 Good afternoon, I'm Sonia Schuyler, Treasurer of the League of Women Voters, and want to welcome you all to our, how many is it? Fourth, citizen engagement luncheon. Today the topic is integrity of journalism, how to be a critical thinking consumer. Our speakers are the husband and wife team of Naomi Shallott and John Christie. They came from, they started the nonprofit main senator for public interest reporting in 2009 because of their concern of the status of reporting and also seemingly the lack of public interest reporting. John is currently a consulting editor with the center. He has a long career, 40 year career in journalism. He's worked as a writer, editor, general manager, and publisher for newspapers owned by Tribune Media, Dow Jones and Company and the Seattle Times Company. In 2008, he edited the series for I Was Hungry about Hungary in Maine, which won a number of awards, including the best editorial series from the National Society of Professional Journalists. Naomi has written for magazines, newspapers around the country and worked as a columnist for the Maine Times and also was a reporter and producer for Maine Public Radio. One of her kudos was an expose on the historic state conservation deal that has gone bad. Currently, she has just become the senior editor of Politics and Society at the conversation and perhaps she'll tell us a little bit more what that really entails. So John and Naomi, also before they actually speak, we had some technical difficulties and we want to recognize two people who worked it through, Beth Roske and John Jose from Orca. Beth is a guest here. The right place at the right time. Thank you. Before I begin, I'll give a little advertisement for where Naomi is currently working called The Conversation in the US. This is a fascinating organization. This is a microphone. Oh, excuse me. This is a, I'll turn it on. No, it's closer. It's closer? Yeah, it really is closer. Okay. An ad for where Naomi's currently working called The Conversation in the US. Her office is based in Boston. It's based on a concept that's sort of similar to what we did at the center, but a different approach to it, that there's not enough independent, well-researched material in the public media. And a lot of that information in media comes not from journalists, but comes from scholars. So you have people at universities who know a lot about the topics in the news every day. But the problem with those people is that they write scholarly pieces that they can understand and the cause can understand, but we, the average person, unless it's discipline, we don't understand that. So the idea was this organization was invented to make the link between the scholars and the public by having people like Naomi work with the scholars on topics, help them write their pieces so that we all can understand them. And that is given throughout the world in the United States to media at no cost, in the AP distributes it. So it's a wonderful organization. It does some of the things that we think really need to be done in journalism. So back to what we're talking about today. To employ was in our president's current words, it is sad that we have to begin this talk about integrity of the news by defining what we mean by news these days. Once upon a time, that wasn't something we had to bother with, talking to an informed audience at the league about it. We all knew what we meant by news. It was what the newspapers and networks told us happened yesterday. Reporters, trained to be as objective as humanly possible, would venture forth from their newsrooms to a city council meeting, interview with the governor, a scene of a deadly fire, a White House press conference, a battlefield, or maybe even your kid's high school graduation. They would interview people on the scene, maybe gather, go back to the office, make some more phone calls. They would check their facts, they would gather details, and they would sit down and write the story. And then, a mean crusty editor would go over this in great detail, that's been Bradley, well known mean crusty editor, looking especially for accuracy and bias. It likely send it back to the reporter for a rewrite. By the time you got it, there was a recent explanation that it was reliable and accurate as much as journalism could be. After all, it was called, journalism is called, history written on the run. But then you actually knew what was happening. Now, we lived by a motto in journalism with two models I'm gonna give you. The first one was in that subtitle. It said, you wanna bet the first slide? That's what I said. If your mother tells you she loves you, this is when we go in journalism classes. We have young students in class or beginning reporters and I say to them, look, when you go home tonight and your mother says I love you, what are you going to do? And their answer usually says, I'm gonna tell my mother I love you also. No, I say that's the wrong answer. The right answer is you're gonna check it out. So that was the way we lived journalism for a long time. I can't tell you precisely when this began to change, but I believe the roots of our current state of journalism began with cable news and the sudden ability of the media to get ratings and learn what kind of stories, what kind of headlines, what kind of visuals got the biggest audience and not the best advertising rates? Now, anybody back in the 70s, 80s, live in the Boston metro area, listen to W, I think it was channel five. You know, those are the guys who invented the phrase we all know right now, but if it leads, it leads. So if it's exciting, put it on first because they found out that sort of news and all the sort of cheap news is what got ratings, but in the newspaper business, we never had the ability to know that for the longest, longest time, hundreds of years. All we could do was guess which story sold more newspapers than the other. I would talk to my circulation director, I'd say, how did that big story about city council do? We sell a lot of vector papers yesterday, Tom Tim's name was Tim. So I don't know, John, I don't know for a week till we get the returns back from the stores. So a week later, I'd say, wow, we got back fewer returns than usual that day, but it might have been because it was a sunny day and more people were out in the street that day and the previous Tuesday was raining. So I can't really tell you if that story took, okay. We'll decide, we won't really worry about which stories sell papers because frankly, this idea that we wanna sell newspapers with big stories was ridiculous to begin with. You wanna know why? Most newspapers are pre-sold, they were at least, before you saw it was in them, because you got what? Home delivery. So it didn't really matter. So you had some papers fill the newsstand. The average newspaper would sell 80% of its newspapers by home delivery and 20% of the newsstand. Of those 20%, almost all of them did it automatically. So the idea, we would have a big headline, we sell a lot of papers. You know how many papers we sell extra? 50, 60, 120 papers, it's nothing because that's a few pennies. So we really weren't oriented towards, it bleeds, it leads, try to have a hot story on there and sell it. And then what happened? We got the web and the internet. And after a while, we found out which story actually got you to look at it, which was kind of bad news for journalism. Because rather than having those people that crushed the editor and his experienced reporters who were trained in journalism make decisions about what the news is, we started worrying about what you wanted to see. And at the same time, we were hurting on a business basis. I want to show that slide. So this shows you what's happened to the circulation of newspapers during that period of time. It's gone down a whole lot. Now circulation, a little less in a newspaper, circulation is not the number of people who read the paper. It's the number of people who buy the paper. So just for your information, background on the inside of the newspaper business, if there's one paper sold, there's 2.3 readers. That's the way. Any case, it's going down. The economy paid circulation or readership. I mean, you're gonna say to yourself, yeah, but I understand though, readership on the line's gone way up. It replaced some of that for a while, now it's going back down again. The most LNLA stats show that in, I think it was in 17, we, the business had fewer online readers than in 2016. Probably because they go other places. Probably because it's topped out. So the business is going down. The other chart shows you the number of newspapers in the country, daily newspapers. So we have fewer newspapers and fewer people reading them. And when you take into account the growth in population in the United States in the last 100 years, it's even a worse story. So here we are, losing readers, losing advertisers, at the same time we could discover how to make people happy with our stuff by giving them more of what they want. Thus, we have the decline in newspapering business and why a lot of the news looks so cheap to you. In the old days, we thought the most important thing was to get it right first. And if we couldn't get it right, we waited. But we've discovered now that getting it wrong first really still gets you clicks, still gets you click bait. So no one, we have ethics that say, we're worried about these things, but we don't really care about them that much. I go back to what I consider another really important point in journalism that happened. Who remembers Richard Joule? Okay, when I tell you who he is, you remember. This was in 96 Olympics, 1996 Olympics. And there was a bombing there. And Richard Joule was a security guy. And somebody in the police department said, this guy, we're thinking about him as a possibility. And then in the Atlanta Constitution and everybody else, Richard Joule, here's his picture. He was not a good looking guy. He's kind of a chubby guy, kind of looked like a loser, hanging around into the good background. Suddenly, Richard Joule was the bomber in the Olympics. It wasn't Richard Joule. It was a complete mistake. We took these anonymous sources. We exaggerated them. We got a lot of attention. What happened to poor Richard Joule? The, I think the Atlanta Constitution apologized. And he died at age 44. I think all he goes, an apology. I want to mention a little bit. You know, it was, right now people won't, people at the same time, this Trump phenomena has exaggerated and almost put a supercharge on what's wrong with the media. So now, besides all the problems where we're doing things to get clicks, we're not checking things out. We're trying to be first, no matter if we're right or not. At the same time, along comes this Trump phenomena and everybody is even more polarized than they ever were before, even more interested in only getting news that they agree with. And even if the newspaper tries to do its job that it always wanted to do, it gets into trouble. The New York Times this year, we're in a fasting profile of a man in the Midwest who was a young guy, a regular kind of guy who became a very big follower of the American Nazi movement. And this story detailed who he was and why he got to be there. It really was very insightful and it really made the point really clearly in a paragraph, we're at the top, that being a Nazi is not a good thing. It's a bad thing that the Times wasn't endorsing Nazism or American version of it. It was just trying to expose it and do its job. Well, the New York Times comments place went wild. People are gonna cancel my subscription. The New York Times shouldn't be writing about this. They shouldn't be telling us this. They shouldn't be ignoring this. So even New York Times readers, rather, wanted news that didn't upset their point of view of the world. And that's another problem that we've got with journalism right now. So, Naomi's gonna come up and tell you a few things too. I'll come back. Just one more. You really can't see what's up on the screen. The reason we're talking to you about what journalism is. Would you speak into the microphone? Thank you. The reason we're talking to you today about what journalism is and isn't is because in order for you to be good citizens, you need to be good consumers of news. You need to be able to recognize when it's news that has integrity and when it's not. And so that's why we're giving you this lesson in news today. You need to be close to the microphone. I'm as close as I can, but I... You can lift it out and put it right up to your mouth. Yeah, I don't think it's working. Is it? All right, I have to... So this is you sitting at your computer at home looking at what the news is, except maybe it's fake news. So this is what we're trying to help you with is ways to identify what's real, what has integrity, what is ethical journalism, and what isn't. So all these changes that John has been talking about mean that the onus for trustworthy news has essentially switched from the producers of news to you, the consumers of news. So first thing you need to do is something that is getting to be more and more of a problem. And that is recognize... Next slide, John. Okay. When news figures are opinionating and not informing. So in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, what we consider that more pure age of journalism when professionalism meant objectivity and independence, you didn't know what the nightly news anchors thought about the news. They were responsible and sober about presenting the news and little of any opinion crept into the news. Now, we have people who are in the role of anchor who have decided or their superiors have decided to grant themselves a second role, which is essentially to editorialize. So Rachel, when we first did this talk, we put up Rachel Maddow and we put up Sean Hannity because they were kind of the real examples of what we were talking about. But what's happening now is if you look at CNN, if you look at MSNBC, if you look at any number of other stations, if you look at your news on TV, for example, even Jake Tapper, who we love and think is a great TV reporter, but he's now showing his exasperation and anger on the air and on Twitter, opinionating about the Trump administration. So what you've got is people who call themselves news people, but really they're editorialists or they're part editorialists and part news people. And these people are damaging journalism, which is supposed to give you the facts and then let you decide how you feel and what you think about it. It even shows up in what you might consider innocent ways. So Wolf Blitzer describing a chemical attack on Syrian citizens as terrible. It's not his job to describe it, just describe the chemical attack and guess what, you guys are smart enough to know that killing people with chemical weapons is horrible. You don't need to be told it's terrible, do you? You wouldn't go out and say, oh, this great thing happened in Syria. They just killed a lot of babies and moms and dads with chemical weapons. So it may seem innocuous, but it's one more step towards shading the news and compromising the integrity of journalists and journalism. So why is this a problem? Because the American public needs to have faith that the news they are getting is free of either fear or favor. Because guess what happens if it isn't? You are vulnerable to charges in the news business of fake news. The news needs to be credible. It's what we base our opinions on about our political leaders and institutions. Journalism itself is a civic institution that should inform the public and should leave the opinion-making to the citizens who read or watch or listen to it. Many of you we suspect are suspicious of the credibility of news that you see on the Fox channel because you believe ideology, colors, slants, shifts their presentation of the fact. But to be a responsible citizen, you should also approach the news that's on NPR, where I worked. MSNBC, I worked at a state affiliate of NPR. CNN with a similarly skeptical eye. Television shows often feature panels of people commenting on the latest breaking news. It's a way of filling up time in the 24-hour news cycle that is voracious. It's a way of entertaining viewers because sometimes you get real food fights on these. And perhaps it's also a way of informing the public about current events. By appearing on a news program, the people on the panels enjoy a degree of credibility that they may not deserve. You should take the time. You, to understand who these people are and why they may be saying the things they do. So when you have a former top aide to a president, a former campaign manager on a presidential campaign, these are people with a dog in the fight. They're not gonna give you an objective independent analysis. I mean, if you wanna hear what hacks think about something that's happening, listen to them, but recognize that this is not an independent analysis of what's happening. These are surrogates, analysts with a particular point of view, and journalists who are not supposed to have a point of view also sometimes occupy these seats in these panels. But there's something that even happens to the journalists, some of them, which is things get so heated up that the journalists kinda compete in heating it up too. Cause they feel boring and kind of minor when they're not in the dog fight as well. Figure out who among these people is the rare independent analyst who will give you sober and unbiased analysis and then listen to the opinionating and buy a different journalist on the panel and remember it the next time they present a supposedly objective report on the news. So news that has integrity may not look as exciting as the junk food news. It's just, you know, Judy Woodruff and some guy and they're having a sober discussion and it's not, you know, it doesn't have like breaking news all over it, but you'll learn something. With all the bells, whistles, virtual reality videos, entertaining and opinionating featured in today's news, the stuff that's good for you, the straight news that informs rather than titillates, looks kinda boring. But treasure it the way you would treasure a well-worn and useful vintage tool that is simply made handy and which you still use every day. PBS NewsHour is still living up to the standards of quality independent journalism and the rest is often just a cheap thrill. So next, beware hidden bias in choice and slant of stories. So it's not just the content of the story but it's the slant of the story. So even with a highly respected NPR, there's a foundational belief among reporters, editors and producers that any program, any government program or non-profit advocacy program designed to help people that claims to help people is good. And these people that are being helped are almost universally referred to as the vulnerable. The vulnerable, you hear it all the time. It's code for, we should feel sorry for these people, slightly condescending towards them and good that we wanna help them. And I think as I've spent a lot of time reporting on poverty in Maine especially, I think it is a terrible thing to do as a reporter because you do not grant agency to the people who you're describing. They're just this sort of passive group of sad sacks who need our help rather than real people who have ideas and opinions and may actually not like being called the vulnerable. So any reporting about expanding programs for the vulnerable is done in a positive tone. Any story about contraction has a negative tone. This goes back to this unfortunate idea that's crept into journalism of quote, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. That concept does not coexist well with a much greater principle that journalists must heed, which is to be independent. And there's a practical side to why afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted is a bad idea. While it may be a good principle to follow if you're an advocate, if you go out to report on a story with that mission driving you, you're likely to miss things because you've already decided what the story's about. And you're just looking for things that support that picture in your mind. You won't truly be able to open yourself to what is happening in front of you. I think this was very much the case in this last national election when Trump got elected. All of a sudden, people woke up and said, oh, wow, there's this whole part of the country that we've just kind of labeled as something but not paid attention to. And we don't really know what they're thinking who they are. But we did decide that they were voting against their self interests. So here's an example from a main paper, a story about how 1,000 calls per month, so you divide 12198 by 12, 1,000 calls per month were going unanswered at the state's child abuse hotline. That's not good, right? Kids are getting hurt, it's being ignored. But what you only learn much lower down in the story is that that's actually a 33% improvement over the previous year when 1,500 calls per month were not being answered and that the state had instituted a program since then to diminish the number of unanswered calls. But, and this is key, it's harder to see the slant and bias when you agree with it. So in fact, this was part of a series of stories done by the BDN that were pretty much trashing every initiative out of the state's department of effectively health and human services. Conservative was running it, deputized by Conservative Governor Paula Page to really reign some programs that represented a huge part of the state budget to rein them in and if so fact though, everything they did was gonna be bad when in fact, in some cases, it wasn't. This case is one example. The growth in conservative media is to a degree a response to this kind of thing. The lack of understanding and presentation of the working and business person's point of view, for example, has led, as we saw in the last presidential election, to an appetite for a different perspective in the news. In these times, would say they represented the working person's point of view as would Mother Jones where I did work, but the working person wouldn't necessarily have said that. Okay, do you wanna go to SPJ now, John? Okay, here we go. We're better at talking into this than I was. Yeah, you would think that it was this complicated thing to know what to do as a journalist, you know, because of all the things you've heard, all the things you see, it's not complicated. We've actually figured out, is our organization, the professional organization, the Society of Professional Journalists, that tells you, after doing research, how to behave, how to do things, and newspapers violate this all the time. Many of you are professionals, I'm sure, and you have a professional code of ethics that you probably take seriously, you're getting trouble. Well, journalism isn't regulated, nor should it be, you might be. But we can self-regulate, and some of these things just have to be paid attention to, and I've been sure journalists are always learning about them anymore. The biggest one is verify. I mean, this is the first thing we're told. Verify, get it right, don't publish it to you. Now, what's right? Anybody remember the coverage of the marathon bomber on television? I mean, it was wrong all the time, because they heard something from somebody via Twitter, or a guy who knew a guy, and they put it out there. I know that there was a bombing after at the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C., in which, it was the New York Times, I think, that Adam worked for, at the time. And he got the actual identification of the person who did it wrong, and we talked to him about it, and he explained what happened. He said, well, I got it from two sources, so I thought I was right. Well, one source got it from the other source. That's bad journalism. And both of them were, and here's the biggest problem in journalism right now. Well, I'm saying they're all big problems. But it's a big one. Anonymous sources. You know what that means? In the story, or on television, they don't tell you where the information came from. Trump is gonna fire some. The mayor's gonna do this. The Pentagon's gonna do that, whatever it may be. According to sources, according to sources, according to my sources. Well, put this as if you worked at sources. Yes, I've worked my sources. Never, never naming the source. That's anonymous sources. What's wrong with anonymous sources? You have no idea if the person exists, or if the person you got it from actually thought there's somebody else who got it wrong to begin with. Well, they have a bias. Well, they have an ax to grind. You can believe it. Most of the stuff came out of the White House. It's all anonymous sources right now. People who want another result by putting down this guy or bringing up that person. But we have rules about it. Our rule says not to use anonymous sources, except in the rare case where they may face danger. Very rare does that happen. Someone's facing danger by giving information. Or retribution. I don't see a lot of retribution going on. Well, people leaking stuff out of the White House or the State House or anyplace else. There's hardly any retribution going on. Well, you can't have, what's that? It's Dormi Daniels. Dormi Daniels, she's not in trouble. She can't get fired. And then she's not an anonymous source. But she's been threatened. She's, well, but she's not an anonymous source. The question is about anonymous sources. They can get threatened, but there's something having happened. This used to have anonymous sources. I've had anonymous sources very, very rarely. Wooden and Bernstein had some anonymous sources, but they checked it out multiple times. It was the rare case where we had to have anonymous sources. Now, almost every story you'll see on politics and government relies on multiple anonymous sources. And the only thing they'll tell you about them, you got the guy, the picture of the guy? There you go. This is anonymous sources. Is that he doesn't want to be identified. It's anonymous source says that New York Times, The Washington Post, or any newspaper you could think of, or any television. He's an anonymous source because he wants to be an anonymous source. Basically, they say he'd ask not to be identified because he has no right to talk about it. He's not authorized to talk about it. That's not a legitimate reason to be an anonymous source. He's not facing danger or retribution. He just wasn't supposed to talk about it. He says he probably could talk about it. He probably was authorized to talk about it. But it's a game. Everybody's playing. And we're the victims of that game. There was a time when we took this problem seriously. In 2004, the New York Times had a public editor, Daniel Orchard. Right pronunciation? Oh, Grant. Oh, Grant. And he said he was at the New York Times with a public editor. The public editor would be the person at the newspaper, called the Ombudsman also, who critiques the newspaper. The newspaper has had enough courage and confidence to hire some in their own organization to be independent to critique the newspaper. And it was called the public editor of the New York Times. And this is what Orchard said. This is an 0-4. And it's just gotten worse. The hunger for scoops, even in the quietest of times, newspaper people lived to be first. When a story as momentous as this one comes into view, I don't know who's talking to this. I don't remember what it was. Iraq, of course. Iraq, right. When caution and doubt could not be more necessary, they can instead be drowned in a flood of adrenaline. One old Times hand recently told me there was a period in the not too distant future when editor stressed the maximum, don't get it first. Get it right. That's mutated into get it first and get it right. The next evolution was an obvious one. Just get it first. And this is where the lab is a mass destruction. And the report of the Times, who got all the anonymous sources that Hussain had them, that got us into war, that turned out to be wrong. That's what's one of the anonymous sources. We, the Times then had another editor, Margaret Sullivan, was there also. And she was a public editor until a few years ago. They don't have one now. The Times just got rid of that job. No one's critiquing the Times. The Washington Post had one too. I don't think they've got one anymore. I don't think anybody's doing this. We're cutting back staffs, and we're cutting back the people on the staff that keep us honest. We had the biennium piece. This piece was some of the Times also. But behind the scenes, White House officials said the ideologists who enjoyed the president's conference became increasingly embattled as other advisers, including Mr. Trump's daughter and son-in-law, complained about setbacks in health care and immigration. Lately, Mr. Bien has been explicitly absent from some meetings, and now he's lost his seat at the National Security Table. An ove that was widely seen as a sign of changing fortune, Mr. Trump removed Ben from one of his principles committee. That was also anonymous sources. Eventually, Ben got removed, but probably because someone planted that story with the New York Times. The SPJ editor said about all this thing, because he's taking it very seriously. And this was a few years ago. He said, this might be the worst collapse of journalism standards we've seen in 50 years. Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, social media, and the uncontrollable urge to be the first to report, this has created a wrecking ball in our ethics. And Ms. Sullivan, the public editor of the Times, wrote, I don't feel so good. This is, I think this was her last column. I don't feel so good about not being able to investigate every complaint or about feeling to make a dent in long-time problems, let the overviews of anonymous sources. And then she called her reader from Vermont, David Steinhardt, any bells, who complained to her about the pointless, blind quotes, anonymous quotes from government officials that can easily serve to mask unaccountable half-truths and lies. I beseech the Times not to facilitate government acting like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. What even stated reasons for doing so make no imaginable sense. Sullivan responded, readers are right to protest when they see anonymity granted gratuitously. That's happening too often. It's time, once again, to pull in the reins. I've written about this from time to time. It has had my predecessors, but a little or no avail. The Times, when they got called on a carpet about this by Margaret Sullivan, would say, oh yeah, yeah, we violated our policy that time, but a good reason we won't do it again. And they would do it again. And then she complained, and they would do it again. And I'm not against New York Times. It's a great newspaper. They do so much good stuff. But when it's their self-interest to violate their own policies, the policies of our own organization, it's in their self-interest, either for business reasons or political reasons, they're very, very happy to do it. You can tell that's not from an American source because it's not learned. It's learned, but I thought that was a useful slide. So we're a little bit of talk about confirmation bias. Does anybody know what that is? Get data that confirms your point of view, and therefore, the data must be read. Yeah, yeah. So do not believe shoddy reporting just because it confirms your biases. But you say the New York Times reported it. But you say Bannon and Trump are evil people, so of course the story sounds right. But sounds right is not a basis for reporting something as fact. As a responsible news reader, listener, or watcher, you may need to be aware of your own biases and how they can make you, nobody in here, but how they make people lazy, uncritical news consumers. And then you need to distinguish between opinion and fact. Okay, this is really, I love this slide. Take the mic with you. I'll take the mic with me. Thank you, I don't know how far it goes, but. So this is the homepage of the New York Times online, okay? And on this homepage, okay, it's nice, you know it's the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print. Here is a news story. Okay, this is not the whole news page, it goes. Here is another news story and they've taken to having a huge photo in the middle every day. And then over on this side, what does it say at the top there in tiny little print? Opinion. Opinion. Okay, it used to be opinion was on a different page, okay? You open the newspaper, a hard copy, the opinions at the back, which is where John was the publisher, I was his opinion page editor at two newspapers in May. The opinion page was way at the back of the news because that's where it belonged, okay? Here, opinion is elevated to the level of news. And it's meaningful that this is what the geography of the nation's most wanted newspaper looks like. I've got a digital, I read digital version of the New York Times and is it on that too? Yeah, yeah, this is the digital version, yeah. See, and you're not even aware of it, okay? So the wear of Devin Nunes' next move, now that's an opinion headline, but it's up here with Democrats win in Pennsylvania, upends parties' midterm plans. So think about this when you're looking at online sources, distinguish between opinion and fact. And I'll tell you where I'm working now at the conversation. We do not allow a scholar to state a single fact even that it rained on Thursday without linking to a source so you can confirm that. And that's what you really should be looking for is, there's way too much opinion in the world. Stop reading as much of it as you do and keep reading the news. So knowing the difference between opinion, in fact, certainly it's labeled usually as opinion, but you will find opinion showing up in news, in the news side as well. And I think the other thing to understand is that a lot of the world doesn't make this distinction. So you'll have your friends saying, no, no, no, I know this is true because I read it again in the Times or whatever, and then you have to challenge them and say, was that an interpretation or was that an actual fact? So I think we go right back to you. This is my short time up here, gentlemen. Speed up a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah, when I was a reporter, and I've been a reporter covering politics since the 1970s, maybe 69 in Boston and in Florida and in New York, generally the way things happened was the politician had some news. They put out a press release, they had a press conference and reporters went to it and we came back and we wrote a story, we got all the sides of the story about there. The politicians, the public officials really needed the newspaper to get the story out, which they weren't very happy about, but they couldn't do anything about it until along came this hard thing we're talking about today. And they could decide, we don't need the news, we shouldn't have anything more to put out news, we'll put out our own news. So they made things that look like the news. Which one is that, the main wire? The main wire. Yeah, I will use a main example. The main wire, oh, do you know what the wire means? The news business? Way, way back when the Associated Press and the UPI, the UPI, the Press International, they were called, for short, they were called the wire because the news came over a literal wire. So for news people, the wire is a really important old-fashioned phrase that means legitimate news. So they called themselves the main wire, making themselves now legitimate. It is strictly, and it looks like news, it looks like, and you can get a bunch of these from democratic groups, from Republican groups, from conservative groups. They all could go on, they'd be in the past to have a newspaper, you had to have a big darn press. And a press would cost you, and you go from three to $15 million, and it cost you thousands of dollars a week to run, and paper would cost you tens of thousands of dollars a year to get. That's how you had a newspaper, that's how you get the news out. With this, you don't need any of that stuff. You need some guy at the computer who knows how to set up a website. And then you make up stuff, or put your press releases out and outlight their news. So, and a lot of people now either go there knowing it's the news they want, it's from the Republican Party, or they Google something, a couple words, it shows up in the main wire, sounds like a newspaper to me, main wire, sounds like the main news, I will believe it. So, what's happened is politicians, and this is getting tough for reporters now in a lot of places, they're cutting us out of what was called, we used to go to a public official, that they didn't talk to you, it was held to pay, you know. We put in Senator John Martin, refused to talk to the paper. Well, next day he talked to you because he was pretty embarrassed about that. Now, no problem, isn't he to talk to us anymore? He's got his own press release operation, he's got his own website. We can be cut out completely so they're not being held accountable by real reporters because they can go out there and get it done themselves. And then this could be the main wire, we have one in Maine called the Maine Beacon, that's a Democratic Party. We have Common Dreams, that's mostly a liberal site. We have the Daily Cause, very much another very liberal site, but there's many of them. I got a quote from the Daily Cause, is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, K.O.S. Neil Gorich will serve the rest of his life on this call with an asterisk by his name. The Associate Justice who was appointed by a traitor will help from a completely corrupt Republican Party. We'll get help from him. So I mean, you may agree with that point of view, it may be correct, but it's being presented as news that someone's a traitor, that a party is corrupt. Not opinion, but it's news. And it comes that way because it looks right to you. And I could find examples from the other side just as easily, the Maine wire has lots of them. We hope that our talk, and we're gonna talk a little bit about fake news in a minute, but we'll end with this in a second. We hope that our talk has given you an understanding of what news is and what news isn't and how to read it, watch it and listen to it responsibly. Okay, we have one alternative though, if all that fails you. This is what one day was tough on Naomi, what she did when we were watching the news. So glad to take some questions and particularly if you have any more fake news I got a few tips to share. Yeah, and actually on the table and back there, on the media, which is a pretty good program out of WNYC, did a breaking news consumers handbook. And it's just put it up on your fridge. You can find it online and things like big red flags or fake news, all caps. Okay, that'll give you or check the domain. This is a very useful one. Fake sites often add .co to trusted brands to steal their legitimacy. So abcnews.com.co. So this is a checklist to help you recognize fake news. So questions? Louder. You hear what you're hearing on the news, fake or otherwise. But then there's a question of what you don't hear. And I think Trump is getting mentioned times as much as Bernie Sanders. So the news is leaving out some significant news. But I think significant news. Yeah, we were watching a lot of that time. And I think it was. Please repeat the question. The question is what are you not hearing in the news? What are you missing? And Trump got a lot of attention and Bernie Sanders did not in the early part of the campaign. And the head of CNN, I think regretted it afterwards. He explained why. They were making a ton of money off Trump. Trump's gonna be on in 10 minutes. Everybody, he's gonna say something wild, crazy. They didn't say that, but you knew it. So he got attention, he got ratings. They kept putting him on. I don't believe, because I didn't see in them. Right now he's really trying to defeat Trump clearly and it's obvious with their eye rolling every time they mention his name, what they think. But at the time, they didn't think they were spreading a monster, but they did. We felt the same way with the times. We felt that, and we have no, we're really disinterested in who wins. I don't really care who wins. I'm a journalist. I have no interest in who wins the campaign. I just wanna cover it. That very similarly, within the Democratic side, Clinton was getting much, much more headlines and better display on page one. And Bernie was getting fewer stories, Sanders, he's not a friend of mine, on page 11. And at the same time, we were watching the polls and the results of the primaries and it was a darn close thing going on, but the times wasn't, and we use the times because it's a national, we use other papers. We're recognizing that. So I think there was some, I believe there was business interests that got Trump the attention in the TV case and then some bias, I think, in print case. And also, a belief by reporters that they think they know more than anybody else. Ah, Bernie doesn't have a chance, put him on page 11. Oh, we won something, too. He's doing one of the polls, ah. Hillary's gonna win. We all know Hillary's gonna win. And that, it was self-fulfilling, in my opinion. Two points. One is that I do watch both PDS NewsHour and I listen to NPR, yes, I am on the political spectrum. And Judy has begun throwing in editorial comments at the end of the story. And I just want to tell you, shut up and report the nerves. So it's creeping into the news hour. The other thing I've noticed is that NPR is reporting more stories from the right. It could just be my hackles and my observation, but it seems to me that NPR is doing a, making a better effort of reporting, doing a very good effort of reporting from the right. Judy's doing an effort with the editorializer. The other thing that constantly baffles me is that is the news effort to, both in print and live media, to ask what do people think will happen? And I thought you guys were supposed to report what did happen and why the focus on, and what do you think is going to happen? What did you guys talk about? You want to give this talk, because you got it down, you got it down. Absolutely, was it? So what Elizabeth was saying was that two things, she said one of them was watching PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff's go more emotional and less independent, and NPR bringing in more stories from a right orientation. There's a reason NPR's doing that, that you'd like to think it was just virtue, but it's also, they got caught. One of their top people was taped by that dreadful man, I can't remember what his name is, who is right behind that. Yes, O'Neill, or something, O'Keefe, James O'Keefe. And they were taped talking to someone, saying very clearly we don't like the right wing, we're progressive journalists and that's where we're coming from. And so they got shamed into that as much as anything else. Let's hope it sticks. So there's that. And then what was the second part? Why don't they report the news? Why don't they keep asking us what's going to happen? Well, because they're filling up 24 hours a day. And you can't fill up with the news all the time you go to rank speculation and people like it. Because again, people are watching for their confirmation biases so they can score one for that side or score one. I think there's also something else that has gone on that we haven't talked about, which is, it used to be if it bleeds, it leads. It's now if it's Trump, it leads. If it's politics, if it's Devin Nunes, it leads. If it's this or that. There is more to our civic life together to our citizens' lives than just what's going on in the White House. There's state government, there's federal government. There's the Agriculture Department and not just what the table is that somebody bought. But real things, real policies, and you just don't see that anymore. When we started the center in Maine, there were five reporters covering the state house and they just covered kind of the state house. 20 years before, there were 20 reporters in Maine covering government. There was somebody who just covered DHHS, the Health and Human Services. There was somebody who just covered Marine Fisheries. And you have lost all of that and basically ended up with kind of the cheap pouring after the, you know, they're so glad that LePage is governor because he gets clicks, he gets page views. And so I think the degradation of our civic lives is also being fed by the fact that we don't know enough about what government is doing anymore. We know what politics, what's happening in politics. We don't know what's happening in government. Yeah. It seems to me that the news media is being led by the noes by our current president who manages to capture every day and draw attention to himself through his Twitter feeds. And whether it's newsworthy or not, it's like boss to the candle flame. And where do you folks draw the line? Well, I think we would draw the line on whether it's going to impact people significantly, whether it's just him talking to get attention or actually as a policy implication. So I, and a lot of journalists have talked about this, some have proposed that there'd be much more judgment applied to everything Trump does and to make some kind of dividing line between what's substantial and what's basically Trump is standup comedian. But the problem is the standup comedian stuff, sometimes a joke, sometimes isn't a joke. Sometimes he says it was a joke to see what it meant. And, and, and, you know. He's deliberately monopolizing. deliberately, sure. Absolutely. He's running for 2020 just by doing that. And it gets everybody's attention. So there's a business aspect to this that we forget journalism is a business. And there's nothing wrong with that. If we don't make money, we can't cover the news. But it's gotten out of here. The judgment's gone. And I really tell you right now, newspapers are dying, the straight press is dying. Austin paper just got sold. The Chicago Tribune where I worked just cut off a bunch of people again. What was the third one of the day that happened? It was the Denver Post. Denver Post is laying off people. There, the, there are newspapers that 15 years ago had 350 people in the newsroom. And I worked on it. It's now 35 and going down. This woman here. I'm often really frustrated when I'm trying to research a topic. And I even go like, when I go to any, even like, you know, big newspapers, any articles at all. And I'm looking for citations and they say studies show this and this. And then there's not like any kind of clue as to what the study was. I conducted the study like nothing like that. And I'm really frustrated by that. And I was wondering is that, is there like some policy or any kind of protocol that real reporters are supposed to follow to cite that? Because it doesn't seem right, but you can just see that. Well, you know, so studies show shows up in a lot of stories and you can't click on what those studies are. And so you don't know whether the study was by the Brookings Institution, which is generally a liberal place, or the Heritage Policy Center, or whatever it is, and the Reason Institute and the Cato Institute. And you name it, because what's happened, along with this fracturing of the news business and getting news with opinion sites, is you've also got more and more of these nonprofit foundations that produce study after study to support the one political point of view or another. A good journalist would, if they had the time, would cite the study. And you will see more and more, I've been hearing, they will label the liberal Brookings Institution, the liberal Center for American Budget and Policy Priorities, the right wing or the conservative, whatever. So that helps you a little bit. But we had a wonderful news intern work for us. She was actually our first fellow, who went on to work for what used to be great newspaper group in, was it the record? Yeah, the record. In northern New Jersey. She had to cover five towns, five towns worth of planning commissions, worth of board of education, worth of city councils. And you can't possibly take the time to find the study, let alone label it and type the URL in. It's triage for so many. I would say that when you have real complaints, let the news organization know. You really should. It will help, maybe, I don't know. But it may get their attention. It's better than going down without fighting. I'll just add up to the organization and I found it. And the one she works for currently, both of them with a policy was cite the study and have a URL and click to it. That's the right way to do it. Lady in blue over there. The information is out there. They sell newspapers that gets Nelson ratings. That is happening big time, but it ruins journalism. Just absolutely destroys it. And it's being done as if it's journalism. When is journalism going to take back its name? When is journalism going to take back journalism? We'll have the same attitude. My attitude is I'd rather go down fighting and lose journalism and do what this lousy, terrible, awful way we're doing it. It's not going to happen because the numbers aren't good for us. You paint a picture describing the deficiencies of the news as if it were perked in the past. But there's always been yellow journalism. McCarthy never would have gotten as far as he did if he hadn't had certain newspapers breathing fire and whatnot. And there have always been newsmen. There was the Buckleys Magazine and the New Republic. And some of us were able to sort that out. Some people weren't. But I don't see that the major news sources, even with their deficiencies, are so much worse than what we've had in the past if you look back. The big problem is that there's a whole generation that doesn't even look at the New York Times online for their news. And they're going to be voting. And so how do we reach those people? That's the real problem. Things are a lot worse. New York Times still is successful. Lots of money. Jeff Bezos bought the post. Still doing great. That's two newspapers out of 1,400. The rest of them are doing lousy. The 350 reporters and editors are now 35. And they just laid off six more. But you're avoiding my question. That's happening because the number of us who even bother to read those sources is diminishing. That's true, too. The big problem is this whole generation that's getting their news from social media. And they're going to be voting and making decisions. Most of us in this room, even with the deficiencies of the current news media, can manage to sort things out. Yeah, you can. Absolutely. But what do we do about that? You try that one because I have no answer to that one. Well, first of all, I don't know if you can figure out which came first, the chicken and the egg. But because of the internet, advertising revenues diminished enormously for newspapers. That meant then that they had to lay off staff. That meant then that they didn't have interesting enough news and a big enough newspaper What's the point in subscribing anymore? So you've got this sort of snowballing effect that is really John used to work, live and work in Gloucester for what was then a great newspaper in the 80s called The Gloucester Times. We have moved back now 30 years later, and it's painful to read it. And this was one of the great local newspapers. Reporters from it came out of there and went on to any number of great newspapers themselves. But a lot of them stayed because it was rewarding to work that way. So the effect on particularly local democracy isn't just because young people aren't reading it. And it's very much because the entire business model has changed. The ability to do bad things is much greater than the ability to do good things. And so we're in a bad place right now. I will say that we were part of a movement that started about 12 years ago called the Nonprofit Investigative News Movement. They have an organization called INN, Independent Nonprofit News. And these were organizations started by essentially refugees from the good news business who couldn't bear working in the bad news business anymore. And we got foundation funding, essentially the nonprofit public radio model, and found our way with limited resources. And I had to learn how to write HTML for our website, which my kids think is an amazing miracle. And with a small budget, do the kind of journalism that wasn't being done anymore. So there are attempts to do this. And it's happening on a smaller scale, not a larger scale, but almost every state has one of these groups. You're not going to get daily stories out of it, but there is the kind of accountability reporting that you need as citizens to hold your government accountable. But you didn't answer my question. No, I didn't. The answer question is, you're saying young people aren't reading the news, so that's bad for news. And what can we do about it? Here is, they are reading the news, but they don't know they're reading the news. I've talked to them all the time. They're not using the traditional news source. They are, but they don't know they are. Yeah, so my son's friend who works for the Boston Globe says, he's 30, says none of my friends read the Boston Globe. And I said to him, do they listen to public radio out of Boston, GBH or BUR? He said, oh yeah, all of them do. I said, so they're reading the Boston Globe. Because every public radio newsroom in the morning gets the local paper, and that sets the agenda for the stories they do. So that's the, they're reading the newspapers. Well, they're going to Facebook, and someone says, read something, and they say, would you get the news from Joe on Facebook? Well, there was a link to the Seattle Times. So they aren't getting it from what you talk about, what you talk about, but they don't realize that where they're getting it from. And there is no monetary value to the originator of that source, the Seattle Times, to make up one. And so that's part of the problem. And I think that this interest in politics is getting on people to check out the news, but they're checking it in totally different ways than we are, and it's not accruing a lot of benefit to the actual originators of the news. Yeah, but the algorithms that are, sure they're quick to the Seattle Times, but the algorithms that are used to click are self-confirming algorithms, so they don't get a spectrum. They can, they can, absolutely, right. More questions at this point, bam. So I almost never write the editor, but I wrote the editor twice this morning, and so in Vermont we have, it was about two different articles. One was about a bill that died, that had to do with the secondhand smoke from marijuana, and another had to do with a guy who was high on marijuana and killed five kids a year and a half ago on I-89 and how they're gonna dismiss it because of reasons of insanity. And I just went through the roof. It just brought up all this stuff for me, again, around how so many, such a large percentage of our population, especially the young people, are not getting factual information about the new marijuana, 100% THC, that's out there and what's happening in Colorado. We, the older generation has more information, but the young generation has a really, gets a lot of it from what you're saying is this, there's a lot of money behind this new industry that's coming out that's all about edibles and whatnot, not about flour at all anymore. And it's, the downside of that just isn't being reported. At both of those, none of, there wasn't any reference in the entire article to Colorado has the highest number of kids being poisoned, that what secondhand smoke is, there was no investigation into that. And on the one about the kids being killed on the highway because the guy was PTSD and high treating. This doesn't have anything to do with this topic. It does because there was no mention that marijuana is associated, when it's associated with PTSD, with increased mental illness. And I never see that reporting. Yeah, I think what you're talking about is, actually it is connected to this issue, which is how does public policy get made? And public policy gets made by people, is it the state house over there, and citizens coming in and saying, this is what you have to pay attention to. And then is also advocacy groups who come in and these, marijuana advocacy groups are, it's not about compassionate care, it's about money. And we saw this in Maine, you've seen it here, it was in Colorado, it's in California. It is an enormous money making industry that hires the most polished lobbyists. And it may be a good cause, it may not, but the legislators who at least in most places, don't become specialists on these things, get completely snowed by the effort that is galvanized by these groups. And so where do newspapers fit in there? They have to be in there saying what is actually real as this goes on. But for a reporter who has to cover one or two reporters in the state house covering something, they're not gonna have the time to do a research project. They may rely on people like you to get in touch with them and say, you know, I notice your coverage doesn't have this perspective and this kind of information. I'd love to sit down with you for half an hour or just send you some material and go through it with you so that you can be more informed about this. So it is a very, and more and more we saw this. I covered the Maine State House for 16, 17 years. And over those years, I watched the industrialization of lobbying happen where more and more lobbying groups came together, high priced lobbyists. They then organized, what's it called, astroturfing? Where they would get folks to send letters and cables and you name it and show up and have, and they were paid to do this. And without a newspaper to puncture some of the stuff that happens around those kinds of efforts, you can have bad policy made or policy that is not in the public interest. So. We've got to the monthly or the weekly magazines that are out there doing news in my opinion, doing long term investigative stuff. We've got seven days here that's done some really great work. Yeah. And also speaking to the idea of false equivalencies and how often those are showing up as though. Well, yeah. When I was seven days, there are other magazines. I don't know what, sure. Atlantic Monthly. I'm thinking of Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair is just some great stuff. Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker. Right. Many of them do have a bias. You ought to be aware of what they may be. They're really well reported and well written, but I kind of know where they stand politically and what their readers want to hear and what their readers don't want to hear. So I have a little bit of skepticism I apply to those places when I read their pieces. And the other question was. False equivalence. Well, yeah. This is something that, no, so and so said the Earth is round. I gotta find some scissors flat because the other stuff, yeah, we've tried it. The business got caught up in that some time ago because it created its own problem by not listening to people with opposing point of views at all because they thought they were yahoo's. Can you define false equivalency? False equivalency is when we have somebody at a city council meeting who says that we think that, you know, that the, that, I think I'm gonna give you an example, that the tax rates are too high. And here's the reasons why and it gives you six good reasons. And you say, everybody says, well, you better find somebody who says the tax rates are too low. So find someone who doesn't know anything about tax rates to give you that point of view. I don't care if he's a jerk who knows nothing made up of the street, but we at least have two points of view in it. So one's informed and intelligent and back up stuff. Other one is just anybody who says the opposite point of view. So that's false equivalency. If you can't find someone who actually knows something about the tax rate, then you shouldn't be quoting them. And we did that because of the complaints, mostly complaints from conservatives who said the papers were too liberal. And at that point, they had a point of view that probably was a bias. And to fix the bias, we went overboard by getting people with any point of view that's the opposite point of view. And I think people have actually now recognized that. And I don't believe that's happening quite as much. Sean Hannity was a false model. Yeah, well, there are examples of- Maybe Rush Lume would have been more obvious. Than Sean Hannity? Yeah, I don't, I haven't seen him that much, but I think pretty sure I know what he's like. But he's not, I see it. Is it a full, it's either Rachel Maddow might have been Rush Lume by you think? Better? More equivalent? No, no, it would have been more obvious. More obvious, okay. We'll fix that one. We could keep them going all, all right, one more. I'm so sorry, but I had my hand up. Okay. I'm gonna get my question, especially tuning on me, as you hit the nail on the head, we've got to speak up and tell these news organizations what we want. I've noticed that NPR, although they're reporting a little more to the right, you should hear the slant and the tone of the voice from when it's more a little left leaning. I actually heard a reporter say twice. I never heard of this term before and I haven't heard it in a while, but twice that something she was reporting on was a nothing burger. I've never heard of this slant before. That's terrible. Anyway, please tell us in NPR, since a lot of us are VPR listeners, to which department or to which person do we? The news director. Plain. The news director. Okay. And have a CC to the president of the organization. Okay, because when I heard that, I said to my husband, you should hear the tone of the voice. Yeah, and also it will carry a lot, it'll carry a lot more weight if you say, I've been a member for 30 years. Yes, sir. And I am a member. Okay, and I support you, but I am concerned about what is going on with your news broadcast, news product, news, you know, whatever. Which one, to VPR or to NPR? No, VPR, the VPR, you know, all the state ones are affiliates of the national one. They pay money to the national one to get the programs, but they're managed locally. Now, they're not responsible for the national content that they feature. So you complain to them if it's one of their reporters. If it's an NPR reporter, then you go to NPR. Okay. I wanna say we could probably go on all afternoon here, but thank you so much, John and Naomi. Thank you.