 Welcome all. My name is Noel Jackson. I'm an associate professor of literature at MIT. David Thorburn, the communications forum director, is unfortunately unable to join us tonight. It is, however, my great pleasure to introduce what happens to be our last MIT Communications Forum event of the term, News or Entertainment, the press in modern political campaigns. Our distinguished speakers are here now, but it's my job to and my pleasure to introduce to you our moderator for tonight's discussion, Seth Mnuchin sitting right here to my right. Seth co-directs MIT's graduate program in science writing. He's a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He's the author most recently of The Panic Virus, The True Story Behind the Vaccine Autism Controversy, which won the National Association of Science Writers' 2012 Science and Society Award. He's also the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster, How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, About the Boston Red Sox, and 2004's Hard News, The Scandals at New York Times and Their Meaning for the American Media. In 2002 and 2003, he was a senior writer at Newsweek. It's my pleasure to welcome Seth, but before I do, I wanted simply to call your attention to the screen behind me and to the MIT, the eighth annual MIT Media in Transition Conference, on which I'm serving on the organizing committee. Nick Monfort and James Parity sitting in the audience are as well on the organizing committee for this. I think we put together a great conference. Registration for the conference is free, but we do ask that you register in advance. So please save the date and we'll hope to see you there. But it's my pleasure now to introduce Seth Nukin. Thank you very much. So I'm gonna, now I will introduce Mark and Tanahasi. And then we're gonna spend somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour talking among the three of us and then we'll devote the second half of the form to questions from all of you. So if something comes up during our conversation that you want us to expand on, just write it down or remember it and we will definitely have a chance to do that. Tanahasi, Coates has been for this academic year a member of our MIT family, which we're very excited about. He's a 2012-2013 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar. He's also a senior editor at The Atlantic where he both blogs and writes regularly for the magazine. And one of his pieces from last year, Fear of a Black President, is right now a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Is that May 2nd? Yes. Yes. So everyone send positive vibes to New York City on May 2nd. He's the author of a memoir that came out in 2008 called The Beautiful Struggle, A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. And that's about his experiences growing up in Baltimore with his father and brother. Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor at Hill and Nolton. Is that right? Nolton, sorry. All right, strategies. He's probably best known as a political consultant, a job that he had in the 90s and then left and then came back in the 2000s. He advised the second president, Bush, on his two presidential campaigns and as well as Senator McCain. And two years ago started an organization called No Labels, which is designed to foster more better working relationships between the two political parties. And there have been some No Labels successes just within the past 24 hours in terms of the gun legislation. He also is a regular columnist for the Daily Beast and the London Daily Telegraph. And you were the editor of the paper at University of Texas, Austin. What is the Daily Texan? So he is both a member of the media and has also worked in politics. So I wanted to start by getting a little bit of both of your backgrounds, just because they're in their own ways a little bit unusual. Mark, I know you spent some time working with Chris Christofferson. Yeah, you're really digging up the past here. Yeah, I actually. Digging up the past means the second paragraph on Wikipedia. So. True. Yeah, my career kind of is in three different buckets, I guess. The first one was in the music business. And I loved music. I grew up on music and had, there was an old folk singer named Judy Collins. It was my babysitter when I was growing up. And so I fell in love with music really early on. And then was that to supplement her singing career? That was kind of before she was taken off. Her father was a piano teacher in Denver. And before she took off, that's how she supplemented. And then I loved writing. I loved writing generally. I mean, that was kind of my entree into politics, journalism and music. And so I started a little band in high school which attracted the attention of Chris Christofferson, who tried to produce our band and get us a record deal which didn't happen, which is not surprising if you heard the tapes. But I got so inspired by it all that I ran away from home in high school and hitchhiked to Nashville. And then just banged around Nashville for four or five years and he was very generous and let me live in his apartment and sort of tolerated me. Because I really was not a very good songwriter. But I had a lot of fun. It was a great thing to do as a young teenager kicking around Nashville. Then I ended up in Texas playing at a folk festival, realized after a couple of years of, then I discovered Austin moved there and then played around there for a while. And then I guess one of the times I really exercised some judgment in my life was realizing my musical limitations and realized it on the arc that I was on. I was gonna end up at the Cambridge Holiday Inn as the second act when I was 50 years old. There was just a lot of great talent around it. So I decided that I'd try a little higher education and then I got into journalism and was writing a lot about politics because I liked politics and wrote about it. This was when you were in college. Yeah, and then which I'd start a little later in life. And then a local state senator ran for the U.S. Senate and I had been covering him and I went over and volunteered into this campaign and had an exciting primary thing. I killed in the general election but that's when I discovered you can fail upwards in politics and went to work for the governor and then got the campaign bug and went to Louisiana and then moved to New York and worked for one of the gurus of our business in New York and worked races all around the country and around the world. And when you say the governor in Texas, that was Ann Richards. Actually it was before that. This was Mark White. Who was also a Democrat. That's right, yeah. Yeah, and I had, so I started off as an anarchist banning the student government initially at the University of Texas and then in Texas at the time there was only the, it was the two parties but it was a Democratic Party and the conservative Democratic Party. There was no Republican Party which was astonishing when you think how quickly things have changed there. In 1990 when Ann Richards was elected and I worked for Ann Richards, every constitutional office in the state and there are 18 or 24 of them I forget. Every one of them was a Democrat. Today all of them are Republican. Anyway, so I came back to Texas, started a firm, worked in politics, worked for Ann Richards, then as you. Now in the 90s. Yeah, and as you know, I kind of bailed out of politics for a little while and that was when she ran against George W. Bush. In 96. In 94. Okay. And so I stayed as. Did you leave politics at that point because you were conflicted about that race? No, no, I was actually, believe it or not I was concerned about the partisan nature of politics and just had kind of tired of it and just was pursuing some other, I was working on some education reform efforts and I just kind of burned out at the time and then I got some, then on this education efforts through that I was got George W. Bush and I met him and got him interested in some charter school things and then got to know him and then. This is after he was governor. This is after he was elected in 94 and then I was kind of evolving in my life and had become a little bit more conservative and had issues with the Democratic Party and I liked his compassionate conservative message and he was pushing at the time, he was very vocal about things like immigration reform and education reform which were two very passionate issues for me at the time. And we became friends and then he asked me to help him in his re-elect in 1998 and his, and the lieutenant governor who was a Democrat, a legendary Democrat and mentor to him asked me if I would consider it. And he, and he adores Bush over his own godson who was running against Bush at the time. Anyway, so I got aboard with George W. Bush in his re-elect and then did both the presidential campaigns. And Tanya Hasse, you tell us a little bit about your path to journalism. I know you started at Washington city paper about a little over a decade ago, is that right? No, I wish it was a little over a decade ago. It's been almost 17 years. So a little under two decades ago. Wow, I am getting old. I was in college in DC at Howard University getting, I am old. I was in college at Howard University. I started in journalism when I was 20 years old and I wanted to be a poet before that. I was not a very good poet. You do have a knack for choosing careers that don't offer a lot of financial skills. I do, I do, I do, I do. I had that, you're not gonna make much money face. And I knew that, I was born with that cloud. I was not a good student in school. So I knew that there weren't riches out there waiting for me. So I, but I did like to write. I did like to write no matter how, whether I was good at it or bad at it. I did enjoy writing. And when I was 20, I had a friend who I knew who was a much better poet than me who had interned at Washington City Paper. The editor was all of our mutual friends, everybody's mutual friend, David Carr. And I sent him a little chapbook of really bad poetry. And somehow that convinced him that I should be a journalist. And that's it, that's my career. That really is it. I mean, I never turned around after that. And so when at age 20, so you left college, made a decision to leave Howard? You know, it's funny, because when I got there, I knew that I shouldn't be there. I was pretty clear to me, I did not belong there. And when I got that job. For what reason? Cause I had never been good at school. And I, you know, I love to read, but I wanted, it's funny, I'm having, I have a conference with my, with my son's teachers tomorrow. And it's like a mirror image of exactly who I was. I don't, I don't know what I'm going to do. How old is your son? He's 12, he'll be 13 this year. And he's just like me. But I, you know, I love to read. I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. And the cool thing about journalism was that's, that was pretty much the job description. I mean, you did have deadlines, but you had to pitch stories. It had to be your idea. And, you know, I think journalism works at its best when the person executing the journalism is fanatically curious. And I did have that. I had that as a child, you know? And, you know, that's pretty much carried over. I could not believe that somebody would pay you to do journalism. Like the question that you were really, really burning the answer. If you could, you know, convey that burning to an editor, you know, they would say, okay, go answer the question and I'll see you in a week or two. And that was like amazing to me. And then they'd give you money. I was giving people money. I was giving a college money, you know? And I couldn't really answer the burning questions that I wanted. I'm making a great appeal for MIT's writing program right now. But that just, that really, that bugged me out. I couldn't believe that. So I knew I should have left when I was 20. I took about, it was like a bad divorce. You know, it took, you know, about another year. I was in and out, on and off. And eventually I finally pulled the trigger and said, okay, this is where I am. And that was it. That was my life. And so, starting out, you were in Washington, obviously. Right. Were you in 2000 that you were in Washington then in the late 90s and early 2000s? I left like 2000. I left about 99, 2000. So certainly there was a lot going on politically during those years. Yes. Did you, were you drawn at all to covering politics or were you interested in covering politics? I wanted to cover music, but working for David, you had to cover politics. You just, you had to cover local DC. You just did, or else you wouldn't work there. It was that simple. You could write about music too, but you really, really, there were very few people who just got the luxury of being art folks. And that was frankly a great contribution because I think it's left up to me. I would never have learned how to report, but you just, you had to, you had to. And I think, I still think, you know, the sheer challenge of walking up to someone who you do not know with a pen and a pad and asking a question, I mean, it's one of the scariest things in the world, but it's so important to be able to do and to be able to master and to put yourself out there and to understand that just because you're curious, no one owes you anything. They don't have to be nice to you. And I learned that in DC. Because this was DC. I mean, you had to cover DC. I mean, this was not Washington. You know, this was local DC. It was local politics. This was local metro politics, yeah. Right, right. One thing that we're gonna come back to is the ways in which political reporting and coverage to politics has changed over the last 15 or 20 years. And it strikes me that both of you were in an interesting position because you are both of this world, but you only in since 2008 and you were not writing about journalism and for the most part, I guess you are now somewhat, but over the last 15 or so years have seen this evolution as insider outsiders. And that's something that I wanna come back to, but I wanna also make sure that we get to the present with both of you until then. So you went to, you worked for President Bush. We were talking earlier, and I think you didn't remember, but on election night in 2000, the first time that Bush was announced as the winner, Mark and I were standing next to each other in Austin. I was covering the campaign and I was with Jake Tapper, who is now the CNN. Yeah, he's got his own show on CNN, right. Yeah, he's got a show. Yeah, right. Jake Tapper and other person who got his start around the same time with David Carr and Steve Daver. By the way, you may all know who David Carr is, but for those of you who may not, he's this legendary New York Times reporter who reports on broadly media technology, cultural zeitgeist, he's a brilliant, brilliant guy and a connective tissue for a lot of people in our business and he's gonna be here next week, so you should. Yeah, we're not talking about the quarterback. No. Yes, we're talking about this person. That's probably the one, yeah. A great portrait. He's speaking next week. Yes, he is speaking with Tana Hasti and I. Anyway, there's David Carr, the one who's not Judd Apatow or the person who created Girls. So, it's interesting to me that you worked with President Bush and then since the end of the Bush administration, certainly your public work has been very focused on forging bipartisan coalitions and I think there are a lot of people who see that administration as a very partisan time. Yeah, great question. Here's what's interesting about that period and the overall frame of not just those eight years but the preceding time and the context which a lot of people either weren't around or don't remember, but first of all, as I mentioned in Texas when George W. Bush was governor, he worked very closely with this legend that I mentioned was Lieutenant Governor, it was kind of a Sam Raeburn, Lyndon Johnson type of guy, been around forever and he was his mentor to George Bush and they worked so well together. And a Democrat. And yeah, a huge Democrat. And in Texas, Lieutenant Governor and Governor are not elected together. No, they're not and in fact, the Lieutenant Governor arguably has more power than the Governor. But as I mentioned, he felt so strongly about Bush that he endorsed Bush over his godson. That's how strongly he felt. So, very bipartisan and that's part of what attracted me to him as I mentioned on these other issues but I mean, he was talking about it being a different kind of Republican, compassionate conservative agenda, all these things which were attractive to me, but also one of the things that you may remember because you were around is, and I think it'd be an interesting exercise to take some of his speeches from 1999, take some of Obama's speeches from 2007, mix them up and I bet you you couldn't tell the difference because they both were talking about changing the culture of Washington, D.C., working in a bipartisan fashion. So- But is that just the same way that if you took any politician some speech from any period and- No, no, I don't think so. No, I think they very uniquely were focused on that particular message about changing the tone of Washington, working in a bipartisan fashion. I mean, that's not what Romney ran on and that's not what McCain ran on and that's really, I mean, the language itself was very particular on that issue. Is the Washington is broken language that certainly they're not the only two politicians who've adopted that? No, but I mean, the characteristics in the language and the tone was just, I mean, it really, as I think back on it, when I saw Obama's speeches, I was like, God, I went back and looked at some Bush's early speeches and it was like, Jesus, they're saying a lot of the same thing. And for, certainly in both cases, they hit the wall in Washington and met the practical realities of Washington and for reasons that are similar and different, I mean, I think they're all just the realities that they both confronted about just the entrenched nature of the special interest in Washington that we could talk about for hours and how it got to be that way and how it's different now than it used to be, which is an interesting subject, but then Bush had the recount, which poisoned the well for him right from the get go. I mean, Democrats didn't, a lot of Democrats and important Democrats on the Hill didn't see him as a legitimate president. And that just, that got things off to a very bad start. Not that arguably he wasn't complicit in his own way over time, but you remember, even despite that, in the first couple of years with Ted Kennedy, he'd worked in a very bipartisan fashion, got no child left behind, done a number of other things. And same thing happened with Obama in a different way with the sort of the birthers on the Republican side, also finding a rationale for thinking that he was a legitimate president. So it just creates this huge hyper-partisan, poisonous well that I think has affected both of their presidencies. And that's also just part of the evolution of politics in Washington and the media. And this is kind of on the topic that we're talking about, which is just harder and harder and more challenging. I mean, I think for every four years, it's an impossible job in my opinion and it's an amazing challenge for anybody. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it struck me that the parallel there between Democrats who were viewing Bush as not legitimate because of the recount and Republicans who were viewing Obama as not legitimate because they don't believe he was born in the United States, one of those is a more reality-based argument. Sure, yeah, no, no, I can see that completely. I'm just saying that people out there who were inclined to be that way anyway found their own rationale and reasons and they went to those kind of bases to say, well, here's why, and that reality affected the whole environment, I think. Right, right. And Tanahasi, so in 2008, by that point, you had been at the Atlantic for a little while, is that right? I was covering, so yes, like I said, I came in 08. I did, I came in 08, yeah. And you started then writing more about national politics. Was that because of something unique about that race? Was it about Obama's entry into that race, or was it just where you were in the evolution of your career? I was, I had gotten laid off from Time Magazine. That was probably the most important factor. That's a very important factor. I had gotten laid off and this thing called blogging had happened and I had at that point been in journalism for 12 years and before blogging, and I think this is like a sea change. This is a really, really big sea change. No matter how excited you were, I just went on this whole thing about enthusiasm and that's great. But no matter how excited you were, you really, before the rise of blogs, you really had to convince somebody else in order to make your voice heard. You mean convince someone else, convince someone to let you use it. Let you use their pages. Right, exactly, exactly. And then this thing came up where there was suddenly no border anymore. You could just sort of throw it out in the world and if the world liked it, that was great. And if they didn't, you found that out too. So in 2008, I had finished, I'd begun freelancing for the magazine. I had finished my first book for the Atlantic. For the Atlantic, yes. I had finished my first book and I had nothing to do. My unemployment checks had run out. And I just started blogging, just out of nowhere. I was still doinking around in freelance in various places and it did strike me that there was somebody who was running for president who might win, who looked a little different than everybody else that was on my mind. Right. I thought as a journalist, I should document that. And it just, I got pretty lucky. I got to go out to Denver for the convention and ended up in a few key places. It was fascinating. It was such an education. It really, really was. And so when you started covering national politics? Oh, something else too. The other thing that struck me was at that point, there was coverage of Obama and it really became clear. And we don't have to spend too much time talking about this but this is an important point from when I realized that maybe I should do some of this. It was very clear that the vast majority of people covering the Obama campaign had no understanding of Black America at all, of its history, of its politics, of anything, absolutely anything. And I thought that maybe I could, you know what I'm saying? I have any sort of total knowledge. But it's clear to me that I had a little bit of an advantage. Is that because there were no Black reporters on the campaign trail? No, there were, there were, there were. I actually think, I think part of it is the motive of what journalism is. Journalism as a form right now, one of my big beefs is totally ahistorical. Right. You know, and I think that's a huge, I mean, you can just to give a specific example. Barack Obama, by the time Barack Obama ran in 08, Black America was pretty used to African Americans running for president. I had seen Shirley Chisholm, I had seen Jesse Jackson twice. I had seen Al Sharpton, I think at that point twice. I had seen Alan Keyes. It was very used to African Americans running. And I don't think people quite got that. So if you go back to 08. When you say people didn't quite get that. I don't think media got that. So it was like surprise, for instance, that Hillary Clinton was beating him among African American voters. Which made total sense to me. Because African Americans, you know, they got the right to vote through a hard fight. They treasure that right to vote. They want to back a winner. Right. And it's very practical and very tactical. There's nothing surprising about it at all. And if you understood the history of African Americans, you wouldn't be shocked by, you know, the support for Hillary Clinton at all. And so when I, that was like one of the earliest things that, you know, really struck me that folks don't quite understand what's going on here. And that was a big, big prom thing for me to go ahead and show you. Did you have any sense, because I know when I started covering the 2000 campaign, I had never covered national politics before. And I felt almost right away like there, I was, had just come into some tribal thing that no one had told me what the vocabulary was and what the rules were. And in some ways, I think my understanding of politics and of that campaign was helped by the fact that I wasn't of that world. Did you have a similar experience? Yeah, I did. Well, I remember when I went out to Denver and I told myself I was writing about Michelle Obama. And the thing that they do, where like, who's they? I'm sorry, the media of which I am a part of. The thing we do, I would never do that again though, where, you know, you pick up a magazine or a newspaper and they profile somebody and you'll always see this kind of scene that really, I guess, is supposed to convey humanness that doesn't really make any sense. Like Michelle Obama was wearing this and she walked past this. And I got to see that they actually set that up. You know, that like Michelle Obama's handlers tell you you can be here at this point in time. You don't get to ask her any questions but she's gonna walk fast. And that'll give you your color for your story. And I totally, you know, regardless of whether that conveys any truth of anything. In fact, I was out. I was out there with David Carr. David Carr was there at the DNC. I'm sorry he keeps coming up, this is hard. You guys should come next week. I was out there and I said, because I didn't, I didn't. And David had been with you in 2000 and had experienced this. And I said, I have gotten limited exposure to this woman. They have put me in all of these places where I don't know, like this means nothing. You know, I've seen these scenes appear in other reporters, you know, pieces, but it has no meaning at all for any reader. It's not interesting at all. And he told me, you have to figure out what it means. You have to put your own thing on it. You just have to do it. Meaning you have to figure out what it means to put your own thing on it because you're not gonna get anything else. Yeah, you're not gonna get it from her. I mean, you can go report elsewhere, you can go talk to other people, but you're not, that's what they're going to give you and you're gonna have to bring something to bear to it. Which was sort of just like, I didn't realize how planned and how choreographed, it was very depressing. I really, really didn't realize how planned and choreographed the coverage of presidential candidates is. And Mark, so is that something that, talking about whether political reporting is functions as news or entertainment, is that something that has evolved or changed dramatically over the last decade or so? I mean, even in 2000, where I spent a lot of time with the McCain campaign, that campaign was obviously notoriously shoot from the hip and gave all kinds of access. So I'm sorry, I don't have to cut you up, but did they do any of that? You have to be here, look at this at this specific time. With the McCain campaign in 2000, he had, I mean, it was almost pathological. He had reporters with him all the time. He had reporters on his bus all the time. And was it journalism better? I don't know. I think it was. Yeah, it was different. Certainly of the McCain campaign. And I think in fact, and this was something I was gonna ask you, that it forced Bush to respond differently to the media because when McCain started getting more traction, all of a sudden, when I was with Bush, he would go from being sort of sequestered in the front of his press plane to coming back much more. There were all sorts of, Karen Hughes became much more willing to have people interact with Bush on a less scripted stage. Yeah. Well, here's a dynamic tension. You write about McCain and that was, McCain got a ton of media love in 2000 for being kind of the wide open, candid, unscripted guy. And that kind of, that got him a lot of, that got him up the runway a good ways. And certainly in the Bush campaign, the joke was that his base constituency was the media, right? But then all evolved and then over the course of time, and this has to do a lot with, I think the evolution of the media and how it works differently now. You have the juror, the macaque of the Senate moment with just sort of the full body coverage. And so candidates and campaigns became more concerned about that kind of access because they were just afraid that there was gonna be a moment because it's all being captured all the time. And unlike old days or the Kennedy days where something happened, they'd say, you know, they just all kind of agree that we'd keep that, you know, but that's the rules now. There are no rules. I mean, in terms of kind of letting, you know, something unscripted happen and not reported, that's not gonna happen anymore. So in fact, just the opposite and where we see sort of secret recordings of people trying to get every moment, even those that aren't supposed to be public. So that changes the behavior. And it changed McCain's behavior in 2008 because he kind of started off that way, but then the campaign jumped in and just said, because he would go off message as they call it and kind of ruin the storylines they were trying to create. So what happened, the response has been that the campaigns have become more scripted as a response to the media. But ironically at the same time that all that's happening, voters have become much more skeptical about the information that they get from campaigns because they rightly perceive it as being scripted. And so they find it not believable, not credible. And so actually I have a presentation that I've been doing for 15 or 20 years called the architecture of a political message and I keep adapting and evolving. And the most recent chapter that I dropped into it was the importance of authenticity in today's media because political advertising is almost completely meaningless because people just assume they're being lied to and I like to talk about that at some point before we're done because I got a particular example about that that I like to talk about, which has to do with truth in campaigns today and what's happened to the truth. But so the moment that I used to describe to reflect the value of authenticity was Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign. You remember Barack Obama won Iowa, shocked the world, suddenly he's up 20 points in New Hampshire. His pollster tells him it's in the bag. No need to, we don't even need to poll for the rest of the week, it's done. And then Hillary Clinton, 24 hours before that election had this completely spontaneous moment on the campaign trail. She's exhausted, tired. Somebody throws her kind of a softball question about how are you doing and she kind of, she has this very vulnerable moment. She chokes up. She chokes up, kind of tears up and I remember initially reporters like oh she's crying, she's done. Then you see the video and you go wow, that's a really human moment. I've never seen this side of this person. That was an interesting moment because it showed, on one level, the disconnect that there was between the way the public was perceiving events and the way the political press was perceiving events because the initial media reaction to that was if Obama was gonna win by 20 points before and now he's gonna win by 40 points. Exactly right. And he lost. Yeah, 24 hours later. And that's how dramatically that moment of authenticity because people just saw kind of behind the curtain. They said oh, this is the real person and that's how powerful that can be. So talking about the campaigns have gotten more scripted which I think everyone would agree is true. But in terms of the information that the public gets, in 1960 you had Ben Bradley went on to be editor of the Washington Post at the time, was writing for Newsweek, going to porn movies with Kennedy and obviously not reporting on that. It's hard to imagine that happening today, certainly. So the interactions that the media had with candidates were less scripted but was the presentation that the public got any less scripted? Well, like I said, the rules were different. I mean, they were different then and so the presentation wasn't authentic. I mean, it really wasn't. But it's a completely different environment that we live in now. Right, right. So in the 2008 campaign, I know that you, that was a difficult sort of moment for you in terms of where you were gonna line up. Well, I just had an unusual situation where I, I had a relationship with McCain and the McCain people that goes back, that went back to, I was like one of the only people in the Bush campaign that were actually communicating with the McCain people. Cause I just had a relationship going back and I love McCain's campaign finance stuff and always just respected him and his sacrifices. There's not a lot of love lost in general. There wasn't just because of the general 2000 campaign but I maintained a relationship there and then later we got together and he's, you know, and I said, if I can ever come down and cut your lawn in Sedona or anything, I'm glad I'm happy to do it. It's a nice lawn. And he said, and so then later he said, would you come help me in the campaign? And I really didn't, I was really kind of burned out and but I said, I'll kind of help put the team together. And at what point was this? This was really early on, really early on and then. So during the primaries? Yeah, early on the primaries. I mean, it was just right when it first started and I initially just pledged to kind of put the team together and drop in on a few conflicts. Then as you probably will recall, the campaign melted down, everybody quit and I'd been just a volunteer to kind of help out. And so I stayed on with it. That was late in 2007? That was kind of middle 2007, like spring 2007 it all melted down. And so I agreed to stay on. Then I went full time but you're still in a voluntary status just because you couldn't afford to pay anybody. And I just kind of my point at that time was I just wanted to kind of help them get his honor back. Right. And then things happened. But what happened is at the beginning of the campaign, I had met Barack Obama and I liked him and I disagreed with him politically on a lot of things, but I liked him. And I also, I liked what the idea of his candidacy could be and thought it'd be good for the country. And I didn't want to be the guy, the point man in a Republican campaign doing what generally happens in presidential campaigns. I didn't want to be the trigger man. And I also didn't think it'd be good for the campaign. And I just wouldn't be comfortable. So I wrote a memo to the campaign the day I started, which was again, early in 2007, I just said I'm honored to work for you and to help you try and win the primary. But you know, and at this time, nobody thought Barack Obama was gonna win. But I said if Barack Obama wins the primary and you win the primary, then I'd feel more comfortable stepping away at that point. And I'm just going to the sidelines and then it happened. And I went to McCain and he said, oh yeah, right. I forgot about that. But he said less of it. And who did you end up voting for in 2008? For McCain, and I've supported him and voted for him. But it was really hard to walk away at that point because a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that campaign and it was this great resurrection and comeback. But McCain, he said to be very un-McCain-like, not to honor your word and I appreciate all you've done and God bless you. And then later I was given the way things worked out. I was happy that I didn't walk away because a lot of things happened that I thought would happen and I'm glad I wasn't part of it. Anyway, so that's kind of that unusual arc. Tanahase, so in 2008 when you all of a sudden are covering this campaign. And I didn't know you at the time, but I remember even people talking about you as if your identity covering that campaign was not a journalist, it was a black journalist. Is that something that you felt at the time and did you feel like you were supposed to write about the campaign in a certain way because of that? No, I am a black journalist, so it's okay. Right, yes. And I'm a brown-haired journalist. You understand the implication of what I'm saying, it was almost as if there seemed to be, and at least some of the things I was reading, this idea that it would be impossible for someone to write about this historic campaign in a way that was equally impartial to- You know what, I'm totally fine with that. I was not impartial. I was very excited about the possibility of an African-American president, and I said it, and I come out of opinion media, city people was opinionated. I've always laid my biases out front. I have never, and those biases include being an African-American. My argument is that more people should leave their biases out front. I agree. So no, I had no problem with that. I mean, I strongly believe that the proof is in the pudding, you come read what I write, and you know, you feel how you feel about that. Like I always thought that if I were good, then that would ultimately be what would matter. And so, and then during that campaign, when you were seeing the things and experiencing the things that were then written about in the national media, did your perspective on the value or place of political reporting change at all, or did it change out now when you read something in the newspaper about politics, do you interpret it differently? You know, I don't have a TV, and I threw my TV out in 07 or 08, and it- Literally? Yeah, literally, like not threw it out the window, but literally took it down to the garbage. I didn't throw it out the way. I didn't want to hit anybody. The defenestration of Chris Matthews. Right, yeah. Right. Right. But it was Chris Matthews. I would like cut on Chris Matthews, and it's nothing personal against him. It could have been anybody, right? I would cut on the TV, and it was very clear that nothing was actually happening. Nothing was actually happening. On a day-to-day basis, nothing, like literally nothing. I mean, but it was so covered in such a way as though every little thing, but it didn't. And it was amazing to me. Were you already on the campaign at that point? Were you already on the campaign? No, no, I was like writing from home. And I think the, so it would have been 07, so I actually think it was like late 07, so I don't think I'd even started blogging yet. I think I threw out my TV before. I really do. I really do. You see the 07, oh wait, maybe I done that before. You've been a solid madman, and no, I don't see it. Well, you know, another development has happened since then, you know. But, you know, at that point, I guess what I'm trying to say was I really began at that point questioning like what is actually being communicated? And it wasn't even just, I'm using Chris Matthews as an example, but it could have been the daily newspapers too, like you, because there has to be a story every day. But how much information is actually being conveyed? You know, so it was very clear to me we have this conflict that we have a lot of space and you can look at that as TV time. You can look at that as, you know, inches in a newspaper. You can look at that as your feature well. But often nothing is actually, I mean, these campaigns go on forever and nothing substantive will happen and then something big will happen. I guess the fear is that you don't want to miss that. You don't want to not be there for that moment. So, yeah, that's, I mean, that's an interesting part of the dynamic that's absolutely true is, you know, the journalists have space to fill and they can't stand static. Right. And they don't want a static storyline, so they're pushing to create a storyline. Well, is it journalists who can't stand a static storyline or is it the pub? I mean, is it, you know, the people who are watching TV? I mean, if you had- Well, it's clearly a demand for you. Right, exactly. I mean, it clearly is a demand. I mean, is it entirely fair to say, well, yes, this is journalists who are doing this. If you had, if Chris Matthews' TV show was him for an hour every night saying, things are basically the same as they were yesterday, I'm guessing that he would be doing even worse than he is in the ratings. Yeah, yeah, no question about that. So, right now, we're living in an era in which we have access to more information than we ever have had in the past and access to more different types of information than we ever have had in the past. When it comes to politics, do you feel like we are being well-informed as a public? Well, let me take this opportunity to jump into just an example of what you're talking about. So, I mean, the question is, what kind of information do we get from the body politic and is it accurate, is it true, and where's the sort of evolution of that dynamic? And I was the ad guy for campaigns. That's mostly what I've done over the last 30 years or so. But, and I remember, I remember producing ads and we would be creative, I'll say creative, but we would never actually say something that was wrong. I mean, we might kinda color the way that we wanted it. So, you would never lie directly? Yeah, yeah, and then what happened is that, but that, you know, but we could get very creative, and then there was a- When you say get very creative, are you talking about, like different camera shots, or are you talking about creative with the truth? No, kind of embellish what you've done and that sort of thing, but then as a corrective response to our expanding creativity, the news industry, business, and I remember specifically the first woman who did it in Texas, a news manager, did, you know, came up with a truth test. They said, well, we're gonna start, we're not gonna just let these things go out unfiltered, we're gonna start reporting on it and having, you know, truth tests, and that had a huge impact on us and what we did. What year was that? This would be late 80s. Okay. Early 90s. Right. And so suddenly, and very healthily, when we were producing ads for our campaigns, we were thinking in the back of our minds, well, this is gonna get truth tested, and so we've got to be very careful about what we say and how we characterize things because when it happened to the other side, when somebody else's campaign would get a truth test and the truth test would say, oh, they bent the truth or something, we jump on that, our campaign would, right? We'd make an ad about that, that they distorted the truth and that would have a significant impact as people were saying, you know, this campaign's not telling you the truth. So that was 20 years ago, so do you think that political ads have become more closely tied to reality in that time? More, yes, skeptically. More closely tied to reality then? Yeah, no, not. I mean, so the implication of what you were saying was that you became even more cautious about embellishing. Because you didn't think we were, we did then. So a corollary to that would be that today, ads are more accurate because people are worried about getting truth tested. No, the second half of what I was gonna say is that over that period of time, what happened is that people became sort of enured to that notion of the truth test and reached its absolute distortion in this last campaign. I just want to play two ads and then I'll just play them without any editorial comment. You'll remember these. And then I want to comment on them. Okay, here's one of them. Welfare recipients were required to work this bipartisan reform successfully reduced welfare roles. On July 12th, President Obama quieted the end of the work environment cutting welfare reform. One of the most respected newspapers in America called it nuts, saying if you want to get more people to work, you don't lose some of the requirements. You tighten. Mitt Romney's plan for a stronger middle class will put work back in welfare. I'm Mitt Romney and I approve this message. Okay, so that's one ad. Now here's the second ad, which was an Obama ad. Hopefully. Hope you're gonna depend on that MRT in that. Oh, I'm in trouble. Here, here. This is how inaccurate this ad was. All right, well, I'll just describe it. This was the ad that Obama ran. You can describe it and I'll try and get it back. We'll hear. You're trying to get that up. Let me start with the Romney ad, okay? So that Romney ad came out and was demonstrably false. I mean, there was nothing about it that was true. And when confronted with the truth, when there are organizations as well as publications now that specialize in, it's the second one, is that one? Yeah. The specialize in reporting and studying political communications and being the kind of gatekeepers for the truth. Every one of them said completely false, completely false. And rather than make a corrective turn rather than edit the spot or take it down or respond that, or even try to respond that it was in some way accurate, the Romney campaign was, let me just read this to you. I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant. I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely changed. When Mitt Romney and they closed the plant, I lost my healthcare and my family lost their healthcare. And a short time after that, my wife became ill. I don't know how long she was sick. And I think maybe she didn't say anything because she knew that we couldn't afford the insurance. And then one day she became ill and I took her up to the Jackson County hospital and admitted her for pneumonia. And that's when they found cancer. And by then it was stage four. There was nothing they could do for her. And she passed away in 22 days. I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he's done to anyone. And I furthermore, I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned. Priorities USA action is responsible for the content of this advertisement. Okay, so let me just read you a couple of quick things here. So on the Romney ad, here was a dispatch. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney's campaign has drawn fire for misleading ads against President Barack Obama on welfare. But the Romney campaign said Tuesday, it's not concerned with being labeled false by independent fact checkers. Quote, fact checkers come to this with their own set of thoughts and beliefs. And we're not gonna let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers. So you had a response from the campaign saying, we don't really care about the truth. I mean, that's fundamentally what they're saying. We don't care about fact checkers. And kept running the ad. Now, so now here's a response on the Obama ad. Let's see. Um, were you gonna say something? Well, I was just, and certainly the last thing I wanna do is have this. I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the ad. I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely change. No, no. Mitt Romney may enclose the ad. I mean, the language there is not dissimilar to the language in that famous New York Times magazine article in 2002 or 2003 about when talking to one of Bush's advisors and his dismissal of the reality-based community. And that that wasn't what the campaign, and that wasn't what the administration's message was concerned with. Well, I have a lot of problems with the guy who wrote that book. With that, right. Yeah. And so, you know. All right, we only need to, that can be another topic for another day. Yeah, so I mean, I never heard anybody say that. And, you know, I know that there's a lot of things that were in that book that I didn't say that were ascribed to me, so I don't know where that came from. And I don't know anybody that believed that. So, so now the other ad says, this, the Obama ad was filmed by the Super PAC run by former White House aide Bill Burton and features a steel worker who used to work for a company that was taken over by Bain Capital, the investment firm founded by Romney. The worker lost his job in health insurance and the ad insinuates a link between that and his wife's subsequent death from cancer. Independent fact checkers have noted, however, the cancer patient featured in the ad died six years after Bain bought the husband's company, that she had her own health insurance through her employer and the Romney was not in charge of the investment firm when her husband was let go. And then that goes on to describe how the present campaign said, oh, well, that's a PAC and we're not, you know, that's a separate entity, we're not legally. So they didn't, they didn't, they refused, they just, their response was, well, you know, we had nothing to do with that. We didn't, we didn't coordinate, we legally can't coordinate. And then it was disclosed later that they actually had been on a conference call with this guy in an earlier ad that they've done so they did know about this guy. So anyway, there was just on both sides, there were just extreme examples of taking it to the limit where, where any common sense sort of legitimate outside agency said these are completely false and yet they refused to even, not only not acknowledge that they were false and take them down, they just said, well, we don't care about that and just pushed around through it. So were those ads that had significant ad buys or were those ads, because I know there was also a phenomenon in the most recent election of essentially making incendiary ads, not even airing them, just putting them online and then essentially using them as chum for, for reporters who would then, and they would get a lot more coverage and exposure than the ad ever would have had. That's a whole nother development, which is, yeah, I mean, which is the reality is that, again, this goes to the whole issue of ads and their effectiveness. People don't generally believe ads, so a lot of what happens today is that the political campaigns are trying to get into the larger narrative of the press coverage because that is seen as more legitimate and credible for viewers who are looking for a more authentic messenger and so you're right. What the campaigns now do is they'll create ads to try and get a story about the ad in the paper or the news coverage and really won't, we used to at least buy some time. You know, we'd do this to sort of get coverage too, but we thought we had to at least actually buy some time, but it's kind of the point today where they don't even buy the time, they just put out an ad and they get the coverage that they're looking for and so it's this little game that goes on. So before we open to that, I want to talk a little bit about your fear of a black president piece, the piece that's nominated for National Magazine Award. First, why don't you just tell us a little bit about the piece? Sure. First, I'm sorry, I want to go back to this point if I can just for a second, because I've been thinking about this a lot and I guess what seems to undergo this is this notion and I think we kind of got at this when we were talking about how the market for believing that something is changed. Wait, I'm sorry, what do you mean, the market? The market for news, the idea that you have space to fill and people are clearly buying that space and people are clearly viewing that. I don't want to sound too cynical here, but this sort of division, you see people running ads like you just described and I have no doubt that when people are running for president, they lie. I guess I'm skeptical that there is this, I wonder how much people believe what they want to believe today. I guess that's what I'm saying. I'm wondering how much any of this actually ultimately matters, to what extent? Even with what you're saying about the media. When you say you're skeptical about how much this ultimately matters, what's the difference? I think if you want to believe Mitt Romney's that guy, if you want to believe Mitt Romney's that guy, if you want to believe Obama is going to do that, you're going to believe it. And I'm skeptical to the point, even in terms of the media being a more credible message. I wonder about what this is going to be. I think that's a great point and I think we should focus on that for just a second because I think it's absolutely true that the country has become more partisan, has become more partisan and then partisan has become more partisan because, I mean Washington's more partisan because the country's become more partisan, the country's become more partisan because people, one of the reasons is people become more mobile and they can move to communities of like-minded people and then they kind of self-aggregate and sort of self-approve and it becomes a silo of information and beliefs. You're like in Cascade where? Yeah, and then you have the evolution of the media which becomes increasingly siloed too. And so I think you're right. I think that there's a huge shift in just the sense that there's just a bunch of people that are going to believe what they want to believe and they're going to look for information so they're going to see that commercial and say, yeah. That kind of goes to my confirmation bias anyway and I'm looking for information that will feed what I want to believe. So I think you're right about that. So is that, are we talking then about how the public as news consumers can essentially create an information cocoon where they're only subjected to, exposed to ideas, news stories, opinions, whatever that already reinforce their worldview? I think like there's an assumption among all of us who are journalists that God, this is going to sound really cynical. And particularly, I think there's this assumption that if I provide you with accurate information you will then make an informed decision. And I just wanted to- You think journalists believe that? I think so. I mean, then what's the value of information if that's not true? And we live in a time where there's more information available to, certainly to Americans, maybe to the human population than ever in our history. And I wonder how much it matters. So let me push back on that a little bit. I mean, I completely, I very much agree with the idea that with the implications of being able to form these information cocoons, both in terms of what we take care of and also in terms of where we live and who we see and who we interact with. But there were a couple of moments in the 2012 campaign, the 47% comment probably being the prime one of them, where that actually did seem to affect the way that the public at large was- Both viewed the candidate and viewed the race. Right, well that's a big unfiltered moment, right? Like that's not, I mean maybe, I guess they might have cut that into ads. I'm sure they did. Certainly Obama in the second debate made it part of his appeal. But that's the kind of rare unfiltered just, and elongated riff that you really, really are not gonna see. How often are you gonna see a 47% tape? How often are you gonna see something like that, where it can't really be disputed? I don't know. I mean, Mark, you were talking about how the ways- When was the last time something like that happened? I think Obama's cling to guns and religion comment. Right, but that's like a line. I mean, this was like, I mean, and his video, you know what I mean, this was, wasn't that kind of anomalous? Mark? It's Naka. Yeah, the- Naka is probably, yeah, and he lost. Right. And he lost, right? Yeah. I mean, do you think that the media is essentially kidding themselves if they are laboring under the notion that information is going to affect the way someone views a candidate or an issue or the world? But that's not cynical. It's more nihilistic, I think, than cynical. I prefer, thank you, I prefer that. I prefer that. And I should clarify, I don't mean no effect. I guess I should, I don't mean no effect, but I mean, especially coming on in a time of blogs and watching, you know, go on, sorry. Well, I think that's all true. And I think it's a matter of degrees and it's changing and it's shifting. And I think there are journalists who still believe and will continue to believe. And there's some merit, there's some degree of it, which is true, which is that they are trying to pursue what they think is an objective fact and truth that they're trying to communicate that they hope that will be consumed and considered in the debate. But I'll- But whether or not journalists believe that, I mean, do you think that that's, do you, is that a fantasy? No, I don't, I still think that there, well, I think that there is, and perhaps, my hope is, my optimistic side is that, that in this revolution that we're in the middle of, of journalism where the pendulum has swung there'll be a point at which the voters and the public will realize that they are not getting the truth, haven't been getting the truth, and there'll be a greater premium placed on communicators that deliver what has, you know, that whatever the consensus body is, that it is actually true because there are, because they've been through a period of time where the consequences for not having gotten the truth become so great that it evolves. So you think like this will shake out and then there'll be what, like trusted- Yeah. Friends, for instance? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I think. That would, that would surprise, I mean, it seems like that's, you know, returning to a pre-internet remodel where you had network news and a couple of big national newspapers that could sort of set a base national conversation. It's hard for me to see a scenario in which we return to that. Well, it'll be different, but I think in some ways it'll be like that. I think there will be trusted brands and trusted aggregators and, you know, poor people. You know, I think it's going to evolve. Okay. Why don't we open it up? I've already taken up more of my time. If you can, because we're recording, if you can go to one of the two microphones to ask the questions. And just introduce yourself. My name is Greg PC. I actually am in the photographer here. I used to work for Hill and Nuln. Why is it assumed that there was a golden age of objectivity in political reporting? I mean, really the 19th century, there was, it was highly politicized. And so it seems that the practice of journalism in terms of politics had a brief period of objectivity when it was controlled by commercial interests. And when those went away, you end up then with partisanship. I'm not, from my perspective, I'm not trying to imply that I think there was a golden age. I think that when there were a small number of news outlets that set the national conversation, then you had a baseline that regardless of where you fell in the political spectrum, people were starting from. Whereas now, you know, what Mark was talking about in terms of the Berthers or in terms of, you know, 9-11 conspiracy theorists, you don't have that baseline. And so when you have people disagree, they're not disagreeing about an issue where they agree even that the issue is what it is. They think that they're talking about totally different realities. But I'm not saying that there was some golden age for objective reporting, just that the implications of having a sort of national, these national standard setters created a different atmosphere. What was there one before? Was there one? Look in the 1890, was there a national standard center? No, certainly not in the 1890s. No, I mean, I think in the middle, the mid-century, yeah, yeah, right, sure. Before and after there wasn't. So we had this little window of national taste makers. Yeah, well in the 1890s, I think it doesn't make sense to talk about, I mean, this is a whole other discussion, but it doesn't make sense to talk about national taste makers in a period in which to get from one part of the country to the other took weeks. And so... What do you think of other countries you see breaking up? Sure, yes. Even the idea that the media should be objective is a very uniquely American idea. It's not, the UK and most of Europe and most of the world does not share that view, certainly. So in human history, in one country, for a small list of times, we have this idea. Right, yes. I think we're all okay with that. Roger Hugo Davis, Comparative Media Studies in the Centre for Civic Media. I think you just said there's not a conception in the UK that the media should be objective. As a British person, I completely disagree with that, but I will ask a different question. You would disagree that, so you think the newspapers in the UK present themselves as nonpartisan? All right, if you're just talking about newspapers, but I mean, I was including broadcast media in that and obviously we all know the elephant in the room, the BBC. Right, the BBC is a slightly different situation because it's state-funded, or it's state-subsidized. Subsidized, yeah, the majority of its funding doesn't come from the state anymore. It comes from BBC Worldwide, the private arm, which is like selling planet Earth. I'm even though you obviously have a position of expertise because the amount of time spent in the UK I can count on probably all my hands and feet, all my fingers and toes, I think it's unquestionable that the dominant method of the dominant paradigm for news organizations, primarily newspapers in the UK, is to associate themselves with a political party or a partisan agenda. That doesn't mean that they then say, and we can't report on the truth, but they're very upfront about the fact that they're reporting on those stories through the lens of a greater editorial vision. I would actually say it's more complicated by class than partisanship, because I think that backing of parties is extremely tactical. So the sun being the voice of the white van man, you know, Axel over at some point backs the Tories when they seem to be in the ascendancy with that constituency. Anyway, so I didn't mean to, I have a very different question, which is a colleague and I are looking into the impact of internet memes on elections, specifically the last presidential election. So you're binders full of women, horses and bayonets, this kind of stuff that spreads online and that people remix and share. I'm just interested in hearing what you think it means to cover these memes in political journalism, because we did see a surprising amount of like Big Bird popping up on the front page of major news websites. So is this just like covering any other agenda item? Or is it like a process story? Like, you know, this troublesome meme came up and this is how Romney handled it? Or are there any kind of other existing paradigms of participation in elections that these memes fit into? I find it to be, I'll just speak for myself, but I found it more to be a way in which here I am being cynical again. People who already agree with each other talk and have in-jokes. But is your question how the media covers those? That's right, how does it go about them? I mean, this may be part of that. Yeah, I don't know because I don't know how it goes beyond that. I mean, watching Twitter, I primarily saw remarks about binders full of women and it's like, just like in-jokes, you know, that people trade it amongst each other, you know? I don't know that it goes beyond whipping up the base. I don't know that it becomes much more than that. To me, it's just- How do you go beyond, this is something people are saying? Like, what's the impact beyond? Maybe you could tell me- I mean, it's the changing the discourse argument, I guess. I mean, you seem pretty skeptical that it's possible to change the discourse through media. No, no, no, I think, I think. I just, I wonder, my question back to you would be, what is the impact then? That it changes the discourse because campaigns see these messages that kids are making partly for fun and they incorporate them. So, you know, after the Big Bird meme came out, you might have thought this was just throwaway, but the Obama campaign started referring to it and using it. Right. And the same with the binders full of women. Maybe, you know, it's, this was a great emblem of like, you know, what the public was saying about Romney and it becomes like a weapon. But isn't it just an emblem? Sorry. No, no, no. Isn't it just an emblem of what their supporters are already saying? Like, isn't it, you know, the base talking to, you know, the preferred candidate? Isn't that the real discourse? Well, I think there's the assumption, which may be wrong, that the kinds of people who create these memes aren't necessarily your party activists, although they do it as well. They're not, right. It's a lot of the kind of disinterested or, you know, allegedly apathetic kind of youth who aren't really voting or aren't participating. They're kind of bored with politics. That's where we would disagree. Sorry, yeah, I shouldn't, I actually don't mean that. I mean, it's not that they're disengaged or apathetic. It's that they're, they are tired of the conventional means of engaging. So this is their way of engaging. I mean, one question I'd like to raise is that almost by definition, when you're talking about memes, is that something that someone created or did it become a meme because, you know, 30 seconds after Romney said Binders Full of Women and the debate, that was, you know, the number one trending topic on Twitter. And that wasn't someone, some kid or adult or anyone who said, I'm gonna create a meme here. It just seized hold of the cultural imagination in a way that without those, it probably would not have become that type of story without something like Twitter because I don't think the press was gonna treat it as the main story coming out of that debate until it became the number one trending topic on Twitter. But Mark, did you, you had a comment about that? Well, I would just say that it's, well, first of all, I would say that, you know, even though the slice of the, you know, the persuadable voters has become narrower and narrower and, you know, the elections are still very close here and that something's affecting those unpersuaded people ultimately, although a lot of the times I think I'm persuaded, or persuadable voters or people who don't end up voting. But, you know, you're fighting over a very limited pool and so any of these things can affect it and so you fight over every inch of turf. I was just gonna say that I think that, that in many ways what you're describing is just a broader sort of sandbox of tools and toys that reflect what we used to do just with single channels. We would try, something like notebooks would have come up in a debate and we would have gone out there and done a press release on it, you know, and tried to have our surrogates go out and talk about it. Now you just have- In a post-debate. In a post-debate spin, but you know, we didn't have Twitter to do it and now that just amplifies it so quickly but it maybe gets to a different universe of people but in many ways it's just an extension and electronic and modern extension of many of the things that we used to try to do just not as well. Yeah, that's something I'm really interested in. You know, I don't pretend that this type of spreadable, remixable discourse was invented with the internet. So I'd love to talk to you more about some of those pre-internet examples. Oh, I'm an expert on that. Thanks. Yes. Chris Peterson, Comparative Media Studies Center for Civic Media. So the title for this talk was News or Entertainment. I'm very bad about sticking with- Well, I also thought that that was maybe like a bad title. Okay. In the sense- Did you come up with the title, sir? Probably. That the distinction maybe, and this puts it a little bit into what you were talking about with needing to fill airtime, that there's an industrial context here, right? Which is that people watch TV or read newspapers or magazines for one of two reasons, and sometimes both. You know, one is to fill their time in the day that's left behind, behind work and sleep. And the other is to have something to talk about with their friends. And that's true whether it's news reports, the weather channel or Gilligan's Island. You think those are the only two reasons that people read newspapers? Fundamentally, yes. That it's part of it is to just fill the time in their day because they have to do something. And the other is talk about it. Now, what they're talking about with their friends, they may talk about it for different reasons. And those things may be more or less connected to something that affects their everyday life in a very real sense. Well, let me just- So how many people here today read an article in a newspaper? Or a website, sure. And how many of you talked about that article with someone else during the day? So maybe half of those people. And how many of the people who read something during the day feel like they have a surplus of time in the day? No one's gonna cop to that though. No, no one's gonna cop to that. He will. Yeah. So I mean- I don't mean necessarily, I mean, there's a cognitive surplus argument that Clay Shierke makes about a surplus of time. But I mean, when you're filling your time in your day, I don't mean like you have a bunch of lax time lying around. You might be a knowledge professional where it's your job to know things, but it's still how you're filling your time. But the point that I wanted to make was this, that you can see a lot of the reasons why pundit shows suck is because they have to put on a show every night. Chris Matthews has to go on air every night and he has to fill an hour and make all these things. But there seems to be a different motivation behind some of these other sorts of media. So Tanahasi has written on his blog about how a lot of the reasons for the blog is not filling column inches or the advertising revenue that isn't coming in clicks per minute or clicks per view. But just because it helps develop an idea in conversation with your readership, right? And that you're writing because you're working through an idea and you wanna think it. That seems to me to be fundamentally different for whatever people end up doing with it than the industrial context of filling time to sell ads to people, filling time to do something else where you have these other constraints that are guiding how long your work is, how short it is and when you need to get it out. The effects may or may not be different, but I was wondering if any of you have an idea of a potential shift from here are some ideas I'm working through or towards that from here is time or space I need to fill if any different results might emerge. I mean, I still wanna push back against the underlying notion there. I think the reason why people read newspapers and even the reason why people read punditry shows is because they want narratives to help them understand the world. If I'm reading a story, if I'm reading about today's Red Sox game, it's not because I wanna talk about it, it's because it was incredibly painful and I want a narrative that is gonna help me understand that. And also, if I'm reading about what's going on around the world, it's because I want, both want a narrative to help me understand the world and also because as a citizen of the world, I wanna be well-informed. It's not because I'm either looking to fill time or hope that I have something to drop into conversation. So, but I'd be interested in hearing both of your thoughts about that. You write for The Daily Beast. I don't know if you would, if you consider that column writing or blogging, but Tanahase, you obviously blog. And I think that the idea that you're talking about is, I'm not sure if it's a new form of journalism, but it's almost something that Andrew Sullivan helped foster on his site early on, which is you use a blog to develop your thinking, to develop your perspective on a situation and it's more of a two-way conversation. Right? Yeah, just to get back, I'm gonna push back on South's pushback. I'm gonna defend Chris here for a moment. It might be helpful to disentangle like what media you're talking about. If you're picking up the New York Times, you're probably a less apt to be trying to fill your time. No one reads at 8,000 where a New Yorker feature necessarily to fill their time. I mean, that's something more that you want. I don't know about like, I think TV's fundamentally different. Right, yeah. I think people do come home, have a hard day and I do think for a lot of people politics, it certainly was for me before I threw out my TV. And even now, you know, I'll boot up whatever, you know, on the computer and go do, you know, whatever, you know, lazy thing I'm doing, you know, eat my dinner or whatever. So I do think for TV is much closer to this notion of filling your time than the commitment that reading takes. Whereas, you know, you can't do anything else. In terms of the second part, this for me goes back to the whole notion of objectivity. When you say this goes back, you mean the idea of working out something and letting the public see your intellectual process. Yes, because I think for journalists, for quote unquote thought leaders, for public intellectuals, the template has long been I am an expert in this and you should listen to me because of that. Right. And you're talking about news and opinion. Yeah, I think just across the board and I think even at universities, I think anybody, you know, who had some sort of platform in which they were granted the ability to talk to large groups of people, what they expertise was how they build themselves in general and probably exceptions to that that other people here might be able to bring up. I never felt like an expert. I felt really, really curious and I just, for me like the fundamental motivation for journalism was curiosity, period. Just an insatiable curiosity. And that's more what I stress that I am in pursuit. And that's why you come under the hope that I won't just stop at something easy. I won't just stop at something easy. And that's why you come to your block. That's why a reader will come to you. I hope so. I hope so that I'll keep asking questions because that's what I can only say that that was how I always worked on stories. I mean, this goes from when I first started. It was, you know, are you gonna ask the question after the question, after the question, after the question? Are you gonna keep pushing? You know, it was that you wanted to know. And so, you know, I worked for 12 years before I started blogging. When I started blogging, the notion was to then open that up, then let, you know, the person see you doing that. But that was where I thought journalism came from anyway. You know, it was this notion that, you know, you went in, you dropped in and often you weren't an expert, but you asked, asked, asked, asked. That's just great. It's a really good question. From my perspective, I think that that ties in a little bit to my whole no labels effort and kind of the conversations that we're having, which again, are, you know, we're not trying to claim all the answers. You know, we're trying to create a collective dialogue and a dynamic by bringing people together. So, you know, that's where I see things shifting in the dynamic change and getting some traction for that because I think that, I think there's a growing appetite for that that we're trying to throw a net around. So, it's a really interesting thought. Before we get to Tom, I'm actually curious. I think that the motivation that you're talking about is the motivation for a lot of journalists. And maybe even, I mean, I was reading today John McPhee talking about his career and what motivates him. And essentially, you know, there's something he doesn't know anything about and he wants the answers and he's lucky enough to be in a position where he can ask them until he gets them. No, I totally agree with that. But if you, can that stay the same way if you're on the campaign trail for eight months? Is that really what you're saying? I mean, can that stay the same way? Do you continue to have that same appreciation for what you don't know? Yeah, yeah, can it be that way? I mean, is that, is it really curiosity at that point that is really motivating you if you're, and again, going back to this notion of how much is really actually happening. Right. You know, how much of that can be sustained, right? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, because you've been there, but there's really nothing more boring than being on a modern day presidential campaign in terms of anything happening that's interesting or different or surprising. Covering baseball. More boring. Tom. Thank you everybody for bringing this to the People's Republic of Cambridge. And I don't think any visit here, Mark, would be complete without a little pushback. So I've got, I guess, one quick comment and then two questions. One is, comment is obviously that partisanship is not obligately a bad thing, you know? And that the quest for bipartisanship is often a way to mask sort of a short circuiting of democracy in the solution to contentious problems. So I think that there is a premise behind some of what you said and some of it. I'm sorry, a short circuiting. Yeah, I mean, if, you know, politics are composed of elites and, you know, popular or mass involvement. And bipartisanship is a tool that can be used, and I'd argue has been a lot in the last many years, by political elites to short circuit discussions about, for example, tax policy or all kinds of things. I mean, you can run down a long list. You know, we have an elite consensus on the way we should deal with antitrust law that leads to, among other things, enormous media conglomerates that make it harder and harder to have a vibrant media ecosystem or extremely large, you know, I mean, they're all kinds of things. You can get very nitty gritty into details like that or you can get into some of the more sort of grand or thematic issues in which a bipartisan consensus is actually a mask for ways that the people don't get onto things. But I guess I was a little bit troubled during your, a couple of your remarks when you supplied examples of, you know, the Romney campaign ad and the Obama ad and the Bush, which says challenge you on the Bush recount versus the Berther crisis, that you were at least tiptoeing around the edges of false equivalency. As I recall, when the campaign was done and people, the various fact checkers looked at, for example, how many Romney ads were bogus or mostly bogus or Pinocchio or whatever the things were versus the Obama ads, the Romney campaign was in much more dubious shape when it came to truth telling. And that's a distinction that's important because if one side of the partisan debate divide is more committed to a reckless disregard of the truth, we've got a real problem. If only because of political equivalent of Gresham's law where, you know, bad money drives out good and bad campaigning, bad information drives out good information. So I wondered, you know, I wanna give you a chance to either- Well, I don't disagree with that. Okay. And I don't disagree with that. So what do you do about a political culture in which one party is continuing to maintain a great deal of power over the current political process despite a wavering commitment to truth telling? Well, the particular party that you're talking about in this instance lost a presidential election. There was a consequence. Yeah, but they retained the house in ways that looked not permanent, but lasting. Well, you know, voters can vote them out. I mean, that's, you know, that's what democracy's all about. Well, there is, I take- Well, listen, I'm all for reforms that I don't like the gerrymandering that goes on that creates protected districts and all of that, but, you know. It is the system we have. And I'll, you know, let me just put one more thing to you, because you noted that partisanship in Washington is at least partly driven by partisanship in the country and the siloed nature of our social life and all that. And I'm sure that's true, but there's also been a lot of political science recently on the impact of leaders on followers' opinions. One of the big case studies has been looking at attitudes about global warming, which is a subject I've been covering since the 80s. And you see a really major change starting around the time that George W. Bush became president when Republican leaders who had been, you know, Republicans and Democrats had equal, had similar disagreement within the parties about the severity, importance, and human causation of global warming prior to that. After that, as Democrats and the scientific community became increasingly convinced of the reality of the problem, Republicans increasingly opted for the, you know, so-called skeptical side. And popular opinions, which had been overwhelmingly in support of the idea that global warming was a problem and we need to take action, shifted dramatically with Republican-identified voters following Republican leaders. There's been other studies similar to this. And I suppose that's something that you may be trying to address with your current efforts, but it certainly suggests that the decisions and information choices and choices about whether or not to be honorable truth-dealing politicians at the top matter for the partisanship issue that you seem to be very concerned with. And before you answer, let me, because I don't want you to need to say this. So, I mean, I think that I don't want Mark to become a surrogate for GOP efforts more generally. And certainly, you know, regardless of your view about specific campaigns, and I've known Mark in different capacities for several years and interacted with him as a journalist and a source, you know, 12 years ago or 13 years ago. And he has legitimately always been someone who pushed back against that within his own party. I don't know if that was also true when you were a member of the Democratic Party. And certainly, I think in the last couple of years has even more vocally since you have been unaligned with campaigns. I'm not, I'm sorry, if I came off as that hominem, I certainly don't mean that. But I, you know, the question is if the problem is excessive partisanship and a decline in truth-telling and the awareness of truth by the electorate, then the question are what are the solutions? And if the issue is one of leadership voices driving that, that suggests different solutions than if the issue is a siloed media environment, for example. You know, if Mitt Romney went out there and said, in fact, I've spent some time on it, I've had some spare time, and I've really become convinced global warming is a significant issue, anthropogenic global warming is a significant issue. That would or would not have an effect depending on how you view this question. So I guess the issue is, do we need to re-educate our leaders or do we need to break up our silos or, you know? I think the leaders, I think the leaders are feeding those silos, but I also think that, you know, that, again, I go back to, you know, you touched on it, but I mean, I spent a lot of time and a lot of column inches pushing back on the leadership of the Republican Party for precisely the reasons that you're talking about, and that's why I think the Republican Party has been in decline and will not re-ascend and tell it addresses that particular, but problems like you've just pointed out. And this is, so a very brief follow-up question to that. If Romney had come out, let's say before he got the nomination and said, yes, the evidence, as, you know, Huntsman did to some degree and said that, I think- By the way, John Huntsman is the co-chair of No Labels. But he said that- Along with Joe Manchin, who just was significant on the gunfight. The gun legislation. If, you know, Huntsman did say, I think the Republicans seem to stand with science. If Romney had said that- That's progress. During the primaries, would he, would that have hurt his chance of gaining the nomination? I don't think so. You know, I think that, you know, I believe, and I've seen plenty of evidence over the years of campaigns that, I think the big problem with Romney was much the same problem with carriage that people didn't believe that he believed what he was saying. Did he believe that he believed what he was saying? No. Okay. I know. And I think that people will support somebody who they think has core convictions, even if they disagree with them over somebody they agree with that thinks that they don't really believe it. So then I guess to get back to Tom's question, if we are in a situation in which, for one reason or another, we are putting up for election leaders who don't seem to have core beliefs that they're willing to stand with, how does this cycle ever resolve itself? Well, I think- And do you think that the crisis in the Republican Party after losing this election was sufficient that there will be a real change in that regard? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think the longer you spend in the desert, the more you figure out where the water is. And, you know, I think that, for example, I think the Republican Party could support somebody who has those kind of bold convictions, like a Chris Christie, even though he may not be, you know, meet the 2008 primary purity test, you know? I think that that, you know, they're gonna get the point. So, you know, I like a guy who says what he believes and he's strong and he's bold and he's clear and he's principled and he's consistent. So one of the things that the GOP has been trying to do very actively since the campaign is broad in its appeal, Tom Hassey, we were talking a little bit just before we began about one of these efforts when Rand Paul went to Howard and talked there. How did that go? Not too well. Not too well. It's really sad because, so obviously folks looked at the poll numbers and figured out that the Republican Party Republican vote from last election was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly white in a way that it not necessarily, one would think that it shouldn't be folks who, at least from the perspective of Republicans should be allies of those that they should be getting, they did not get. Rand Paul, who I think actually could, you know, make inroads over a long-term period, someone like Rand Paul came to Howard University and I was actually disappointed because I think there are some natural issues, not fake issues, real, real issues that he's actually spoken out of, for instance, prison reform, the war on drugs. I mean, these are actual issues that people in the African-American community aren't talking about. These aren't like, you know, fake sort of, you know, foe. People say things like, oh, the African-American community is socially concerned, which is a big broad sort of thing that might be true. But then, you know, when you start getting down to actual issues, struggle is, this is a real issue. Prison reform is a real, real issue that there's activism around, there's a base around. People are organizing around, you could get votes around. And he spent three quarters, or half the speech, lecturing an African-American audience on African-American history and the political parties. This is Howard University. Howard University is the mecca of African, I went to Howard University, I'll clearly tell you all about it. Howard University is the mecca of African-American education, they call it the capstone of neuroeducation, that's what the name used to be. There is a requirement that every student who comes into Howard has to take something out of the African-American studies, African-American history, African-American lit. I was joking with Seth, it would be like me going to Paris and saying, I'm now going to give you a lecture on Vichy France, in English, by the way. You know, and wondering, like, and expecting you to receive me well, like expecting to be well received. And I say all this to say that what that points at is not even so much, you know, problems with Rand Paul specifically, but you don't even know anyone to talk to, to tell you that this might be a bad idea. That's a problem, that's a real real, I mean, we start looking at, you know, we talk about votes, we talk about who's running, you know, is there going to be an, you know, other Republicans are going to put up an African-American candidate. But the real issue is who's behind the scenes? How many contacts do you have? How often do you come in contact with African-Americans, with Latinos, with Asian-Americans, with gays, lesions, people who are different than you? How much contact is there? I have this satirical letter I'm going to write to Rand Paul, but it actually is a very serious letter. And if you look at what the Obama coalition that he put together, this didn't happen overnight. This happened over a period of 40, 50 years, and they were nasty, really, really ugly, ugly battles behind the scene. Awkward moments that probably are much worse than what Rand Paul went through yesterday. But what counts is your willingness to have those fights, your willingness to have those. You mean with the Democratic Party building that coalition? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Awkward moments between, you know, pulling those constituencies together. African-Americans, deeply skeptical. James Baldwin writes about this famous scene with Robert Kennedy. I mean, just really, really ugly, awkward, bad, bad moments between the Democratic Party. And, you know, these various constituencies. What folks want is some sort of feeling that you're in for the fight. And when you don't care enough to even assemble people around you, to even, you know, rub some elbows, even have some conversations before you decide to give a speech, I mean, what have folks left to conclude about that? It was deeply, deeply, you know, depressing. Right. Sorry, that was my rant. Yeah? I'm gonna ask a question that's a little bit of a meta question, I guess. An opportunity to reflect on the kind of conversation that I think we've been having today. And I think it relates to an observation that I've been making or sort of just wondering about in conversations about journalism in general, so not just political journalism. But it seems to me like, there are these sort of two strands of conversation about sort of where things are heading or what sorts of observations we can make as trends. And the one side is that there's a problem of the fragmentation of the sources of news or the audiences and so that, you know, I think at one point in the conversation today, one of you was mentioning that people aren't getting the same narrative, they aren't debating the same things and that that could be an issue. And that's the more pessimistic side of the conversation. And then on the other side, and I feel like these are the conversations that we maybe more often have here in CMS. There's the more optimistic opening of access. You know, people have more opportunities to be bloggers or to, you know, find channels through which they can communicate their ideas and there can be a more diverse set of ideas communicated as a result of greater access today. So there's this like very pessimistic and very optimistic side of the discourse that I think. But why are those two things opposed to each other? Well, maybe they're not. I mean, what I'm asking, I guess, is sort of for your reflections on whether you agree that's a pattern and whether I think my question when I hear those two sides of the discourse which come up quite often is, you know, why is it that it seems to be so easy to look in one direction and see one thing in another direction and see another thing? Like, is there something more fundamental underneath that we're not getting at when we have these kinds of conversations? You know, it was a good question. Part of the problem may be that actually that, and we talked a lot about truth and what is the truth? And maybe part of the problem is that with the additional information that we have and sort of, you know, people can get whatever information they want now, right? So if I'm inclined to believe one way or the other and I'm gonna be more righteous if I have what I think is my truth behind me, and that's kind of what I see in like the gun debate and stuff. You know, it's suddenly I'm finding myself having discussions with people where they're suddenly all telling me the same thing. So I know that they're sort of migrating to, and these are people from all over the place. It's like my cousin and, you know, it's not like suddenly they all got the same book, but somebody out there is like, you know, we know who that somebody is in this particular, like the NRA, was like really in a manufactured way feeding this information in a very sophisticated way. So the people thought they were getting the truth, you know, and then suddenly it becomes this collective truth. So that's where it becomes problematic, I think, because people, you know, they have these, you know, it's not like the old days where there was kind of, you know, three networks with their version of the reality we started with. People's, you know, migrate to, now they can go to wherever they want to to get their version of the truth, and they think it's true. So it's, I guess that's the reason why I was saying, I'm not sure why those two things are in opposition, because a sense that we can create these information cocoons, I think, goes along very closely with the ways in which we are all able to generate information and put our opinions out there. In fact, there are more sources of information is one of the reasons why it is easier to create an information cocoon. And for the more sources of information to have a positive effect on society as a whole, you need to have people in that society who are actively seeking out information that they might not agree with. And I think that's, in a lot of ways, goes against human nature. Well, maybe the tension in the question is, we think, we generally think more information is a good thing. Right. Yeah. Maybe it's not necessarily having good effects all the time. Maybe not. I mean, I don't know the answer to that, but I do think that there's an assumption underneath both sides of this conversation that the point is to get at information. And as a historian of news, I think my question then becomes, well, information itself is, I don't wanna start sounding like the people who are talking about those ads and saying, well, we don't need to care about facts or we don't need to care about reality, but at the same time, facts and information, these are historical categories as well and they do depend on the types of media that are created to use them. And we didn't really have an idea of information and then leading to objectivity until the early 20th century. And so it just makes me wonder if part of this debate needs to get at, well, what do we mean when we even say information is what fundamentally we need to be distributing? And could it be that there's some combination of being much more upfront about it? Do you think that factual information is a construct? I think it's tricky. I think that the concept of what a fact is is something that has changed over time and I think that the concept of what information is is something that's been built through history and does that mean that there is no truth? No, not necessarily. I'm not saying that it should become a free for all, but I am saying that I feel like maybe part of what's happening is that there are standards that are shifting that we still wanna have some kind of standard and we wanna have something to pin our news on. But could it be that we need to be thinking about a different sort of underpinning? And just to give an example- But you mean other than facts? Just to give an example, I think there was at one point in this conversation someone mentioned that maybe we could be more upfront about the biases that we do bring to our stories. And is there some sort of combination of being more upfront about opinions and more reflective about what a fact might be? I don't know. I mean, this is getting into a lot of speculation. I think my point with the question was just trying to get at sometimes the concept of information that's underneath the discourse is something that perhaps we don't analyze enough or not saying that we should necessarily but trying to bring that into the conversation. What's underneath? Right. Yeah. I mean, I have a problem with the sort of post-modern notion that facts don't mean anything. This is the tricky thing. I mean, I don't wanna be standing here saying, right, that's not what I'm trying to say it. And I don't think that- Certainly, I mean, yes, certainly information and how we value information has changed. What we consider information has changed. And the proliferation of news sources of blogs, whatever, is one way that that's changed. Now I can sit down at my computer for eight bucks, put up a URL, write something down, and that's information, whereas five years ago it just would have been me talking to myself in the corner. And that, I think, has changed things in real ways, but I just wanna be careful that we're not also saying that the factual underpinning of what it is that I'm blathering about is mutable in that same way. You know, you can, and let's take the Berther example, you can disagree about whether Obama is a good president or whether he should have been elected or whatever, but you can't really disagree, not really, you can't disagree about the fact that he was born in the United States, he's not a Nigerian foreign agent, whatever. And yeah, so I get uncomfortable when we start going down that sort of relativistic path. What? Yeah. I think that's a little bit of that. Thanks. Either you wanna jump in there, sorry, I didn't mean to. No, I like facts. I'm Roger Wilson, I wanna ask, is it accurate to say that we're getting more partisan? Party enrollments, I believe, are declining. The unenrolled numbers are increasing. So it seems to me we're getting less partisan, the parties are getting less effective at delivering votes. And it seems to me that there might be an opportunity to deliver to citizens useful information to help them make voting decisions and other decisions of citizenship that's not being met by the parties or the current for-profit media. Well, and I'll let you all sit up in there, but that does strike me as even in just the definition of partisan might be a little bit what you're talking about because you can interpret partisan as meaning enrollment in political parties or you can interpret it as the rhetoric that the candidates and campaigns are using and I think if you, depending on how you define partisan, you get two very different answers there. Yeah, I think that both can have, I think both are happening. I think that you're right that dedication to either party or allegiance has fallen off and people are increasingly less party loyal but at the same time I think there is more partisan behavior that can be reflected in the rhetoric and the general debate and the heat. But I think both of those things are true. We probably have time for one more short question. Oh, just a quick point. Oh yeah, yeah, please. The other thing I think to recognize is to the extent that, and I'm not even sure if you see, to the extent that this wasn't more bipartisan country or less partisan country, it was always underwritten by a kind of immoral consensus. One example of that immoral consensus is obviously segregation and Jim Crow. I don't think it's necessarily a mistake that we've seen increased partisanship since the civil rights revolution but it's not just that. I mean, it was the suppression of gay and lesbian folks. It was that women occupied a certain place in our society. A lot of the things that we had consensus on about how a country should be organized have changed. So if you're sitting in a seat like mine, this consensus was built on false things to begin with and to the extent that we're now fighting, the fight is a good thing for a lot of us. We've wanted to fight for a long time anyway. Hi, I just have a quick question. You had mentioned about the Michelle Obama where they were just trying to hide the fact you couldn't see her yet. They told you where you had to see her very specific and that David Carr had told you you should write about this, why is this? And I guess I'm still curious that never got answered. I felt, you know, it's very interesting because I was thinking about like what reporters should do when they do that. I included virtually none of that. I included none of it in the story. And I think that as a reader, I would want to know that the campaign is general. It's like, this is what's happening as a reporter. I'm experiencing all of this stuff. So I was given a kind of a tough assignment. They didn't want to talk about race at all. And I was supposed to tell you what Michelle Obama meant. And I can't really tell you what Michelle Obama meant and not talk about race. So I went and talked to a bunch of other people. But I get what you're saying. I mean, I guess in that sense, I didn't feel like I wasn't writing a process story. I just felt like I didn't want any of that. I just didn't want, it wasn't part of what I was doing. I didn't want any of it in my story at all. But your point's a good one. No, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you guys and thank both of you. I know both of you, you traveled here for this, which we appreciate. I know, Tanahasi, you didn't travel somewhere, which we also really appreciate. This was a fascinating discussion. We did not get into Judy Collins at all. But we certainly could have gone on for some time. And I suspect that we'll continue part of this next week, next Wednesday. So this was great. You know, these are, just as a summary point, it's stating the obvious. I mean, I think that this conversation is a fascinating one, but I think it also reflects that we are really in the middle of all these big, this revolution and, you know, fascinating and... I mean, we're in the middle of this, not like we are in the middle of the action, but this revolution or this is unfolding as we speak. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, I think there's a lot of perspectives because there's a lot of things to shake out yet. And I think that it could shake out really well and it could shake out really badly. Right, right. Right. All right. Thank you guys. Thank you.