 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Uptigrove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. Good afternoon, everybody. On behalf of the LBJ Foundation and more perfect, welcome to day two of Trust News Democracy. As we continue to examine our fragmented media landscape and the propagation of misinformation and disinformation, there are adverse effects on our democracy and offer solutions for a stronger, healthier media ecosystem. Thank you all for being here, and thanks to our participants, many of whom you'll see today, including our presenting sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation, Donald E. Graham, Lucy Johnson and Ian Turpin, and Linda Robb and family. Last night, we heard from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed by Kara Swisher and Larry Wilmore. Today, we'll continue the conversation with a remarkable array of practitioners, benefactors, experts, and advocates who are working to strengthen our media ecosystem. And we begin by hearing from one of them, my friend, John Bridgeland, the founder and co-chair of More Perfect, a bipartisan initiative to engage institutions and Americans in protecting and renewing American democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming John Bridgeland. Good afternoon. On behalf of the More Perfect Alliance, I too want to welcome you and the outstanding leaders working to address challenges in local, social, and national media. And I want to give special thanks to a wonderfully dynamic leader and partner, Mark Uptegrove, and his superb team, Dan, Sarah, and Hannah, and also thank our own team, Gary, Alan, and Maddie. If we can just bring the same energy the country's just brought to the solar eclipse, I think we could really have something. And it was really a striking and stunning program last night. The threats to our democracy can be paralyzing and make us feel like there is nothing we can do. But that's never been the reaction of Americans in times of crisis. Many efforts have emerged in the last few years, and I want to thank the founding partners of our More Perfect Alliance, the 31 presidential centers from Washington, Adams, Jefferson, through LBJ, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. And I understand David Kramer from the George W. Bush Institute and Janet Tran of the Reagan Presidential Center are with us today. Also, the National Archives Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Karsh Institute of Democracy, and more than 100 partners who are united and working together across an extraordinary big idea to advance five sustainable democracy goals, including access to trusted news and information. In the face of darkness, we can bring light. When our partner John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, saw the decline in local news, he didn't despair. He led an effort to create a roadmap and organized more than 50 donors to generate more than $500 million to launch Press Forward to revitalize local news across America. And with 20 local Press Forward chapters already underway just in the last few months. He is an example of someone who is moving a nation. When another partner, issue one, saw the negative mental, civic, and public health effects of social media, some of which we heard on the second panel last night, former majority leader Dick Gephardt and Alex Fraser formed the Council on Responsible Social Media to bring accountability to these platforms and organize that amazing bipartisan Senate hearing you probably saw on your television screens with energy to move concrete legislation. When studies showed students had little understanding of our democracy, our partners, Louise Dubay of iCivics founded by Sandra Day O'Connor and Harvard's Daniel Allen, stepped up to ensure seven new states, now 48 out of 50, have civic course requirements in high school and teachers have an educating for democracy roadmap. When one of our co-chair Stephen Hines, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund saw the decline in participation in civic institutions, he unleashed a new trust for civic life to support rural and small towns where civic connection is so desperately needed. When we all saw the threats to our elections and election deniers running for office in the midterms, more perfect supported efforts in battleground states to build understanding of how elections actually work, the checks and balances to avoid error and fraud and to challenge candidates to accept the election results and agree to the peaceful transfer of power because of the work of so many organizations, leaders and institutions and those heroic secretaries of state and election officials, candidates for secretary of state and governor who were election deniers lost in the midterms. And when another one of our co-chairs, General Stanley McChrystal, saw the power of large scale national service to heal a divided nation, we were able to work with the White House on a new American climate core and the president just put an $8 billion plug to support it and with Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican and Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat on major expansions of national service opportunities for young Americans in states. These are all hope spots upon which we can build. Our country has always been divided. At the beginning we were even exclusionary, but we've repeatedly transcended our differences to create a more perfect union. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin who of course worked with President Johnson reminded us at the launch of more perfect that all transformational change has been initially catalyzed from the ground up, often from leaders with no political platforms such as the citizen soldiers of the revolution, Americans who cared about a place and helped make it a national park, leaders who ushered in the civil rights movement and all of us here today committed to increase access to trusted news and information so vital to a healthy democracy. It is now my pleasure to introduce one of those catalytic leaders. I first met Sonu Shah when she was director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and her career has been a story of entrepreneurship and innovation. She worked at the US Treasury Department on programs to support Sub-Saharan Africa, helped design post-war banking systems in Kosovo and Bosnia and helped shape a US response to the Asian financial crisis. Everyone seems to want to hire her with Stinson Coleman Sachs, Google Center for Global Development in Georgetown University. She was the founding president of the Asian American Foundation which launched with more than $1 billion in support. She's one of the kindest, most compassionate, the most extraordinary human beings with whom I've ever worked. Please warmly welcome the CEO of the Texas Tribune who will tee up our discussion of the challenges and opportunities in local news, Sonu Shah. That's it? Come on. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to be here. I'm gonna walk through before our first panel to talk about trust news and democracy. And my goal is to give you a little bit of just some statistics of what to look at and to think about what are some challenges we face ahead, but where are the opportunities and what more should we be thinking about as we think about the next 10 years, not just the next two years, but the next 10 years. So, let me see if I can get this right here. On the, where are we today? Let me start with trust. Since our conference is trust news and democracy, let me start with trust. 32% of the public, according to a Gallup poll, has great deal or fair amount of trust in media news reporting today. 32%. 39% have no confidence in news media whatsoever. Now let's look at Gen Z. Only 3% have a great deal of trust in news. And only 13% have quite a lot of trust in news. Gen Z has even less trust than the general public. But let me break that down a little bit more. 22% of the Democrats who, Gen Z that identify themselves as Democrats have trust in news. 8% who identify themselves as Republicans. And 10% for those that identify as independents. But do you know what they do trust? They trust science at 71%. The younger Gen Z, which is from 15 and under, trust institutions, particularly the military, the medical system, and the police. Let me talk about news. We know a lot of these statistics, but I just wanna make sure we have all the data here. There are only 1,766 counties in the United States that have local news of 3,143. One third of all newspapers will close at the end of this year. And the newspaper employment in the industry has gone from in 2022, it's 106,000 compared to 365,000 in 2005. But the landscape is changing. There are two times more nonprofit newsrooms today than there ever have been. So nonprofit news is growing. The trust in local news is 14% higher than national or regional news. And 73% of all news organizations believe AI presents new opportunities. So let me talk about democracy. According to the Pew Research study, 42% of Americans believe that the American political system needs to be completely reformed. 83% feel like government doesn't care about what they think. And amongst younger people, especially those in 18 to 35, only 57% globally feel that democracy is preferable to any other form of government. We take those two combinations of the number of people that trust the government is looking out for them and the number of people feel that democracy was preferable to any other form of government. We have some challenges, but let me put out some of the opportunities at the same time. According to a Tufts University study, 76% of the youth surveyed believe young people have a power to change the country. 77% believe there are ways for them to get involved. That is an opportunity to engage a generation that is looking to be engaged. We can talk about not wanting to be engaged, not voting, but they're looking to get engaged and there is an opportunity there. The night study shows also that trust is local. 67% trust local government to solve problems. Six in 10 Americans say they have more trust in local news than national news. And eight in 10 Americans trust local news to give them the information they need to get involved in their communities. So the question is, how do we harness this energy and help empower people to want to get involved and stay connected? And there's places where we can learn. When you look at science, the scientific industry also faced a lot of its challenges, but they decided to think about how do we become more democratic in our approach to science? They created citizen science. Many places, not just in the United States, but around the world, they've given you ways to test your own water. They've given you ways to participate in science, whether it's through small experiments, whether it's in schools, whether it's in other places. Local governments are testing citizen assemblies, allowing citizens to come into communities and hold their own assemblies. City councils are doing participatory budgeting. This is such an interesting idea started in Brazil, but it's been happening across the United States. The idea that citizens have, they can take a budget, a portion of the budget, and they can allocate where the communities want their budget to be spent. So it's not just the government doing it, it's actually citizens actually choosing where their money would go. So then what can we do differently in the news industry? If the problem we're trying to solve is providing timely, accurate, and trusted information to the public, there's a series of questions we might wanna ask. Who is the public we are trying to serve? How does the public wanna receive information? Not just today, but 10 years from now. And here I wanna put this, just remember, 10 years from now, a child who is 10 years old will be 20. They will not know a world where generative AI does not exist. Keep that in mind, 10 years from now, a child that is 10 today will not know a world where generative AI does not exist. So how will we behave differently with AI today in order to prepare for where the future is going rather quickly? And what will news be? How do we want it to be? So I ask three questions as we go into the next panel. Thank God I don't have to answer them because I'm not on the panel. But the questions I would ask is, how can we think about being more democratic? Can the news provide public participation in the news? What does that look like? How might we do that? How do we train AI to build trust today? We can easily think about AI and talk about all of the things that are not working. But the question I might ask is, what do we do today to build that trust? How can it work with news organizations to help engage and build trust amongst readers, amongst those who come to us frequently, but also infrequently? And what are ways we might do that? And what if local news created belonging? If we did that, could we engage more people to want to participate in changing the communities around them? If 77% of young people believe they can do something, how do we harness that energy to do that today? So that's the opportunity I think we have, but these are some of the hard questions we have to ask ourselves as to what do we want, especially local news to look like for the future, for a generation that is dramatically changing in a state like Texas where the demographics are younger and skewing younger, how can we engage communities more effectively? So with that, I'm gonna leave the hard questions to the panel. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sarah Beth Berman, Lolly Boine, John Palfrey, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, and Evan Smith. Good afternoon, and welcome. I'm Evan Smith. I'm a senior advisor at Emerson Collective, one of the country's largest funders annually of nonprofit journalism, and I'm the co-founder and former CEO of the Texas Tribune. I was Sonal Shaw's warm-up act for 13 years. I'm very pleased to welcome you to the first panel of the day on promising solutions to the challenges of sustaining vital local news outlets. As Cara Swisher succinctly put it last night, no business, no journalism. If we embrace the premise of this event, that there's a connection between robust local news and a healthy society, that informed communities strengthen democracy, that giving people a reliable, credible, independent source of information allows them to be thoughtful and productive citizens engaged and empowered. The best civic versions of themselves, then we need functional models to enable this critical work. What we know for sure is that we can't do things the way we've always done them. We need to innovate, iterate, disrupt, and transform the way we think about the economics of our business. With me on this stage are four people who not only share that view, but are devoting their lives to addressing and solving that problem over the short and long term. First on my left is Sarah Beth Berman, the CEO of the American Journalism Project, the first venture philanthropy dedicated to local news. AJP makes grants to non-profit local news organizations around the country, supporting the successful launch of new enterprises and partnering with existing ones to grow and sustain their businesses. Over five years, AJP has raised $170 million and has supported 44 news organizations and incubated four startups across 33 states plus Puerto Rico. On Sarah Beth's left is Lolly Boine. She is a program officer on the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression Team, and she's been in that role since the winter of 2021, responsible for making grants in the US to support journalism and storytelling. Previously, she managed the media and storytelling portfolio at the Field Foundation in Chicago, where she put special emphasis on supporting local news outlets that served the city's marginalized and underserved communities. And before that, she spent 20 years as a journalist the last 15 as a reporter at the Chicago Sun Times. On Lolly's left is Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the National Trust for Local News, a non-profit community newspaper company dedicated to connecting people to the places they live. Founded in 2021, the trust has acquired and now operates 64 papers in three states. Previously, she was a senior research fellow at the Tau Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and before that, led news sustainability research at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Finally, John Palfrey is in his fifth year as president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of America's largest philanthropies. Consistent with its mission to build a more just and peaceful world by placing big bets on solutions to some of the most pressing social challenges, MacArthur has laser focused on the local news crisis by catalyzing press forward, an initiative that is secured upwards of $500 million in commitments over five years. Well, I thought the number was from more than two dozen funders, but it's now from 50 funders. Anyway, give these four a big hand. Thank them very much for being here. What an impressive group. Thank you all. So I wanna start out asking a big picture question of each of you. Let's start with Sarah Beth. We'll go down the panel. Talk about the problem you're trying to solve and talk about your thing, the way you're trying to solve it. Sarah Beth first. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you to more Perfect and the LBJ Library for hosting us today. To your question, Evan, we were founded five years ago to address the market failure in local news. You heard Sonal talk about it, but I think some of the facts are worth repeating. Over the last two decades, the American newspaper industry has been in crisis. 2,300 newspapers have shuttered, 60% of journalists have lost their jobs. On average, we continue to lose two newspapers every week, and the research on this is very clear. It matters. Studies show that when communities lose a local paper, we see voter participation decline. We see civic engagement decline. People become more polarized. Instead of turning to their neighbors for a sense of connection, they turn to cable news and social media. And so we have come to believe that the crisis in local news is a crisis that is necessary to resolve and that this is fundamentally a business, a market failure problem, a business problem, and that we have to find a sustainable solution to uplift new news organizations across the country that can play the role that American newspapers used to play. And what's been thrilling is that there is an emerging new generation of news organizations across the country. The Texas Tribune is one of them, is one of the leaders of them. We now support 44 news organizations across 33 states, and all of them are really ushering in a new way of how you think about supporting local news. They think of themselves, and we think of them, as civic institutions that we support in the same way we support our libraries, our museums, and the other institutions that stitch us together. So our role is we work with philanthropy all across the country to bring in more philanthropists to prioritize this issue, and then we take that capital and we invest in supporting organizations to build the business and revenue capabilities they need to become sustainable over the long term. Yeah, excellent, and again, 170 million over five years committed to this purpose or raised for this purpose, fantastic, and transformational in Texas and elsewhere. Lolly, talk please about Ford. I have had the good fortune to get to know your big boss, Darren Walker, the head of the Ford Foundation, who is a graduate of this university, very proudly, and who has been an enormous supporter of journalism around the country. Talk about how you think about this set of issues, the problem you're trying to solve and the way you're solving it. Absolutely, thank you again for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. Before I answer your question, I'm gonna issue a little correction because I spent more than 20 years at the Chicago Tribune, and as journalists, we like to get it right. You said the Sun-Times, the competing paper. The paper cost the street. I'm going to go to moderator jail, actually, over this mistake. It is a distinction. Right, fact check. Fact check, because journalists, we like to get it right, and in case anyone in the audience decides to look into it, they'll know it was the Chicago Tribune. But no, to answer your question, as you have pointed out, yes, the Ford Foundation has long been invested in journalism, and that's in part because we know that good journalism is vital to a good and strong democracy. As Sarah Beth has said, when people have news and information, then they are empowered to go out and make stronger decisions for their lives. We know that. We also know that journalism is a route toward justice. Last night, Woodward and Bernstein reminded us that when journalists are doing their jobs and when they are actually revealing the truths of what happens, when people get that truth, they are mobilized to take action. Now, when Sonu told us that there are newspapers that are closing down every week, every month, every day, I understand that for all of us in this room that can compel strong feelings of nostalgia, because so many of us, we woke up in the mornings and we saw our parents reading the local paper. So many of us woke up and turned on the radio and tuned into mainstream media and mainstream news, and that was a part of our ethos. That was a part of our daily hygiene was getting our news from these outlets. But I have to remind you that many times, those outlets were not reflective of our full and broad communities. And so while there are some of us who were able to open up the paper and get our news and get journalism and get information that was vital to our lives, there was a large bit of the population that could not. And as a result, they were not in this relationship with their news outlets. So at the Ford Foundation, we have identified that as one of the central problems. It's not a problem that we identified yesterday or the day before. It's been a long-going problem. It's been a problem that was identified by the Kerner Commission more than 50 years ago. And so our journalism investment strategy is really to pour into journalism outlets that are serving those communities, right? And that is specifically because we know that when we pour into those outlets and that we are pouring into those communities, that the other outlets take note, right? And so when they see that we are uplifting an organization like the Texas Tribune, we see that the entire media ecosystem is responding. We see the ripples and the waves in more communities being covered. We see that when the Texas Tribune is covering the statehouse in the way that it should, well then other papers that have pulled back on their coverage, other news outlets that have pulled back, then get compelled by the competition to step in there and offer some more coverage. So that's kind of the central theme of how we're our investment strategy. It's looking at communities that have been historically overlooked, historically marginalized, both by the mainstream media and by philanthropy, and ensuring that they have their news and information needs met. Now this is an interesting proposal that we are engaged in, our interesting work that we're engaged in, because right now, as you all know, there is a local news crisis that's impacting so many communities. Well, by investing in organizations, some that Sarah Beth is working with, like MLK 50 in Memphis, Tennessee, like the Texas Tribune, one of the things that we are learning, one of the opportunities that has been presented to us is the opportunity to learn from those organizations that are reaching those communities that are doing the work on the ground and that are building newsrooms in a much different way than the newsrooms of the past. I love that. Elizabeth, talk about the National Trust. Yeah, so the National Trust for local news, we were founded to solve the problem of preventing the spread of news desert. So, you know, Sarah Beth so beautifully encapsulated the real crisis of the newspaper industry. And I think there's a, you know, there's kind of like a glass half empty perspective and we have a glass half full perspective. So we look out there across the landscape and see 6,000 newspapers still in operation in this country. We see 4,000 of those papers that are still independent, still in family hands. Many of those have owners who have served their communities for decades with titles that have been around, in some cases, for centuries. And they don't have a path forward in this environment. And those news sources in so many communities, those tiny newspapers are really what is standing between their communities and a total information blackout. So, you know, for example, in Texas, 250 counties, 29 of which complete news deserts, no remaining source of local news. But 131 of those counties still have a county paper. And in counties all across Texas, that paper is owned by a family owner who doesn't know what to do next. They don't want to sell to Alden. They don't want to sell to a politically motivated buyer. They don't want to shut their paper. But they are out of time. They are out of capital. And their communities love their papers, but there is no room for investment, no room for growth. And, you know, and fundamentally our diagnosis of the crisis in local news is that, you know, at the metro level, yes, it's a business model problem. At the community level, it's actually an ownership problem. These owners would hang on, but for the fact that they don't have investment. So, our approach to the business model problem is to acquire papers that still have revenue, still have audience, still have margin, and put them together in a way that realizes some efficiencies of scale, but also under ownership in the trust that is looking out for the sustainability of local news in small places for the long term. So, you know, we're not a metro news strategy. We have no interest in, you know, buying lost in American statesmen, but we have an interest in communities that are, you know, 250,000 people and fewer. And, you know, as we were talking about this morning, you know, there are 3 million people in the state of Texas who live in those rural communities and they are vital to democracy. So, you know, we're not willing to throw up our hands and give up the fight and say newspapers are over. We see a path forward. John, the MacArthur Foundation has a long history of supporting journalism. I think I pointed out to you when you were here in September that I knew the middle initials, John D and Catherine T, because growing up on public broadcasting, I would hear support of the MacArthur Foundation in full name and I was like, I know the middle initials as a kid. So, you've been in this conversation for a long time, but over the last six months, you've really accelerated, supersized your involvement on this. Evan, thank you and let me start with just to thank you to you personally for the leadership you've shown here in Texas. I think you're an amazing human being who's truly made this, made so much possible through Texas Tribune and otherwise and to the amazing co-panelists that, you know, one of the reasons that we at MacArthur are so excited by this moment in local news is the entrepreneurship we've seen, both from those who have been journalists and leading the way in philanthropy and then Elizabeth Sarabath and others who are just showing the way on this. So, I'll come back around to that, but part of it is we are on a solutions day here in the midst of an actual crisis, but there are things to invest in and they're amazing and I'm definitely with you on that glass half full front. But back on the crisis for a second, MacArthur has been funding journalism and media for our whole history, mostly public media, independent film, making sure that diverse newsrooms are made more diverse and covering a broad set of communities much as Ford has been doing so well. And we reviewed this a couple of years ago and what came back was you have to keep doing it. It's really important and you're a really important funder in this, but also was there's this huge crisis in local news, which we have now been seeing. And our staff who are working that said yes and, right? They basically said, yeah, we got to keep doing this and if we start, you know, divesting in these other areas that'll be a problem. So we increased that budget, but then we basically said, we are going to double what we're doing in journalism and media, in particular in local news over the next five years. And we're going to invite others in because when we did the math, so MacArthur's got a lot of money, but even if we put hundreds of millions of dollars additionally in on top of the hundreds of millions that we were planning to do, it wouldn't be enough. There's too many places in America. There are too many great things that are undercapitalized. There's a need to do this. And doing the math, we couldn't do it alone. So we put an invitation out basically and I've been on a whistle stop tour with others here. Ford quickly jumped in, which was awesome. Lolly and Darren, and as you noted, we launched with 22 different funders, a half a billion dollars in September. That is good, but we are now up to 57 funders. We are substantially bigger, well over 500 million dollars committed nowhere near enough yet. But the point is by coordinating, by working together at a national level and also importantly, a local level, we can do so much more. And so our call at the moment is pleased to join us. And as we've been doing this tour, part of it has been saying place by place, let's ensure that local donors are seeing this as something they need to do to sustain democracy in local places. So yes, there's gonna be national funders like Ford and MacArthur. There are gonna be national strategies like AJP and the National Trust. But what we really need are local solutions to this ultimately. So we started with zero local chapters in September. We had six in November. We had 17 as of February. We have 20 as of today. So across the country, we are trying to encourage local funders, community foundations, private foundations, families. And I think the bottom line message is, everybody has to pay for local news one way or another. Or else we are not gonna have a democracy. It's that simple. That's why we're part of more perfect. That's why we're here is that we all have to invest in that. So if your main thing as a funder is climate, if you don't necessarily have agreement on the facts about climate change, you need to jump into this. If your main thing is reforming the criminal justice system, you have to have agreement on that topic. If your main thing is your democracy funder, we won't have a democracy without this. So we all need to jump in and press forward is really a mechanism to do that, to do that both locally and nationally. So if I'm someone in a community and believes that we need more journalism, and I come to one of the four of you and say, come help us be part of a solution to this problem. What is it, Lolly, that you are looking for? I spent now the last 15 months on the road, traveling around to work with news organizations around the country after having been an operator. I'm now on the other side of that desk, right? And it occurs to me that we fund four things, at least four things. We fund mission, we fund need, we fund product and we fund leaders. Depending upon where I go, one of those might rise to the top of that list. I'm wondering what it is for you that motivates you to notice in a community there's an opportunity here. Yeah, thank you for that question. Because similarly, when I'm looking for or I'm receiving pitches and trying to decide on what organizations that we should be supporting, one of the first things that I'm looking at is that community and the relationship between that news organization, that media business and the community itself. One, do they listen to their community and are they serving this community in a way that the community has a stake in this organization's success? So that's one of the things that I'm looking at. Another thing, because our strategy is focused on serving historically marginalized communities, I'm also looking at the location, the geographic area. Are you in a rural area? Are you in an area that is a news desert that is completely underserved? Are you in a region where there are fewer philanthropic opportunities for your news organization to tap into? Are you in a community that is supporting the news, supporting the organization, but can't support them financially? So you have an email newsletter that's going out to thousands and thousands of readers, but when you ask for subscriptions, they're not able to subscribe, possibly because you're serving a lower income community. So those are part of the criteria. We look for leadership as well and who's leading the organization. We look for the content and ensuring that it's getting fat-based, accurate news and information to the public and that the information is available to the public for free. So those are some of the criteria. That's not all of it. I mean, Sarah, Beth, I know that you get a ton more news organizations seeking AJP support than you have the ability at the moment to support, you love to support everybody, but you can't. What is the differentiator for you? When an organization comes to you, what is it you're looking for? We are focused on figuring out how we build sustainable business models that can endure in the long term. We need to figure out how we make sure communities can have local news over the long term and that means investing in leaders that really understand what it takes to build these businesses, how to get in the hands of readers in the 21st century on their phones, in their emails, on TikTok, on WhatsApp, wherever readers are. So we need really innovative leaders and we also need to see a path towards how you build sustainable revenue and there's a lot of different revenue streams these organizations can pursue and we want to have a clear strategy for how to do that. We see these organizations expanding the number of philanthropists in their communities, going out and making the case to their community that if you care about the strength of your community, you should invest in local news. We see these organizations figuring out really smart appeals to their readers to say, if you care about the news product we are providing, you should care about whether or not your neighbor has it too, so join us, become a member, become a supporter of this organization. And then there's still advertising revenue out there, it's just far diminished because of all the market dynamics that we're aware of. So we support these organizations to become sustainable over the long term and we're very focused on making sure that they're going to be able to do that and that they have the leadership team that can do it. You know, John, this has become the liturgy of this space of late that if you've seen one nonprofit news organization, you've seen one nonprofit news organization, right? That they're all different by definition, every community is different, every organization is different, every set of leaders is different. And so what philanthropy can bring to the table to support an organization is itself different. There is no one size fits all in this, right? There sure is, Evan, you know, but I think part of it is it's America and that's partly what's amazing about it. Like we talk about diversity, this is diversity, we have communities of every type and every size and you know, across 50 states. And I think partly that means it's a hard problem to solve just as having a democracy across 50 states is hard, but also that lots of different things are gonna need to be supported in various ways. Ford's strategy is absolutely needed to be laser focused on marginalized communities where people are doing unbelievable reporting and absolutely what Sarah Beth is doing which is figuring out what works in specific communities, 44 of them comparing them, all that has to work. National Trust for Local News, crushing it in Maine, in Georgia, in Colorado with a different strategy ideally soon in Texas. These things are all gonna be necessary at the scale we have in America. The one thing that I would say joins all of these efforts and all of our country is there has to be a demand. There has to be the demand. So if the point is nobody is paying for local news, nobody's paying for it, there will not be any. And this is ultimately the sustainability question. So my number one message is whether it's individuals who are subscribing. And by the way, the money is out there. Think about how many people subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, but then don't subscribe to any local, like there's plenty of money going out for subscriptions. We just need to be sure that people are paying for news one way or another. There are ads that are being spent. There is philanthropy. There are events that Texas Tribune has. All of these things are happening. There is money there. The issue is we need a way to fund this. And I think the change, the change that is crucial is that we've shifted from a world in which these were great businesses to have the local newspaper was a great business in any community in America. It made the great fortunes of Knight and Annenberg and McCormick, right? It is now a lousy business. It's almost impossible to make money in it, right? So we've shifted where it's predominantly going to be nonprofit or low profit, right? And it is doable. You're showing how it's doable. It's harder, but it's doable on the low profit side. And the nonprofit side, you guys are showing that it's doable, but it's gonna be all of those things but it rides on there being demand and some degree of paying for it. It occurs to me, Elizabeth, that the polarization in this country, red America and blue America to just reduce it to its essence, lands you on the side of communities where they may not be as a default setting open to the idea that journalism is a public good, right? There are people in rural parts of Texas who resist the idea that journalists are honest brokers or providing something that is of value to them. You're in kind of a little bit of a different situation than some of us who may be operating in big cities. Talk about how you make that argument in those communities. So I think the fascinating thing is we don't have to make that argument in small towns and small communities and those of you Texans who live in those places, I think we'll understand this. Like the nationalization of media and the nationalization of polarization, like that conversation happens in big cities. When we go to small towns and talk to newspaper owners, like there's certainly controversy over like there's misspending at City Hall or the school board seems to not be making great decisions. But it's just a much different view of people's connection to each other and to their sense of place when you're in a town that's 250,000 people or 50,000 people or 10,000 people. So I would say like that premise of, journalists are the enemy and news is the enemy. I think that's a national conversation. That is not a community hyper-local conversation. The local communities in some ways local news is the antidote to that poison that is coursing through our veins. And that is what people in small communities rely on and that's why these small papers are so beloved because it's not about the national media. It's about high school sports. I mean high school sports in my business drives a ton of revenue and a ton of loyalty. And you know, and everybody, no matter how you vote on election day, like everybody cheers for the same team. Right, are the people in the communities you're serving Elizabeth willing, as John says, to pay for news? I mean this idea of paying for news comes in a bunch of different forms. You can subscribe or you can receive it for free but see the value of it and make a contribution in the form of membership. Regardless, people in your community see that, your community see the value of it. They absolutely do. So, you know, we are a $53 million earned revenue operation. Philanthropy is for investment and national operations, not locally. We have subscribers in small towns across the country. Now, are they paying like a Netflix level of, you know, monthly for their newspaper? No, they're paying a dollar, they're paying $1.50. But they are paying for it and that to us, you know, sometimes I get asked like, well, you're a nonprofit, you're buying papers, you're gonna drop the paywall. And I say absolutely not, absolutely not because that is a measure of community service. If people are willing to plunk down a dollar every week for their local paper, that means we're doing something right. And if we took that away, what signal would we have that we're reaching folks who wanna actually read what we have to say? Lolly, you've pointed out that in some communities that Ford has invested in, the people there don't really have the money to pay for a newspaper. No, absolutely. In some communities, people are making very difficult decisions. And so John is right. There are those of us who have our Netflix, we have our Hulu's, we have our New York Times subscriptions on our phones. But then there are so many communities where people are making very difficult decisions. And so we have identified that in those communities, people still should have access to quality news and information. And that's why dropping the paywall is important for us. And there are different ways that news organizations can show a connection to community. Sometimes it is through events, right? And so you have an event like the Texas Tribune has and you get many, many more people that come out physically in person that wanna be connected to the journalists that wanna be connected to the product, but don't necessarily have the funding in their own bank account to be able to give. But on the flip side, I do wanna say, because we have this opportunity and we are talking about solutions, that the other side of that is that the people who are able to support a news organization, the encouragement that I have for them is to dig a little bit deeper to support. And so it's not just support for yourself, it's support for the entire community, right? That it's not just supporting this organization so that you get your subscriptions or that you get your newsletter, but that you're supporting it so that your entire community can have access to it. And that's the public good. Yes, Sarah, but that's the thing that I heard myself saying over and over for 13 years was it's free to consume, it's not free to produce. And if you fund the ability to make it free to consume, you're doing a public service, not just for yourself and for your immediate community, but for everybody else. You've made a version of that argument too. Yeah, and the news organizations across our portfolio from Mississippi to Montana to Puerto Rico are making that case to their communities. That what they need is for readers to give what they can give and they need philanthropists to give what they can give and they hope advertisers will see the value in their product and they do. So that everybody gets access to it. So on this question of advertising and more broadly I wanna ask about earned income. Yeah. And I appreciate Elizabeth you saying you've got a very significant earned income business that you developed where you are. Some of us were at the Knight Media Forum in Miami a few weeks ago, maybe it's a few months ago at this point honestly. And the new head of the Knight Foundation, Maribel Preswazworth, said among many other things at that conference philanthropy is a revenue stream and it's not a business model. She was making the argument that we have to think more broadly as we look for solutions to go beyond simply expecting that philanthropy is going to pay the freight for all of the news organizations we believe should exist. We have to move toward models that include increasingly earned income alongside philanthropy. As you think about the organizations there about that you supported AJP where do you see the earned income piece? First of all, is it realistic for everybody in your portfolio to be out generating advertising or sponsorship revenue from companies or to be putting on events and how important is it for you as a funder that you see that diverse revenue pie chart? Because again, we're looking for what works. It won't work every place, but it will work some places. How critical is it for you to find places where it does work? What's critical is a business model that is enduring. ProPublica, some of you may be familiar with it. A thriving national nonprofit. For $43 million annual budget. If only we could have their annual budget. And you know what it is? It's all donations. And they have 40,000 donors. Some of them giving very small numbers. Some of them giving very significant. That is enduring. That is enduring. And so do we want diversified revenue? Absolutely. That is the path towards sustainability that can look like diversifying the number of donors you have. And it can look like diversifying the number of revenue streams you have. And what we need is to be really smart about building businesses that diversify their revenue to different streams and within those streams. And we're seeing lots of examples of organizations doing that. But not the same. Not the same. There is no one-size-fits-all. Is it important for you as you look to support newsrooms or communities where they need more journalism and you're going to invest in helping a press-forward local chapter stand up? Is it important that those organizations supported ultimately show you they've got a path forward? Absolutely. I mean, there has to be- You're only really sort of committed for five years for now with the entire initiative. At some point, people need to take the baton. Yeah, so absolutely. There has to be a sustainable plan. That is going to look different in different communities, depending on the makeup. And this is where I think the portfolio approach of donors with Ford's can take one of you. McCarves can take another, let night, another, and so forth. I think an essential piece of the puzzle, but it really isn't always going to be the same. And I think the shift that I would love to see is that we think about local news the same way we think about arts and culture, the way we think about a hospital, the way we think about a university like this one. This university could be a great university on tuition and whatever, earned revenue only, but it's a truly great university because philanthropists have stepped up, right? Because others have said, we're going to do something really remarkable about a state flagship for a variety of reasons, also state money and so forth. We're going to invest in our true R1 university like this one, hospital, same thing, right? Community hospitals, you can charge something for it, but to get truly the care that you need and to be a safety net hospital and so forth, sometimes you need the state, sometimes you need philanthropy. Arts and culture the same way. Think about a symphony. People do subscribe, people do sponsor and whatever, but you're not going to get the great conductor, the great first violinist if you don't actually have philanthropy. I think we're getting to that place for news. Some places are going to absolutely thrive in the systems these guys have set up. Others are not, but if there is no demand, if there's no traction, if they're serving five people or nobody wants to read it, we're not going to invest in that. So even though it is the case that we're going to say some places are going to have more earned revenue and some we have left, if you don't have any traction and you're just serving yourself as a journalist, you got to get over that, you're not going to get philanthropic funding and I think there's a little bit of that and that's partly why I'm trying to shift both donors to think differently about local news and how we approach it, but also on the demand side for journalists to say you absolutely have to provide the need, the community connection, and so forth. Yeah. Please, Lolly. Because it is, it becomes a yes and no how deep philanthropy should be in funding journalism organizations because if you rely so much on earned revenue for historically marginalized communities, that means that they would not have the quality of journalism products. Philanthropy just has to be in the room and playing a large role in it. When I talked about earlier about newspapers not being reflective, it shouldn't be lost on the audience or on us that on this stage of three women talking about journalism and 20 years ago this picture would be a lot different, right? But if we had to rely solely on women to fund journalism, then that means that we would not have the papers, the podcasts, the materials that we have today in part because philanthropy has ensured that there's diversity in journalism. Lolly, let me ask you, as someone who had a career on the for-profit side of our business, you wrote for the Chicago Reader, right? Is that right? See what I did there? Yes, that's a callback to my earlier mistake. We haven't talked about the for-profit model for producing the kind of journalism that our communities need in any of the minutes we've been sitting on this stage. Is the for-profit model a foregone conclusion that it's just gone? I mean, I know. I mean, we are a hybrid nonprofit for-profit model. So we fundamentally believe that it's not the business model that's broken, it's the ownership model that's broken. And as a nonprofit owner, we can use philanthropic dollars to invest in creating businesses that still have margin and we think will have margin for quite a while. I'm all for that, but I'm really asking is, are the traditional models of for-profit journalism, the big city newspapers, for instance, which we're not talking about. Those are done. It's not coming back. The for-profit metro newspaper days, I think, are over. I think we can say that. So you agree with that? I mean, I'm nostalgic for many things. I'm nostalgic for a day when those papers were functional from an economic model standpoint. I'm not sure that they are now or can be. Again, I don't want to write them off, but maybe I'm being too nostalgic. I think the data is very clear on this. The American newspaper industry in metros, in that many of us grew up reading, those papers are hugely diminished and the market conditions do not allow them to come back. Pour one out for the old newspaper business? I want to. I'm gonna try. It is the case, no question, that basically the business model for big metros is done. And as I mentioned, I think we really have to shift from thinking about this as a for-profit to a nonprofit or low-profit business. But I think there are interesting models at the big city daily level. So Philadelphia would be one example where Lenfest Institute as a nonprofit holds in trust Philadelphia Enquirer, right? That's a different model. And then I would call out Chicago, which I've refrained from being all about Chicago here in Texas, but I'm gonna go with Chicago for a second. Well, you had a material hand in how that's gone. So, you know, part of our goal is to make Chicago a news oasis, not a news desert. And I think there's real opportunity there, great innovation. And one of the innovations is that Chicago Public Media, which is the big public media station, has acquired the number two newspaper that Lollie did not write for it, The Chicago Sun-Times. It was losing on the order of $5 million a year. It was donated from a for-profit to a not-for-profit. A bunch of us put $60 million into a pot, gave it to Chicago Public Media, and we're giving them five years to prove that you can do this, that you can actually have a nonprofit big city daily connected to a very powerful NPR station. We'll see, the jury's out. But, you know, two years in, they're hitting their marks, more or less. So I think there is a possibility that this is one of several models. But is it going to be the case that you're gonna actually have the Tribune, I'm sorry, competing with The Sun-Times in Chicago in five or 10 years? I don't think there's any chance of that. But you'll notice that both those examples, the word nonprofit was in there in a big way. I mean, we are not gonna see these be profitable engines. But, you know, the logical question to ask, we have about just two minutes left. The logical question to ask is if the model is broken and beyond repair, are these papers going to go away? Or are they gonna be ghost ships? Like, you know, in Texas, we have five out of 13 largest cities in the country. We were talking about this before we came up here, more than any other state, large population cities. Are the papers in those big cities, including Austin, simply going to sort of, you know, list along forever, indefinitely not go away, but just exist as a shadow of what they once were? Or are we looking at a situation in which there's an extinction event coming and these papers are gonna disappear? I mean, that's the question. Well, so I think on the big city metro front, as John was saying, we're seeing a number of experiments. There's like the billionaire buy it experiment. There's the billionaire buy it and turned it into a nonprofit, which is the Salt Lake Tribune example. A great example of a successful conversion. A nonprofit conversion. So I think there probably is room for nonprofit conversions. I think, you know, if you look under the hood of Gannett or McClatchy, there are some newsrooms that they've been able to maintain, some Metro newsrooms or they've been able to maintain some critical mass. And then there's a long tail of chain-owned ghost properties. But, you know, I would encourage us to like sort of think a little more broadly because of the 6,000 papers, you know, there are maybe like a thousand that fall into that category, but they get 95% of the attention. So I would like encourage us to like think harder about what this newspaper landscape looks like and how it can be a sort of asset and how there are experiments like the Chicago Tribune, like the Salt Lake Tribune, in figuring out what a different ownership model looks like. I also think it is worth saying that there are still journalists in those newsrooms that are doing incredible work. Under the most adverse circumstances as possible. Yes, and so I think that you'll see a transformation of old school mainstream newsrooms because some of those brands are gonna be able to hold the mayor's office accountable. They're gonna be able to hold the governor accountable. They're gonna get phone calls returned and be able to do investigative work that you are not gonna be able to see for some time with the smaller news outlets that are growing and getting bigger. So some of those brands that have been around for so long, they will be around not in the same form that we've traditionally seen them on the business side, but in transformed ways of being. How great it's been to be with these four significant leaders in our industry. Please give Sarah Beth Berman, Lolly Boine, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro and John Palfrey a big hand. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Brian Stettler, special correspondent, Vanity Fair and former host of Reliable Sources CNN. Good afternoon and thank you to our hosts today for bringing us all together on this lovely afternoon. I'm gonna set up our next conversation and bring up our next panel by framing the conversation about the national news media. We heard some tremendous insights just now about the local media environment and how to help communities feel seen and feel represented on the local level. Now we talk a bit about national. We have so much more in common than we have apart but sometimes, oftentimes, it is hard to see that. It is hard to see the commonalities. That's why I was thankful for Monday. I was thankful for earlier this week for the eclipse because the eclipse was a moment, especially here in Austin, but all across the country where people felt a sense of belonging. They felt a sense of community and commonality and it wasn't just the eclipse this week. On Sunday, the women's NCAA basketball championship, the country rallying around Caitlyn Clark and then watching South Carolina beat Iowa, outrating the men's final a day later, another moment of unity, of commonality where we have more in common. And I'm struck by those examples because those were national media events. The basketball games, of course, are more entertainment. They're more sport produced by different wings of major media companies, but the eclipse coverage was brought to us, number one, by NASA, by taxpayer-funded cameras, but number two, by the major American networks, the ABCs, the NBCs, the CNNs, and millions of people tuned in for that experience that brought us together. Of course, you know I'm saying that because I'm gonna turn in a darker direction in a moment, but it's important to recognize the news is not always bleak, right? The news can often bring us together, but as our co-host today, more perfect, as more perfect likes to say, America is trapped in a destructive loop of toxic polarization. Us versus them thinking is, quote, weaponized by purveyors of disinformation, division, extremism, and hate. We must break this loop. And that is a critical factor. The media is a critical factor in breaking that loop. We need a media culture that helps us see one another more clearly. It helps us see what we have in common. But oftentimes, we're getting the opposite on the national media level, especially for more partisan-oriented media outlets, especially hyper-partisan media outlets that exist mostly to sell rage and division. So let's survey the landscape for a couple of minutes before bringing up the panelists. This is a chart from an all-sides media bias chart. It's not perfect because no chart of this type is perfect. There's no really ideal way to chart and show the vast landscape of the national news media. But I appreciate this attempt because it does try to show the ideological spectrum that exists in all the different types of outlets at the national level that many of us are fond of, or fans of, or our consumers of. And I like to show this slide in order to point out some of the distinctions between the brands on the screen. And I think in some ways these distinctions are more important than the blue versus red that you see on screen. The New Yorker, for example, is over there on the left, listed with places like MSNBC and Salon. But the New Yorker employs some of the best journalists on the planet, allowing them to spend months, even years, to produce investigative journalism in conflict zones and in different areas around the world, also closer to home in New York and beyond. The New Yorker is one of the strongest journalistic organizations in the country. And I would suggest to you, there is no equivalent to the New Yorker on the right side of the screen, on the right side, where most of the coverage, not all of it, but most of it is about talk, it's about regurgitation, aggregation of other people's news. I'm up here in part because I wrote a book last year about Fox News and Donald Trump called Network of Lies. And I like to explain Fox News the following way. It is a small news operation and a really, really big opinion operation devoted to helping the GOP. That small news operation should not be ignored, it does exist, but most of what Fox does and most of what a lot of those brands do on the right side of the screen is not report the news, per se, but instead complain about other people reporting the news. Listen to take in what others are reporting and then complain about it, rebut it, debunk it, ignore it, et cetera. But this chart is helpful for that reason. It lets us think about what these different brands do and I would suggest another form of this chart would organize these outlets based on the amount of original reporting they do. Of course, perspective and analysis and opinion is important, it's critical actually to help people make sense of the world around them and we need outlets to specialize in the opinion form of media and journalism. But to me, the highest value add from national media outlets is that original reporting, the kind that you see from the New Yorker, the Atlantic, also places like Reason Magazine on the right side of that screen. As we talk about what divides us and what we have in common, I think we do have to recognize there are real divisions that partisan media reflects. Partisan media outlets are not simply ginning up these divisions out of nowhere. They're not simply exploiting something and creating something out into thin air. In other cases, what they're doing actually is exploiting what already exists. I think this is a really helpful chart from the Brookings Institution titled World's Apart, showing a real distinction between Americans who feel, quote, it's a big, beautiful country full of mostly good people versus those who feel our lives are threatened by terrorists and immigrants and others and we must prioritize protecting ourselves first. To me, that right there, that's the country's divide and pretty much everything else we talk about is mapped onto this chart. The presidential election maps onto this chart. Donald Trump's base of support maps onto this chart. Many of our conversations about media map right on to this chart. Open versus closed. What kind of society do we have and should we have? Open versus closed. And different part of the partisan media outlets speak to those different segments. Of course, the conversation today is about trust, about trust in media, about trust in institutions and how that impacts democracy and trust is also related to that previous chart. Trust in media is complicated and I always cringe when I hear people say that no one trusts the media anymore. There's no trust in media. Everybody distrusts the media. I completely reject that. Everybody trusts some form of media. It's just that some of my neighbors trust Fox and others neighbors trust CNN and it's very hard for them to communicate with each other because they're living in different media realities. One of which CNN involves a lot more original reporting and other Fox involves a lot more ranting and raving. I think this is a key point here about distrust and how it's not symmetrical. The rise of distrust in media has quote been largely driven by Republican distrust. Basically what we see in study after study is that Trump voters only trust explicitly to pro-Trump outlets. Everyone else is somewhat more dispersed. Think about Nikki Haley's campaign, for example. So many of these devised, by the way, they're within the Republican party. That's where the interesting divides are between MAGA loyalists and everybody else. Nikki Haley was making appearances on ABC's The View and other outlets trying to reach moderates and independents and Republican voters who are not fully in the Fox bubble who have been told for years to distrust the rest of the media. But that I think is key. It's being driven by Republican distrust. And of course, whether you're a Trump fan or a Biden fan or a fan of none of the above, when there is an emergency in your community, when there is a big event in your town, people generally do trust the news as it breaks. I happened to live right near the epicenter of the earthquake in New Jersey last week, and 99% of my neighbors on Facebook all believed it was an earthquake. All went on to find information, but the fact that most of us were stuck on Facebook getting the information is not an ideal circumstance. Again, one more chart here showing this divide between pro-Trump outlets and others. We see from PRRI, people who most trust far-right sources in Fox obviously favor Donald Trump, while people who most trust the mainstream media generally detest Trump. I bring this up because Trump is a proxy for all conversations about the partisan media divide. For as long as he is a political actor, he will dominate the conversations about the national news media. There's no way around it. We're here at the LBJ Library, at the LBJ years, people didn't talk about being anti-LBJ or pro-LBJ. Even in the Bush and Obama years, people didn't talk about whether you're pro-Bush or anti-Obama. That language literally didn't exist in our dialogue. Unfortunately now we're in an environment where everything is anti-Trump or pro-Trump. You have to choose, but you don't actually. We can reject this false dichotomy and we can end up in a better world in the future. But for now, Trump has told his fans to distrust every media source except for his personal favorites and the trick worked. Republicans have very, very, very little trust in any source except Fox Newsmax and OANN. Of course, this is the way Trump and some of his allies wanted, but it's incredible to see the skews here where you have Democrats and Democrat-leaning readers trusting almost every outlet more than Republicans do. There's one more chart to show before we bring up the speakers. Again, showing the divides this time based on age where Americans get their news based on age. We'd be remiss not to talk about Facebook and TikTok in this conversation and how younger people are more visually oriented. They want to watch more than they want to read. Look, Americans, this is an AP poll recently. They fought the news media for dividing the nation, but not all news outlets are created equally. Think about what America would look like if Fox News was not so dominant on the right. Maybe we'll talk about that during our panel now. So let me bring up the other speakers and the moderator. I'm Andrew Solchan, the editor in chief of the Texas Tribune, a veteran of the LA Times and the New York Times, Susan Page, the DC bureau chief of USA Today. Her third book comes out later this month. It's called The Rule Breaker, The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. And our moderator today, David Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and vice president of the Bush Presidential Center. I'm gonna be taking his questions along with our guests so let's give them a round of applause. These are deep seats. There, I hope I can get up. Brian, thank you so much for kicking us off and setting the stage. And I wanna say congratulations to Mark Uptegrove and the LBJ Presidential Library and also to John Bridgeland, more perfect for pulling this terrific event together. And it's a real privilege for me to be here. And I wanna jump right in with this terrific panel on restoring trust, responsible journalism and earning trust in a partisan media environment. We have a perfect panel to dive into this. And Susan, let me start with you with sort of a basic question. How do you think news organizations are doing these days in terms of restoring trust and what more could they do? Well, I think we're doing some things better. Not everything better. Not a problem solved, a problem still very much in front of us, but here are a couple of things we're doing better. We're doing better at covering politicians who tell lies over and over again and won't stop, which is not an experience, I think we had experienced before about 2015. And we have figured out some more responsible ways to cover that situation. For instance, the truth sandwich, which is now a policy at USA Today, which is that truth sandwiches, you tell the truth, you tell the lie, you tell the truth. So that no one can get to the lie without hearing the truth. So we wouldn't run a headline that said, Barack Obama wasn't born in this country, people say, some say. That is not a headline. We would say some people repeat a debunked conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in this country in order to force people to hear the truth, even if they're gonna believe the lie. That's, and I think just one other thing I think we've become better at, although there's a long way to go, we've become, I think, more transparent about how things work in journalism, about how you go about reporting a story, about how many people you talk to. And we've done a little bit more transparency about who we are, we've run little bios of reporters now so people can see who is reporting the news and decide whether they can trust them. So we'll same question to you if I can. How are news organizations doing these days? I think we've done poorly, to be frank, or rather we need to do a much, much better job. I see the crisis of trust taking several dimensions. First of all, in general, there's an erosion of trust in all kinds of authority. There's been an erosion since the 70s of trust in all kinds of institutions, even including the judiciary. Probably the militaries are most trusted institution. Even those numbers are moving. So first of all, I don't think it's unique to journalism. I wanna say that. But I do wanna say a few things. I think journalism needs to do a much better job of reconnecting ourselves and our work to the lives of ordinary people and communities. There's a lot of criticism of political journalism as too much focused on elites and too much focused on arguments and rhetoric rather than policies and lived realities. So I think that we need in journalism a bit of a rebalancing. Now I wanna be clear, I do think that journalism is worthy of Americans trust. And I think the bad faith attacks on our profession, on our institutions have really, really hurt. But I also think that the best way forward is not to merely assert trust, but show that we can be trusted. How do we do that? We need to be in a lot more communities across America. We need to encompass, when we say diversity, we need to mean diversity of every form. Of course that means including communities of color historically neglected in the news. But it also means people from military backgrounds, people from conservative communities were often themselves people of color. People from, and yes, people from conservative and faith-based perspectives, which I think we've done a poor job at. I don't think we've done a poor job because people are trying to exclude. I think rather it's a question of self-selection. Journalists have always been somewhat authority challenging. So perhaps there's a bit of a bias in terms of who goes into the field. But as our field became more and more professionalized, I think we lost some of our connections to ordinary people. When I started off in newsrooms in the 90s, there were still people, you know, there were working trades people printing the presses. And we frankly had that connection to the experiences of working people. Journalism became more professionalized. There's nothing wrong with having a master's degree. But we also have to make sure that there's space in journalism for people from a wide variety of socioeconomic, geographic, and life perspectives. I think that's one of the things we can do to advance trust. Brian, same question to you, but let me add an element to it. The proliferation of outlets. Has that had an impact on the level of trust that people have? And is it a sign that these outlets themselves don't have trust in what existed before? That's the main issue that comes to my mind as we talk about this. If you go from an environment where there are a few major networks and a few major papers and one for your town 20 years ago, and now you live in an environment that is completely different, that it's so radically different that most of us can't keep up. It's a wonder that, you know, that we're doing as well as we are. You know, because the fracturing, the fragmentation has happened in such a, you know, it's happened so quickly. It's a bit like the AI revolution. Our brains are not wired to keep up with the rate of change that is happening right now. And so when we apply that to the national news media, you are clicking on brands and clicking on links to outlets you have never heard of before, many of which didn't exist 10 years ago. And we're better off to have more of them, I think, because, you know, there's now more outstanding journalism being made, being produced in more outlets than ever before. But it creates a situation where we are all, forgive me for this image, I like the true sandwich better, it's yummier, we're all stuck at a garbage dump. And at the garbage dump, there's some treasure within the trash. There's actually a decent amount of treasure. There's a great little gold nuggets and antiques and heirlooms within the trash, but we're all forced to pick through it ourselves. And separate the trash from the treasure. To me, that's the environment of the media that we're in these days. When I was booted from CNN a couple years ago, which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, because now I'm a stay-at-home dad, I was at the county fair with my daughter, and I get an email from a fact checker who says there's a website out there that says you've been arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay. And I laughed, like you all did, because that's insane. But then a couple weeks later, the same website said I had been sentenced to death and then I had been executed at Gitmo. And then I started getting tweets from people that said I thought you were dead. And in that environment, that's the trash, right? And then Sewell's operation and Susan's operation is the treasure. And unfortunately, the pressure is now on everybody in this room and everybody outside this room to separate, Brian got executed at Gitmo versus your investigation about what really went wrong in Uvaldi. And to me, that's the environment that we're all in. It's very unfair, frankly, to the average American. I would just like to say I'm glad those reports are not true and that you are here with us today. I'm still here alive and well. You're still here, in case anyone was wondering and was questioning the trustworthiness of this panel. There's a survey that was done, I share it with you, I think you already knew this. The most trusted media organization in the U.S. these days, does anyone know what it is? It's the Weather Channel. Imagine if you could be most trusted and you'd get things wrong half of the time. PBS was next, BBC USA Today made that list. It was, I think, number seven or eight. What does that say about where we are, Susan? Well, we are in a sorry state. And it's taken us a long time to get here and it'll take us a long time to get out. I guess the Weather Channel is connected to their communities. It's giving you information you need to know and it's not putting a political spin on it. So I am not surprised that the Weather Channel is the most trusted news outlet. But we all need to aspire to some of the qualities of the Weather Channel in being connected to our communities, telling them things they want and need to know. And for doing it in a way that makes them not suspicious that there is some hidden political or other agenda behind the information that we're giving them. So there are some very notable news organizations on this list, I mentioned PBS, BBC Wall Street Journal is on here, Forbes, AP, ABC. What are they doing that engenders trust that some of these others are not? Yeah, so before joining the Texas Tribune I spent 20 years at Legacy Newspapers, The Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times. I think that right now, you shouldn't trust them because they've existed since the 19th century. That argument's not gonna hold with Gen Z or even anyone else. But you should trust them because they've got processes and procedures in place. I advise looking at the Trust Project or the Trusting News Project, these are two initiatives that try to explain why certain sources like USA Today, like CNN, should be trusted. They include, we publish letters to the editor, we correct errors when they are identified to us. We have a complaint procedure so that if you feel aggrieved or upset, you can go to someone and be heard of your argument. So there are a lot of procedural things that I think legacy media still have that make them trusted. The problem is that we're facing an unregulated tsunami on the other side. The person, 25 years ago, no one could go online and just say Brian Stelter was executed or Guantanamo. And what Brian says is absolutely true. There's a cognitive overload right now. And I don't see anything is ever all good or bad. Media was gonna become more democratized. Was gonna become more in some ways equitable. Everyone has a voice now in a perspective. The problem is that that fragmentation occurred without quality controls. And we can discuss section 230, the lack of regulation of the social media giants. But I also think the legacy institutions, I wanna stand up for them. The New York Times has a whole department of people committed to standards and ethics. Whether you think they've always made the right choices or not, okay? But they have a department of people. They spend so much resources, AP, USA Today, my organization, all of our ethics policies are online. All every person who gives a penny to the Texas Tribune identified by the amount online. So to me, disclosure, transparency are the new sources of authority and trust. Brian, missing from social media are editors. People who can check and verify things that are being written and claimed. But even some of the more mainstream organizations seem to be cutting back, particularly say on copy editing and things like that. What impact can that have on the level of trust? I think it can have a serious impact. I recently noticed my name was spelled wrong in my local paper and I laughed about it. But I can see how if that happens to you, you also might get a little bitter. You might not re-subscribe next year. You might let your subscription lapse if they can't even get your name right. Now my reaction was different. I thought maybe I should be a copy editor. Maybe I should volunteer. And I joke about that, but I think that's a real dynamic, right? We can either try to make these institutions stronger, either by subscribing, paying, supporting, helping out, volunteering, or let them slide a little bit further backwards. It's a game of inches, right? Trust in news is a game of inches. It's won a couple of inches at a time or lost a couple of inches at a time. And I know that there were days or weeks or months. I was on CNN where the environment was so intense and the volume was so loud that it was hard to win any more trust. I think we're in a political environment where if you try to side with reality and stand up for what is true, you're going to tick a lot of people off and end up losing trust from another direction. And there's only so much that news outlets can do about that. I did notice the list you read of outlets are outlets that Donald Trump never really targeted and doesn't often target. Maybe every once in a while. But he has his outlets that he wants destroyed. He wants Comcast to be punished for owning MSNBC. He vows to investigate MSNBC if elected. That kind of behavior warps the entire conversation up here. And I say that not in order to take away pressure from individual journalists, but just to recognize the limits of the media's power when in a political environment where the media has been designated the enemy. Now that said, can I tell a quick story about my time at The New York Times when Sol and I were there at the same time? When I would screw up in one of my articles, and my editor would call me into his office, the memory of those moments where, you know, just a quick little convo. Bruce doesn't remember any of those chats, but I remember every single one of them, right? Because being held accountable by your editor for misspelling someone's name or screwing up some fact, that sticks with you. And that's exactly how it needs to work. And so to your point, to the extent that there's less of that happening, to the extent that there's fewer of those editors, it does have a real impact. Susan, what more can the national media do to regain trust or do they just stick to their mission, which is reporting the news? Well, you stick to your mission, but you can't ignore the reality around you that fewer people believe what you're writing. Because that, you know, that doesn't, for mainstream news sources, like the ones that we work for, we need to have the trust of people to have democracy work. It's not the stakes here are not low. The stakes here aren't just whether we can have a profitable news model for the news industry. So we have to figure out new ways. And we are, I mean, one of the realities that we face are the disintegration of the way we used to finance the journalism we want to do. And this is the subject of enormous experimentation. And you see different ways on this stage of approaching that. I think that's probably a job one, figuring out a pay for journalism, not in one way, not one silver bullet, but having five or six different models that work. It would be a first step to doing a kind of journalism that can then regain the trust of people who have lost it. So Susan's point gets me to the business side of things and how that impacts the job that reporters do, editors do. What is the driving mission? Obviously you have to stay in business. You have to stay afloat. But is the goal to get as many viewers and clicks and hits, or is the goal to objectively report the news or is it a combination thereof? Yeah, I would argue in America it's always been a combination, right? Unlike Western Europe, we don't have a state broadcaster. We have Voice of America, but explicitly its mandate is overseas, not broadcasting domestically. I think a lot of us in this room probably have a lot of issues with having a state broadcaster, even though there's also arguments for it as well. The BBC is a very high quality source. Look, in the media we have to remember, I just take the long view for a moment, hyper-partisan media is not new. We had it in the early republic. We had it in the mid-19th century. We had the yellow press. We had scurrilous accusations that, I don't know about torturer Guantanamo, but we would, a lot of random stuff. Really, the idea of a professionalized press that cherishes notions of neutrality, objectivity and partiality, whatever you want to call it, really is about a century old. It goes back to the progressive era. It goes back to Walter Lippmann, the idea that our society was becoming more and more complex technologically, demographically and otherwise, that we needed actually, the original notion of objectivity was that we needed journalists to serve as kind of gatekeepers, where we would talk to experts, social scientists, natural scientists, and help interpret a more complex world for a public that was becoming more educated and more literate. I think that that goal is still very, very noble, actually, and I think that still very, very much needs to be preserved. But what we'll have to remember is that for the 20th century newspapers and broadcasters existed in somewhat monopolistic or oligopolistic situations. There was a much more centralized ad revenues, right? And so the golden age, if you want to call it that, and it was not really a golden age, but I can talk about that in a moment, but like, you know, Cronkite was subsidized by national, you know, Procter and Gamble, whatever. And it worked in the sense because you had the editors and the executives at CBS and elsewhere being that firewall saying, we are going to have the news division separate from the entertainment division devoted to public service. The FCC also had certain requirements because the public owns the spectrum. And of course, we had the fairness doctrine until the 1980s when it went away. And so there was this nice sense of public trust which still exists today at places like the New York Times. But even in my own career, the number of family-owned newspapers has really dropped, right? So you've got some family-owned papers left, but the majority of the nation's papers are now owned by chains, private equity hedge funds. And there's an interest misalignment. I'll say one final thing. In some ways it's been good for our business that our economic interests have moved away from advertisers partly because they went away and more aligned with customers and readers. That's not a bad thing per se because we want to be on the side of our readers. The challenge that can come in there is that if all of our readers are coming from one side of the spectrum or the other, there's going to be temptation to please them. And I think that's what we have to be careful about in separating news and opinion and being careful about, you know, not just giving readers what they want because sometimes they need to be told things they need to know, not just things they want to hear. And I think there is that commercial, you know, there's always going to be that intersection of commerce and principle. I don't think it's avoidable necessarily even at a nonprofit. But I think that the question is, you know, it used to be about making sure the advertisers didn't have too much sway. Now I think to be honest, it has to be about not just giving the readers the red meat that they want to hear or consume. Brian, dear, we had an in-house conversation yesterday at the Bush Center and a colleague of mine made the observation that the media don't report on the thousands of flights that take off every day and make it from point A to B. The millions of car rides that occur without any tragic accidents. It's the negative stories, it's the tragedies that the puppies that are rescued. The puppies, yes. Is there a tendency in the media to focus on the negative? I notice ABC is on here. And I wonder if, for example, like David Muir has these segments to the end, America made or America proud, something like that. Do those also resonate, but just aren't getting enough attention? Well, those segments at the end of the news rate really well, right? And those segments are there partly to get you to stay tuned to watch Jeopardy, which it always works, I always do. But it is also there as a palate cleanser because they know that the rest of the half hour is rather bleak. I think that negativity bias is something that is so baked in, there's very little that individuals or maybe even institutions can do about it because fundamentally the House on Fire is a news story and the other houses are not. But that said, I see a business market opportunity. I see a lot of market opportunities for startups and for new kinds of news outlets to come and fill in some of these blanks and come take advantage of what's broken about what we're describing. For example, imagine a startup news video operation that's made for mobile, vertical video, made for your phone, that tells you in a minute or two everything that happened today without trying to scare the bejesus out of you, right? That tells you you don't actually have to pay attention to this or that, but you should watch out for that. And speaking to you directly, person to person, on camera, that kind of content I think would resonate with a wide audience and would take advantage of some of the flaws of the existing national news media model. Right now we have an incredible amount of news fatigue in this country, partly because folks don't want to have a rematch between Biden and Trump, partly because they're disgusted by the state of the national political discourse, but that news fatigue is also a market opportunity for startups or individuals to come in and deliver news a different way. And we've seen a little bit of that, a good news outlets, people trying to do more positive coverage. It's difficult to create a brand just about positive news, because there's almost a contradiction within the phrase, but I think there is a real opportunity to break through that, look, I was part of this, right? I was on CNN for years. I loved nothing more when there were breaking news stories and we'd go wall to wall for hours. And yet I know you didn't need to watch every minute of that coverage, right? And for a million news junkies, it's great. But I have a feeling there's 10 million people who'd rather have what I just described to you, that little on camera moment. So you're entirely right. It's like people are yearning, I would argue, for context. So it's not about only doing good news stories or happy stories, you're right. That probably wouldn't feel very valid, but I also think we can't go too much in the other direction. Not every controversy is Watergate. Not every thing that, frankly, a politician utters is necessarily the biggest news of the day. We have to supply context. We have to dial back a little bit. And frankly, we might need to slow down a little bit. That's really hard in this age of instant-instant. We all get our emails in the morning. We all probably look at our phones at night. That kind of pace doesn't necessarily allow us to reflect a little bit. So I think one thing that news can do is not so much tell a happy story, but we gotta provide a context. How did we get here? How did this situation get to the point it's at? What are the players' underlying interests? Not just what the politicians say, but what they actually do. And I think, frankly, that calls for also more attention to public policy and not just electoral politics. And that's something that I try to do in our newsroom, we just stayed focused. Brian, can I come back to you before returning to Susan? You mentioned about the breaking news, the chirons that would come on. And breaking news, a tree just fell in Maryland. A lot of it just seemed like, really, this is breaking news. Right. The bridge falling is a matter of the different matter, yes. Well, the bridge falling is one of the few stories of the year that's actually worthy of that breaking coverage. And so there's been conversations that's seen in recent years about how high should the volume be, right? And we shouldn't be at the same decibel level at any given time. And I think that's true. I think my friends who were still there certainly feel that way and want to try to make sure the volume is relative. It's not always easy to do, though, in an environment or in a system, in a television infrastructure, where the banner on screen is the same size, whether it's a one or a 10. Right. There are structural impediments to some of these cable news structures. But I had an idea the other day that I shared with a colleague. I said, there should be a channel called breaking and a channel called Fixed, right? Like, there's broken news, and then we'll tell you about the fixed news. And if you want that raw feed, you can get it. It's all over X. It's all over what Elon Musk has done to Twitter. That kind of raw, is it real, is it true, that's available now all the time. The value add for traditional publishers and brands and networks is going to be the fixed news, the verified news. We're going to need, desperately in the next few years, as AI takes over everything, a kind of verification layer on top of the world to know what is real and what might not be real. And I'm banking on the Texas Tribunes and USA Todays and where I am now at Vanity Fair. I'm banking on those brands, being able to provide those verification layers. Well, in fact, that's what we're supposed to be. Yes. If you want to define mainstream media, it would be news you can trust that is put in some context that tells you what you need to know and tells you the bad news, but it tells you the good things that are happening or the responses to bad news that are encouraging. That is the definition of our mission. That's the old-fashioned print front page. And yet, nowadays, there's always going to be something that's going to grind our gears. There's always going to be some really stupid article out there that makes no sense, that's on your Facebook wall, that your mom or your dad or your brother sends to you. We have to accept, like, we're always going to live in an environment now where there's going to be a lot of that trash. How can we then amplify the treasure is my question. I'm going to ask the panel in the audience to indulge me in a pet peeve of mine, if you don't mind. And you're all on, this is about TV programs. But often, the anchors don't use the word program. They say, thank you for being on our show. And the use of the word show, it seems to me, suggests they are performing for their audience, not delivering the news. Does that contribute to this? Or am I making too much of this? Well, I think it's a little subtle. But maybe it does. I've never been accused of being this. Maybe it does betray. Maybe they are performing. And maybe show sounds a little more exciting than program. But I definitely, look, I've been guilty of this. The way I realized it at CNN was television and journalism is a Venn diagram. And sometimes when I was on CNN some mornings, if we're covering a space launch, it's really good television. But it's not the highest, most nutritious journalism. There's a little bit of journalism in it, but it's mostly a TV show. And then other days, we're not putting on a very good TV show at all, we're producing excellent journalism. So the dream is that the Venn diagram, that the middle is as big as possible, and you're putting on great TV that's also great journalism. But I do think all too often, it ends up just being a good show. I think it's an interesting point that you make, David. We have to always remember that our lingo as journalists is not like normal human language. And I always tell our reporters, when you go out in the field, journalism's not a huge profession. If you're talking to someone, you might be the first journalist or the only journalist they've encountered, especially if you're interviewing members of Congress, you're the 300,000th journalist they've encountered. If you're talking to someone in a small town, someone who suffered a tragedy, like a mass shooting or a natural disaster, my god. So you're representing not only yourself and your institution, but our profession. And I think that that means that the front line journalists of America are underpaid 20-somethings. They're trying their best, they're going into a profession that doesn't pay well, may not even be all that stable. But they're doing it because they care. And I think in doing it, they have to remember. And I think most of them do remember that journalism is an act of curiosity. It's an act of empathy. It's an act of open-mindedness. And I think we've gone to the field that way. And if we present ourselves that way, not as these arrogant, distant corporations, but rather people who are interested in telling truthful stories to inform America, we can start to rebuild some of that trust. And I think terminology is a part of that. You mentioned your truth sandwich. And it leads me to a couple questions. I'll start, though, with both sides'ism. Is that a good thing to do? Does it depend on the issue that's being covered? How important is it to get the other side's position or end the other side's position that you know is just reflecting inaccurate and false information? Well, I think the idea of both sideism is a terrible idea because it's over giving equal credence and weight to both sides of any argument, even one where one side is telling the truth and one side is telling a lie. However, it is important in your reporting and in your writing to reflect a diversity of points of view. Just there are things that are true and false, but there are a lot of things that are shades of gray. And it's important that you're sophisticated and nuanced in describing what a story is or describing various sides of it. But there used to be a very reflexive, I think, both sideism. And I mentioned earlier the conspiracy over Barack Obama's birth certificate. And I remember when that first came up, we had a debate about whether we should report on it because it seemed very fringy and we would give it more oxygen by reporting on it even if we labeled it as a lie. And then we realized everybody knew about it whether we were reporting on it or not and a lot of people were believing it. And so we started out by doing stories that would say, Donald Trump says Barack Obama wasn't born in this country, Obama says he was, right? That is the wrong thing to do because you can figure out who is telling the truth and who is telling the lie. And so you started to do tougher coverage like in your lead would say, Donald Trump is telling a debunked theory conspiracy theory about Barack Obama's birthplace comma which was Hawaii, right? So we've gone, I think, to a better form of both sideism that avoids the trap that we were in initially. Text-to-bune, how does it approach it? So look, you have to remember that journalism is still an art and a craft. And a lot of decisions editors make are not about including or excluding, it's not that binary. It's more about tenor, tone, completeness, fairness, robustness, the tone of a story. The framing really, really matters. And I mentioned that not to be too abstract. I'm gonna give a very concrete example. Probably 30 years ago there were stories where you quote climate scientist like Jim Anson and Noah who was warning about climate change back in 1988 about greenhouse gases. At the time there were a lot of climate skeptics and deniers. It would really not be legitimate now to quote a climate change denier that's absurd. However, it also doesn't mean advocacy journalism because what we should do about the human activities that are warming the atmosphere is extremely complicated. Should they be market-based incentives, international treaties? Should there be, how much pressure should be on car manufacturers? How much should there be an emphasis on personal consumption and changing our habits as Westerners? So it's like, it's not both sides but it's also recognizing as Susan said that the world is complex and gray. And to be honest, I think as journalists we have to recommit ourselves to that because at a time when people say outrageous things there's almost like an urge to like, well that is so mendacious that we're gonna go all the other way and not even entertain that. I think we get into a little bit of danger there. Like there's a lot of people who support President Trump for example, who asking them who are you supporting is not gonna get any useful information. But if you ask people what are their life experiences? What have they seen or experienced or witnessed in their lives? And how they got to where their voting behavior or where they are now, you might elicit some real stories and experiences about anything from automation, deindustrialization of people's perceptions that they don't see their lives represented in the media, that they don't feel they're getting dignity and respect from the media. Those are very subtle things. It doesn't mean it's justifying whatever falsehoods they might believe in but it also doesn't mean that we can afford to discount or overlook or just write off people who have, because they have those political beliefs we can't just write off what are the sum of their life experiences that led them to have those beliefs. Is that distinction that I'm making clear? Yes, absolutely. Brian, I wanna ask you, this picks up on where Sule was going. The rise of fact checkers. They're not editors, but there are people either in newspapers or on TV cable who after someone makes a statement then try to set the record straight. So the question is the importance they play but also is it better? I'm not saying this is better but would it be better to actually ignore those inaccurate statements that we made or do you then leave out what people need to know that so and so said something that's a lie? Gosh, I mean, we could spend an entire semester of journalism school debating this. The fact checkers are the true sandwich makers and we need more of them. We actually need many, many more, I think, right now as we enter this election cycle because there's so much numbness right now associated with political rhetoric that sometimes a lot of this stuff is not going checked. I have a couple of different minds on this because I've noticed lately, whenever something bad happens in the world and crazy conspiracy theories start to spread on X, for example, with the Baltimore Bridge collapse, I noticed news outlets rushed to write stories about the conspiracy theories basically to point at them and say ha ha, you crazy people. And I read those stories and I laugh but I do wonder if we're doing it as service sometimes of those stories. Let me go back to more perfect and this idea that most people, most people have a lot more common than we think. There are many more normies in this country than it can feel like when you're on X. There is a mostly usually silent majority that just wants to know what is true in the world. And by the way, that includes some Trump voters and many other Republican voters as well as a bunch of independents and Democrats and non-voters and people that don't care about politics. There's just a big wide world out there that you don't hear represented when you're on social media feeds and when you read these stories about the conspiracy theory of the day. You know, it's hard to have numbers around these things. It's hard to say what percent of folks subscribe to whatever Looney Tunes theory is out there on any given day. But I fear that there's such a thing as too much attention delivered and distributed onto those nutty ideas and not enough attention to us normal people. I, maybe I need to come up with a media brand for normal people. I guess it's called USA Today. I guess it already exists, Susan. But you know what I mean? You know what I'm getting at? This idea that how can news outlets, and I ask this as a question, how can national news outlets help let the average more reality-based voter be heard is a question. So we've only got a couple minutes left. I wanna ask each of you, how do you keep your lane straight? If you're invited onto a talk show, it's one thing if you're with a bunch of other reporters and I don't mean that disparagingly, you can basically analyze and talk about what you've learned in the course of your reporting. But what happens when you're on a panel with a Republican strategist and a Democratic strategist? How do you keep your lane straight so that you don't sway over into the opinion lane and risk undermining your credibility as an objective journalist? Well, if I'm on a panel with a Republican and a Democrat, it's easy because I'm the truth teller. In the middle, that's ideal. I love that situation. I do Fox News Sunday every month or two and I'm sometimes on a panel where it's with a Trump Republican and an anti-Trump Republican and me and then the real risk is that I wanna try to respond to what they're saying in a way that makes me the Democrat. So I think that is not a position I wanna be in and that's not a role I wanna fill. So here's my rule of thumb is do not say I think, say my reporting says that. And offer context and history do not offer opinion. Yeah, I agree with Susan. I mean, I don't do a lot of national politics and focus at the state level right now for a reason. But I think that, you know, I'm a traditionalist in the sense that I think it's not the journalist's role to go from chronicling, observing, bearing witness, reporting, covering into the realm of advocating a particular outcome, either a policy outcome or certainly an electoral outcome. And by the way, I think there's some critiques that we are worth listening to from both the right and the left. The right says, oh, you're just pretending to be objective. You're not really objective. Just come off your high horse. And some of the left say, you claim that, you know, you're not advocating an outcome, but aren't you then just justifying all this injustice and oppression that is unfortunately too often the status quo? I actually think both critiques need to be taken seriously. But I take them intellectually seriously, but I don't think that that should change the core of our journalistic practice. Like we are ultimately here to bear witness and to kind of describe history in real time and hopefully inform and improve our democracy in doing so. But I think the moment we make the leap into advocating what people should do and certainly what they should believe or what they should think, that gets into very dangerous territory. I was just writing down my thought on this as I wanna screw it up toward the end here. It was making me think about the morning in November of 2020, three weeks after Trump lost the election when he called his friend Maria Bartiromo on Fox, Maria Bartiromo who helps smear dominion and lead to that historic settlement. He called up to Maria's show and he lied and he said he had won the election and he said he was gonna win and go to the Supreme Court and all that. And I had to rearrange my entire show the next hour, sorry, program the next hour because, you know, in my view, the president was delusional and it was dangerous. And so to go on the air and say, this is sad, sad for the country, sad for Trump, where's his family, why won't they intervene? Those are statements that a journalist is not comfortable making usually and I wasn't comfortable making. I wasn't comfortable saying he's delusional and he's still in power. But I wanna defend the role of perspective journalism for 10 seconds. There is a value in having perspective journalism, analysis, a point of view, especially on television, on podcasts and on digital to have someone who you trust give you your sense of what has happened. There is real value to that. And some of you might even call that opinion journalism. But as long as it's rooted in journalism, rooted in facts, rooted in what we actually know to be true. But here's where the real highest value at is in journalism. It is not in the television anchor giving you a speech on camera. It's in putting new information out into the world. That's the highest value at. Opinion is important, analysis and perspective and context are all so important. But the highest value at is putting a new fact into the world. That's where this industry needs the most support. That's where it needs financial support, philanthropic support, subscriptions to have boots on the ground gathering those raw facts. And with those raw facts, those pieces of new information, so we'll know this, Susan knows this, putting that new information out of the world is the highest high in journalism. It's the best feeling of all when you've introduced a new fact into the world. And that is how journalism, in my view, best defends democracy. I'd clap for that. In about the minute and a half left, I wanna ask each of you a real quick question. We've got an election coming up in case you folks didn't realize. Do you sense that the media world, and this is gonna overgeneralize things grossly, and I apologize, but is the media world prepared for this? Do you feel they feel confident or are they feeling really stressed out? Oh, I would say stressed out. I mean, this is, as we all know, a replay election. So we've been through this with the same two candidates, two major party candidates before. So there are some things we know, but I think it's tough on voters and tough on journalists, too. Yeah, I always avoid the word unprecedented because we have had one precedent of an incumbent running against someone trying to come back, but no one here was alive in 1892. So we're not able to pull them on what it was like to cover Cleveland and Harrison. But in all seriousness, Yeah, exactly, there was a chiron. Jay Rosen, who talks about the truth sandwich a lot, he talks a lot about the importance of covering the stakes, not just the odds, and I really, really think that's right. We have to cover what's at stake in this election, and we have to do it not just from the grand perspective of the survival of our democracy, though I think it's a very real question, but we also should talk about what it means for ordinary people. I think we have to connect the rhetoric back to what would actually happen for ordinary people depending on one outcome or another, and not just the presidential, the governorships, the state houses. We need to have a full picture of our democracy, the 3000 plus legislative seats. A big problem is that with the consolidation of media in many ways, it's both fragmented and it's consolidated. We keep thinking about Washington and Washington, but so many of the decisions that affect people's daily lives, public health, K through 12 education, roads and bridges and highways, that's all state and local, and so we just have to have a balanced perspective on our democracy, walk voters through what are the stakes, and not just the odds of who's likely to win or who's ahead in the poll, because in reality, we're not certain until all the results have come in. I'll give you a real quick answer. I'll give you a real quick answer. Go ahead. Individual journalists are up to the challenge. The real question is about owners of media outlets, the owners of these institutions. Will they succumb to pressure? Maybe Biden's gonna threaten them, I don't know, but that's not happening right now. Right now it's Trump that is threatening some of these owners. Will they succumb to pressure? Or will they stand strong? I happen to think today I'm feeling optimistic, I think they're gonna stand strong, but that's what I'm gonna be watching as a media reporter. What are the owners of these outlets do when the pressure comes? Susan Page, Sue Will-Chan, Brian Seltter, thanks for a fascinating 40 minutes. Thank you, David. And somebody help me up. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mike Cannon, Leah Klettman, Rachel Mercy, and Steve Waldman. Okay. That seems to be the moderator chair. Well, wonderful, we are going to, since we've heard a lot of really challenging information about the state of things in national and local media, and we all realize that it's actually gonna be the next generation that is going to ultimately figure this out, we're gonna focus this next bit on the next generation, and what we're seeing, what they need, and what we can expect. So I wanna actually start by just having each of these great folks on the panel talk a little bit about what their group does, just super briefly, because everyone's coming at this from a slightly different angle. So Leah, would you like to? Sure, great. Thanks, Steve. So I run a program called Student Reporting Labs. It's from the PBS News Hour, and we work with high school and middle schools across the country to do journalism programs. So some of it is broadcast journalism, journalism programs that are starting to do social media and digital journalism. And then even some of the teachers that participate are science teachers or English teachers. So we've created a whole curriculum called StoryMaker as the platform that we use. So teachers come in and they lead these programs across the country. And we have 7,000 educators registered in StoryMaker and 100,000 other educators who use our resources, and so reaching around 70,000 students per year doing journalism, broadcast and video journalism in high school and middle school. Mike? Yeah, so I work at the Scripps Howard Fund. You may remember us as the Scripps Howard Foundation, and we support journalism education programming for college students. We really look at how do we think about what the industry is going to need 10 to 15 years from now and think about what support students need now? So we have a whole variety of different types of programs, sort of our crown jewels, no slight against any of our other programs, but are the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State and the University of Maryland. And they are really more like grad school programs that prepare the next generation of investigative reporters. And they do incredible work. They win national awards against students and professional journalists. And they just had a really incredible project that they partnered with the AP and Frontline called Lethal Restraint. You can check out. And so we support a whole host of programs like that, as well as have our own internship program. One piece of that is internships and nonprofit newsrooms in under-reported upon communities across the US. Wonderful. Rachel? I think I can be a bit briefer here. I'm the dean of the Moody College of Communication here at the University of Texas at Austin. One of our schools is the School of Journalism and Media, among others, radio, television, film, advertising, and PR. I'm honored to be here today. So let's talk for a second just on a high level of, with all your interactions with people at different levels, which is high school, college, grad, school level. What's your assessment of the spirit, the motivation, and the skills of this generation, what they have and what they might be missing to face the journalism world that we have out there? Is anyone? I'm happy to answer that. I'm completely bullish on the talent base, as you would expect from a dean of the College of Communication. But I think, especially coming out of the panel discussions we've had today, that's an important point to make. I get the most questions from people about two things. What are the writing skills of students? Are they learning the old school reporting, shoe leather reporting skills that I learned when I was a journalism student? And what's the journalism marketplace? The good news is they're coming in with a whole set of skills that we don't have to teach anymore, how to use your iPhone to capture video, how to capture your own audio. We used to teach that in journalism schools. We don't have to teach that anymore. It leaves more time for the fundamental skills that they're not getting in high schools, critical thinking, really thoughtful, quick writing, the kind of reporting. So that's really become the focus, I think, of journalism education. But also, you're dealing with the generation. And I think that some of the data you saw earlier points to this. This isn't engaged. They're not voting, but they're civically engaged. They want to make a difference in the world. And I think that's a really powerful combination for what kind of entrepreneurs they're going to be and how they're going to contribute to existing journalism organizations. One of the stereotypes of young people is, tell me if this is right, is that they are uncomfortable with the term objectivity and have the different definitions of what fairness and intellectual honesty look like from the previous generation's definitions of objectivity. What's your assessment of that? And what are the implications of that for this general task of rebuilding trust? I see a real openness. I mean, when we start to talk to students about what it means to tell someone else's story. And a lot of our curriculum, we have a whole lesson plan on journalism ethics. But also opening it up, like these are the ethics that maybe come from the PBS News Hour. But what are your ethics? What does it mean to do honor to someone else's story, to find out someone else's story? I find they are really excited about finding untold stories and people who are not represented in the media and being able to go out and tell those stories and then seeing them published. That's a really exciting thing at a high school level and seeing the response from an audience that you actually have the power to tell someone else's story. And you can have some really sophisticated conversations with teenagers when they've actually gone out into the field and done an interview and looked for sound bites and then edited and knowing the power that they have as storytellers to do that brings them to a whole other level of understanding the media that they see when they're scrolling through their feeds or when they're talking to someone about what's going on in the news. If you've actually created that media, you really understand what you're seeing and what's happening in the media landscape writ large. I think it's going to be fascinating to see over the next 10 years or so how this generation that's coming out of journalism schools right now change and reshape the industry when it comes to things like objectivity and what we share about us as individuals. Their lived experience is a part of what they bring to the workforce every single day and they don't want to hide it. They don't want to keep it in. If there's something that affects them or touches them, they want to share that. And I think it's really sort of, if you think about the trust challenge and the thing that we sort of grapple with, why the audience doesn't trust us, my hope is that this group of young journalists can help us figure that out. Because I think one of the things that they're bringing forward and they're sort of tossing out there as something for consideration is the fact that when we say we're objective, we're kind of telling the audience that we don't have biases. We're kind of making this claim that we're not biased. And the reality is every single one of us is human. And we all have biases, some of which we're aware of, some of which are unconscious biases. And they affect our work, but the difference is, as journalists, we are literally professionally trained to keep our biases in check. And we have checks and balances in newsrooms to keep those in check. But by starting out with this premise that we're just this robot that just doesn't have feelings and doesn't think about these things, I think that diminishes our trust with our audience. And I think they're thinking of things from the standpoint of why don't I just be who I am and communicate who I am and then you can make your own judgment about whether to trust my journalism and believe my journalism. The reality of what it means to go into journalism now as a young person, of course, has changed a lot. And there seems to be no shortage of people who want to become journalists. I don't know if that's been your experience, but at Report for America, the last cycle, I believe, they said they had 1,000 applicants for about 60 slots. Are you seeing that at your school too? Absolutely. Despite all the difficulties out there, there appears to be no dampening of enthusiasm among people who want to become journalists. To be curmudgeonly befitting my age, is there an argument that we're producing too many? Like in the sense of we're producing all these great young journalists and there aren't enough jobs for them? Well, I'm willing to take that argument on because my response is always, I don't think you can produce too many people who look for factual information, have critical thinking skills and know how to write and write quickly. So that's my response to you if you're paying for your child to go to journalism school, which deans have to deal with that question. But my honest response, really thinking about it in the context, is also journalism schools have a new responsibility, which is to help students understand the entrepreneurial skills to work in this environment. So I think I left my graduate degree and immediately got a job at the Arizona Republic. I think in shorthand I often say a top 10 newspaper, I think it was actually 11th on the list at the time, but it's just easier and sounds better to say top 10. So I think it's important to understand that is not likely the path for the typical journalism school graduate today. And we have a responsibility to think about the skills that we're teaching so that they're entering the workforce with the skills not only to participate in how existing news organizations create funding, think about events, think about other revenue streams, but they're also potentially gonna go into their own businesses in a variety of different ways. So I think that's the piece that changed, but I'm a big believer that there's, I mean, I am not currently a practicing journalist, but I think I benefit from being trained as one. And so I think that I'm pretty hot on, there's never too many journalism students in the world. Journalism schools also have a different role than they used to in terms of kind of changing the ecosystems and not just training the journalists. It's a great question. I think about it a lot and I think about it a lot. I came to Texas from Northwestern University where I was on the faculty. I think about it a lot in terms of being at the University of Texas. I think when you're at a public institution as important as this one, you play a role in what does journalism look like in this state. And I will say that's been a reframing device for me that I thought about differently when I was at Northwestern. So what is, how does the University of Texas play an important role in the news and information that circulates in this state, whether it's about the border or whether it's about what's happening in El Paso or Austin or Dallas. And we've been talking about programs that get us there. We talked a little bit about this this morning, thinking about programs where we might do loan forgiveness for students who stay in the state and practice their journalism here where it benefits our community. So I do think journalism schools play an important role in thinking about that ecosystem. And I think that's an easy way, at least for state institutions to think about it. I think some of the private journalism schools are gonna have to do some thinking about what their role is, but I think it's very clear what the University of Texas plays a role. Just to throw in from the perspective of the project that I'm working on now, which is about public policy, journalism schools and universities are actually playing really important roles, not just in the formation of public policy, but implementing it. So in New York City, there is a policy called Ad Boost, which got the city to put half of its advertising money toward local news. It was created and launched and watched out by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. California, they decided they wanted to put $25 million into local reporting. They went to the journalism school at Berkeley to administer it. And there's a sort of comfort level with state legislatures towards universities. So that's a little, it is a different role, because I think people are realizing we can't just train the reporters, we actually have to help make the jobs there. So let me ask about a really practical thing that we have, I think in some ways have not really been reluctant to talk about as a field, which is how low the salaries are for starting reporters. I mean, we were, at Report for America, we were sort of shocked when we would get the applications in from newsrooms and routinely there would be 23,000, 24,000, something like that, and not necessarily in areas that had really low costs of living. We had to establish a higher minimum. And we increasingly hear that as a real issue, that even the people who wanna be doing this, it's just not, you can't imagine having a life and a family that way. Is that, how big a problem is that? I think it's a huge problem. I mean, I've known journalists who had to work at Target or Starbucks after they finished their 40 hour a week journalism job just to pay the bills. It's that difficult in some places. And then if you think about some of these more rural areas that simply don't have the finances to be able to support a higher salary, it's a huge problem. I mean, you might come out of journalism school with 80 to $100,000 in student loans, and then you're gonna go take a job for $24,000 a year. It just doesn't make financial sense. Of course they're gonna jump to PR or something else eventually. If that's the salary you're gonna pay. We're connected with the EW Scripps company, and they're actually overhauling sort of the way they think about the reporter and producer roles and sort of realigning the resources within the newsroom to give substantial pay raises for entry level positions and positions all up and down the chain. So in some places they're increasing salaries by $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Because otherwise they're just gonna be a revolving door of people coming out for one two year contract before they go do something else. I think we also have to recognize how this generation views careers. I mean, we see a lot of our students starting their own businesses in high school. Like they become wedding photographers or they film events and they get paid as freelancers. And so we've really built that into our curriculum and our community. Our newsletter we are constantly putting out those kinds of opportunities or fellowships or ways to do that. And I think we just can't picture a career as like you join an organization and you stay there. I mean, this generation really sees like I'm gonna do this for a while and then I'm gonna do this and I'm building my skills so that I will be employable no matter where technology goes or where the journalism industry goes. And that's what's really exciting for us is that we're working with them, middle school and high school talking about journalism, the purpose of journalism, giving those experiences. And we really look forward to like working with them in the future to see like what those news products are gonna be or when they're in a news organization and they are the social media editors, like what that can do for a news organization to reach younger audiences. So it's really about for me like investing in them and then supporting them through their careers. Like we have a really active alumni group and network and I think that's one of the most important things we do is having this community of young people who understand and believe in journalism. And they, I mean, it's amazing when we have a story produced by a student that runs on the news hour and we put it up on Instagram, all these friends that they've met that they've connected with are like cheering each other on because they really want it to survive and we just need to give them the pathways to do it. It's important, it's so important. Another positive area is it seems like a lot of journalism schools really have made a tremendous amount of progress in recruiting a more diverse population. And I've reported for America, I think it's almost half journalists of color now and I think your school is similar to the diverse and so there's some progress been made on that front. How are we doing in terms of sort of viewpoint diversity? Recruiting children of conservative families to become journalists? It's a great question. University of Texas, 90% of our students are in state students. So much of our student body diversity reflects the diversity of Texas. We benefit in that way. When you think about ideological diversity, the interesting point is many college students really don't identify ideologically. So they might come from a conservative family but if you ask them about their own viewpoints, they don't necessarily think about it that way. I know everyone in the room thinks you were wildly politically active when you were 18 but if you're really honest about what you did on a Friday night, maybe not everyone in the room. So I think the challenge for us honestly is we have the diversity of students who've been exposed to parents and communities that have all different kinds of perspectives, right? From West Texas, when you have 90% of the students from in state, you're obviously attracting students who come from conservative backgrounds. The challenge still becomes, and I think this goes back to the salaries, students tend to be attracted to the fields where there's a little bit more flash. So I worry that some of those students tend to wanna be sports journalists or they tend to wanna do something in this space that's not necessarily gonna change the political news that we see in this country. So I think one of our challenges is how do we take the spark of someone being really excited about music journalism or really excited about sports journalism as you might imagine here at Texas. We got a lot of students interested in sports. How do we take that and say, okay, well, what if you wrote about public financing for stadiums, right? How do we think about that as a story that is really relevant to how you vote, how you think, that I think is something that we're working on all the time. How do we take the spark of what you wanna do and make sure you have a full journalistic training experience? I think anything you wanna do that involves getting different people to the table, you have to be intentional about it. So there have to be inroads made to try to bring folks who have the more conservative background who come from rural areas or whatever it is to bring them in and involve them and engage them and try to get them interested in journalism. And I will say, the premise of we're doing better when it comes to diversity, I do think we're doing better, but I do think that that bar was low. We're improving, but the bar was low. And also with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action last year, it's really changing a lot of the ways the journalism schools I work with operate and think. I just went through some applications for a whole side project thing that we do. And last year when I went through those applications from professors, administrators, et cetera, almost all of them talked about diversity. This year probably about 20% of them talked about diversity. It's changed the way people are thinking and I think it's because the incentive to bring diversity to the table is not there at every university now because of the Supreme Court ruling and sort of the way that's being interpreted at the state level. That's a great point. And how are schools adjusting and responding to maintain diversity with that? It's different at every school. Every state's interpreting things differently. Every school's interpreting things differently. So some places have said we can't mention diversity in any way, in any scholarships, in any job applications, in anything. And that may mean that in practice they operate exactly the same way they do right now and the scholarship still goes to diverse students to help diversify the industry. But what message is that sending to people who are students of color and are considering journalism if they're not sort of specifically being recruited and trying to say like, we want you here. We want you at the table. And then on the sort of like more conservative, I mean we are really supportive of the educators especially in conservative communities. We know they face pushback. We know there's self-censorship or they feel pushback. But if we focus on the core of what journalism is is like this is our community. We are looking into the issues that our community cares about. We're looking for solutions. We're highlighting what great people in our community are doing. You slowly start to build understanding that this is not like done by people who are out to get you. This is done by students. I remember walking with a student who was from a small town in Kentucky and he came to Washington D.C. for our academy. And we were out in the field with our T-shirts and he said, this is so wild cause people are coming up to me and they're saying like, what are you doing? And he's like, oh I'm working on a project with PBS and they're like, that's so great. Go, go, go. At home, he's been told like, why would you wanna work for the enemy? But slowly, he's doing the work and he's got a great program in his school and my hope is that you would change those parents' minds or change just the understanding of why journalists do what they do. And it's to really help the community. I've had professors say that as well that students will sometimes confide that their families think that they've kind of betrayed them by becoming journalists, does that ever come up for you? It does come up, but I think the biggest concern I get from students and from parents is really about the longevity of a career in this space. I mean, I think many parents just want their young people to have a successful career and know they're gonna be able to support themselves. The biggest gap that I see honestly here in the state of Texas that we haven't, we've been struggling to fill is in Spanish language journalism. Where I consistently meet parents who speak Spanish at home, the students are not comfortable enough with their own Spanish to take Spanish language reporting, to really do the intense, they might really have what we would call Spanglish. So they feel comfortable using it with mom and grandma but they don't feel comfortable using it in the classroom or for reporting. And when you think about some of the reporting gaps at the border and in West Texas, I think that's an area that I'd like to see the University of Texas really succeed but I think that's a challenge. I think some young people feel comfortable with vernacular Spanish but not the kind of Spanish you would need to be a Spanish language reporter. Now you work in high schools and I guess some of your programs are in high schools too. So let's go one step younger. You made a comment earlier that you thought that journalism, what you do in journalism education is very valuable even if they don't become journalists. What did you mean? Yeah, well we actually did a study early on in the program where they did a pre and a post test as one does and they saw a real growth and critical thinking as you were talking about. Confidence, being able to go out into a community to interview a stranger, interview an adult, prepare teamwork. We see that they are more civically engaged. They're following the news. We saw like a shift in what they understood about what the news was and where they got their news. So for us it's really about whatever you're going to do whether it's gonna be business or arts. I remember early on we had a student who said I was gonna go to med school but like I've discovered journalism and so now I'm just gonna go into journalism and I was like, okay. And he did for a while, he did some journalism then he was a medical scribe. Now he's in the medical field and he said I'm a better doctor. I'm a better, listen differently. I hear my patient's story and it really helps me understand how I can help them. So really we see these skills as like critical life and citizenry skills. Like how do you look at your community and identify the people who are making it better and how do you support them or how do you tell their stories and what does the telling of stories due to the community's image of itself and its ability to change and its ability to work together to solve things. You mentioned empathy. Yeah, you mentioned empathy as something they learned which of course I so want that to be true. Well a lot of our teachers, yeah I mean the teachers themselves and that's why the teachers are so important to this program, they really see themselves as teaching empathy. I mean when you are doing an interview, when you're preparing and you're learning about someone and then you're there present in the interview and you're listening and you're asking follow up questions and then you're thinking about the story that you're doing and some of these go back to even, Jim Lara always talk about, I respect the person I'm doing the story about, I respect the audience, they are as smart and caring as I am and I'm just gonna assume that about the people I'm doing the story with and when you see a student, they understand that. I mean they understand also the skills that you learn when you actually do it and you actually prepare for an interview and you do it and you listen and you're able to tell stories that wouldn't otherwise be told and then to see them on the news hour or local news organizations and you see that power and so there's that connection of the empathy to be able to tell that story and to listen to someone and do honor to their story and then the power to be able to bring that person's story to an audience and be able to shine a light on it that otherwise wouldn't be shown. I wanna go back up for a second to the salary question which I know is very like nitty gritty and not very aspirational but it keeps nagging at me a little bit in the sense of it could sometimes feel like we're just crushing it with all these great new ideas and new programs and new models but at the end of the day we might not be able to keep people in this profession if the salaries aren't higher maybe it's all the same business model questions that we've talked about earlier in the day but do you all have any ideas on how to get the salaries up or what we should do about that problem? I mean that's a huge question and I think it is the fundamental question we've been talking about all day is the business model. I think that there's always gonna be attrition we're always gonna lose people and we've had a lot of conversations internally at our end of like well that is an acceptable rate of attrition I mean I don't know I mean it used to be a lot of times journalists when they got eight, 10 years of experience they would leave the industry when they had kids and started to be more busy with their family life and now we're seeing I don't know if you're seeing this but I'm seeing students jumping after two years and they're out of the industry and to me that's a loss it's way earlier in their career than it was before and I think that's a loss but the biggest thing when we had the internal conversation is the regrettable attrition is those superstars who are great storytellers, great journalists who are passionate about it and they still leave and I've come across those students out there who should have been journalism rock stars but they're out in two or three or four years because salaries are too low the hours that they're expected to work do not align with what they're interested in they're not giving opportunities to challenge themselves or to fulfill themselves no one goes into journalism school and says they want to be a journalist because they want to do night cops they want to make their community a better place they want to do investigative stories they want to do a really incredible storytelling and if you don't get to do that for two or three years I think that this generation is less willing to sit in a job and paying their dues for 10 years than say people were 20 years ago and so they're gonna find something else my hope is that they'd come back though I mean you can leave, go do other things maybe enter fields that have more you can make more money but if you have that love of journalism and you wanna see it succeed I've seen some of our alumni start media organizations and some of it's just first getting clients and then starting it but they want to in the end be impactful journalists they wanna do those stories so we're just getting started and I'm really excited to see what they're able to do because they want that too and they're the ones who are gonna be able to I think feel that out for their generation I think from a college perspective one thing we think about a lot we talk about low salaries in journalism as I mentioned in my introduction we also have the radio, television, film department that's also an area where your first job is not likely to pay much money you're likely to work on a set and to be an assistant so I think one of the challenges is how do we get career earlier in their college experience so they're getting the internships in the space earlier so their first job out is actually not the very entry level job I think that's one and the second piece is also validating the expanse of places where you can do journalism now it might not be a brand name that your parents recognize and there's outstanding examples here in Austin the 19th would be one of them you know that there are wonderful places that are paying fair salaries where students can do outstanding work and I think validating that it doesn't mean you have to go into PR but there is journalism happening in places that aren't just the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News so I think validating the expanse of those careers also becomes important this might actually be an area where public policy is gonna be important like the employment tax credit that passed the House of Representatives I know a lot of the publications were gonna use that to try to raise the entry level wages I wanted to Leah you have an alum in the audience somewhere to talk about this pathway yeah so Tyler is in his first year at UT and he came through the Student Reporting Labs program he was a podcast host for On Our Minds podcast and we were hoping we could pass the microphone and he could just give the audience a sense of what it means to do some journalism in high school and take that all the way to UT and have it be a part of his journey hello can everyone hear me yeah thank you for having me I just wanted to talk a little bit about like kind of my experience with journalism and everything I remember that when we were planning for high school our classes in high school I remember that journalism was one of the first classes I signed up for and in my four year plan I signed up to do a news hour all throughout high school I mean not news hour sorry newspaper all throughout high school and I thought that would be my elective throughout but I remember the first day in my journalism class was the last day that I saw my journalism teacher and after that like he quit the same day I'm not sure what happened exactly or anything like that but I just remember like there was an excitement and there was like an energy about journalism that day that kind of never returned to my school and it was very disappointing to be so excited about being able to do stories in my community and stuff like that that didn't really return and so we tried to get a newspaper started at our school and it really didn't work out for whatever reason but I think that it was important that I kind of had that experience because it made me realize that not everything is gonna be perfect not everything is going to be like an easy path I guess and through some way I found out about working with student reporting labs and it really gave me an opportunity to have experiences that I probably never would have had otherwise being able to be a part of a podcast that really talked about teen mental health and getting to work with so many amazing and talented young people that were really passionate about things that affected our generation and everything and then on top of that I got to be a Gwenn Eiffel fellow for the news hour which is another amazing experience where I got to cover issues relating to affirmative action which the decision when I did the story had just come out and even being at a school like UT which shout out UT I love it here but even being at a school like UT and being able to write for a paper like the Daily Text and I've gotten opportunities to interview people like Bon Jovi and I'm really interested in entertainment and media journalism and stuff like that but having those opportunities at schools that provide these kind of resources or whatever it is really important because now it encourages me to keep going and there's stuff out there that I can do and there's ways that I can contribute to my community that I might not, if I didn't have that experience of going through an experience where the journalism program was kind of shut down at our school if I didn't kind of push through and see what other opportunities do they have I might not be here today writing and going to UT so thank you, I appreciate it. In the last minute and a half or so I wonder if you could each just have a closing thought that is usually we start next week and then we end on a negative and end on a high note. I'd like to end on a down note. No, I'd like you to think about for the people in this audience who are involved in creating the models or funding the models, what is the thing that they need to know? What are the things that have to happen for the next generation to be able to succeed? I'm gonna end on a happy note. If I were a funder in this space I'd been on the talent of this generation. It's about investing in the people and the business models are complicated but if you have a conversation with people as talented and as passionate as this generation find the people who inspire you to put your money where it belongs whether that's as a subscriber paying for the news that you use or if you're an investor or you have philanthropy dollars in this space invest in the talent. I completely agree. I think that this generation they're gonna be the ones who figure it out and what's great is so many more experiments we haven't really touched upon this are finding ways to use journalism students who are in college right now to cover not just their campus but their community. Covering, I think it's something like 27 state houses have student journalists from colleges covering those state houses where state house reporting has been decimated. So not only bet on the talent and the innovation and the creativity of this generation but also how can we foster that right now while they're in college? And be intentional about it. I mean there are ways to build connections between high school programs and local news organizations were working with documenters figuring out a way that they can hire high schoolers to go cover school board meetings and pay them really important. And I think that high school journalism can expand the capacity of local news organizations if done in an intentional way and sort of a building out that network that local network that includes young people because when they are involved in the coverage when they are a part when they see themselves represented and see their issues, they become audience members. And so you need to, if those local news organizations are gonna survive long term, I think they need to build those connections early so that they're also building their audience and also building the community that's gonna support them long term. So you're building the demand as well as the supply. Exactly. Okay, good, well that is, I'm glad you forced us to end a happy note. Thank you very much everyone and thank you to the panel. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Vivian Schiller, Vice President and Executive Director of Aspen Digital. Thank you. So you heard a little bit earlier this afternoon from Sonal Shaw talking about the state of local news. And then you heard a little bit later from Brian Stelter talking about the state of national news. And right now I'm gonna just talk for a few minutes about the state of digital media. The story of digital media sort of follows the trajectory of a tale as old as time. It's a story of hope followed by disillusionment. And then in theory the last stage is redemption although I'm not sure what the redemption yet. So let me go back to the hope for a couple of minutes. So you may recall or some of you may recall or maybe some of you or if your students are too young that back in the mid to late aughts and the early part of the 2010s, the world was a pretty exciting place when it came to digital media. Google really did bring the world's information to our fingertips. We connected with old friends and from high school or from other parts of our life on Facebook. We had access to so many incredible videos on YouTube. And when it comes to news, it was revolutionary. You may remember that the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011, the miracle on the Hudson, that ways that we had access to information because people on the ground with access to these mobile devices, these powerful computers in our hands were able to report just regular people on what they were seeing, what they were experiencing. It was sort of the promise of citizen journalism. We learned actually as it turns out about the capture of Osama bin Laden by a guy a few, you know, a quarter of a mile away saying I'm hearing chapters overhead. This is very strange. I'm in this, I've got the name of the town. You know, what's going on? It really was the democratization of information or so we thought. Fast forward just a few years and we get to the disillusionment phase when everything began to change slowly, slowly and then all at once. So what is it that went wrong exactly? Well, I would put it in three categories. First of all, people, people is what went wrong. You had foreign actors who game the system. The internet research agency in St. Petersburg who were able to use these powerful social media platforms to try to manipulate public opinion in the United States in the run up to the 2016 elections. We had domestic folks who were targets who then willfully spread those and other kinds of myths and disinformation. You know, whether it's about elections, whether it was about COVID, whether it was, you know, the reasons that the bridge felt, the crash happened at the bridge in Baltimore last week. And then you have the profiteers. They had no ideology other than just making a few quick bucks and they were able to game these platforms to bring money to themselves through various means. So that was one category of problem. The second category of problem was the tech companies and the platforms themselves. Whether or not they did not anticipate what could have happened with these platforms or whether they knew that their platforms could be gamed and didn't care, we do not know and we may never know. But we started to see that social media platforms became basically a big game of whack-a-mole. Basically in the run up starting in like 2014, 2015 and continuing to this day. Then after 2020, a lot of the social media platforms decided threw up their hands and said, enough. We're not gonna try to moderate necessarily moderate content on our platforms anymore. It's too expensive. It's too politically fraught. Too many people hate us no matter what decision we make. Too many subpoenas coming from this Congress. They're like, we're out. We're just gonna leave it alone. And of course you have Elon Musk who bought Twitter. Never perfect, but always an incredibly valuable tool. Basically just turning that into a dumpster fire that it is today. And then the third category of what went wrong is the decline of local news which we've been talking about so much about today. I don't need to repeat it, but it has played into that void, has filled in so much of this kind of noise that we hear from platforms. I mean news organizations sometimes did it to themselves. They were chasing in some cases, those of us in news, we all laugh at the line about the pivot to video which was supposed to save journalism. Of course it didn't because as soon as Facebook change or strategy, the whole thing went down in flames. But the money that supported journalism went to the platforms. A lot of it for good reasons. Advertisers, it was much more efficient for how they reach people. And also the world has become such a polarized place that many just do not trust any news. Again, we've been talking about that all afternoon. And now here we are, and this is gonna be a bit of a segue into the panel that I'm gonna be part of that's coming up next, into the AI world. And what is that going to do to this already very fraught digital information ecosystem? My message to you, and I may repeat this again on the panel with the right opportunities, don't be afraid, there's been a lot of coverage about the big spectacular deep fake of Trump doing something or Biden doing something that may happen, I don't think that's a big worry. Those will be debunked so quickly that those are not gonna get a chance to get much traction. What I'm much more worried about when it comes to content that is manipulated via artificial intelligence is the things that you can't see, that the media can't see, that the public can't see and debunk. It's coming in on WhatsApp. It's coming in on Facebook Messenger, Telegram. All of the peer-to-peer, which are not always peer-to-peer, you can distribute those. WhatsApp goes out to very, very large groups. The kind of content that you can't see that can be very damaging. And very targeted information that can be what AI enables is a speed and scale and a degree of targeting never before possible. So if before you needed the Internet Research Agency funded by the Kremlin and St. Petersburg to pull this off, now you don't. And now we're back to the proverbial guy in his pajamas of his parents' house who can make the same effort at the same scale to cause a lot of trouble. But if there's one thing that worries me most, it is something, it is a phrase that was coined actually by two people, one of them a UT researcher named Bobby Chesney and another academic, Danielle Citron, and it is the Liar's Dividend. The Liar's Dividend describes the phenomenon of what happens when we hear, we are so, we are hearing from so many different places how we can't trust information that AI can manipulate video, which it can. It can manipulate audio, which it can. It can manipulate images, which it can. That instead of trying to find out, is this real or is it not real, going to trusted sources? What do we do? We stop believing in anything at all. And this is the Liar's Dividend. It is out of the playbook of autocrats and would be autocrats going back for millennia. Now enabled by AI. I was thinking for those of you that were here last night and you heard Woodward and Bernstein, Carl Bernstein made a comment that public opinion changed when people were finally able to hear Richard Nixon's tapes. Think about what would happen today if those tapes were released. Fake news, this is AI manipulated audio. That wasn't me and you know what? A lot of people would be like, yeah, I don't know that I can believe that. So that's the world we live in. Oh yeah, I was supposed to talk about redemption. I don't know whether I have the redemption yet, but if there is redemption to be had, it is in the promise and the growth which so many people here in this session, you heard it in the first panel, have the promise of local news. Local news is there is no silver bullet to all of these problems, but if there's any salvation to be had, it is in local news and the growth of local news, people of the community in the community communing with the people who are their neighbors, providing them the information that they need, listening to them and building that trust. We know that leads to civic engagement. We know how important it is. We must all support efforts, whether it is press forward or any of the other efforts you heard from Sarah Beth Berman, the American Journalism Project or the work that Elizabeth Hanson Shapiro was doing. We all really need to support that. It is the only real way out. And with that, we are gonna move into our AI and elections panel. I am happy to introduce my fellow panelists, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, Open AI's Becky Waite and our moderator, Dr. Talia Schrad. So much for that. Such a pleasure to be here today to chat about digital media and the 2024 election. We have a hot topic here. Just a small topic. And just to offer some introductory remarks, we're in a remarkable setting right now in 2024. We have elections in over 60 countries plus the European Union, representing just under half of the world's population, which is just mind blowing to think about. We've seen AI already used in elections. We have the AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden that sought to discourage voters in New Hampshire's primary. We have audio clips of Savlakiya's liberal party leader discussing vote rigging. We have a video of an opposition leader in the conservative, Muslim majority nation of Bangladesh wearing a bikini. There are so many things to talk about and so many possible uses of AI as we look to the election here. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So I want to just get started. We're delighted here to be joined by Becky, who is Becky Waite, who's the head of global response at Open AI. And Becky, I wanna just dive right in. So Open AI released details about its approach to the 2024 elections earlier this year. And they noted that the rule that they have is that people cannot use Open AI tools for campaigning or for influencing voters. Can you talk to me about enforcing rules like that on a global scale? It seems almost unfathomable. Tell us about it. Yes, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me and for this LBJ having this forum and discussion in this milestone election year. It is more important than ever to have these sorts of conversations that bring together, particularly folks across government, civil society and industry to have these important discussions. I spent a lot of the last six months speaking with policymakers and civil society around the globe to really understand what is top of mind for them going into this election year. And while we are very excited about the significant benefits of this technology, we also are clear-eyed about its potential risks. And through those discussions, through that dialogue, we've developed a preparedness framework that really focuses on three efforts. First is the policies, making sure that we have the right policies in place. Second is preventing abuse. And third is elevating appropriate information and transparency in our tools. So I'll take those each in turn. First, as you mentioned, our policy lines, we noted that we don't allow political campaigning and discouraging participation with our tools. We wanted to have a set of policies that were a little bit more conservative this go around given that we haven't seen generative AI in the election space before. We wanted to make sure that we were really taking a conservative approach out of an abundance of caution. Second is preventing abuse, and this is really getting into the enforcement piece. So we think about safety through the entire lifecycle of our tools. It's not at a single point. To use a, if you'll excuse the bad metaphor, to use, if you're going fishing and you have a bunch of nets, you don't just use one net to catch every single fish. You want to put a number of different nets so that you catch as many fishes as possible along the way. And we think about safety in the same way. We have interventions across the entire lifecycle of our tools to make sure that we're enforcing on different harms. One example of an intervention that we might have is something called reinforcement learning with human feedback. So I don't know how many people here have used any of our tools or generative AI in general, but one thing that we have in our chatbot tool, our large language model, is this reinforcement learning where it's sort of at the very front end of how we think about safety. It's a fancy way of saying that we ask a question of the model, we generate a bunch of responses, and we tell the model which one is best. And by doing that, we can steer the model over and over to something that is safer, more reliable, and more helpful. So that's how we reduce the likelihood that it's going to produce these harmful responses. Finally, the last piece of this is really around transparency. So in our model, we also look to elevate appropriate sources and cite where information is coming from, where appropriate. So I guess final thought before handing it over to someone else on the panel is it's ever more important that we have these sorts of conversations and that we're collaborating not just across industry, but also within industry. So we're really excited about some of the work that we're doing with our social media companies and others where generative information might be actually distributed, making sure that we have those close connections going into the election season. And speaking about close connections, OpenAI has a partnership with the National Association of Secretaries of State and what an honor for us to have the president of this organization with us, Secretary Scott Schwab. Thank you so much for being here. Let's get started about thinking about Kansas. So when you think about Kansas, what AI or foreign influence threats were you most? So okay, this is where we come from looking at, there's this, and Jen Easterly and I wrote an article about this, there's a difference between the campaign side and the election side. And often people co-mingle them. So as a secretary, if you get that fake Biden phone call, I'm not concerned about that because that's campaign side. We'll let our ethics commission deal with that and our Bureau of Investigation and whatnot. But on the campaign side, this is where it can get to be really a concern. And I hate to use these examples because then when you use the examples, you give people ideas. If Johnson County is a wealthy suburban county outside the Kansas City Metro plaques, I get the honor to live there. I love it. But it's a very swing, it's a purple county. So imagine if somebody generated a video that was shared on social that said, hey, due to bomb threats, all Johnson County polling places will be closed on election day. Imagine the chaos. It was if someone used my image and likeness created it. And we already know that sometimes news is so quick. Hey, we got to get this out there. Now I'm out there saying that's not me. Now the news is trying to say, well, what's real? And then when it's all sorted out, there was no bomb threat, it was fake. How many voters did you affect that said, you know, I'm just not gonna take a chance, I'm not gonna vote today? You can't undo that. And so those are the concerns. I really like what Minnesota is doing as it relates to AI. If you generate an AI image or video or a voice and it doesn't have a disclaimer saying that it's AI and you're using it to influence a campaign or an election, it's a crime. And so they carved out so you can do satire and whatnot, you know, the whole Saturday Night Live exemption. But those are the things on the election side that really can become terrifying. Because now you're not misrepresenting a candidate, right? They can undo that. But when you put, there's two great motivators for humans to make decisions, hope and fear, right? And fear is a lot stronger and it's a lot easier. And so if you cause voters to have fear to not vote, how does that truly influence the election? And that's outside the campaign side. So as secretaries, that's the conversation we're having. Disturbing scenario. Again, you don't want to use the example because now somebody's on the internet and say, oh wow, I got an idea. And those are the concerns we come up with. But we have people here who maybe are the ones, maybe we have a student in the audience saying, I have an idea about how to deter that or how to deal with it. So you can go to sos.ks.gov and help us. There we go. Let's dig with you for another minute here. So you authored an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year where you said that generative AI companies in particular can help by developing and making available tools for identifying AI-generated content and by ensuring that their capabilities are designed, developed, and deployed with security as the top priority to prevent them from being misused by nefarious actors. How well do you think that generative AI companies are doing? Well, I just encourage you like the example she just gave how they're creating safety nets. And you don't know until ever know. When we hear the phrase and in the article, it's got to be, safety's got to be your top priority. OK, when Boeing has a door come off an airplane, what's the first thing they say? Post facto, well safety is our top priority. OK, I get it, but this still happens. A lot of times you don't know what the holes are until after it happens. So we don't know how they're doing. We can come through November of this year. And Cisco, I'm curious about your opinion, because you're more of a swing state than Kansas. There's a pretty good idea of which direction Kansas is going to go. But there's concerns that we won't know until after the election what could have happened. My bigger fear is not this presidential election. It's going to be the one in four years, because it'll be more developed. And then nobody knows how to truly weaponize AI right now. But in four years, I'm pretty sure they will. I mean, in 2020, our biggest concern was misinformation, and we got hit with a pandemic. The great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, the problem with trying to predict the future is it keeps changing. And that's what happened to us in 2020. And now, in 2020, we didn't deal with AI. And now it's coming at us like a freight train. We will know about it in 2024. We just don't know how creative people have come to be able to deploy it. Yeah, really interesting. And Becky, I know in some of the conversations we had before you also mentioned, like the things that are going to develop between now and 2024, we really need to look at that on the horizon. Secretary Aguilar, I want to bring you into this conversation as well. So in January, you said that addressing AI threats to electoral integrity is going to have to be a partnership between the federal government, private sector, and local governments. And I'm hoping you can give us a progress report on how much progress has been made in helping state and local governments understand the threats and how to approach them. I'd say there's no progress. And it's really, really frustrating, especially when a high-level federal official arrives in your state. And the first thing they ask you is, what are you doing about AI? And you look at them and you go, you want my state to step up, put the resources behind something that is receiving billions of dollars of investment. You're the federal government. You have access to researchers. You have access to information I could only dream about. I'm trying to figure out how to get 17 counties across our battleground state to be able to use legacy systems that exist to transfer on to a statewide system. And you're asking me to be the leader on AI? It's pretty unfortunate. It's pretty unfair. Not a good progress report there. Okay, well, hopefully someone is wrong. I don't get to sit around every day and think my job is not to be strategic on these types of things. This is a thing that is impacting the rest of our country. It's not just an issue in Nevada, but for me to have somebody ask me how I'm approaching AI, I think it's pretty unfortunate, especially when the federal government has not had a hearing on funding. Everything in the election space from the federal side is reactive. There is no strategic plan. There is no sustainable strategic funding in elections. Even though it's deemed critical infrastructure, nobody's saying, what is it we're gonna do? Everything we're doing is reactive. Sorry to be the downer, but it's just, I can tell you a lot of great things we're doing in Nevada when it comes to election and voter engagement. But when it comes to this issue, this is one that's catching all of us. Yeah, yeah. And I think that everything is evolving so quickly that we're all thinking about what could be, because we don't know yet. But when you talk about don't know, we will catch the issues of the impersonator. What really scares me is that an opportunity to participate in the AI Democracy Project with Dr. Alondra Nelson from the Institute of Events Study, which is a fascinating organization. And proof news. They brought a few of us election leaders into a room. We tested several of the chatbots. And the information that was coming out about Nevada specifically was wrong. And when you talk about these issues, and we don't know when somebody's getting this bad information. And we know it's a younger voter that's gonna go to AI and use it to ask the questions to become educated. If somebody's turning 18 and they say, how do I register to vote? And the chatbot tells them, you have to register three weeks before the election, which is not true in Nevada. Nevada, we have same day voter registration. This young person is just gonna walk away and continue with their day. We just lost a voter. And that's what really scares me. And I will have no idea that happened because the information being given is wrong and it's false. And the fact that we can say that in the United States where there's lots of available information that models can be trained upon. But then we think at global scale, which Vivian, I know you at Aspen, you've been doing a lot of work thinking about this and hosting a lot of public conversations and discussions about AI and elections. How does the threat and the strategies to counter possible threats change when we think about this globally? Yeah, well, as you said in the opening, this is a record year for national elections. So we've been able to see, and you mentioned some of these in your Open2, as we count down to the people voting for the national, in the fall, we've been able to sort of track what we've seen happening in other national elections in the United States. And can we point to anything that said, this changed the vote? We don't know. I think Secretary Shraab had it right, which is we're not really gonna know the impact on anything of 2024 until we're able to study it afterwards if we can study it, if we can get access to the data, which is a whole other issue and another panel that we should have. But we have seen in every single national election AI used along the lines of some of the examples that you gave about vote rigging or a leading candidate in a very Muslim country, a picture of her in a bikini which can just sink your candidacy in a heartbeat with that emotional response. And it's terrifying. And the messaging, again, it's the stuff you can't see. It's the WhatsApp messages. It's the telegram messages. That's where this kind of information, misinformation, false images, false audio can travel. And the ability to generate this kind of content, highly targeted, customized, personalized to your district at scale is unprecedented. And just so frightening to think about that, we're gonna continue on this frightening theme for a second because Becky, I wanna ask you something because you live in the world of open AI. You live in the world of AI and thinking about what the challenges might be. You do it at a global level. And I think from, it would be really fascinating for all of us to think about from your vantage point, what really is the worst case scenario in this upcoming election and what can be done to try to circumvent that. I think piggybacking off of what Secretary Schwab said earlier and what you mentioned in your opening remarks. The harm that we have seen to date is really around deep fakes that we've actually seen play out at a global scale in these elections. And frankly, that we've heard over and over and over again in our conversations with policymakers in civil society that this is the thing that they're most concerned about. I think the technology today is not yet at a place where some of these more large scale risks and concerns could take place, but there are audio visual models available, audio, images and video that could be leveraged and that out of context information or misinformation could result in some really scary outcomes. What we're doing, we only have an image model currently available. We don't have a commercially available audio or video product, but for images, we have a mitigation in place at the front end where you can't create an image of a real person. So if you ask the model to create an image of an elected official, a secretary of state and an election official, otherwise it won't create that, it will refuse. That said, we know that images that are seemingly innocuous could be taken out of context and that can be equally harmful. And so I think one of the things that you mentioned in your article earlier is really around provenance. So understanding the origin of these audio visual models and their output is a huge part of the work that we're doing internally to give a little bit more context on what that looks like. There's something called C2PA. It's a fancy term for just a piece of data that's attached to an image. You can think of it like a passport. So as you go around to different countries, you bring your passport similar to this image. If it travels around the internet, it has this piece of data attached to it. And with that data, someone on the other end can identify where it originated, that it was produced by Dolly 3, our image generation tool, if it was produced by a different model, or if it's an authentic image, and it was perhaps an image that came from the BBC, who is another entity that has signed on to C2PA. This is by no means a perfect solution if the image is somehow modified. It can lose that data, but it's a really good step in the direction of creating an industry-wide standard where all of these different platforms can talk to each other. Our tools are not a distribution platform. People don't distribute content from our services, but they can go to a distribution service and upload it to any one of the social media. So making sure that we have common language that we can use is really important. The last thing I'll say on that is that I think it's really important that we continue as an industry to push forward the research in this area around provenance. As I said, the current technology is by no means a silver bullet. One thing that I am personally very excited about that we're working on internally is something called a classifier that effectively allows us to look at a whole bunch of images and with very high accuracy, identify which ones came from our tools. The thing that I'm excited about is that it does that even when the image has been modified in ways that you see out in the wild on the internet. So on social media, things get cropped, things get compressed, text gets laid over it, and it continues to be able to identify those images with high degrees of accuracy. That's the kind of stuff that we need in order to be much more robust to these kinds of harms. So that's sort of top of mind for 2024. I think that's great in making those sorts of things public in the way that you called for in your article, Secretary Schwab, I think is a really exciting way to think about how this could help, how things could be more productive moving forward. I want to return Vivian, you kind of started to mention that encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp are a particular issue. And Secretary Aguilar, you've mentioned that multiple languages are a particular issue and a concern, especially in a place like Nevada and here in Texas. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're thinking in terms of AI and foreign influence and why things like multiple languages and maybe elaborate a bit more on Vivian's comments about WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging apps? Sure, I think knowing the large number, we have a large Latino population in Nevada. They are going to determine the outcome of some of our most critical elections. But it goes back to even AI and translation of information. Again, at the AI Democracy Project, we went through some of the translation projects and the information, the way information was translated into Spanish, the tone was very festive and very party-like. And I think when you're talking about the seriousness of elections, that's not gonna translate very well to that prospective voter. And so that's a big concern. And we also did it into Hindi. And the way Hindi was translated and translated was so strict and so critical that I think a voter would hear that and would be afraid to actually vote because it was so strict and so direct. And so the tone of translation is very, very critical, but the majority of people don't speak second languages and so they're not able to understand the impact the translation is able to have. Yeah, I think that's one thing that you think about not only the scale in terms of how quickly people could create messages using AI but also how far they could spread, give it distribution channels and then adding language to it is... The underground data that's been relied upon in AI machines is not generated by these communities either. And so there's a sense of already existing bias. And so how do you ensure that you're actually being content appropriate in those translations and that information being given? Yeah, what a good point. In thinking about how we deal with all of this, and I want to come back to you because given your background in the news from New York Times and PRNBC, The Guardian, I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about what you think. How prepared are the news media to deal with this? What role should they have in this? Could be more prepared. At the Aspen Institute, we have a big AI and elections initiative going and our objective is just to share information across groups because I think that is the biggest gap. So we presented at the National Association of Secretaries of State about what are the risks and what are the mitigations. We have a meeting coming up in two weeks for technologists in Silicon Valley. In fact, the secretaries are gonna be there, which I'm very grateful for, to help the tech companies, those who are not as informed as Becky is, say, for example, about what the risks are to help them understand what are the challenges that those on the ground are facing so they can also come up with mitigations. And the third part of it is to make sure that the media is ready for how to cover these issues when they inevitably come up because there is, I come from news media, I am in my heart a journalist, I will always be, consider myself, my primary identity as journalist. That said, my fellow journalists don't always necessarily do the right things. I think that there is sort of a little bit of an overblown coverage of the big spectacular deep fake, which I think can actually lead people to just mistrust everything, as I mentioned on the podium earlier. And at the same time, not just being prepared for how to cover when these kind of, particularly not just the big deep fake, but the big shiny spectacular deep fake, but the kinds of things that Secretary Aguilar was talking about in terms of what's happening with language translation, whether it's get out, fair-minded, good-hearted get out the boat, or whether it's nefarious actors who are trying to dissuade those using easily accessible language tools, or what stories may be traveling across messaging apps, and really making sure that they are prepared. Really the only thing we can do, I think, for 2024, is to make sure that the public understands whenever they hear, whatever they see, whatever strange robo-call they get about bomb scares at all of the voting places, that they know where to go to check it out. So it's, what's your website again? SOS.cancis.gov. Vote.nv.gov. There you go. This is important, too, is if it doesn't say .gov, chances are it didn't come from us. CIS is really good about protecting, we get significant cyber protections by using the .gov, and there's a lot of imitators that are .org, or .co. So know where to go, and that is both that those who are in charge of election integrity, who will be the, or local election leaders in their communities, or trusted news media. I think making sure that people have those relationships so that they say, okay, I will go to trusted media outlets, please. On the trusted media thing, and I would have the great opportunity to speak with a group of teachers today, what really bothers me right now about trusted media is majority of Americans and students don't have access to that media because they're behind a paywall. And that paywall is a huge barrier to people having the opportunity to get good journalism. And I think when it comes to elections, I wish the elections information would be, the paywall would be removed because it's in the public interest to ensure people have strong information available to them. I will say a lot of the nonprofit, local media, some of whom were represented by organizations today are free and open and not behind a paywall. Thank God we have one in Nevada. We have the Nevada independence, and it's great, but again, we need to ensure they have the resources to exist to do the journalism they need. And I think this brings us to a next question here, which I'd like to ask of all of you, which is if you have the ability to enact one policy with respect to AI in elections, a realistic policy, so this is not the magic wand scenario of do no one would be deceived by misinformation. This is a realistic policy that you could enact. I'm curious to hear what it would be from each of your respective perspectives. Who wants to start? I spent 19 years in the legislature and I love the making policy, being a chairman was one of the greatest honors I ever had because you get to, and when I was a chair of financial institutions, the biggest issue was Uber because the question was who's responsible for the insurance on the vehicle, right? And if you remember back in 2016, maybe it was 2015, Uber canceled their network in Kansas and if you opened Uber, it said, please respond to Chairman Schwab about getting Uber again in Kansas. And so you clicked on it and so imagine their network, it shut down our server and our capital because they got all these emails, right? And so I took down Uber, but we struck a deal and whatnot, but so these are the things are, I believe in a free market, so there's a freedom there, right? But it does work through critical infrastructure that is subject to regulation. If you're engaged in commerce in the United States, you're subject to regulation, which is fair. I really am spending more time on that Minnesota law that's saying, no, you have to disclaim, I'm not saying you can't create it, but you have to be honest about what it is. And if you're not, then we're gonna throw the book at you and it's gonna be a financial, it's financially gonna hurt you. And if you're just a college kid or if you're a foreign adversary, it's still gonna be a cost because maybe the federal government won't go after you, but Minnesota has a National Guard. They can still sue and have jurisprudence across oceans, right? It's more of a challenge, but at least you set, hey, this is the standard of what we're going to do. Outside of that, how can we make laws better? Well, you're setting a great standard. Do we put that in statute? I don't know, I'm gonna hand that part off to you. That's a great pivot. I think from our lens, it really is about standardization. I mean, taking again, thinking about provenance, that's just one example where there has been across not just tech industry, but also the news media, some amount of standardization that has occurred organically. But I think for that to apply to other areas of this technology, there does need to be some momentum that is across not just industry, but also government. One thing that you were saying earlier is, how do the models respond consistently? One way that we can do that and that we're exploring is pulling in what we're calling democratic inputs, identifying a whole host of representative views so that we understand what model behavior should look like. But I don't think that 1000 people in Silicon Valley should be responsible for determining what that looks like. And we're trying to make good strides towards that absent standards, but I think that's really something that we need to pull together a whole bunch of minds across multiple industries to figure out and to roll out a clear consistent way to do some of these really tough things in this nascent technology. Yeah, I love that idea of the collaboration and thinking through how you would enact these provenance indicators. We have a researcher at the Center for Media Engagement that's been doing some work to try to figure out if you displayed that to people. Just the raw information of where an image came from. Will that affect whether people find it to be true or false? And she found indeed that it does have some really beneficial effects. So I think there's some optimism behind doing that sort of work, which I think is really exciting. Okay, jump in. What do you think? I'm gonna go back to my days in grammar school and say, every time you wrote a report, you had to use a primary source. And so if these chatbots and these machines were able to only use data from primary sources, those sources being.gov websites and making sure that that information is being used. Nevada passed some pretty significant voter access policies in 2021, but they're not showing up in these chatbots. They're showing old Nevada law that's been replaced. And so if we could go back to .gov, go back to statutes and use primary sources as the source of information. What do you think? I'll harken back to this Minnesota law that Secretary Schwab was referring to. We do need Congress of the United States, the Federal Congress to act and to create legislation along these lines. Again, we don't wanna ban synthetic media. That would be ridiculous, but we do want disclosure, mandatory disclosure and real penalties for those who not. And also to give the Federal Election Commission more teeth. The Federal Election Commission, most people don't realize, it's very little, they're really only about campaign finance. They don't have any other authority that the, and probably shouldn't have a lot of authority, by the way, I'm not recommending that. I think it's right that the elections are handled by the states, but when it comes to this kind of disclosure around the use of synthetic media, AI generated false content, I think there is a role. I know that there's many members of Congress of both parties that agree that this is a role that the FEC can play. Great policies. If I had that magic wand right now, I would do it. Okay, so for our last question here, I want to end with giving people a sense of where we're all coming from so that after the 2024 election, we can all reflect back on this panel and what we think. So I want to read you some headlines about AI and elections, and I want to hear from each of you in our short time left, whether you think that the fears of AI are overhyped, underhyped, or just about right. The Guardian says disinformation reimagined how AI could erode democracy in the 2024 US elections. Pointer, how generative AI could help foreign adversaries influence US elections. From foreign affairs, the coming age of AI-powered propaganda. Overhyped, underhyped, or just about right, and Vivian, I think we should start with you. I don't know what the other great philosopher, that being Taylor Swift, that say two things can be true at the same time. So it can be overhyped and underhyped at the same time. And if you think that's my answer. Do you want to just offer 30 seconds more of explanation for that response? Well, first of all, we don't know what's going to happen in 2024. I think that there is reason to be very concerned about the impact of synthetic media, AI-generated false information on the election. So it is not overhyped. We all need to be aware of that. For the reasons I was mentioned before, so that people know where to check to make sure something is true. So that's the underhyped. The overhyped is that I fear we're going to just make people stop believe, like I've said over and over again, that they will not believe anything. And that's got nothing to do with technology, tech companies, policy. That is a massive societal issue that could be incredibly damaging. Okay, we have to be quick now because our time is almost over, under, just about right. Everything as long as we're prepared to respond to it collectively. Okay. I think it's important for us to be clear-eyed about what's coming. And I don't necessarily think that all of those things are likely to happen right now with the current technology, but I do think it is very important that we are aware, that we're building awareness of what might be coming in the future, so that we are prepared. That's sort of core to the way that we deploy our models. We deploy models even that might be very stupid, so that people might be able to understand where this technology is going. And I think it's critical that folks are clear-eyed going in so that we can start building mitigations for the risks of tomorrow. First off, is a huge Chan City chiefs fan. I love Travis Kelsey. Bonus points for bringing in the Swifties, man. So as a son of a military guy, you expect the worst in hope for the best. And so both would have to be true. So we expect the worst in hope for the best. And I think Cisco would agree. We're gonna, you're gonna have a good election this year and you're gonna be able to trust the results. You just may not be able to trust the people who tell you about the results. You heard it here at check.gov. Please join me in thanking our panelists so much. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Frazier, the Honorable Richard Gaypart, Faro Pandis, Eli Frazier, and Nicole Tisdale. We're just waiting on one more here. Some Mike challenges. Well, it's a pleasure to be, well, we're waiting for Far to join us here. It's a pleasure to be with you all today, this audience. But most, for me personally, it is just a true privilege to be with this panel. An incredible group of people, many of whom I get to work with on a regular basis on the Council for Responsible Social Media. As I've sat here these last two days and listened to these conversations and grappled with the core of what we're trying to do and understand, I've come to one central question. Can our democracy survive if something isn't changed in our information environment? And of course, at the core of that is social media, which is what we're here to talk about today, technology. And it has become the dominant form of communication. It is becoming the predominant way in which people get their information and news, particularly for young people. And what has this world resulted in today? Very different conversation if we were having this conference 20 years ago. Well, what has resulted in is mass spread of false information, flooding the airwaves, creeping into our minds. It has resulted in the worst mental health crisis ever for young people, where we see two thirds of young people saying that they are anxious more than half of the time. Self-harm has increased threefold for young girls. It's remarkable what's happened to our democracy. We think about where Congressman Gephardt served in the House of Representatives. It's hard to even understand how these are the same institution. And you think about how fractious it is. We didn't have a speaker of the House for three weeks. By partisanship seems to have died. And so much more has changed in this era of social media. Not to mention that our foreign adversaries are licking their chops and using every opportunity they can to divide us further, to spread disinformation and so much more. So, I paint this picture for you all because it's a really important understanding what the center of this is, which is a broken business model that we heard a lot about last night from Kara Swisher, which is about engagement. Keeping your eyes on those platforms with the most powerful addictive technologies ever created, sucking you in so that they earn more money. And through those business models, we see then powerful algorithms created to keep us in information silos or at worst radicalize people in very profound ways. And now we have to deal with generative AI and all the things that that's gonna throw into the mix of this cycle. So now I just painted a very dreary picture for you all, but I promise you, this is the optimistic panel. We are here to tell you there is real genuine hope because we can and I'm seeing signs every day of the possibilities for change. And so with that, I'm gonna turn now to our distinguished panel and start with the issue of kids. Many of you may have seen in January, the CEOs of many of the big tech companies came to Washington and were dressed down universally across the aisle, so much so that Mark Zuckerberg was compelled to apologize to grieving parents in the room. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship, a glimmer of hope that there is possibility to do stuff with both parties. And that is best demonstrated by the Kids Online Safety Act, which now has 67 co-sponsors in the Senate. It was just introduced in the house this week, something we've been working on very intensely. And while all of us care about the future of our kids and the health of their mental state and so much more, this has profound effects and impacts for democracy and what we're all talking about as well. So my question, and we'll start with Congressman Gephardt, is outside of the immediate impact on our children and their safety. Why is COSA so critical for our broader tech reform efforts? And how could this have a bigger impact on the information environment and our democracy? We need a win. We have not had a win since the beginning of social media. They run the show. They've got all the money. We've not had a win. We believe that COSA can be passed this year and sent to the president. CRSM is a totally bipartisan organization. We've got 40 or 50 members, very diverse, from all different vectors of this problem. And we are working top down. A lot of the groups that are great, that are here, are working bottom up to fix this problem. You need both top down and bottom up. And we go up on the hill and we talk to Republican members, Democratic members, and I have never been more optimistic than I am today that we're gonna get legislation done this year as the beginning of dealing with this problem. Anyone else wanna chime in on the importance of kids online safety and how this could weigh into the broader impact of the information environment? One of the things I would say, having worked on the issue of young people getting radicalized for the last 20 plus years since 9-11, is that we've learned a lot about the process of radicalization and how ideas can be weaponized. We have, across the board, both from conservative and liberal entities, universities, as well as think tanks and nonprofit organizations, done a lot of thinking around what we can be doing to be able to protect young people. What was just said about we need to win is extremely important because there's been so much failure along the way. We have failed our children, we have failed the future of the American leadership, whether or not they are going into the public sector or the private sector, we're looking at generations of young people for whom these ideas are really compelling and if we don't do more today to be able to build a safety net for our future generations of Americans, what are we doing? So I couldn't agree more on the issue of we need a win but I will also say that win can be backed up by data that we didn't have 20 years ago and we have today. Any other comments on that? Yeah, I really appreciate the optimism and I think it speaks to, you know, there's kind of been a learned helplessness about this problem that we can't do anything about it and I think that's pernicious and it's starting to change and the conference has democracy in the title but digitally we live essentially in these kind of autocracies. We operate in corporate environments that people have no say in, they have no rights in and I think shaking that off and starting to think about how do we as citizens govern our information environment is a really critical step that we need to kind of take and so this is a start to that. It's all good, jump in please. I'll just add to everything that everyone is saying but also I want our optimism to be empowering. I always tell people these social media companies owe us, y'all. We use their platforms, they make money off of us, they operate in an open society, all of that is the foundation of a democracy and so while I'm very optimistic, I'm also really forceful about this is no longer we're asking you, we are demanding accountability, we are demanding transparency, we are demanding that these social media companies do their part to uphold democracy and I'm very forceful and passionate about that because I think that's also included in how we get the win. We stop asking and we start demanding. Well, we'll get more clouds. Let's go now to national security and we're fortunate to have a couple real national security experts here with us on stage. So Russia, China, Iran and others regularly interfere in our elections, polarize us further, spread false information through disinformation campaigns and much more. The House recently passed a bill to essentially ban TikTok. If taken up by the Senate and President Biden has said he will sign this bill into law. And the reason for this is because there's concerns about data, the CCP's access to sensitive American data and the ability to manipulate the algorithm to move public opinion in a certain way that is advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party and not to American policy. So Farah, starting with you, does this approach make sense and expanding that out further? What else can Congress and the US government do to most effectively protect US national security both when it comes to foreign platforms like TikTok and our own companies domestically? I think it's a really critical question that you're asking and I wanna scope back just a bit before I get into the nitty gritty of what we can do in terms of solutions because solutions are available and affordable right now. That's the headline. But let's take a step back and really think about what human assets we have. Outside of time, which is in fact the most precious asset that we have, our own human data and information is the next in line. And what we are talking about today in the world that we have constructed and it's not just America, it's around the world, is that that data has been used and it's part of our daily life. We can't live without the sharing data and whatever, what food you eat, what clothes you buy, all of this stuff, it's part and parcel of how we live. But for the average American, they aren't waking up every day wondering what Russia and China and other non-state actors like an ISIS or a Hamas or a neo-Nazi group might be thinking. For those of us who have been doing foreign policy, we think about those alongside what's happening domestically. And that domestic piece for me is the part that I think is most compelling because we are not living in the 1950s. We're in 2024 where international and domestic have merged. What happens in one part of the world affects another. I remember very strongly when I was working in the Bush administration during 9-11, you guys will remember perhaps the Danish cartoon crisis where something that happened in Copenhagen affected lives in Kabul. We weren't ready as America to understand, we didn't know what viral meant. We didn't understand that something that had moved along in Europe could make our troops vulnerable. People lost their lives all over the world because of that cartoon. And we began to understand that in fact these ideas and the ricocheting effect of how these things get spread, this was way back in 2006, 2007, when we didn't have Twitter or X or whatever it's called and other social platforms, even the most basic things. So for me as I think about this and as somebody who has spent my career thinking about the ideas about hate and extremism and how bad actors use these platforms, I think about my own country and I think about what do Americans need to understand about things that are being shown on YouTube or conversations that are happening on Discord or conversations that are happening on Twitch, if you don't know what Twitch is, take a look and why that matters to their daily life because their information and your ability to behave as Americans can be manipulated by states and non-states. The way we are as Americans will change because there are adversaries that want that to happen. If we begin to understand that we shouldn't be duped and if we begin to understand that we have an opportunity today to take everything that we've learned about all of the things that we know and to build fortifications so that we're not duped, that we're protecting American societies, that we understand very critically that there is not this moment where we put our hands up and think, oh my goodness, it's too hard, we're boiling the ocean. No, we're not boiling the ocean. We are taking a very confident and very focused approach to how we build resilience and that resilience can happen. The way I describe it to people is there are nano-interventions, there are micro-interventions, there are macro-interventions and there are mega-interventions. And it is not just government that needs to make laws or policy makers that need to move. It's also regular citizens who think about their own fortification of their communities and what we stand for as Americans. So for me, the national security points, yes, of course we are worried about a China taking advantage of an American society. Of course we care that a platform like TikTok can mobilize a change in American behavior. Of course we care that there's propaganda that's being put forward by Russia that's making us think differently and act differently. But we should also care that the very nature of who we are as Americans are changing because people who are not Americans are deciding that that's what they want to do. So the way in which we approach this, the solution side, one piece of this, of course is the TikTok component. But it's much bigger than that. It is a holistic assessment of who we are, what we stand for, and what guardrails we wanna put on society so that we're not duped. Thanks Farah. Nicole, you've spent time in the White House and Congress working on these issues directly. Tell us your perspective. What can we do and what are the biggest threats that you're concerned about at this moment? Yeah, I mean just to echo Farah's point, I wanna say this and I'm comfortable because I'm from Mississippi and I'm in front of a Texas crowd, but y'all, two things can be true. We are all getting these questions about what about the TikTok ban? What about the TikTok ban? You can support, which I support the TikTok ban and decentralizing who owns TikTok and who has the ability to demand the data of the people who are on the platform. And it's not enough. And that's what I tell people. This false equivalent that people are giving you that you can only have one, that's not true. We can do hard things. Yes, it's going to be hard to decentralize TikTok and hold American social media companies responsible, but we can do that. And so when I think about from a national security standpoint, one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this is because Farah's point is right. It's not just the people's Republic of China. It's not just Iran, it's not just Russia, but these influence campaigns, and I'm very cognizant to not call them disinformation because all of the information is not false or misleading, which is what disinformation is. Some of the best influence campaigns are because they are spreading kernels of truth. They are saying things that are not totally false. They're not totally misleading. And the examples I use are, you know, I'm a black woman. When I hear people say it's disinformation to say that some people don't want you to vote, I look around and I see what's happening to black voters, Hispanic voters and indigenous voters. It is not false or misleading to say that some people don't want us to vote. The source matters. If Russia is saying that they don't want you to vote, the American politicians don't want you to vote, I know what happens in Russia. I know that people vote out of fear of being killed. I know that people vote out of fear of being jail. It matters to me when Russia is spreading influence operations and spreading information because the source matters. When you hear, you know, I'm also a woman, when you hear that the People's Republic of China are doing influence campaigns saying, you know, American politicians don't care about a woman's autonomy of her body. It matters that that is coming out of China. That is a country that also doesn't care. The difference between what when Russia says it, when China says it, and when it happens in the United States is we live in a democracy and so there is an option, there is a process, there is due process for change. I tell people I'm not happy with what the Supreme Court did as it relates to women's rights, but there was a process. We are in a place now where Congress can come in and act in that process and change. You don't have that in Russia. You don't have that in China. Whatever they say is the law or is the rule that is the rule. And I think getting people to be empowered to understand sources matter. Also our communities are not in a place where we can't understand that. I think everybody, that was a very quick summation of kind of what happens in Russia and China, but I see people nodding so I know people understand that. You have to be able to, from a national security standpoint, put this stuff in context for people so that they understand we can't have this on our social media platforms. Going back to the beginning, these companies have a level of responsibility that we are just enforcing. And if you are gonna operate, if you're gonna have us on your platforms for good, then you also have to acknowledge when your platform is being used for bad. So I'm gonna pivot us now to another creative and really optimistic possibility. Elizabeth Warren, Lindsey Graham. Don't have much in common, pretty much don't agree on anything. But yet last year they came together and proposed to the creation of a new digital regulatory agency to oversee technology and social media. Similar to the FDA or FAA. And you all think about this example that was brought up last night, but I think it's the most clarifying. When one issue happened on Alaska Airlines flight, one issue, no one's hurt, but it's one serious issue. Hundreds of planes are down for months, billions of dollars in lost revenue for companies, lasting implications for Boeing. But yet when products, products are wreaking havoc on social media causing immense harm in so many ways that we've talked about, there is no body that oversees that dedicated just to that cause to say, we're gonna take down this product and we're gonna test this product before it goes to market. So my question, I'm gonna start with Eli. Do you think that some sort of structural change like this agency is necessary to really get, bring oversight and fix the technology sector? And beyond this proposal, are there any other structural solutions that you would propose? Yeah, so I think you make a great point, which is like we have federal bodies that regulate toasters and kids toys and just about anything you can think of, but we don't have a body that is holistically responsible for regulating the place where I have young kids and it's like this is a big part of the environment that unfortunately they are gonna be growing up into. We don't have anyone who's at the wheel of the ship there. So yes. But I think I wanna kind of stretch the conversation a little bit because I think these questions of regulation are kind of absolutely end in the sense that if we were talking about public education and we were only talking about regulating private schools, that wouldn't be a full conversation about how you secure education for a population. And if we were talking about making sure that everyone had access to information in libraries, regulating bookstores wouldn't get you to the goal. So I really think we need to be thinking in that way about our digital spaces. And our friend Ethan Zuckerman, who's a scholar of information, has a great story about Ben Franklin and the post office. So Ben Franklin's mostly known for keys and lightning, but the post office was really like a critical visionary invention in early America that subsidized the ability of people to very easily trade information. And so many people worked for the post office that you can really describe America in the early days, and this is his words, as like a post office with a small military. That was what we were. And that was critical. When you talk about DeTochville going around America and seeing this kind of civic society that was emerging, it was because we had invested in an infrastructure, a public infrastructure for information exchange that bound us together and that encoded our democratic values from the beginning. We've done that many times over history. We've done that with libraries. We've done that with public parks. It's one of the things that makes America kind of amazing is that we've had this continual public innovation and how we organize ourselves and our information. But I feel like we've lost that muscle or that reflex that we're ceding all of this ground to how can we tweak the algorithm in Facebook and make it a little bit better or make it a little less worse? And so I run an organization called New Public, the focus of which is really thinking about sort of not everything in digital space needs to be publicly driven, publicly public infrastructure. But there are places, just like you can have bookstores and libraries, there are places where we need to build things around public values. And Kara Swisher said last night, that this is a business problem, she's right. There are certain things that big businesses, multinational businesses are never gonna care about, are never gonna make a priority. And if we don't build the kind of civic institutions that do that, we're not gonna get where we wanna go. So to answer your question, I think absolutely we need to rein in the excesses and the damages and the harms of the existing platforms. But we also need to be thinking about how we create, what is the equivalent of that kind of postal service for the digital age? What's the equivalent of the libraries and parks? And how do we build those kinds of institutions as well? And I think that's an enormously important policy project for the 21st century. Absolutely. Congressman Gephardt, let's bring you in here again, whether any comments on the digital agency or the structural changes that we need to see to really make a difference. I totally agree with what was just said. And I started with it, we need top-down work to get guardrails in these platforms. But we, the people, have to build things bottom-up as we always have, as we always have. That's what makes this country so fantastic is that the people do things. I think the digital agency is a real help and I hope we can get something done on it. Let me give you my wish list for legislation that I hope we can get done in the next year or two. Number one is COSA. We gotta take care of the kids, that's the first problem. We have three mothers on our council whose kids kill themselves. And a lot of people out there don't know the dangers that come from the way social media operates. One of the mothers told me her story. She said, my son was 14, he came to me one day with his phone and said, look at this, this is funny. And she said, what is it? He said, it's the choke challenge. She said, that sounds dangerous, don't get involved in that. And he said, oh, I never would. I just thought it was funny. A few days later, she finds him hanging from his belt in the garage, dead. Why did that happen? Well, the media platforms, if I'm a youngster and I go on and I'm asking questions about eating disorders or being depressed or cutting myself, the algorithms drag me into these challenges. And I'm told there are like 15 different challenges that all lead to the same result. I mean, this is, and the people that run these platforms know what they're doing. This is immoral behavior, I'm sorry. So, we need COSA, we need privacy legislation because the base property that they use to make their money is us, we're the product. They know everything about you if you're on the platform. Everything, so they know to boost to you information to keep your attention on the platform so they make more money. So, privacy legislation would help with national security. It would help with everything we're talking about. The third thing is section 230. And I don't wanna go too long on this but I voted for section 230. In 1994, whatever. And if you'd like to hear all my bad votes, I could spend all night. That was a bad vote. But at the time, the platforms came to us and said, you gotta make us immune from harm that would be caused by what's on our platform. If you don't, you'll never have an internet economy. These companies were little bitty companies then, right? They second said, more importantly, we're just a dumb pipe. We don't put any content on, the people put it on. So, let them be sued but don't sue us. Since then, they've become the most intelligent pipe in human history. They know everything about me so they're boosting to me information 24-7, 365 to keep me angry and upset so they keep my attention. So we need that piece of legislation as well. Maybe we can't rescind it, maybe we can amend it to make it safer so that they have to have accountability for the harm that they are affirmatively creating. One of our mothers tried to sue the platforms because of the harm that came from her son killing himself and the suit was thrown out because of section 230. Immediately, fourth, the digital agency. If you want my wish list for top down, those are the four things and we're gonna work our heads off to get those four done. Thanks for that. Yeah. And for those who are not aware, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act essentially gives social media platforms a lot of technology companies blanket immunity from lawsuits for the harms they cause. Far, you wanna jump in? Could I say a couple of things? Just in response to the two wonderful comments that have just been made, I wanna pick up on this idea of who we are as Americans and who we've always been. And I see a lack of imagination on these issues and it surprises me because we don't have a lack of imagination in America. We figure out how to do things as Americans. And for some reason, this is too hard, right? And I look at the what we have decided is important to society. The decisions that we are making as society about ourselves and I shake my head because we see what's coming, we see the train that's coming, yet we aren't change, we're not doing anything to change behavior. What was just said about top down and bottom up, absolutely 100%, but it's also circular, right? We've gotta look around and say, where are the places with creativity and imagination that we haven't thought about before? So the digital agency is one exceptional and really smart idea. But there are lots of smaller things that will nudge people in a direction that will change behavior and we've done that in America. We did that when AIDS came in the 1980s and we never could say we couldn't talk about safe sex. We couldn't even say the word condom out loud. We couldn't talk about all these things and we thought, how will we ever get Americans to change their behavior? Well, guess what? Years later, we have figured this out. There was a time in America where to say to America, if a European looked at an American and said, they will never recycle, they will never change their behaviors. Americans are not like that, they're so wasteful, they don't do what we do. Well, over time we've taught communities how to put plastic in this place and paper in another. So these kinds of behavioral changes can happen. The nudges that happen both from the private sector and from the public sector can develop itself in such a way that these protections that we are talking about, the safety components, but also the society components are there for the taking. And for me, as I think about what you've just said about who we are as we the people, we the people ought to be better at going forward in the way that we know we have done for this magnificent country and think creatively about how to do this in a smart, effective and trial little, not be so sure that we're gonna fail. I think that's part of the reason why we've hit so many roadblocks. Nobody wants to take the ownership over this. They don't wanna have it be a disaster. We've got to experiment the way we would in other fields. We the people ought to be better, I love that. So Nicole, one of the pieces on Congressman Deppart's wish list was data privacy. I'd love for you to share with this audience here something that's happened very recently with respect to data privacy and anything else you'd like to add to the wish list of what else we could do to fix this legislatively. Sure, so there's been a really important privacy bill that has been in Congress. On the house side, we had really good movement, bipartisan support, and it got held up in the Senate. I'm trying not to use the members names because I don't actually think it's important about who was supporting it and who was moving it. What has happened as of Friday is there is an agreement to get text done with the commitment to move it forward. And what I want people to pull from that is there's a commitment to do something. And so as we're talking about the different legislative proposals, but also just some of the history of like societal changes in our country, it all comes from us doing something. And so the privacy community, we're very excited about the possibility that there is going to be agreed upon legislation that will actually get a vote in the house and the Senate. And I think as you're hearing about a lot of the proposals of how do we hold the social media platforms accountable, the most important thing to remember is we have to take a vote. So when you talk about voting on section 230 in 1994, I just think that is too long for us to have a piece of legislation and not amend it, not reform it, not change it, not just vote on it again. We don't see that in any other industry and we don't see that with any other laws. We're talking about the post office. I know people have strong thoughts and opinions about the post office. But you know what? The post office gets reauthorized. We vote on that, Congress votes on that consistently. And as the needs of the people who use the Postal Service change, the laws change with it. Everything in our democracy, in our legislative process requires us to go back and make sure that these laws are still pertinent for the time that we are here. It's insanity that this law was passed in 1994 and it's hands off. I was 10 years old in 1994. We didn't have internet access in my home in 1994. It is fair to go back in and say we need to look at this. Just today, there's a really big surveillance bill that failed in the House vote today. It was passed originally after 9-11 at a time where we were really worried about kind of homegrown terrorism and like trying to make sure that we didn't have another 9-11. That is a really big piece of legislation and we knew that it was imported and Congress said every five years we're gonna bring this up for a vote. And every five years people debate over it, people fight over it, I hated the vote to be honest when I was working in Congress because it requires so much. And you have members of Congress that are on different sides. It doesn't matter what party they're in. That bill failed today because they are going to continue to debate on it. They're gonna deliberate on it. The Senate has an option if they wanna pass it, they can do it. But it's happening. It's action and I think that's the most frustrating thing about Section 230 or any kind of reform with the social media companies, we won't take the vote. And I know there are a lot of grassroots people that are here and you're trying to, I would say you don't have to figure out where the commas go and where the periods go and which proposal you like. Demand that a vote be taken on laws and provisions that were set up when these companies just didn't have access like they do and they weren't so much of our life. Thanks, I completely agree with you, Nicole. So I wanna finish off with another Eli Evil teaser to other things besides legislation. There's a lot happening at the federal level which you're hearing about or optimism. There's a lot of stuff having to state but there's a lot of stuff you alluded to that people can do. This problem started in the private sector. Private sector, entrepreneurs and individuals like those watching those here in the audience can do something. So please, I'd love you to go back into this Eli and expand upon what we can do as individuals to help protect our democracy. Yeah, well, I think this in some ways links not only parts of this conversation together but also parts of the conversation throughout the day which is, you know, Robert Putnam wrote a great book recently called The Upswing which tracks sort of this extraordinary birth and new civic institutions in the early 1900s and these innovations as Congressman Gephard says do often start bottom up. And I'm particularly taken with the story about sort of public high school which was something that totally crazy idea for a while. A couple of schools in, I think it was Iowa, you know, started experimenting with it. And within 20 years you had it as a kind of universal public good. The place where I'm really focused and which really again speaks to some of the focus on local journalism and local news that we've had earlier is that where we're seeing kind of some emergent good patches of social conversation, social media is in these kind of very local contexts which are not always kind of driven by large platform mechanics, are not always often have like people involved and actually actively pulling them together and are doing some of the jobs that are missing in the news deserts. And so I think there's an extraordinary opportunity to think about if we were kind of to take apart what news media and what other civic institutions did in the 20th century and rebuild it for the 21st, what does that look like? And I don't think any of us totally knows yet but I think that's a really exciting project of invention that a lot of people, we're seeing tons of people experiment with this right now in Vermont and then Detroit and then Brooklyn and all sorts of places around the country. People are experimenting with like, how do we build this in a way that doesn't lead to the awful incentives that Congressman Gephard talked about? So I think that's really like, that's an exciting thing about this moment. There's a lot of destruction, there's a lot of harm but there's also a real opportunity to think about what's the kinds of civic institutions we wanna build and how do we do that not just through policy and through government but kind of build a new kind of civil society that's gonna see us through this new digital era. I think that's the opportunity that we're all here together to explore. On that note, thank you so much. This panel is an incredible conversation. I hope you all have left feeling more optimistic than you came in about the possibilities but thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our afternoon program. Thank you for coming.