 Hello, everybody. I'm Andres Martinez. I teach journalism at our Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. And I am the editorial director of Future Tense, which is a project of New America Slate magazine and Arizona State University. And I'm thrilled to be here today with my good friend and former boss, Steve Call, who is the dean of the country's second bass journalism school. Come on. Come on. But also, significantly, he is one of the founding fathers of Future Tense. That's Steve has many accomplishments, but we'd like to think that that ranks high up there. He is, of course, a former president of New America, former managing editor of The Washington Post, author of many great books. And so Steve really appreciate your taking the time today. I know you're very busy. Well, thank you, Andres. Thank you for having me back to New America. I always enjoy that, even virtually, and thanks to the group who's with us for sharing some of their confinements with us. That's my wife, Liza Griswold, that's Andres Martinez, in the middle of a live webinar. Excuse me. I'm just so inspired. All right. You're a great writer and a great mind, and she should pull up a share. OK. So I don't know if checking in with you is going to make me more alarmed or make me feel a little bit better about the state of affairs around the world, but I can't think of a more authoritative person to check in with about this sort of parallel epidemic that a lot of people have taken note of and are concerned about that we're seeing globally when it comes to free speech. And I should have mentioned that this is the latest in a long series of conversations that we're having that we're calling the free speech project. We're doing this in collaboration with American University's Tech Law and Security Program. So I should have mentioned that. So we were concerned about the state of free speech well before the pandemic, as a lot of other people are in our field. And along comes this moment. And as we see with other crises, particularly in the context of wartime, governments that tend to have authoritarian tendencies to begin with often take advantage of these moments to act against critics' dissent control speech. And of course, the thing about this pandemic and this crisis is I can't think of anything else in my lifetime that is so universal in its reach, right? It's not a regional issue. It's not two or three countries over here involved in conflict or facing civil disturbance. It's global, and it comes at a time when we had seen sort of a rise in authoritarianism and some devaluation and appreciation for some fundamental civil rights and also kind of a return of nationalistic sovereign concerns that say what happens in my borders, I can control. But so just those are just some initial observations that I have. And I wonder, though, if you feel that there is something materially different about the attack on free speech that we're seeing. And I mean, you can pick your country, right? Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Hungary. There's been a lot of reporting to the extent that it's possible on what's happening in a lot of these countries. Is it materially different to reactions against speech in the past? Or how would you describe what's going on? Well, I mean, we're kind of living through the end of globalization as we knew it in the period between the end of the Cold War and pick your date of decline. But sometime in the aftermath of the last financial crisis. So yes, there's a general kind of tightening a return to authoritarian governments that are unabashed and that don't feel in need to even create the appearance of a regime of free speech and free press in order to have credibility with the international system. So if you think about the repression of speech and journalism worldwide, it has clearly been rising steadily over the last few years. And as more and more governments of different stripes succeed in repressing jailing journalists with relative impunity in the international system, the more others are encouraged to follow. And so you have regimes like Turkey and Egypt that have imprisoned more journalists than ever. They've been able to get away with rationalizations of national security that would have been tested and even sanctioned in the past. But then you also have a rhetorical environment of polarization, populism, and attacks on the credibility of independent journalism that are certainly rising. We have a president who makes a daily sport of it. But his embrace of that language of populism and his direct attacks on journalists as part of a conspiracy against himself and his followers is being picked up and echoed as a strategy, or he's adapting the strategies of the deuterities and the modes of the world. I think the one thing, since your conversations are centered around speech as opposed to journalism, because I think they are related but distinct, we are also experiencing a world of speech in which even as there's a closing of governmental policy attitudes, repression in diverse parts of the world, including members of the European Union like Hungary and in the United States, at least through political speech. At the same time, you have this huge structural opening of speech through the spread of social media platforms and bottom-up communication that governments attempt to suppress with mixed results. They're getting better at it, but you still have this competition going on. When Egypt decides to control political speech in that very large and politically aware nation, you say, what's different? It's not like the 1950s when they could control the radio station and the TV station, and then what was left were the cafes and the word on the street and maybe some underground political organizing and unions and lawyers' guilds and that sort of thing where speech could be organized in defiance of the government's regime. Now, instead of a handful of unions and lawyers' guilds, you've got all of the population potentially with access to global speech. And so you have this Egyptian exile, dissenter. I think he's in Spain writing things that would result in his immediate arrest and prosecution if he were at home, and it matters. So there is a competition between this new era of authoritarianism, I think, and the structure of open speech that technology and connectivity have created. Yeah, and I feel like 10 years ago when we were working together in New America, that structural opening was the cause of great optimism. And there was a lot of euphoria about the Arab Spring and all the ways in which our newfound connectivity and how empowering these platforms were going to be. And then we sort of soured on that. And then in the last more recent years, we've been very concerned about how these platforms can be weaponized in ways that are pernicious and disinformation campaigns and so forth. And so one thing that's been interesting to see in this moment of the pandemic is governments sort of cynically perhaps saying, OK, well, yes, we keep hearing the misinformation and disinformation is a source of grave concern, even in democracies. And so I know we'll just outlaw it. So this has been sort of a trend where countries will outlaw misinformation, which they can conveniently be the judges of what constitutes misinformation. So it's been interesting to see that shift. We had a good piece in the last week about Vietnam that the outlawing of misinformation, if only it were that easy, right? Well, in this country too, it's interesting. I mean, Facebook obviously has been the focal point of reconsideration of this kind of privately-owned public square that Facebook in particular operates, but you could say the same of YouTube and some other important platforms. But Facebook, most dominant and most susceptible, the evidence shows to deliberate campaigns of misinformation and political manipulation, even today, problematical because its public square is closed to researchers who even want to document what's going on. And Facebook now is gradually year by year, month by month attempting to get ahead of the prospect of regulation or other governmental action in the United States, which is already facing in Europe and elsewhere, to get ahead of that by attempting to self-regulate and to use both technology and now this new panel of overseers of experts to try to get a grip on what is permissible speech, even if it's inaccurate speech and what is unacceptable propaganda or manipulation or misinformation. And the net result of it is you have to, I think, even if you are one of those people, as I am, who is appalled by the pollution that Facebook allows across its platform in the name of openness, but in the context of a program of profit making and the lack of responsibility that Facebook has been willing to take for its role as a publisher, its place as a public square. So I'm appalled by that. On the other hand, I'm ready to admit that this tightening, this self-regulation, is going to have the effect, is already having the effect of making marginal speech less possible, less influential, less present. And OK, if you are of the school that thinks Alex Jones and Infowars should not be part of a credible publishing operation, you may be pleased by that. But it's always the case that policy is adopted to silence a voice that the consensus holds to be unacceptable also turns out to silence lots of other voices before they can even get going, which may be necessary to our kind of system of continuous self-examination and change. So yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on. If I can just jump into the sort of darkness subject, though, because there's a lot of darkness in the discourse about speech and journalism as authoritarianism rises around the world and as populism polarizes politics in our country and in other countries. But I just say, like probably the kinds of people who are listening to us now, one of my responses to the pandemic was to go back and read the plague by Albert Camus. And it's quite a worthwhile, if not uplifting, novel to read in these times because it's prescience for what we're going through is just stunning. But well, actually what it does is it places what we're going through in the proper, accurate, eternal context of recurring epidemics and government responses to them and the failure of governments to get a grip on viruses throughout history. But anyway, it made me interested in Camus. And I'm going to write something about this for the New Yorker. So you'll see it whenever it drops. But it made me interested in him. And I was reminded that he joined the resistance in Paris as an editor in 1943 and 1944 against Nazism. And I went back and read his articles in the newspaper. He added this clandestine newspaper called Combat. And he basically is trying to respond to the German propaganda machine, which I mean, talk about a dark moment in speech and manipulation of public opinion. He didn't even have a Twitter. And his optimism in these, he's very forceful and clear. I mean, he really is kind of closer to Orwell in the clarity of his political language than I appreciated as close as I've come across on the comic. But anyway, he basically just says, facts will win out in the end. The truth will win out, my countrymen. Pay no attention to all of these lies. Yes, if you tell a lie a million times, it will have an influence. But so will the truth. And so we are going to just stay that course. Now, you look back on what kind of a person would write that under false papers, living like half a door from the German counterintelligence service that would torture him if they knew what he was doing, and turn out to be right. Turn out to be right. So I don't know. I hate, as a friend always says, optimism is just a state of brain chemistry. But just when you look at the kind of assumption that misinformation, because it's growing, because it's prevalent, will win, I think there's reason to both moral and analytically, there are reasons to fight against that assumption. I like that note of optimism. It's clouded in my mind by PTSD from having to read that book in the, that's about as far as I got in French when I was studying. I had to read La Peste. And I still remember the first line about his mother is dead. And it was like the verb continue. So I'm having some PTSD. But yes, fortunately, he did write very clearly. So even for a student of French, I'll have to go back and read that. There's also been a lot of referencing to Garcia Marques and Lovin' the Colora. But I like that sense of optimism. But I mean, what you're pointing to when we talk about these platforms and going back to your comment that censorship isn't what it used to be in the sense that you don't have the army surrounding the radio broadcast station. And that's basically like the job is done. Even in a lot of these countries that we're referencing, there is a fair amount of openness to social media platforms. And so who is the censor is a different equation now. And these platforms are often in the US context the debate has been should they exercise editorial judgment and start thinking of themselves as having the role that you used to have at the wash and post in terms of deciding what's credible, what's not, what's newsworthy, et cetera. But in a lot of these other countries, they are kind of often the ones who are asked by the government to take down speech that ostensibly violates norms that the government has maybe arbitrarily decided imposed in that country. And these platforms are sort of caught in between and they're scrambling to figure out should they stand up to the government, should they Google famously pulled out of China back in the day. But just talk a little bit more about that. The evolution of how Facebook in particular perceives itself once upon a time, I think Mark Zuckerberg said, I'm not responsible for anything that is for any of the content on this platform. I'm just providing the public square or the other analogies people made is I'm like the phone company. I mean, if people have seen things on when they're connected, I've connected that's not on AT&T, that's on them. And so all these analogies were sort of imperfect. But you're right, whether they haven't explicitly embrace the fact that they are in the business that you used to be in in the wash and post. But there's certainly been an evolution. I mean, just because of the outrage and because of the threat of regulation and whatnot, and I feel like with the pandemic, there's more and more vigilance in terms of the content. And then this oversight board, I mean, I've heard many people have differing views on how effective that's gonna be and whether it's just window dressing or whether it's gonna be sort of a useful Supreme Court type instrument to at least make some of the tough calls. But do you see things evolving to a point where Mark Zuckerberg or his successor at running Facebook is going to be sort of feel like his or her role is the same that the Graham family when they were stewards of the wash and post or the Salzburgers at the New York Times or is it just gonna be different and we're not gonna get to something resembling that? I mean, I think Facebook is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg just the way the New York Times company is controlled by the Salzburger family and the wash and post company was controlled by the Graham family, he owns the A-share. So it's not a normal publicly traded company in the sense that all of these external pressures that would normally drive a public company towards reforms, they meet resistance from their owner who I don't think will evolve into the outlook that the Salzburgers or the Graham's had as newspaper owners, he's too wedded to the insights, I guess, as he would call them that he developed in creating the platform and to the kind of philosophy or ideology that evolved as Facebook scaled. Now he has been rethinking some of the things of the regulatory issues as each time the status quo became untenable, he would think a little bit forward. The mechanisms that he has used to try to get the governments that influence Facebook's profitability off his back have evolved. Initially, Facebook took the view that a lot of Silicon Valley companies do, which is surely there's an engineering solution for this. We don't need gatekeepers. That's, we've already blown up all the gatekeepers, the newspaper editors, the book editors, they're antiquated, they're unnecessary, their function is inefficient and maybe even structurally damaging. And so let's write code and algorithms and build kind of crowdsourced insights that will produce a better experience for our users. So when the problem started arising, like people carrying out acts of violence using Facebook Live or staging gruesome events of various kinds that I just skipped past what those all were, well, their first response was to try to write code that would detect these and preempt them. That didn't work because the human complexity that you have to manage when you build a beehive of the sort that Facebook represents is just too great for all code all the time. And so then they started hiring these, sent these kind of editors as they called them. They turned out to be for the most part low paid workers in places like the Philippines in the India and Southern India who had to work shifts in which they watched just unspeakable material and decided which was on the wrong side of the free speech line that Facebook was trying to enforce, which I think was probably not a very healthy working environment for many of those people. But anyway, also a very retail and not traditional publishers approach to the question of what content is welcome on our platform. Now you have this Supreme Court which is it going to attempt to try to unify the questions about policy and access and so on. And there's a notional independence that's being given to this board but its function is so circumscribed at least in the way it's been initially described that it doesn't actually constitute management. It seems like a safety valve for the leadership of the companies to basically be able to say, well, that's not our responsibility anymore. So I don't mean to be cynical. I mean, Facebook is a living organism and Mark Zuckerberg has got a long life ahead of him. But when you say Mark Zuckerberg or his successor, I mean, wait 40 years if he has a normal lifespan and he doesn't seem in any hurry to turn this over to anyone else. We had a conversation recently with the FEC commissioner, Ellen Weintraub. We do these movie nights. I don't know if you were still here and got to go to any, but we normally will ask somebody interesting to pick their favorite movie and we'll show them at the East Street landmark. And of course, we had already scheduled it with her when this situation came along. So, but she'd picked the social network. And so we still had a chat with her about it. And so, and I watched that with my son who had never seen it, Sebastian, he's 15 now. And, you know, watching them high-five when they hit the, when they get the one million and it was interesting just to re-watch that movie. And I'd forgotten how dark it is. And I think that movie came out the period of time between the founding of Facebook. Sebastian was also very struck by the fact that he's as old as Facebook is. They were born in the same year in, you know, that dorm room at Harvard. And but that movie basically came out, I think it was roughly the midpoint between the founding of Facebook and where we are today. So it was kind of interesting. And it also left me wondering how did the twins, the vinkelvi, as Mark Zuckerberg calls them, how are they doing with their Bitcoin investments? Cause for a while there they were like heavily into Bitcoin. Do you have a view? You know, I realize this is getting a little bit away from the sort of journalism framing, but do you have a view on the sort of debate around political advertising? You know, Facebook has taken one stance and there's questions about how much they should be, you know, vetting political ads for veracity. And then Twitter just said like this isn't worth it. We're not, we're getting out of this business. There's all sorts of questions about what is political and what's not political. And of course that wasn't a huge business for them to begin with. But do you, despite all of the difficulties of policing these networks and the ways in which their business model might not have the right incentives to act in a responsible way, do you think there's a concern if we just start throwing our hands up in the air and saying a lot of this is just too hard and platforms say, you know, when it comes to public issues, we're just going to say don't do it here. And of course they have that right. There's not a first amendment issue because they're private enterprises. But so I mean, a lot of this could fall into the category of corrective measures, but there's always, you know, sometimes that creates new problems too. I mean, if I'm a political candidate and want to reach people on Twitter, I can't, I guess throughout, you know, I can't have sponsored messaging. And so I mean, I can go somewhere else, I suppose. But over time, if we just, if we decide that political advocacy is too hard, do you think that could be a dangerous trend too or? I'm not worried as much about that. I do think, I mean, my own views are shifting maybe a little bit toward where some people on the right are about political advertising just in the last year or two, partly based on evidence. But I'll say that, I mean, I think there are some common sense laws and goals around political advertising makes sense to me. Like whoever's paying for it, we should know who that is. Transparency and one of the problems with the post-Citizens United regime is dark money, which I don't think can be justified, especially not in a speech context where you're privileging sometimes false political advertising, often false or manipulative political advertising on a speech basis. But there's no, you know, I know anonymous speech is also protected, but anonymous financed speech just seems inconsistent with our political values. That's one line that I would wish to enforce. And then of course, money that is being poured into the United States to influence an American election from international sources. I don't think the law or our Constitution, you know, wants to see that become a regular part of our elections. But what I've shifted is I don't think political advertising as speech is as dangerous as some of our kind of orthodoxy or certainly some of the conventional wisdom on the left has held it to be as post-Citizens United. I mean, election cycle after election cycle over the last, you know, I don't know, certainly going back to 2008, all of these groups, outside groups with different agendas have poured amazing amounts of money into races through television and social media political advertising. What's the evidence they have actually influenced outcomes? I mean, if you wanted to run an exam, I mean, if you wanted to run a test of this hypothesis, well, we just had one. Michael Bloomberg spent what $350 million in- I don't know, two months and all it took was one moment on the debate stage and it just, you might as well have taken it into the backyard of his home in the Bahamas and set it all on fire for all the good it did. And, you know, so there's a sort of hysteria about political spending that I don't think is justified by evidence of, and it's not just that case. I think there's a fair amount of social science that says, yes, you know, political ads can be influential to some people. People do take a lot of information in about elections on television and those ads can influence some people. But I don't see the evidence that they are as decisive as, so decisive as to justify the costs in speech to start trying to enforce lines that are very difficult to draw as to what is acceptable advertising and what is not. And secondly, you know, if you ask, you know, you don't have to take this from a right perspective or a left perspective. If you ask political professionals on both sides of the competition who are really fired up about their agenda of winning, including on the left, they don't want these restrictions either. I mean, I was teaching a covering politics class spring and I had a woman in who ran, you know, one of the Democratic primary campaigns that was, you know, on the left side of the party's spectrum. And she was fascinating when people asked her about, this, it was at the moment when Facebook was trying to restrict political advertising because of concerns about what was coming from the right. And she said, you know, we don't want to see any of those restrictions imposed because as soon as they go down against Trump, they're going to go down against us and we think if we can get our message out, we'll win. So we want everyone to get out of the way so we can speak basically. Right. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I want to remind everybody who's watching to feel free to ask questions. I want to just sprinkle them into the conversation as opposed to they're coming a time when I'm gonna say, like, okay, now we're open for questions. So the Q and A function on Zoom is great for that. Steve, you mentioned earlier the fact that, there's been sort of a breakdown of the international system and globalization over the past few years, past decade. And so in this moment, there aren't plenty of governments around the world. If they're trying to assess the cost benefits of acting in ways that might have at one point gotten them into trouble with whoever was policing, whether it's a United Nations committee or sort of a scold in Washington or the European Union, it does feel like there's a lot more latitude for countries to decide that the reputational cost of acting in ways that are not the most democratic, that reputational cost is less than it used to be. I sometimes feel that sitting in the States, we can maybe overstate this because we just feel like everything revolves around the United States. And so if our presidents acting at everyone else around the world is gonna take their cue from that. I mean, he does use, as you pointed out, language like enemy of the people, which in other context has very dire repercussions when leaders in other countries just sort of appropriate that language. So I don't mean to minimize that, but sitting where you sit as the Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, do you have you had conversations with people in other countries that do make this very direct linkage of, hey, we've been counting on you, United States and now nobody has our back. I mean, do you hear that from people? Yeah, I mean, I think I don't have conversations to recount, but I don't think there's any question that in the emerging world, particularly in countries like the Philippines that have long historical ties to the United States, the influence of the permission that the president creates when he calls the American professional working press, enemies of the people is meaningful and it is felt on the ground. Maria Ressa, one of the great independent journalists in the Philippines came and spoke to our graduates last year, I think it was. And I spent time with her and, she is hanging on by her fingernails and every time Trump delegitimizes journalism through his speech or uses in language of incitement to basically incite attacks on journalists, it washes into a place like the Philippines in a very meaningful way. I think to step back from your question, the United States has already surrendered leadership in the realm of global human rights promotion or global free speech promotion. So this is not a speculative question now, we're in the fourth year of the Trump administration, the European Union has its own problems but one of the problems it's trying to address is that it can't count on the United States to prioritize not just speech and press freedom but to use the instruments of the international system that might influence governments in a way that prioritizes human rights. And you can certainly critique the European Union's own ineffectualness to live up to its own values but it's definitely a world that is full of sort of a centrifugal force around these subjects. I mean, when you talk about human rights and the status of the press worldwide, I think you have to connect that to the state of human rights defense generally. I mean, there's not a difference between the status of the press in Latin America or in Asia or in parts of Europe and the general state of human rights and civil rights. I mean, when governments seek to repress all civil and human rights, they also suppress press independence and speech and that's as worrisome as the conversation we've been having about the actual information ecosystem in which we live because I think it's hard for me to remember as an adult of a certain youngish boomer age when in my politically aware lifetime, human rights promotion or defense has been less salient to international kind of power or course or the priorities of international institutions, including the UN, but also the IMF and the World Bank and lots of other organizations, the big foundations, open society, which I was involved in for a while, is back on its heels, kicked out of Budapest where George Soros created an important university and who's defending these organizations as they're forced into their retreats? Rarely do their governments put anything on the line including the United States government. Right. So here's a question, it's an interesting shift of gears. As a dean of a journalism school, do you see a shift in between generations in terms of their overall view of free speech? I mean, I think there are a lot of people of a certain age, if you read op-ed columns, there's a lot of hand-wringing about the state of how political correctness is run amok on campuses and there's a lot less tolerance for free speech that's threatening to people or not comfortable and gosh darn it, we're abandoning our, one of the things that was essential to American exceptionalism was this high tolerance for obnoxious speech and going back to sort of the Brandeisian view of that right and Supreme Court cases that defended the right of Nazis to parade down Skokie, Illinois or wherever it was and that there's been a shift where younger people now might sort of assess the cost of that unfettered free speech that can often be hurtful to people in a different way but then I also hear a lot of colleagues say that some of that critique is overdone and it's not that different but have you, you know, you're sort of still relatively recent arrival to the world of academia? Seven years, it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel like yesterday. Relatively. Relatively, yeah, but I mean, so, and you're also, Yeah, I know, I hear what you're saying. I mean, I think, You're not in a journalism school, so presumably you have the true believers but I don't know, I do notice a slight difference in terms of my students and how we view things a long time ago when I was in college, but what's your thought on whether we are seeing a generational shift when we draw these lines? Well, I think you said there at the end where I would begin, which is that at a journalism school, you know, we find that our students are much, are very open to alternate points of view and aren't coming with an orthodox about what's acceptable speech. They're, they wanna become journalists. They want to understand how to report, how to think, how to write and they're at the graduate level, so they are purposeful and we have had in my time hardly any problem with students not wanting to hear a point of view. In fact, we are the kind of vanguard at the university for bringing in diverse points of view sometimes and I think our students share the outlook of our faculty that that's what we do and I try the biggest deficit, however, in our faculty as conservative, I political conservative, perspectives and so we try to, I try to bring in people even from the never Trump conservative press and they feel trepidation about stepping onto Columbia's campus and coming into our school and then everyone of course treats them way too politely and so nothing ever really gets said. But I mean, a couple of years ago, Kyle Pope who runs Columbia Journalism, he was a professor at Columbia University at Columbia Journalism Review had an editor from Breitbart come in and had him on a panel with someone from the New York Times and someone else, he was a former Wall Street Journal reporter and it went reasonably well, but there's not enough of that. But that's really about defining the range of journalism that is actually relevant to our society. In terms of speech and this, like the incident at the University of Missouri where reporters were turned away by protesters who basically said hostily and even were backed by a faculty member who had some dual appointment at the journalism school, you know, you're not allowed to ask questions of these protesters because they're in a safe space. There may be some students who harbor sympathy for those protesters, I'm sure there are, but that is not a form of activism that arises in the classroom or that is trying to reshape journalism. I mean, this year there was the controversy at Northwestern, right? Which was sort of similar, that student newspaper apologized. Yeah, and I felt badly for that editor who made some, you know, the kinds of judgments that a young person without a lot of backup can make and got eviscerated for it. There was no ambiguity among our faculty or students about what was wrong and right there from a journalistic perspective, but there is some sympathy for the peer culture that this generation is shaping for itself of respect, of inclusiveness. And I have respect for that as, you know, it doesn't need to be hostile to journalism and sometimes create unfortunate decision-making as happened in the case of Northwestern, but there's nothing innately wrong with trying to redefine from generation to generation who's included, who's respected, how are they respected? I mean, every generation that in an open society full of social change and change in civil rights, consciousness and goal-setting goes through that. So I don't feel threatened by it. Yeah. So we have a couple of questions that are sort of similar vein and you mentioned the University of Missouri, so I should hand the microphone to Christopher Leonard, an old friend of yours, a great journalist, one of our star fellows at New America back in the day. Chris is asking, how do you see the unfolding economic crisis affecting free speech, particularly in America? It seems that weakened media outlets might be less likely to challenge powerful government and corporate institutions. And there were a couple of questions that had the similar vein of the pandemic's impact on the actual business of journalism and what that means for speech and journalism that can hold governments accountable across the country. Yeah, I mean, I think the crisis, the economic recession and fallout from the pandemic is going to accelerate changes in the structure of media and so some, a lot of speech that were already underway. So the big get bigger, the big platforms on the West Coast consolidate and survive, have greater control, greater influence over what speech reaches audiences. Yes, they may be under regulatory pressure to take more responsibility, but as we were discussing before, taking more responsibility is almost certain to marginalize speech. And in journalism, you see the accelerating collapse of commercially based local newspapers all across the country. And this was happening anyway and now it is accelerating. And while there are important and necessary responses to the loss of local news reporting out of these newsrooms in the nonprofit sector, particularly the scale of reporting that these green shoots are providing to their communities with philanthropic support, just don't have the scale to replace what's being lost. And I think that is a profound danger to the informed democracy that our founders had in mind when they privileged speech in the first place. They also had in mind competition of ideas, but the First Amendment has evolved in the complex age of industrialization and in the atomic age in parallel with the rise of science to try to privilege a fact-based public discourse and without locally rooted journalistic institutions to play a role in that system. I think a lot of those communities are really going to lose something important. And one of the things they're gonna lose is just the accountability of their public officials and their leaders. I think a lot of as an example of the Indianapolis Star which essentially played a role in bringing to justice the serial child molester, Larry Nasser, and when he was sentenced, the judge said, if it weren't for the Indianapolis Star, we wouldn't be here today. And you look at that paper, it's being crushed by the same forces that are crushing a lot of independent newspapers. They still, or commercial local newspapers, they still have a strong newsroom comes to work every day. But you think about the people who picked up the phone to call the star when they had run out of options with the prosecutors and the court systems and everything else. I mean, journalism still functions as a court of last resort. We know our public institutions fail. They fail again and again. Prosecutors, they do lots of things well and then they miss or they reflect political or other institutional biases and problems. And we can't afford to learn to lose journalism as a court of last resort. In DC, there's all this talk all the time about whistleblower protection and whistleblower mechanisms. So just look at the way the whistleblower system has worked over the last two or three years. Do you think that absent independent journalism to create transparency around what was actually happening to the whistleblowers? And who was doing what? That the whistleblower system would have lasted even a month. And so we have robust watchdog functions in Washington and New York and San Francisco to an extent. But in these towns and cities, about a decade ago, I was at some, when I was at New America, I went to a hearing about the future of journalism that David Simon, the creator of the wire, appeared at former Baltimore Sun reporter. And I remember he said to the assembled senators during the hearings. I laughed, I didn't think the senators laughed. He said, you should be really happy about being a senator at this time because with the collapse of local journalism, you are living in the golden age of public corruption. Right. I mean, that's more true 10 years later than it was. Yeah. Yeah, that's well. But let's end on fake news. We have a question about, since we have a question about fake news in France and a case, but also, let's see, Jen Daskell, who is a con law professor here at American University, our partner on this project. One of our intellectual Sherpas that we're collaborating with, she writes, curious to turn the question regarding fake news inward. When the president of the United States talks about fake news referring to clearly accurate stories, what does it do to the state of journalism in the United States and to our democracy? We often, we live in a world of such divergent narratives, including regarding baseline factual issues that we can no longer seem to have one national conversation. Should we be concerned? And I mean, I would add on, is this something that you feel journalism schools can try to remedy in some way? But these divergent narratives, I think, is a good way to think about what we're saying. And it just seems to be accelerating or widening the chasm between the two. I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think when the president does what she accurately describes him doing several times a week, if not several times a day, he is executing a populist political strategy that seeks to motivate his base and which has the effect of exacerbating polarization in the country that extends well beyond people's attitudes towards professional journalists and to virtually every other cultural touchstone that we're divided about these days, more divided than ever. And polarization is a big subject that has much more to do, has to do with many more things than journalism. But within journalism, one way that I think about it, and it is damaging, and can a journalism school do anything about it, a school that's been around for more than 100 years, we were founded on the idea that there should be a profession of journalism, not just a bunch of ambulance chasers taking photographs of dead bodies and selling them in tabloids. And that the purpose of the profession would be to advance the goal of an informed citizenry. And essentially, it was a very farsighted idea of why there should be journalism education. And it was linked to the rise of professions like medicine and law and eventually accounting and the rise of the scientific method, which was also happening at that time in at least an incubating way. And so what we think of as journalism today at our school is lashed to the scientific method. And it has a public function. And it seeks to justify its privilege in the Constitution by working honestly and independently and toward the goal of an informed readership. And we recognize that opinion journalism and ideological journalism has always been a part of the picture in the United States. That's not going away, and it has never gone away. But the polarization that you see in our political competition around the legitimacy of journalism is partly about economic change and the incentives that are emerging in the media business for publishers to basically pitch their journalism to their tribes. So the collapse of advertising has meant, for example, that the New York Times, as it emerges as a survivor from the collapse of newspapers, is 70% dependent on subscriptions and rising. Now, I don't know how many of you subscribe to The New York Times seven days a week, but it's up to like $90 a month. I'm happy to pay it for the hard copy version. Maybe I need a discount. But when people are paying and when publishers are driving their content toward the deepening of subscription and subscriber engagement, there is an inevitable clustering of identity and worldviews that I think challenges some of the postwar assumptions about fact-based scientific method and journalism. Same thing happens on cable more obviously. Why do Fox News and MSNBC and CNN cluster around ideological audiences? It's because the incentives of the way they get paid by cable systems encourage them to have passionate, engaged audiences. In a 500-channel universe, if you're being carried on Comcast, which is in secular decline, but not in danger of going away tomorrow, or if you're being carried on YouTube TV, you have to justify why the carrier once must have your channel rather than National GO3 or any number of other 1,000 channels. And what Fox News discovered was that even if you have terrible demographics, like the average age of a Fox News viewer is well north of 60, and so you're really useless to advertisers except for a very specialized section of them, nonetheless, Fox News is indispensable to cable providers because if they tried to pull it, their headquarters would be burned down. And so everybody is incented economically to get their tribe fired up, and that's happening around news. Now, some of these stations don't even pretend to do reporting anymore. They're just like radio talk shows. But where it gets very confusing for viewers, I'm sure, is where they mix in the idea that we're field reporters. We're going to tell you what happened yesterday, and then they have these panels full of people who just are basically trying to reinforce the tribal code of that by reference to today's headlines. And so these are huge structural forces that are very difficult to reverse. And yet, I have a conviction, we have a conviction on our faculty that doing journalism the old fashioned way from the facts backward and challenging your own assumptions and following the scientific method, telling stories, thinking broadly about what should be included in journalism, that this will, just as Camelou said when he was thinking about this under extreme pressure, it will win out over time, but it's a harder time to have faith in it than it was. Great, we'll see if we're up on the hour. So this last note about where the incentives lie could be another two-hour conversation. But it is five o'clock where we are. So I can't thank you enough for this conversation. It's been a long time. Thank you, thanks for having me. We'll all go read Camelou to try to find some hope. That's an oxymoron. But anyway, I still recommend it. OK. All right, thank you. Thanks for tuning in, everybody.