 A criminal justice major from Burlington, North Carolina, I am honored to bring you greetings on behalf of Elizabeth City State University's Community Connections Program and Lecture Series. We would like to thank our sponsors, First Citizens Bank, Microsoft, National Endowment of the Arts, Duke Energy Foundation, and Trustee Phyllis Bosenworth, along with the contributions of all of our ECSU students that made this event possible. The Community Connections Performing and Lecture Series mission is to produce cultural experiences which can be enjoyed by students, faculty, staff, along with the community at large. We'd also like to welcome those who are joining us tonight via ECSU's YouTube channel on livestream. We are in a critical period of time. Throughout the month of October, we have explored the complexities and beauties of the intersections of our collective identities as ECSU students, as the citizens of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and this country. In just a few days, we all will make a choice for who will represent our voices. Tonight, we are honored to have with us a nationally recognized voice, a thought leader, a woman who pushes a global agenda and leans into discomfort. Leila Fado. After a brief video, we will hear from my classmate, Kaya Carter, who will introduce tonight's guest. There were a huge amount of attacks on foreign journalists on Saturday during the celebrations because people suspected journalists of being from Al Jazeera, the Katari-funded network. And so it is getting harder to do our jobs because of that hostility. Elizabeth City State University proudly presents, Connecting the World, Global Conversations, Creating Community Impact with Leila Fidel, National Public Radio Host, as a part of the Community Connections Performance and Lecture Series on October 27th, 2022, at 7 p.m., inside of the Mary Albrighton Douglas Auditorium, Room 206, inside of the Walter N. Henrietta B. Ridley Student Center. This will also be livestreamed on ECSU's YouTube channel. You know, Augustine, I'm a student here at Elizabeth City State University. I'm an aviation major. I'm also a double majoring in business accounting. And I'm from Baton Ridge, Louisiana. She is very genuine and passionate when it comes down to her line of work. I would love to know her different outlook on why she felt that she had to hurry up and go to the place she went to during the George Ford incident. Be sure to register and join us for this very special Community Connections Performance and Lecture Series with Leila Fadell of National Public Radio. Good evening. I am Kaya Carter, a senior digital media major from Warrensville, North Carolina. And I am humbled to introduce our featured guest. Leila Fadell is a host of Morning Edition, as well as NPR's Morning News podcast, Up First. As a national correspondent, Fadell consistently reported on the fault lines of this divided nation. She flew to Minneapolis in the midst of the pandemic as the city erupted in grief and anger over the killing of George Floyd. She's reported on policing and race on American Muslim communities and on the jarring inequities the coronavirus laid bare in the healthcare system. Her Muslims in America, a new generation series, garnered her the Goldzie Air Prize, an award for excellence in the coverage of American Muslims by an individual or team of U.S. journalists. Previously, she was NPR's international correspondent based in Cairo and covered the wave of revolts in the Middle East. She told tales of a coup in Egypt and what it is like for a country to go through a military overthrow of an elected government. Before joining NPR, Fadell covered the Middle East for the Washington Post as the Cairo bureau chief. Prior to that role, she covered the Iraq War for nearly five years with Knight Ritter, McClatchy newspapers, and later the Washington Post. Her foreign coverage of the devastating toll, human toll of the Iraq War earned her the George R. Polk Award in 2007. In 2016, she was the counsel on foreign relations Edward R. Murrow Fellow. Fadell is a Lebanese-American journalist who speaks conversational Arabic and was raised in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Vikings and community gas, I ask that we recognize and get ready for the authentic storytelling of Leila Fadell. I think it's on now, okay. Thank you both so much for that really beautiful introduction and thank you all so much for having me here. I'm a little bit familiar with Elizabeth City because my uncle, Dr. Jim Watson, is from here and his wife, Phyllis Bosworth. So I'm very excited to be here and to talk to you. I plan to hat up a podium, so I'm just gonna read my notes from my lap. And then we can talk about this work and really whatever interests you about what we do at NPR and journalism. My talk today, I hate wanting to say good morning, but I know it's not morning, but I'm never out past seven, so good evening. Yeah, I wake up usually at two a.m., so I'm usually in bed by now, but today I woke up at five because I was not on the show. So I want to start to talk to you about what I do and then about what I think is at stake in the industry that I work in. What's at stake in journalism? So I've been a journalist almost 20 years. I mean, that video clearly I was much younger 10 years ago covering the uprising in Egypt. And when I first graduated from college, I walked off campus with my degree and I had to figure out how to get a job. How do I get a job in this industry that I wanted to be a part of? And I got an internship at the St. Paul Pioneer Press in a rotating internship program that prioritizes bringing students of color into journalism newsrooms. And so it highlighted young people from all different backgrounds that might not typically be in these newsrooms. Got into St. Paul was covering all kinds of things from crime to politics and whatever people would let me write about. I went to Fort Worth, Texas, and there I also did an internship which turned into my first job covering crime in Fort Worth, Texas. And I covered all kinds of things. We'll just wait for that phone call today. Okay, I covered all kinds of things including the Krispy Kreme Bandit who would leave glazed doughnuts in people's front yards which I felt like he was a saint and not a criminal. I don't know why he got the bandit term. And while I was there, I had always wanted to work in the Middle East. And part of the reason I'd wanted to work in the Middle East is I had grown up watching current events that I was living through and never really recognizing the way that it was covered in US media. I didn't recognize people that looked like me or my family. And I thought maybe I could be part of journalism and I could tell the stories more three-dimensionally and wholly so people got to be full human beings. So in Fort Worth, the newspaper was owned by Knight Ritter which was a national at the time a national newspaper chain and they had offices in Baghdad and DC. And so I went into my boss's office my first week on the job, my first job of my entire life. And I said, send me to Iraq. And she said, go back to your desk. You have no experience and no. But like eight months later, she told me, do you want to go to Baghdad? And I said, yeah, I wanna go. So I got on the plane and at 24 years old I was doing a corkscrew landing so that it wouldn't get hit because that was how you had to land in Iraq at the time because it was under war. And we landed there and I was covering the formation of the Iraqi government and I was covering a country that was trying to live through occupation and conflict. And I really wanted to center the voices of people who were living through that and the young American soldiers that were being sent over there. And that's what I did. And there are stories that stick with me like one of the stories I think about often and I think about this often when I cover any stories that every human being is generally going through the same thing. They wanna survive, they wanna live, they wanna think about happiness and joy and how to feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads and be safe. And all of these pregnant women in Baghdad, I realized were scheduling their births so that they could survive because at that point in 2005 in Iraq, the streets at night were incredibly dangerous because there was a curfew. And so anybody on the road might get shot by US forces or by insurgents. So they were sleeping in hospital hallways, they were inducing, they were having cesareans and those were the types of stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell people what it was like to try to have a normal life when things were not normal in everything that was going on around them. So that was the start of my career. I have lost the point in my notes here. So I spent over a decade in the Middle East and North Africa covering popular uprisings against autocratic leaders, the aftermath of those revolts and the forces that formed to counter those movements. And during that time when I lived in Cairo, that's where I fell in love with audio storytelling and with NPR. I left my last job at the Washington Post to go into radio because there's something incredibly intimate about sound without images. Listening to a voice to a place can transport you as you imagine who that person is that is speaking, where they are while they're telling you that story and talking about what they're living through, their dreams, their joys, their fears, their pain. So I'm gonna play you a short piece. It's three minutes and it is a story I did in Minneapolis in May of 2020. It was the day that police were charged in connection with the killing of George Floyd and so I went to the place where he was killed. And I want you just to imagine what that place looks like based on the three minutes that you're gonna hear right now. Right now we are on 38th in Chicago. We're right at the site where George Floyd was murdered by the police. That's New Me Nichols. Free food honey, you want something? She's passing out sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, hand sanitizer from the back of her car. Do you want sour cream? No. Okay. You wanna let it? The killing has at least temporarily transformed this corner where he begged for his life. Those who mourn him gather to demand change. Some who knew him, but mostly it's the people who virtually witnessed his killing and all too familiar scene for black Americans. As for the charges against the officers involved, Nichols is skeptical. If we actually can get a conviction and we actually can get some police reform, then I'll feel a lot better. But like right now it's kind of like a bandaid being put over like a big gaping open wound. She comes here to be with others who feel that wound and allies who want to help heal it because charges are a tiny step on a much longer path to change. What else are we doing to make sure that this doesn't happen again and to make sure that the black people in this country feel safe? Cause at this point I don't feel safe. Some want reform, others want to defund the police but everyone here is trying to process the pain. Being a black person in America, you know? It's just, it's constant trauma after trauma after trauma. And it's like, when is it ever gonna be time for us to breathe? Like to be like, okay, finally. Now the place where Floyd took his last breath has become sacred ground. The air is filled with the sounds of community. Music, laughter, invitations to share food, but also the sounds of protest. Black lives, how do you say black lives? People pose in front of a black and white portrait of Floyd with their fists in the air. On the ground, piles of bouquets are sprinkled with handmade signs. One asks, how long must we wait for justice? This place outside Cup Foods where Floyd was pinned down by police officers is where Taylor Winbush says he now comes for solace. He's a black man, 28. Today he says he feels better than yesterday. Every day he sees more people join including people that don't look like him protesting police brutality and systemic racism, but he's tired. How do you spend your whole life seeing people that look like you die on the news and not facing consequences? He pauses. My grandparents have the same thing. They marched in 1965 to Selma and we're still here today, marching for the same reason. It's tiring. Winbush begins tearing up. He slips off his mask and wipes the tears with his shirt. I haven't cried yet the whole time. But even getting here, he and others say took so much. They wonder if parts of Minneapolis and other parts of the country didn't literally burn would these charges have even been brought? That everyone was feeling pain, grief, allyship, comfort in other people who were going through the same thing. That is the power of storytelling and it is the power of audio storytelling and it is also the power of bearing witness. My job in those days of protests in the midst of a pandemic, prior to this I'd been shut up in my house like everybody else in the country. But I got on a plane because NPR decided that this story had to be told in person. Me and one other colleague and soon others joined us. We get into this crowd of demonstrators still social distancing I have to say during the day at least. At night things changed. But during the day everybody was mass trying to still be respectful of distance and there was this outpouring of grief and rage and it was everywhere. And the only reason we knew what happened to George Floyd was because someone else bore witness, Darnella Frazier, a 17 year old with a cell phone camera filmed Floyd's killing and put it online. And this is the reason we know what happened. That job to bear witness. This is the job journalists do every day. What that girl with a camera did was a public service that led to demands for accountability that could not be ignored. And for me it was only by being in Minneapolis in person that I understood that there were moments of excessive force by police on those first days of demonstrations where we were facing tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, even when demonstrations were peaceful and even when we were very clearly identified. And there were also people taking advantage of that moment to break into businesses, to steal, all of that was happening at the same time. Now as host of Morning Edition, my job has changed. I'm not always in the field, although I'm still in the field a lot more than I realized I would be. My job is to also facilitate national conversations about our country and our world, even in this country at a time of deep, deep division. It's my job to ask elected officials the questions, the public wants the answers to, and it is my job to bring you conversations and voices from around the country and the world that help us understand people who have the same lived experiences as us and those who do not have the same lived experiences as us. And it's why in Iraq when I was there I felt so much that my job was much more higher stakes as an American journalist. We were on the ground, we could truth bet what officials in DC were telling the public about a costly war in Iraq when much of the American public couldn't just get on a plane and land in Baghdad and check it out themselves. We could bring the voices of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians home for people to hear themselves, to decide for themselves about what was happening in Iraq in the war on terror, but armed with more information than just what officials in DC were telling them. The word that is now in the headlines that is now often a source of propaganda from a different nuclear power is Ukraine. Russia lied about why it went to war there. It claimed Ukraine was its own. It claimed that it was denazifying the nation rather than invading, occupying, and committing what appear to be war crimes. And journalists on the ground are risking their lives to document what is happening. In the first weeks of that war, that was my job, to document what Ukrainian civilians were going through. It's where I met a boy named Vova lying in a hospital bed in Kiev with Russian forces just a few miles away. And I'm gonna play a clip for you to meet him too. He's a little bit hard to hear because, well, he's speaking Ukrainian, but he's also, his jaw is wired shut in this clip. I asked him about the scar running down the side of his face. What happened here? Nothing, nothing, nothing. As the car was fired at. But it's not just his face. A bullet grazed his hand, two pierced his back, another, his foot. Okay, I see you're pulling up on your back. That also, you got a bullet here? Wow. And he's showing us a wound to his legs. He's got a bandage on his thigh and more wounds on his knee. He shows me each injury with the practiced rhythm of a patient who's been poked and prodded. He doesn't cry. He says it doesn't hurt anymore. And Bova's mother, Natalia, sits on the bed next to him and tells us Russian forces opened fire on their car as they fled their neighborhood outside Kiev. So, yes, we were together, the whole family in one car, in one car and the car was fired at. So he died here on the spot and just when we start screaming, the children are in here. It was too late for my husband and for Maxim. Maxim was her nephew. He was six years old. She pulls up pictures of her late husband. Alexander was 43. Oh, a beautiful family. Is this from Christmas? Mm-hmm, yeah, two years ago. Yes, this picture has been taken one year ago. There's a picture of them on their anniversary. He gave her a huge bouquet of flowers, another one of them on a family hike. Bova jumps in to change the subject. Ask Krzysztof for the dog. Mm-hmm. What's your dog's name? Zora. Zora? Zora? Georgia, Pasporti. Mm-hmm. You love your dog. Jesus, what is it? He doesn't talk about his dad. You are brave and strong. How are you just so brave about all this? I'm just a little scared. I just don't care about this war. Bova's mom jumps in here. He's just not completely realized what is happening. Yeah. What do you think is happening? Mm-hmm. Putin has sent his troops to kill the Ukrainians. Putin has sent his troops to kill the Ukrainians. He's 12 years old. Now, Bova told me all he wanted was to play video games, to play with his dog. He wanted to be a normal kid. He didn't want to be a child injured, a child whose dad was killed, a child who has to survive. And at the end of that day, I watched Bova get loaded up on a bus to go to Poland, away from the ambushes, away from the distant sounds of gunfire and explosions, away from the stories that we heard and told from Kiev. And today, the capital of Ukraine is a safer, more vibrant place and other parts of Ukraine are under siege by Russian forces. Now, this work to document, to truth vet, I think it is a moral obligation in journalism. And of course, in my job at Morning Edition, I also get to tell stories that are about love and joy and music and literature and poetry. And Harry Styles says I give a really good speech, so I'm hoping I deliver today. But all these stories that I'm describing to you, the clips that I'm playing, they're about reflecting who we are as a people in this country, in the world, from city to city, from state to state. They're about asking questions of leadership and documenting how people in power wield that power. And right now, I feel like I always have to talk about every public remarks and all public remarks that I give about the danger that I think fact-based journalism is under right now. Journalism, it's a cornerstone of our democracy. It is a part of our country that is very important to keep our officials accountable. But it's also an industry that is under resource. There's no funding for it. We live with so many news deserts across this country, especially in local journalism. And when people don't like what we're reporting, they often wanna just discount it as fiction. You know, it's hard not to see over the past several years, especially in the isolation of the pandemic, that this country's divisions that I mentioned have deepened. And I'm not sure that deepened is even the right word. I feel like sometimes we have this chasm between swaths of the country that are almost impossible to bridge. And we're living in generally unpredictable times. And we've done this throughout history, but right now impending climate change disasters, a war in Europe that's threatening the global order. And frankly, the divisions here that are so deep that some people question whether American democracy can survive that divide. And so I feel like our role in this moment as journalists is more important than it's ever been. The role of truth teller, of providing platforms for people to see themselves and also see people that are not like them. The role of bridge builder, the role of accountability holder, and the role of cutting through the reams of disinformation that plague our societies today. Not just here in the United States, but in many, many places across the world. Truth is a very powerful thing. And it's why in moments when power structures are threatened, those in power go after critical journalists who are there to document what is happening. And right now what I'm thinking about is Iran, where protesters are risking their lives to demand choice and freedom of expression. And those protests, like the protests in Minneapolis, and like the protests in Cairo, they were inspired by a picture, by an image of a 22 year old woman, Mahsa Amini, in a coma, in a Tehran hospital, her parents hugging in the hall. And Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Iran, detained by the morality police because she was deemed inappropriately dressed. And that's why people are protesting in Iran today, so that it doesn't happen again, so that another woman, like Amini, will have the choice to live whatever she chooses to wear. And the Iranian journalist who took those pictures to inform the public in Iran, Nila for Hamidi, she's been detained and is reported to be in solitary confinement. Nobody's heard from her. At least 185 people have been killed in those protests. And the Iranian government is controlling information and the internet because truth is powerful and the government is trying to put down the movement demanding change. Now in 2011, I was detained with many journalists in Egypt when Egyptians were revolting against an autocratic leader. They were also demanding change. And the goal, by arresting a bunch of people, not just journalists, all kinds of foreigners, actually, when I was detained, there was a teacher, there was a random guy coming back from a beach resort. I think they were just arresting everybody because they were freaking out. But by briefly detaining me and others, they were sending a message, right? They're demonizing us. They're telling us not to be there. They're telling people in the country that journalists and aid workers, people who were documenting human rights abuses, that they were the enemies. And in other countries, as I've talked about, a lot of journalists died doing this type of reporting. And right now, if any of you follow Egypt, you know that many of those young activists that I covered 10 years ago when they were young are now middle-aged and languishing in prison because that revolution was defeated. In Ukraine, journalists, many journalists have been killed trying to report on Russia's assault and beyond Ukraine. Many journalists have lost their lives for the work they do in dangerous places or on dangerous people. Saudi Arabia, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, Syria, Mexico, the list goes on. Now killing us to silence us is one approach to stopping one voice and intimidating others. But I think we keep going. I know lots of people who will still go and cover something if it's dangerous because they feel that moral obligation. But I think it's another approach that is more sinister in democracy. It's more effective, in my opinion, to stopping our work. It's the demonization of fact-based journalism and the slow blurring of lines between truth and fiction so that a cornerstone of our democracy is decimated and there's no ability to hold those in power to account. For us at NPR, we have a responsibility to counteract efforts to undermine fact-based storytelling and conversation. And I hope we have the tools to do that because we have member stations in local communities across this country that can go to city hall meetings, that can go to the state house, that can go to the Capitol, which we do. And they represent so many different ideologies, political, religious, different lived experiences, ages, gender identities. But it's harder to do our work because there has been a loss of respect for the work. An idea that instead of answering to accountability journalists, you just dismiss it as not fact. And that happens when you have people in power who will do that, who will repeat those and repeat that and manipulate people into believing that certain things are true and certain things are not true. I mean, the biggest case and point for that is a lie that led to the attack on the Capitol, a lie that a lot of people believe that the election was stolen, despite the fact that dozens of courts and thousands of elected election officials affirm that the election was not fraudulent. And I believe this happens as journalists when I look at this, I find that it's much easier to be in power when you don't have to answer to anything, when you can just declare what the truth is instead of being held accountable when you're caught in a lie, when you have to answer for shortcomings or when you have to deal with uncovered corruption from a local newspaper, a local member station, a local MPR station, whatever it might be. And as I mentioned, these challenges present themselves while news deserts in local communities are more and more common here because there's no funding to keep going and it's often replaced by unreliable online platforms that attack rather than inform. And I told a story out of Stockton, California last year, a local online blog that trafficked and misinformation was filling the hole left behind by the city's newspaper, the Stockton Record. The newspaper had lost much of its staff and its ability to report because it didn't have the money anymore, couldn't have people at every city council meeting at every school board meeting. And that blog then became the go-to source for much of the community. And some of its work was very honest, reports on crime, for example, but it also trafficked in racist memes and manufactured political scandals that took a kernel of truth, wrapped it in untruths to convince residents that certain local officials were corrupt even if the accusations were verifiably false. Now I remember one official who lost his reelection bid to the school board and it seemed to come directly from a story that was from this blog about his supposed corruption. And I checked out all of these accusations, all of them were not true, but he told me he knocked on 4,000 doors and even people who knew him told him, I really like you, but I'm reading all this stuff online and I'm just really not sure. And so he wasn't reelected. And he warned that Stockton was a harbinger of what could happen nationally, if lies become truth, if something isn't done about disinformation. And as we know from reporting, just recently the New York Times did an excellent report about right after the Women's March, the way that Russian trolls sort of, they come in, they cling on to things that are very real in our societies, divisions that are very real and fan the flames and sort of divide people and things get bigger and bigger. And so that's why I think of us at NPR as an oasis in news deserts, our presence as resistance against the undermining of fact-based journalism. And it's why I'm willing to keep getting up at 2 a.m. every morning to host Morning Edition and up first with my incredible co-hosts and a team of producers and editors that are up all night, putting together a show for the nation. And of course we can't do that without the many reporters at NPR and our member stations that fill out our show with voices from across the country in this world. And when it's a really good day, we get it right. So as I end this lecture, I do ask you to be invested citizens, whatever, it doesn't have to be NPR. You could go to The Wall Street Journal, to The New York Times, to The Washington Post, to your local paper, to your local station to break out of your echo chambers, whatever they be, if that's your Twitter feed, your TikTok for you pages and consume and support local and national news that help us stay informed, that provide us with the facts that allow us to make informed decisions about our countries. And with that, that's my ask and then I'll turn to questions. Thank you for your candor and the work you are doing to tell these untold stories. I would like to open it up to the audience for questions. Please raise your hand. We have volunteers who will come around with the microphone to you as we are live streaming. We want to be sure that your question, as well as the answer is heard. All right, thank you for coming. Hi. Are your shows edited by a producer? Yes, so we have a big team of producers and editors. So Morning Edition is a two hour program that has news, but also music and literature and interviews like that. So it's impossible to do this work without producers who edit our conversations. But in every edited conversations, the idea is to preserve the integrity of it. So let's say if we interview an artist for 20 minutes, we're gonna pick what we feel is the most representative of the entire conversation. We're gonna weave in the music that we're talking about. And then there are conversations that we do fully live, but we still need a producer to make sure it gets on the air. So I would say some days it's like half live, half produced and the produced conversations are typically things that are not on breaking news and then we can add in elements into those pieces. Okay, and if you don't mind one more. Yeah. The consolidation of the broadcasting companies, is that impacting or do you see that as impacting the ability of free speech in the future? I mean, well, obviously I'm in public broadcasting, we're not a private entity and so that doesn't impact NPR. We just need people to continue to support the work. I do think, as I mentioned when I was talking, that the less that newspapers are, for me, local news is what's getting hit. When I went to Iraq, American newspapers had huge presences in the countries that I lived in. So Boston Globe had a huge thriving international desk. Charlotte Observer had a national and international presence. The Philly Inquirer, all of these newspapers around the country were bringing to their cities the national and international news that their citizens needed to hear. That has slimmed down. The only American newspapers that now have an international presence are The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, right? NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, if you're talking about international. And then nationally, who's covering DC for Elizabeth City? Who's covering, you know, and so that's where I get concerned because an informed citizenry makes for a better democracy and so in the end, if nobody's gonna fund it, how does it work? Yeah, so I am concerned about that. I see a hand and a hand. I think these two questions are related, but I'll defer to your answer. When you're telling stories about these terrible situations, particularly the young man in Ukraine, for example, how do you separate yourself emotionally from their circumstance? And do you ever get the chance to go back and visit those people at a future point in their lives? I don't separate, like I'm a human being, so I'm not gonna stand like a robot in a hospital room with an injured child. You know, sometimes I cry with people, I'll sit with people for a long time, you might hear five minutes, I might have sat with them for five hours. In this case, you know, this was a child who'd clearly spoken to a lot of people about his injuries and the thing that happens in a war like Ukraine, I saw it in Libya, Syria, they're desperate for help, somebody to come help them. And so they want to show you what they're going through, they're opening their doors, they're asking for help and you see also over a period of time, I especially saw this with Syrian families, they start to feel neglected by the world. How many times do I ask for help and nobody comes to help me? I'm still in a refugee camp, I'm still being, you know, Syria, what, it's like 500,000 people at this point that have been killed and millions that have been displaced outside of their country. And so there becomes a point where they're like, how many times can I tell the world and they'll do nothing and they don't want to talk to you? And then it depends, sometimes yes, I have gone back to see people and see how they're doing it, sometimes no. I mean, I don't know where Vova is right now. You know, I know that when I last saw him, he was going somewhere safer, but I don't know where he is today. Okay, another question I have is this. I go back to 75 with PBS and I'm noticing more and more crossover. Here you guys on morning edition, yes, I'm up with you. And then all, and that's news, that's fine, but then all of a sudden, like you have your Michel Cinder with Washington Week and that's more opinion and are the lines getting blurred? I guess is what I'm asking. No. They stay in their lane. Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of depends on the show you're listening to. So if you listen to our flagship shows, morning edition, all things considered, our newscast, our weekend edition, weekend all things considered, all of those are straight news shows. So you're not gonna hear Michelle Martin or Steve Inskiep or Aisha Roscoe pontificate on their opinion on X, Y, or Z. But we do have, especially in some of our podcasts, we do have opinion journalists or more like people who are talking about pop culture. So I don't think the lines are being blurred, but I also think we are contextualizing. We're not gonna just throw up what people say cause they said it, especially if it's not true. But I do think that more and more in broadcast journalism in general, it's a lot of people that can be, I don't feel this way about our show, you should listen to morning edition. It can be a lot of people yelling at each other about the day's news, instead of telling people what's going on, and we have to have people understanding what's going on before the debate. And so yeah, so I don't feel that at NPR, no. And I think it's very clear also in newspapers that delineation between the news pages and the opinion pages. You talked about the video of Rodney King, well, of George Floyd, which took me back to the video of Rodney King, which even took me back to the picture of Emmett Till in his casket. Is this the way we now need to get information out to be able to validate the atrocities that happen to black people and people of color? Unfortunately, I don't know if there is any other way because there's a lot of the country that will never see it because they don't live through it and they think, you know, they don't, they're like, well, the police wouldn't do that because George Floyd's killing was described as a medical incident until the video was out. In Cairo, which sparked the protests in 2011, it was sparked by a picture of a young man who the police had described as dying of a drug overdose, but the picture was of a man clearly beaten to death. And so it is unfortunate that quite often in these moments of mass protests and change, it is because there is hard and fast evidence that can't be denied. So I remember covering the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who was convicted of George Floyd's murder and the attorney general talked about that video and how he wondered if there wasn't a nine minute video of a man dying, would a conviction have ever happened? And so, yes, you have to shine a light. And I know that it's traumatizing to see these things and it's horrible for the communities who know this is true, but when there's denial, that's why we go in to cover. Like in Ukraine, Russia is constantly making up stories about what's happening and then there are a bunch of journalists on the ground that are saying something else. So yeah, I don't know if I answered your question, but I see a few hands, oh, okay, yes. Thank you for coming. So as you're talking about these stories, I'm curious, how do you guys as a news organization get down to the decision that I'm gonna go to Stockton and talk about this blog or I'm gonna go to Russia and Ukraine and tell these stories? Well, some of it's very obvious, you know, like all of Minneapolis is protesting and the country is erupting and the world, I mean, these protests went global. So clearly a newsroom is gonna say, this is really important, we must go. The war in Ukraine, again, a war on the European continent, we must go. The US goes into Iraq, we have to go. And then there are stories that we talk about, like how can we get at, how can we tell a story from a place that gets at a larger national issue that probably everybody is dealing with, which was the case for Stockton, where we talked about, I had heard about this thing happening in Stockton and we talked about it and we decided, okay, let's do a story on this because it's something that is important to Stockton, but probably people will recognize in their other communities. So it's definitely a combination. Some things are just really obvious and we as a network go. And then sometimes your editor's like, go do this story and sometimes it's a good idea. Sometimes it's not a good idea. So it's really a team effort. We as a network decide, we talk about it. The interests of our journalists is really important and this is why I think diverse newsrooms are really incredibly important because when you have different lived experiences, you think about what is important differently. And so those conversations are much more broad in what is an important conversation, what is an important story, where one person might not think it's important because it doesn't impact their lived experience, but the person next to them says, here's why it is important to this part of this country or fill in the blank. So for me, those conversations are as robust as the people that have them and that's why diversifying our newsrooms has been such an important thing over time because we are a reflection of the society that we cover. And if you look at the way we cover things, they have changed dramatically as we as a society have decided what is and isn't okay, right? There are things we have decided are no longer okay and we cover it that way. There's no both sides to that. But that's changed. Those aren't the same standards that we had 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 100 years ago. And you'll see that in newspapers and radio. I have a question about how you make decisions about what the important stories of the day are. I do it alone. I make health decisions. I just make. You're doing a great job. But specifically I would like to question, for example, there's famine in Somalia right now. That's a story largely ignored in the United States. Why isn't that as important in many regards as because it does have many repercussions for the whole world? It's not just an isolated place. East Africa is in big trouble with food. And yet we don't really go into that. And in Yemen and Afghanistan, I can name a bunch of places. Yeah, and instead we're covering in great depth Ukraine and not really talking about what other pressures exist to make that story rise to the top, including the defense contracts and the money that's being made. So this is such a vast question. I'm not sure how to phrase it in a way that you can really answer. But it just feels like to me that if the American people want the truth, it needs to be a more interactive process of responding to what our need to know about why. And again, Somalia is a perfect example. I have friends from there that have told me about it, but you wouldn't know it from the... From listening, yeah. I mean, we have had a few conversations on Somalia, on famine in Somalia on Morning Edition. But you're right. I think that that is a very important question. How do we decide who gets coverage and who doesn't? And those are conversations that we are actively having, not just at NPR and other newsrooms. But Ukraine gets a lot of coverage and certain other parts of the world don't get a lot of coverage. And those are important questions. Why? What gets resources, what doesn't? Obviously, Ukraine, when you think about the US, there is a proxy war going on too here. It's about the global world order between Russia and the West and that's how it's being covered. And so there is importance there. But when we talk about how much time we have and the pages that we have, where are the resources allocated? And those are important questions and also the American public has to show interest, right? We're also providing what people are also asking of us. So, I don't disagree with you. I think we should constantly be thinking about who's getting coverage and why. And when we have our morning, so every day at 9.45 after the show is finished, we have a pitch meeting and we sit and talk about the next day's show. And we try to decide what we're bringing in. But also, we have limited resources. We don't have everybody in every country. We have maybe 17 people on our international desk. So we have to depend on our correspondence but we also have to then use conversations with experts or people on the ground to fill things out. So right now, we have somebody in Haiti which I think is a really important story that hasn't gotten its time. And because he's there for three, four days, we're gonna have robust coverage for those three, four days. But it won't have the same long lasting covers that Ukraine has had. And when I came back to the States and I talked about Ukraine, a lot of people would talk to me about how singular, they, did you ever see anything like this in our modern times? And I was like, yeah. I saw it very recently in Libya and in Syria and in Iraq was a foreign war and it is a different war. So it's not new and refugee crises are not new and famine is not new. But I do wonder if certain things got the attention of the American public in a different way because of how they looked. And when you think about Poland and how they were welcomed so I got to the border, it was incredible. Ukrainians that were scared that the war had just begun, they were, as you heard, leaving their cities under attack, risking their lives to get to the border and they got across the border into Poland to welcoming. People coming with cars and food, trying to help them. And that isn't always the reception I witness when I watch people trying to escape wars in other places as a journalist. Hi, you mentioned the importance of being informed citizen and how to navigate the space in terms of what's being seen on the news. But one thing I wanna know is how to make yourself information literate in terms of how to filter out the bias and what's being partially told or partially true. How to navigate as a regular citizen. Well, let's take bias out of it. It's really actually very difficult right now. Let's set the bias aside. Let's say you read something that's factually correct and biased. That's a step above of what we're dealing with right now when you think about what's out there. You can watch an entire video that has been fully reconstructed and is not real, right? People will circulate like right now with the Iran protests. There are videos that are circulating from 2009 being said to be today. So anything that you see that somebody messages you that you see on Twitter, that you see on TikTok or wherever, you wanna be critical about where it might've come from. Is it a video from 2022 in Tehran or is it from somewhere else? Has it been seen anywhere else? There's also like Reuters does a lot of fact checks on these things that people share a lot. And then be credulous when you read things. What are the sources? Who are they quoting? Those types of things. So just don't take things and assume they're true, especially if they're things that you are, that you, that confirm things you already believe, which is where you can fall into the trap. And we've all fallen into that trap. Like I've seen things where I'm like, oh my God, could you believe and it's absolutely, so just be really credulous about what you're reading. And I think we as journalists, we have to show our work. We have to say, here's how I know these things. Here's who I talk to. Here's how many unnamed sources and here's why we can't name them. So that the public knows what's in the story and why we think it was enough to print, especially if it's a topic that is, you know, somebody being accused of something, those types of things, so. Can we, we have a couple more hands, but we are coming to the end of our time together. So can we give a round of applause? Layla, thank you so much for your candor and the work that you're doing to tell these untold stories. I do want to mention, for the sake of the audience, if you feel like you need a little bit more, you can hear Layla Fidel. That was a show. Every morning. At dark 30, which is so funny because now I realize why your voice sounds familiar to me, because when the alarm clock comes on, somewhere between five and seven, on WRVS 89.9, then you can catch Morning Edition. So again, thank you so much. We appreciate you. We appreciate you all. I am Nicole Lewis from the Division of Student Affairs and we'd like to welcome you to continue to check the ECSU website for community connections as we post very soon our Spring Edition. Thank you so much. Good night.