So I think in some ways it's meeting people where they are. If TikTok is what it is and introduce them into BBC's TikTok or introduce them to USA Today on Snapchat. I think the thing that people need to do is learn kind of where people are and then try to point out the news that could be the most accessible to them. I also think the thing that my mom always tells me is really take into perspective the international news. I think American reporters, the one thing that we might have a little bit of bias is that we kind of are thinking we're living in the best country in the world, which is that we think, okay, well, this is a problem here, but it's maybe our coverage is different because of that because we're all American reporters or at least living in the country that we're covering where if you watch France's reporting of President Trump, you watch the British's reporting and the British's reporting of President Trump or watch reporting from Haiti, you realize just the different perspectives, the different ways that we're being seen in an international space. So when I'm like covering NATO or I'm covering the UN, I'm constantly reading other countries, news organizations to understand kind of the protective perspective that we're missing because I think especially with the coronavirus, it would have been, it's lost on us in some ways just how much of an outlier the United States is and just how shocked some other countries are of how we've struggled through this pandemic if you don't watch and listen to international news. Yeah, we always talk about the responsibility of the media and obviously, we have a huge responsibility, but I think news consumers have a part in it too. And so people have to take the time if they're going to be weighing in on these conversations, if they're gonna be sharing content especially and spreading information. I do think we have to stress what Yamisha said, which is finding a diverse portfolio of our sources. And we have to do that as journalists, but especially for those people that you're talking about who are just trying to become more engaged, you cannot just rely on one source of news. You can have your favorites, but I definitely also encourage to look beyond what you typically would because there's so much work to be done and that means there's so much product out there, really amazing storytelling and pieces of journalism that really help shape your understanding of what's happening. And it's your responsibility to inform yourself as best as you can and you can't just do that if you're relying on just one source all the time. So, and we touched on this a little bit, but we have a really specific question about sort of the coverage, right? So how do we have conversations with the public, which is largely white, right? About the lived experiences of people of color that are authentically told without censoring whiteness in those conversations. I think sometimes when you're a reporter of color and you're an editor of color, you're thinking about that. So how do you guys think about that when you're shaping your stories to have it not come from a place of, where whiteness is at the center of it? I'll say for me, it's boots on the ground again. It's this idea that to explain to people what a lived experience is, is to show them which is why I love TV reporting because you take people into people's living rooms. You explain to people what people are going through. I think the facts speak for themselves in a lot of way. Like I was just in Southeast, it sounds like racial is there just there too. That's the ward out all the wards in DC. They have the highest rates of all sorts of diseases. They have one grocery store for a large ward where other wards in the city, which are just same size, have 13 grocery stores. Explain to people what racism and structural racism can look like from a ground level in a way that they can really explain. So maybe people will say, well, anyone can live wherever they want to. Okay, well, if you live in this neighborhood, you literally will have one grocery store. If you move across the water where housing is double, you'll get 13 grocery stores. What does that mean for your health? What does that mean for how you live your life and how the virus impacts that community? So I think a lot of it is really explaining to people what the data shows, but also then bringing people into people's lives. I went to Mexico in November and did a story about President Trump's remaining in Mexico policy. Of course, it's important to explain to people just how many people have been sent back to Mexico to wait through that policy. But I went and interviewed people. I interviewed a woman who was raped while she was waiting in Mexico to try to seek asylum. If the president hadn't changed the policies, she would be waiting in the United States. That's just a fact. So the idea is that it's one thing to save these things, but it's another thing to go out and show people. Here's the neighborhood where people are having to sleep on the ground as they wait for the United States to look at their asylum cases. So I think it's all about really bringing people and showing people what it means to be American. And of course, I'll just shout out the 1619 project, which was the project by our friend, Colhanna Jones, teaching people the history of this country and teaching people how things were set up in a way to the detriment of African-Americans and people of color, I think has to be something that's shown. So we just point about Asian-Americans. I remember when the virus first started in it, you started hearing these spikes in hate crimes explaining to people that a family was stabbed and targeted because they were Asian, because people think that this virus is something that only Asians are carrying or it's their fault. I think if we don't explain to people what the real lived experiences are, it's lost on people and the numbers can sometimes just be that, they can just be numbers and not real people. Yeah, I would say the intent is never to make any group right feel targeted by coverage. I think our goal in doing this type of reporting again, it is to reveal that lived experience and also to show the links, right? Of how these systemic issues create problems, especially now with the pandemic. And so I know we're talking a lot about like word seven and eight right across the river in DC that we've done some reporting on. But when you look at what that means to have one grocery store for thousands of residents where you can walk down a street and before you reach that grocery store, you can pass how many corner stores, where how much is it to get a fresh piece of fruit? Is it three or $4? That surcharge where it's easier to get access to a bag of Cheetos or liquor than it is to get access to fresh produce, right? And the real effects that that has on a community over time, the real effects that it has on people that live there, people of color being pushed across the river to live in a certain subset of a neighborhood, right? And then not having that access, the health disparities, the lack of testing and how all of these things together during a pandemic has made a community more vulnerable, right? So showing that is not in any way targeting another section of the population. That is just exposing and ripping off the bandaid of a womb that America has that needs to be fixed quite frankly. And so that's never, I would say that's never the goal to someone that asked the question, but more so than ever, it's just to reveal the realities of the experiences, the lived experiences for so many in this country. Lisa, I'll let you get the final word here before we wrap up. I mean, I think that, you know, Yamish and Rachel really captured the essence of what this conversation is all about. And at the end of the day, when we're presenting these stories because we have the facts and the numbers and the figures to back up, you know, these claims that we are making with our storytelling, I think that's where we have to lean in to the facts and the right information. And, you know, it's okay if somebody feels uncomfortable after seeing a truthful piece of journalism, because that's how we can make progress as a society is when we acknowledge something that makes us feel a certain way and we ask why, and then we try to move forward together. And, you know, it's not something that we should run from. That's what we're doing, we're presenting these stories to try to, you know, make this country a little smaller and this varies a little bit smaller. And so that is our job to bring provocative, rich stories that really capture what people are going through in order to make it better for everyone. Well, thank you. Thank you for each of you for joining us today. Each one of you is doing a very important, you know, work to lift up this cause of equity and journalism and really informing the country on these important matters. So as we've heard today, the hardware continues. So thank you to each of you. Thank you. Thanks so much. So please join us at the same time next Monday for another episode of Informed and Engaged. Thank you for watching.