 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is Christine Brooks. She's the vice president of communications here at the Kato Institute. How does one end up in charge of communications at the Washington D.C.-based Kato Institute? Wow. Well, you start in Idaho where normal people live. You know, it was an evolution because when I first came here, I was a journalism major in college, and I really thought I wanted to be a reporter. So I came to Washington thinking, of course, you know, I'm just going to walk into the Washington Post, and they're going to say, okay, you're hired. And then I found out two things. I found out that it really doesn't work that way. You have to do like a million internships, and it also didn't pay very well at the time. So instead, I walked up to Capitol Hill where the pay was only slightly better, but it seemed like there were young, fun people working there. And so I got into politics. In D.C., a lot of people move between jobs. They go from the policy world from being a legislative aide of some sort to being a think tank to maybe being back on the Hill. What does the kind of communications job cycle look like? Well, you know, communications jobs, I would say, are, I mean, if you are a policy person, you're going to go to Capitol Hill. You're going to be a legislative correspondent, a legislative assistant that gets you deep in the weeds of policymaking. And I never thought I was smart enough for that. So if you're in communications, you get to be kind of, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep, you're doing a lot of different things. Any particular issue that's up on that day, you're going to be handling that just to the extent that the press is interested in it, which means, you know, not terribly much. So that's kind of the communications training. And you learn more about messaging, you know, you've got the 10 bills before Congress, but the press is going to be interested in about five words of those. Which five words do you pick? How do you get that reporter to open your email and actually look at it and read it? So those are the sort of things you learn kind of in the communications field. And then when I moved from being a press secretary on Capitol Hill over to the think tank world, you have to understand about trying to get a reporter's attention when you are not a policymaker. At least when you're on Capitol Hill and, you know, you're working for a member of Congress, you're working for a policymaker, you're working for someone who can actually introduce legislation and change the laws in America. When you're working at a think tank, you're just trying to appeal to those policymakers to do what you'd like them to do. So I'd say it's a little bit tougher pull. That relationship between the communications person, whether you're working on the Hill or working for think tank and the press, how much of that is proactive versus reactive? Like, so is it that the press, there's something that the press is suddenly interested in and your job is then how to figure out how to talk to them in a way that's going to promote whatever message it is you want to promote, or is it or are you creating interest among the press in issues? Well, in a think tank, you really have to do both. I mean, you have to be a part of the daily news cycle because the press only has, you know, so big an attention span, and they all tend to chase the shiny object, which is usually Trump's Twitter feed. So you have to be aware of that and try to fit in what you're trying to get out, you know, your messages for the day, like all this great research, we have an immigration from Alex Narosta. You know, there are various different points in a news cycle that we might put something out by Alex that might be, you know, grabbed by a reporter or a TV news anchor or something like that. So we kind of have to be watching the news to proactively put those messages out. But then we also do have to be reactive. If a reporter calls and, you know, wants a comment on the tax bill, we need to be able to provide it because we want them to look at us at the Cato Institute as a source for that kind of data. So you have to do both the reactive and the proactive. To a certain extent, I wish we could play a larger role in guiding, you know, what the press is interested in because these days it is the shiny objects more than the substantive policy. But you have to find a way to make those two work together. Has that changed what the press is interested in in your time in Washington? Not, I mean, Trump is a big change. But even before that, I mean, you used to have one cable news outlet. And when my previous job before I worked with the Cato Institute, I was at the Heritage Foundation for 10 years, mostly doing broadcast media. And that was about the time that Fox News came on the scene. Prior to that, you had CNN. And that's all you had. And you had a Clinton administration, Bill Clinton. And mostly CNN was interested in having, you know, people on from the administration to talk about what the administration was doing. And if they were going to have an opposing voice, it was going to be someone from Capitol Hill. It was going to be, comparatively to now, a fairly substantive policy debate. But then Fox News came on the scene. And at first I thought, this is great. We have an opposing voice and we put lots of people from the Heritage Foundation on. They were still talking policy to a certain extent. But then Fox made a discovery that if you want people to watch TV news in the evening, you have to disguise this news as entertainment or disguise the entertainment as news. I'm not sure which way it went. So you had Bill O'Reilly becoming more and more of kind of a, you know, I don't want to say a carny, but kind of just a loudmouth entertainer. And he'd get on and he'd yell at policymakers and say, you know, I'm talking for the people and people found that very entertaining. And suddenly you went, went from Larry King Live being the most watched show on cable news with slightly over a million viewers to suddenly four million people watching Bill O'Reilly. So that kind of worked for Fox. And then you had MSNBC and CNN think, huh, well, media is a business. And if we want to draw new viewers, how do we make it more entertaining? I think that's when we kind of saw news take on a far more entertainment perspective. The examples that you just gave of that were cable news. But does that same thing play out to the same extent or at all in, say, print journalism? I think less so, although if you've watched the evolution of newspapers, which I'm sure you guys have watched, I mean, you still have about, you know, 20 to 25 percent, actually 25 percent may be high, about 20 percent of the American population getting its news from a traditional newspaper. And you've seen a lot of newspapers going under, advertising sales just aren't there. But I don't see that the newspapers have really changed their content. You know, they've gotten they've gotten shorter. I mean, you used to have a news story that may start on page one and jump to page two USA Today. You may pick it up and the news story, what you see on page one, that's that's the whole thing. That's the whole story about, you know, 10 inches of new space. So I think the stories have gotten shorter, but substance wise, I think you still find news on the news pages, entertainment on the entertainment pages, maybe entertainment pages have gotten a little bit bigger. But certainly, you know, the Washington Post reduce the size of its food, food section and reduce the size of its sports section, but its new section is still pretty darn big. So I don't think you see that to the extent in print. When it comes to the producers of shows on Fox News or MSNBC, any of the other, I mean, you know, PBS News Hour, what are they looking for? I mean, they're in this news cycle, which is the well, I mean, every day if you're producing a show, yeah, seem to be a lot of work, a lot of work and a lot of stress. And they might call Cato or Heritage or Center for American Progress. And we have a story and what is the mentality of the producers for their show? Well, I mean, those news producers are generally fairly young between the age of maybe 25 and 30. Most of them have probably been working in the news business for two to three years. So not very, not very long. They're looking for someone who can get a point across very quickly and very succinctly and also from a very distinct perspective. We want black versus white, blue versus red. We want very distinct sides, which is where libertarians sometimes suffer because, you know, a lot of times we're allied with with Democrats, sometimes we're allied with conservatives, but we're not always as black and white as cable news audiences would want. So, you know, we're asking them to accept a little bit more explanation, a little bit more nuance in an argument, perhaps a little more substance in an argument and these 25, 28 year old producers just can't comprehend that. They just, you know, do you hate immigration or do you not hate immigration? Do you do you hate Trump's foreign policy? Do you not hate Trump's foreign policy? I don't want you having to explain anything to say yes or no. That's kind of what they're looking for. Now, you mentioned two examples. That's what I'd say the Fox News Channel and CNN would be looking for. PBS, especially the news hour, they have the time to be a little bit more nuanced. They also have an audience that's older and maybe not looking for the quick hit, maybe looking for a little bit more substance in what they watch. So I like the news hour. I mean, I think it's a good place to actually see news. There's a lot of criticism that is, oh, it's so left wing. I don't know that it's so left wing. I mean, I think they get both sides on. We've been on it quite a bit and I think it's a good spot. That age of viewership is interesting to me because it seems like so much of what we think about as the media and the stories is comes out of cable news. And the cable news drives a lot of it. It certainly seems to drive our current White House resident quite a lot. But but every time every now and then they'll be like, here's the, you know, the listener demographics of cable news. And it's it's always shocking just how old cable news viewers are. Like they're, you know, the medium age of like a Fox News viewer was like north of 65 or something like that. But so if cable news is kind of as important in the zeitgeist, but it's so overwhelmingly watched by much, much older Americans, what sort of effect is that having and how does that pack to the way that like younger people think about the news or get the news? Well, one thing you have to remember about those older people, you know, that are watching cable news all the time, those people also have a much higher percentage of voter turnout. So these people are watching the news, but they're also engaged in the political process to a much greater extent than perhaps millennials are. Now, I do have some hope for millennials and part of it is stuff that I've learned from you guys. Millennials are listening to podcasts. They're listening to long podcasts. They're listening to deep podcasts. So maybe they are getting a lot more interested in deep information than I think they are. The back to your question on cable news pop in here and say that if you have hope for millennials after listening to me, yeah, I mean, I kind of go back and forth on that because I have met some millennials, you know, especially in the Kato intern program, they're really smart and they're, they're not just, you know, social media, 140 characters, short attention spans. So there's, there's hope for our future. But yeah, you know, the older viewers on cable news and the fact that the cable news does tend to drive the news agenda, you're still talking about a very small percentage of the population. I mean, maybe it's amount of time to watch as opposed to sheer numbers because you've still got about 9 million, 7 to 9 million people watching ABC, NBC, CBS, evening news broadcast, but they're only watching it for, you know, the whole program is only half an hour, maybe 15 minutes worth of news and the average watching time for these people is about 12 minutes. So if you just have people watching network news and they're not watching anything else, they're really not getting very much news. Cable news, they tend to tune in for a lot longer. So they're older people, but they do tend to be more politically engaged and tune in to the news for a lot longer. So they're probably more aware. I saw a figure recently in 1985, if you asked, if you showed people a picture of Dan Rather, who at the time was the anchor of the CBS evening news, nearly 50% of the American population knew who that was. A few years later, when you showed people a picture of Brian Williams, only about 23% of the people knew that he was the hottest news anchor on network TV at the time. So, you know, people's viewing choices have changed so much. They still may be getting a very good diet of substantive news or just not getting it from TV as much anymore. This question of how libertarians fit into all this, you said, you know, it is true that the DC is like primed to think in red versus blue. And so the question of like, well, are you liberal or conservative? And it's no. But so I know that you that question comes up a lot and reporters ask that question a lot, but has that changed over time? Are our reporters generally more aware of libertarianism than they used to be? Do they get that nuance more than they really do think so. And, you know, when I have to, we do a lot in the media department here, we do a lot of emails to reporters being as polite as we can say, oh, you know, you call this conservative. We're not conservative. And this is why, but it seems to me that media outlets and maybe the reporters themselves know, but the media outlets don't give their audience enough credit for knowing the difference between a conservative or libertarian and a liberal and, you know, some various other ideologies that are out there. I do think people, the general audience is far more aware now of the differences in, you know, between a conservative and libertarian. But the reporters or the owners or the producers or whoever is actually deciding what gets to go on the air don't give their audience enough credit for understanding these nuances. But I am finding probably just over the last five years or so that the reporters do seem to be a lot more cognizant of the differences. And I think that's a good change we have more work to do. You mentioned the owners of media and a lot of narratives, especially from younger, I think younger people, maybe Bernie people, but also some libertarians would talk about the corporate controlled media and how they dictate the message and how it's all coming from the top. And do you think that that is true to some or to some extent or to what extent do you think that's true? At some news organizations, I would say yes. I think that Steve Bannon, when he ran Breitbart, probably made it pretty well known what he thought the viewpoint of every single news article should be. And I think a lot of the reporters there were happy to provide that. At Fox, Roger Ailes set a news agenda. I know a lot of producers there. I don't think that there was a daily instructive of, you know, this is who you will put on the air. And this is the point of view you'll put on the air. But certainly he was a big personality and did insinuate a lot of what he thought the news coverage should be. CNN, I think, has tried to stay very true to a straight news broadcast. But certainly if you have someone with a more with more liberal leanings at the top of the organization, the hires, the people that he hires down below him are probably going to be more ideologically inclined toward his point of view. So he may not be instructing them. This is how you have to report things, but he's certainly hiring people who he knows shares those viewpoints. So that's probably a little bit more common than just, you know, daily instructions on what you will put on the air. What do you see in the difference between the broadly speaking liberal media world and conservative media world? Are they, I mean, is it is it kind of just they're the same? MSBC is the same as Fox, their opinion shows of people shouting at people. And, and I mean, did the producers treat us the same when they call us on those two? Is it sort of yeah? I mean, the producers, the producers do treat us the same. I mean, there's been a few times that we've gotten calls requesting guests to who have a conservative viewpoint on foreign policy, because, oh, hey, we just used you on tax policy last week and, you know, you were a little bit more conservative on the tax policy. So, hey, can you come, come on the show and argue in favor of, you know, more troops in Iraq? Like, no, we can't. And you have to get into the whole conversation of what the differences are between libertarians and conservatives. But yeah, when when producers call us there, they treat us pretty much the same across the board. I would say MSNBC especially watched Fox's success and said, okay, well, let's let's try to mimic that and do that. And Rachel Maddow has been extremely successful. There was, in fact, just last June, I think she eclipsed the evening Fox lineup, whoever they had on at the time after they kicked O'Reilly off the air. So it took them a long time, though, because initially I thought, you know, they were viewing Fox as they're only putting one point of view on the air and that's working for them. So let's do that. But really, that's not what Fox did. They put both viewpoints on the air. The dominant viewpoint was generally a conservative viewpoint, but there was always a liberal on for them to argue with. MSNBC was just putting liberals on. And I don't think that's what people wanted to see. So, you know, slowly they started understanding that, you know, Rachel was going to be really good. She needed to have a good, not just a weak conservative to argue with because she's very smart. She needed a strong conservative to argue with. So they started doing more debate segments, which I think is what, you know, is more entertaining to the audience and that started drawing viewers. Why is it that it seems so the news outlets that we tend to associate with really high quality journalism? So Washington Post and New York Times also are predominantly left of center. I mean, maybe not like they're not self consciously the way that Fox or MSNBC has its viewpoint and strives to hammer it home, but the reporters are overwhelmingly, you know, identify as Democrats or progressives. The news coverage tends to the stories they tend to cover and so on and so forth, whereas the predominantly like self consciously are more conservative news outlets tend to be typically of lower quality. Is there a reason for that? Is it accidental? It's interesting because I've pondered that myself so many times. It's like, OK, the Washington Post is quality journalism. I think the economist is very quality journalism as well, and they tend to be, I think, far more centrist. But, you know, news outlets that have been owned by and run by conservatives, Newsmax comes to mind that is not usually associated with high quality journalism. Breitbart is certainly not associated with high quality journalism at all. Is it because they don't want to be or is it because they've recognized that high quality journalism sometimes isn't the most the best way to make money? I mean, the Washington Post for all of its high quality journalism did have to have to get rescued by Jeff Bezos because they weren't selling advertising or newspapers to the extent that they wanted to be. So I think that there's a choice being made between, OK, I'm going to have journalism that I can sell to the masses that will make me lots of money. And maybe that's not what we would consider the highest quality journalism and organizations that want to feed you more boring stuff, which honestly, really good news is generally sort of boring. They need a little bit of subsidy from, you know, a guy like Jeff Bezos who is a news fan himself. And I'm very glad that he bought the Washington Post. I think he's done exceptionally good work with it. Their facility now and the multimedia events they're having, I think he's really moving that news organization into the next century. So I think it's a good thing, but they were lucky. I mean, if he hadn't come along to to kind of bail them out, they were in a situation that they were going to have to change their news, their model significantly. Is there something we should be concerned with that many of these reporters are liberal? If they're good reporters, no, I don't. I really don't mind that a reporter has personal viewpoints if they're still a good reporter. I had a professor in when I was in journalism school who was one of the best professors I ever had. And he asked us at the beginning of the semester if we could guess what persuasion he was by the end and we never could. So and he turned out to be a total lefty. That was fine. He was a great instructor. So I don't mind if reporters have a viewpoint. Good reporters know how to keep that out of their reporting. If they if they're not keeping it out of their reporting, that's a problem. And I think that fortunately with social media being what it is today, they get called out on it significantly. But yeah, I really I don't mind that as long as it's still good reporting. How does bias work in reporting generally? Because lots of people accuse the press or the media of being biased. I mean, we're recording this on the day that the president is supposed to be unveiling his first probably annual fake news awards. Still to be announced. Still to be announced. He's probably forgotten about it. But there's there's a sense in which like, especially the establishment media of the coasts is like just exists to advance the interests of the Clinton family or some such. So which I don't think is quite the way that media bias works. But so is there such a thing as media bias or left wing media bias and establishment media and if there is like, how does it function and how is it different from the popular conception? I think I think media bias functions mostly as choice of stories to cover. I mean, if you turn on CNN on a given day and you see what stories they've chosen to cover, it's probably going to be things that are critical of Donald Trump or things that they believe would make Donald Trump look bad. Now, in approaching those stories, they may take a very balanced approach to it. They may have someone on from the Trump administration and Trump critic on. But the fact that they have chosen to cover that story, that's where the bias comes in. It's not, you know, it's not so much that you have the anchor, you know, shouting down the conservative gas saying you're wrong and not letting him finish. I mean, that does happen. But I don't really think that that's the way bias manifests itself in the, you know, the truly most damaging way. It's that the stories that they're choosing to cover are they're choosing to cover them for a dedicated purpose to make the administration look better. You know, there's there's other examples as well. But that's that's the most obvious one these days. But yeah, once once they get their story docket put together, I think they do a pretty good job of presenting both sides of that story. It's just the story itself may not really be the biggest news of the day. I notice on Fox News, they like to cover that an immigrant committed a crime. Basically, it's one of their fin. Therefore, a lot of Fox News viewers think that lots of immigrants commit a lot of crimes. Yeah, this is this. That's exactly where their bias comes in, because it's like, you know, the the storyline you're selling is statistically wrong. And Alex Narosta has lots of data to support that. But if we keep presenting these, you know, these little anecdotes about an immigrant committing a crime, you're going to get the impression that it's a huge problem, even if it's still statistically very insignificant. Now, to return to the question of sort of theme of entertainment media versus news media, when we talk about the talking heads like the Bill O'Reilly's and the Rachel Maddow's, it has always seemed to me that that there there seems to be a shift in their own shows that they get shriller and shriller as though as they're on TV longer and that Rachel Maddow used to be much more fair-minded in my memory than she in the first two years than she was later on in terms of how she treats the other side. Is there a pull, do you think, in for those personalities to become more shrill and carny-esque? Oh, absolutely. It's like, you know, it's just like the look at me, look at me, you get a scream louder, so people will watch. I think Rachel Maddow is one example. But another example, compare Megan Kelly Daytime versus Megan Kelly Nighttime. Megan Kelly, when she was Daytime on Fox, was just your basic straightforward news anchor. She had no political. And I don't think she herself has that much of a conservative leaning. But as soon as they put her on primetime, it's like, OK, your primetime audience is a different group of people than your daytime audience. And they want you to be more aggressive. They want you to be more conservative. And can you do this to pull viewers in? She did for a little while. Maybe it just got the best of her. But yeah, I think there is a push by the producers of the shows, maybe by the hosts themselves. Hey, if I'm going to draw viewers, I have to stand up and scream and say, look at me, which is unfortunate, because it's not the best way to make a news point. How do we fix this? Or is there a way to? I mean, it's possible that we simply have like kind of a golden age notion of news that never really existed. It existed. And I think it existed because at the time that the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and he was. I mean, people forget how long he was on the air. He was on the air a long time. He was the most trusted man in news because everyone knew who he was. But you didn't have options, you know, if you were going to watch TV at five or six o'clock at night, you were going to watch news. And if you didn't want to watch news, you could turn on your radio. And if you didn't want to listen to your radio, you could read a book. I mean, that was basically what your choices were. So news didn't have to be entertaining. It was just this. This is something that we're giving you because you need it. You need this information. It's important for you to know this stuff. Now there are so many choices. You know, if you've got 118 channels versus eight, you've got social media. You've got, you know, a variety of other online distractions. You don't have to watch the news anymore. So if the news, if news media is going to be a business, it has to do something to get your attention. And unfortunately, carnies, carnies are going to get your attention a lot more than kind of like Walter Cronkite. But should we call that the golden age? I mean, maybe we can call the golden age of objective, stuffy news reporting or something. But that is not the norm in human history. In 1795, they didn't have a Walter Cronkite telling them, here's all the news that you need to know. And then they didn't have that for most of human history. Pretty much we're about post-war to about 1996 is when they had it. And that made America seem pretty unified, possibly for people having nostalgia for. Remember when Americans could agree on facts and we're always at each other's throats and all these things. But maybe that news environment was was falsely creating a sense of unanimity or more agreement than there actually was because it was producing its own product. I think I think you're right. I think we have the we have this idea that everyone agreed with everything that Walter Cronkite was saying. I think I think of it as the golden age of news, not because everybody agreed with what they were being fed. But at least people had information. At least people were presented with facts that were 99 percent true and could then take those facts and draw an opinion. Now I just I just don't know that people are getting facts anymore. You know, you ask people, well, where do you get your news? Oh, from my Facebook feed. OK, well, are you sure your friend's a great reporter? Because, you know, there's there's some people that follow legitimate news organizations and are getting what I would call news. There's other people that are getting, unfortunately, the fake news that Donald Trump rails against all the time. I just I just don't know that they're getting the true information like they used to. Does this then depend does fixing that or at least pushing it back in the other direction depend on stripping away the democratization of news that's happened because of the internet? Because this so this fake news, I mean, there's five. There's the cable news networks, which are from our perspective, faker than, say, the mainstream newspapers would be just in terms of quality of reporting and their ability to put entertainment and shrillness in front of trying to get the facts right. But a lot of it is coming from the internet and a lot of the stuff that they get shared, the stuff shared on Facebook is not cable news. It's internet news and it's it's from blogs and outlets like Breitbart or, you know, the on the left, the life likes to say that they're not, you know, we don't we don't fall for the fake news. But then they share every bizarre science reporting article from the Huffington Post or alternate or alternate, you know, but. But but to some extent that that is all the result of it used to be that if you wanted to get news out to people, you had to do it through broadcast or publishing a newspaper or publishing a magazine, all of which were extraordinarily expensive and not just expensive, but in some case, like in the case of broadcasts were like legally limited, you know, you couldn't you could maybe have a pirate radio station, but that was about it. But now anyone can put stuff out there and from a libertarian perspective and from kind of a free market perspective, that seems that seems good. Like we want we want a thriving ecosystem. We want easy entrance. We don't want the established players to be able to keep people out. But it also seems to be what's caused or has led to a lot of the problems that we're seeing, you know, to one extent it can be because these things in function is like Breitbart can function as a prototype. You know, so this look Fox News can say, look, we see that Breitbart suddenly really popular and we want to make money. So we're going to try to do what they're doing. So their proofs of concept for even worse reporting. So is there a way to make this situation better without kind of the elites clamping back down again on distribution? Well, yeah, I mean, I do think that there are like I said earlier that the fact checking the Internet has made fact checking, you know, very easy. If you see a story that you know has an error in it, you can you can post a comment right below the story and say, no, that that's wrong. You know, here's here's the accurate information. Now, you're an honest person. You're going to you're going to be truthful when you do that kind of fact checking. Unfortunately, not everybody who reads the story is going to be honest. And there's so much self policing that has to go on on the Internet and in in actual news organizations. I think that it can lead to a good result, but it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of work for the readers. I mean, we need a more educated public in terms of news consumption. We need for people. And this is, you know, this is something I know Facebook is working on as well as some other social media outlets. If you read something that you think is a little too fantastic to be true, it probably is. And maybe you should do a little fact checking on your own before you share it. If we create more responsible news consumers, we're probably going to be a lot better off, but I don't know how close we are to getting to that. Going forward, we mentioned millennials and the changing media environment. How much do you get the sense that the current media companies and people are afraid of the future? I think they're a little afraid of the future because they don't completely understand it yet and they don't know how to monetize it, which, you know, media companies, business. And in the end, yeah, they want you to have news, but they also want you to be able to pay want to pay for it. You know, they want to create a product that is worth you paying for. And they don't quite know how to do that yet with millennials, because millennials are just so accustomed to getting free information. So how are we going to set up a situation where they're willing to pay the ten bucks to go beyond the pay wall and see the whole story? Are they going to be satisfied with only reading the first paragraph because they have such sort of tensions and spans? I think that's what scares media companies. And I think you've seen them take a few wrong steps in trying to gain a few more eyeballs from that millennial audience. Certainly the Fox News channel, you see a lot of the guests and anchors are getting younger and younger because there's some, I think, flawed theory that young people want to watch other young people present the news. I don't think that's true. They tend to want people that are older than them. We actually tested this for some of our own video content. What convinces people more young person telling you a point of view or an older person telling you a point of view? And it's the old guy with gray hair. So I think that there are some misfires as the media tries to figure this out. But the fact that there are just so many choices in news right now. I think big media companies are really going to have to diversify. If they want to keep making money. What does this changing media landscape, so everything we've just discussed for the last 30 minutes, mean for think tanks? For us, for the way that we approach both the kind of scholarship that we produce, the way that we present it, the way that we communicate it to the media or to audiences outside of the media? Like how do we have to rethink our communication strategy for this new landscape? Well, to quote Kato's fabulous social media director, Kat Murdy. You have to meet them where they are. We have to, as a think tank, we have to figure out who we want to be talking to. And then we have to go figure out where they are. If we want to talk to Capitol Hill, that's a different distribution than talking to the mass public. If we want to talk to younger audiences, which you guys have been doing so well with L.org, we have to figure out where they're getting their information from. You know, before putting buying ads and newspapers to try to reach millennial audiences, we're not going to do very well. So just like big media companies have to diversify if they want to make money, we have to diversify our outreach in order to reach those audiences that we're trying to convince. Because in the end, we would like everyone to go to the voting booth and write to their congressman and take part in civic society with libertarian principles in mind. But if we can't teach them what those libertarian principles are, we're not going to be very successful. So we need to try to reach them where they are. That means still means doing TV, because even though TV audiences are shrinking, it is still the largest distribution tool. So we still need to be on TV. I'm not sure how many more years I'm actually going to be saying that. But for the moment, I still need to be on TV. That was my next question. We need to be all over social media. But we have to recognize that social media is a much more it's not a medium where you're going to get someone to read a 70-page research paper. We have to use social media to pull people in to get them interested in some of the things that we may be saying. And then we have to convince them to maybe read an op-ed and then maybe go so far as to actually read a whole book, which would be really cool. So we have to kind of recognize that our audience needs to be pulled in gradually as opposed to just smacking them over over the head. Because we are a research organization. We are not a social media organization. We are not a talking points organization. We do actual research that's important and we want people to read that research. But if we're going to reach audiences that aren't accustomed to taking in large quantities of substance of policy material, we have to kind of ease them in on that point about the future of television, which I mean, one thing that millennials don't seem to want to do is to sit down at seven o'clock and watch a show between seven and eight. With that, even me, that seems crazy to me now. Just be like, kind of get home to watch something. And so in that world, I mean, when we have YouTube, things like the Rubin reporter, I mean, will that completely change? I mean, like, is that demographic that Fox News and SMBC, the people who watch, who watch the commercials, who pay the bills, who watch at the appointed time? I mean, is that that's that's going away? Go. So they will have to completely change what they do. Pew did some research recently, which I'm kind of peeking at right now. Gap between television and online news consumption narrows from 2016. So from 2016 to 2017 went from 57% to 50% of the number of people that got their news from television and online went from 38% to 43%. So that gap is narrowing and, you know, I think will disappear pretty soon. Even I wonder if it's even more insignificant now, because if you ask people, where do you get your news and they say, well, from Fox News, I don't I don't I think they might be getting it from Fox News's website. But I don't think that they are sitting down at eight o'clock to see what Fox has to offer up. I think they are taking little bits and pieces of video from Fox's news news site, and that's what they're watching. So, yeah, I think that, you know, probably not too far into the future, maybe just 10 years, people are going to be going to their mobile devices and deciding which video they want to watch from whatever organization, whether it's Fox News or the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or the Center for American Progress, you're not going to have to be a traditional news organization to get your message out there on the same level as a traditional news organization might. So then does that to some extent mean we should flip the script in the sense that the way that Cato has approached media, not of the newspaper or the reporting kind or the like report publishing reports kind, but of the, you know, getting on television, getting on radio is we get our people placed on and we have people here who work all day every day trying to get Cato people placed on these programs being put out by these media companies. Should we be flipping that and saying, well, instead, we should be just making our own programs and then putting those out on YouTube or wherever else that is can, you know, has just as much of a possibility of reaching an audience and then we can do it our own way. Yeah. And I think we have been doing that. We've been we've been easing into that for the last few years. Like I said, at the moment, I think it's still important to be one of those voices on the cable news outlets because people are still watching for the moment. But to the extent that we can be producing our own video content, whether it's a sit down show where people are talking or something that I think is more effective with certain audiences, putting together short two to three minute videos that illustrate a policy area, in a way, you know, graphically enhanced way that attract these younger audiences that are not likely to watch a couple of talking heads, even though you guys are very interesting talking heads, that maybe they're not so into news that they would want to watch a couple of talking heads. But if you show them something that had some cool graphics and made one solid point like, you know, we should not have the United States should not be paying for so many military bases overseas. And here's a graphic to show you how much money we've been spending and why we think this is a bad idea all in three minutes. I think those sorts of things are going to be very effective moving forward into the next, you know, 10 to 20 years. Well, then I just see it even more democratized media environment and more people saying fake news all the time. Everyone's getting it through their own little personal news feeds. And everyone can make videos these days. It's, you know, I mean, I think we make good, you know, high quality produced videos, but people watch videos that are not highly produced that someone shot with an iPhone that it is very democratized because, you know, iPhones and that sort of technology has made video production extremely easy. So we're going to have more competition. And that's when our marketing people also in my department need to figure out how do you track those eyeballs? How do you rise above all that clatter? Well, the interesting thing there is, you know, for a long time you've had institutions of trust that, you know, when Kato particularly like when we first started out, you know, that the New York Times would quote us or we'd go on NBC nightly news when that was one of the only three or four, including PBS, you go on that validated Kato and hopefully we have enough institutional capacity now that we sort of validate ourselves. But when when those go away, if people don't trust Washington Post or New York Times and it doesn't really matter, or do you think that will happen? Do you think that will even be untrusted? Yeah. I mean, I think you're always going to find someone that tries to detract from your message saying, OK, well, you can't you can't believe the numbers the Kato Institute is giving you because, you know, they're only saying that because, you know, donor A or donor B told them to, which is not true. And any good reporter investigating how we came to a point of view would find that we did not come to that point of view because of any sponsor of this organization. Doesn't matter. I mean, someone can still accuse us of that. And they can accuse any organization of that. They can accuse, you know, the Fox News Channel of doing everything that Rupert Murdoch wants for Washington Post or the Washington Post of, you know, carrying Jeff Bezos's water. If you research all the articles that they wrote and determined how many were in favor of a Bezos position, which I don't know how anybody would know that, it would probably be wrong. But you can just ask Alexa. She will tell you the truth. But, you know, it's once the accusation is made, a lot of people are going to buy that and say, oh, yeah, well, of course, they're only being led around by whoever's funding them. So there's always going to be those kinds of criticisms. But I think that they're really the smart people that do actually look at our research and read it thoroughly and say, OK, well, I see how they came to that conclusion, conclusion based on that data. I mean, those are the people we really want to reach anyway. There are a lot of people out there that just are never going to be convinced that we're right about anything because they've decided that they hate our position on immigration or they hate our foreign policy. So it doesn't really matter what else we say, they've just decided they're not going to agree with us. I think that's unfortunate. But those people, I think we need to kind of just dismiss and go after the people that we can convince. Then within all of this, are there particular challenges? Because what we've talked about so far would be potentially best practices for any organization doing the kind of thing that we do. So any think tank could learn from that. But are there particular challenges as a libertarian think tank getting out a libertarian message when communicating to people like they, you know, so the short videos that explain a single point. And I'll just by way of example, like one of the things that I notice is the difficulty because we don't have, we don't have a team. I mean, that, you know, there isn't, we aren't the Democrats, we aren't the Republicans. It sometimes is easier to frame yourself and frame your idea in opposition to. So, you know, here, like, we don't want to be like those guys, so therefore we're like this. Or you want to be like, you know, we, we are part of this group that you like. And so that's why our idea, you know, we're going to tell you what this, this group likes. And libertarianism doesn't have that. And it also is oftentimes our views flow from a more self-conscious set of foundational beliefs than the, the traditional conservative or progressive, which have kind of become just a grab bag of things that they hold onto that just have a delineator between them and the other guys. So we like this because we take this position because it's not their position, but there's not really any coherence to the overall arc of the views. Whereas we have like almost to understand our views in the first place, you have to say, okay, well, first we have to, you have to agree with us that human liberty matters. You have to agree with us that, you know, freedom leads to wealth, like these kinds of things, which is a bigger sell. So does this, I guess one way asking the question that is, does this move to, we have to be talking to these people, we have to kind of figure out how to shorten things up or make a single point. Is that harder for us than it would be for other people? Well, it's harder for us because like you said, we don't, there's no shorthand with libertarians with, you know, with a lot of other think tanks. The shorthand is this, this think tank is affiliated with the Republican Party. Well, most everybody knows what the Republican Party stands for. So they, they can very quickly make a judgment on what that think tank thinks or, you know, this think tank is associated with Democratic Party. Okay, well, I get that. Okay. And then we say, not only are we not Republican or Democrat politically, we're also not the libertarian party. We are not the, the entity that's backing a libertarian presidential candidate or they may have some views that are similar to ours, but we, we don't jump into an election, like elect, elective politics like that either. So that makes it even harder for them because everyone wants to know, okay, well, what horse do you back? Because I can make a judgment on what I think of you based on what political candidate you're backing. Well, we don't back any of them. Okay. Then now we have to go back to square one. What do you believe? And like you said, we believe in limited government. We believe that you should be free to do what you want to do as long as you're not hurting somebody else. So I think simplifying our viewpoint down to those specific things. You know, we think you could, you should be able to keep, keep more of what you earn. We think the government should stay out of your bedroom. We think the government should, you know, our government should pay more attention to what's happening here in the United States than having a lot of military adventurism. So, you know, I think simplifying our message like that, but then convincing people that a viewpoint doesn't have to be associated with a political party. And you don't have to vote Republican or Democrat every single time you vote. You can vote for Republican once you can vote for a Democrat. I mean, tying people to a political party for their entire life and telling them that if you have these five viewpoints, you are only allowed to vote for Republican for the rest of your life. I mean, breaking people away from that, I think is, would be a good thing. Aside from, you might have just answered this question, but aside from some sort of tips that libertarians or Cato policy people, you know, to do when we're communicating, what things do libertarians do when communicating that drive you crazy? They go, they, they frequently try to make a philosophical point. And what's wrong with that? I think this is why you don't do media. I think that philosophical points are very good on C-SPAN. If you ever do Washington Journal, because most of the people watching are very engaged and they're going to know what you're talking about for the most point. If you're on the PBS News Hour, also an opportunity that philosophy to explain how philosophy guides your viewpoints, that might work on the news hour, most other television broadcast programs, as soon as you go to philosophy, you've just lost half your audience. You know, they just want to know, are you, are you pro-immigration or anti-immigration? I keep using immigration as an example, but, you know, people get that. You've lost them if you try to explain the philosophical underpinnings that led you to that conclusion, which is unfortunate because they should care more. Problem is, they just don't. So, I would say we need to save the philosophy for a time that we've actually got somebody in the door. We've gotten them interested in, you know, a short video or a podcast or even, there's a lot of humor that can be used to drag people into a more philosophical conversation, but I don't think we should lead with that and sometimes they do lead with it. Thank you for listening. And if you've been listening to us for the last five years, you've heard the name Evan Banks a lot. Two hundred episodes. For over two hundred episodes, he's been our producer, the one who's made the show sound as good as it does, who's cut out our ums and pauses and missteps. And the times we spoke to him off air that you guys didn't hear. Yes. And Evan cut out that last question I just asked. Terrible or inappropriate jokes that could have gotten us fired. Yeah, like for example before we started recording this the first time, Aaron said greener pastors and we realized. I did. And we realized that people think Evan is dead. Evan's not dead. He's just no longer with Kato. Evan moved on to greener pastor. See now that Evan would have caught that. Evan would have caught that. And Tess did catch that of course. So he's not dead. He's not dead. He's moved on to better things. He's on to other things and Trevor and I just wanted to thank him and encourage all of you to thank him. Evan has been a tremendous asset. The show would not be what it is without him and he would be missed. Thank you Evan. Thank you. Free thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoyed today's show please rate and review us on iTunes and if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org