 34% of people agree with the notion that the press is the enemy of the people. There was a Gallup pullout earlier this year asking people whether they approve or disapprove whether they trust different institutions and the media came in at about 20%. The military I think was first with 67%. FBI was maybe 51 and then it was a big drop-off. So my question is why are the media unpopular? It's not new really. I mean we've we've been kicked around by presidents better than Donald Trump. I thought I was just feeling really popular actually. I mean in San Francisco. You know maybe during the FDR era maybe? No no I don't think so. I mean look it's our job to tell the best version of the truth and the truth is hard to take and it's that simple. I think I don't think that there is a when you when you actually do your job and and there are some results and they're not always any results then you find people are very appreciative. But I think in general by telling people the best you can what's going on isn't isn't necessarily gonna get you make you pop you. I think you know I think there's a conflict like a combination of things. I think for a lot of people we are the other. We are you know I think there's some truth to the critique of what happened in this election that there's like media elites on coast in a large part of the country that feels little connection and I I do think there's some lessons to be learned from that. I worked with the Chronicle for years and I always think about like I remember the New York Times did a story of years ago where they went to LA and asked everyone in LA do you like the LA Times and everybody of course hated the LA Times because it's their hometown paper it's like your mayor you never really like your mayor until somebody else attacks them. And so I don't know I feel like actually right now we're kind of in that second part where we're being attacked and there's there is a lot of support that we don't generally enjoy and I think an appreciation for our role. But it's great for New York Times subscriptions and KQED membership drives and pledge drives. But what about this idea that Marisa brought up about us being sort of the East Coast elite and you know having West Coast East West Coast Coastal elites you know. It begins it doesn't begin but it takes its modern form or in the late 60s when with ag news attacks on. Nattering Nabobs of Nattering Nabobs of negativism written by future journalist William Sapphire. And at that point the liberal media become become the enemy and the liberal media or the enemy until about 2005 or so when the liberal is dropped. Right. It's just the media because what else would they be but but but but liberal. But but if you look at the the surveys up to that period the belief that the media are biased keeps going up. It goes up particularly among the right who think the media have a liberal bias but even among the left who think the the media bias that by the mid 90s that's that's a kind of part of American did the media change or what what I think part of it has to do with the idea of the media. When you talk about the media. What does that mean. The New York Times. You mean the Washington Post. You mean NBC. No the media. You mean your local paper. Yeah. Fox. You mean who do you mean. So the media was against Franklin Roosevelt for instance. I mean he had very very few almost three or four newspapers endorsed him. So the media what we call the media newspapers and so on changes. And quite frankly I don't think a lot of us would if you take the broadest definition of the media would want to include ourselves in that it doesn't necessarily mean that you're in you're doing reporting or that you have any standards so that you're trying to you know get beyond what appears to be true to something beyond that. So yes if I were the general public I'd say the media ain't a general rule ain't great. You know you've got to fact check them. You've got to be discerning. You've got to use some of your own judgment. Well there's a lot of changes happening which we can get into. But I think in general too it's it's sort of a lot of people don't understand what we do or how we do it. And I think to your point it's like pirates what do you think there's any Gilbert and Sullivan fans like it's like collectively they hate us but individually you know we're not so bad. It's like you meet us. What do you think they misunderstand about what we do. I don't think when I talk to people I don't know that they really understand like how our job is done or like what we do every day which is probably true for most professions right. If you think about somebody who you know maybe a college professor we think we know what you do right. I don't know. But you know it's like how do how do we work. What do what do we when we talk about being unbiased. What does that mean. I think that there's just a lot of misunderstanding about sort of the way we approach our job. And I would argue sort of the code of ethics that we hold ourselves to because in recent years too there's been a lot of sort of turning that on its head with you know right wing left wing media with a sort of change in the way that it is presented. Well what about transparency. I've noticed more of that in which I think is good in all things right sunlight is the best disinfectant but it is helpful to for people to understand like what the methodology was how you went about gathering the story reporting. And with a certain extent with the with the arrival of the internet in the digital age we are more transparent. You get more information. There's more out there that's available to you. But I think and Jeffrey actually would be better speaking to this. I think the real problem that's going on is language. I think the language has been hijacked in many ways. And so it's a very example. You could fair and balanced. Oh fair and balanced. You know I mean you can go through the whole fake news fake news. All these words that are the manipulation of words which is why you know my background isn't as an academic. And I had three different professors who are all German expatriates who fled Nazi Germany. And I spent a lot of time with them reading about it. And the last of the three had to flee San Diego, California back in 1968 because vigilantes were attacking his house. The governor of California was saying he should be fired. The local newspaper was drumbeat saying he should be fired. And some people thought he should die. So they were using language, calling him a communist, calling a revolutionary. Why is the state paying for him? So this is not new what's going on either in this country or other countries. And I think the issue of language is really a critical issue with Donald Trump. But one other point I'd make here is that the only group whose level of confidence rivals the media is Congress. But you ask people what about your local Congress? Oh no, he's great. Or she's great. It's Congress in general. And one of the interesting things about fake news is that the way in which it's circulated, people make up these putative media sources. The San Francisco Gazette or the Denver Independent. And they ape the form of the legitimate media in order to give credence to some story about sex ring and a pizza. What's the line between legitimate and not legitimate media? Well, I think if you're talking about guys in an attic in Croatia. So that's that's really out on the edge. But that that is to a certain extent where a lot of this stuff is being circulated. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a difference between fake news and maybe slanted news, right? Like we can agree or disagree on what we think MSNBC or Fox does. But I think in general, with the exception of maybe some commentators, those are not organizations that are making up stories. I mean, one thing I was thinking, well, I don't know, we'll come back to that. Really comparatively, it's like child's play. One thing I've I noticed a lot, especially working at the Chronicle was how two people could read the same story and see totally different things. And so a lot of this talking about language is sort of the lens through which you perceive the world, right? So if you already think that the Chronicle or KQED is leaning one way, you will bring that prism to everything you read. And I think that that that's part of it is and that makes this whole fake news thing even more confusing because even, you know, legitimate news, people are going to see a different sort of point of view depending on where they start from. It's interesting, though, how quickly, especially supporters of Donald Trump have accepted the notion that what we do is often there or what the New York Times does is fake. How did that happen so quickly? I went to the state Republican convention up in Sacramento a few weeks ago and unprompted. So many people talked about, you know, the media, how much they hated it in the fake news and the maybe all like is this just the power of Trump in terms of using, you know, the megaphone? I think it's the power of the media, technically, to reach a large number of people much more intimately all the time with all kinds of information. And it's also the problem that we since 1985, we haven't had any real regulation of what we would call broadcast news and what it's and what its limits can be. And I was struck in a moment of honesty, when Les Moonveys, the chair of CBS said it may not be good for America that was referring to putting Trump on camera, but it's damn good for CBS. Right. And it has been right and CNN got saved by Trump. CNN. The money is rolling in and this is fun. Yeah. Right. So there's no in the past people are forgotten that you could not attack someone on broadcast broadcasting in the United States and accuse them of being ugly, being dumb, to integrate them in any way unless and if you did that, whoever the license holder was had to provide equal time for reply. And when I was when I was briefly an executive at ABC News in the early 80s, I watched as my colleagues in New York were just rubbing their hands for deregulation because it meant the stock price of their retirement programs was going to go up and there would be fewer restrictions on time, fewer ways that they had to do things that were not profitable. And so that has been extrapolated into every other form of mass media since then. So if you're wondering why it's screwed up, that's one reason. There are lessons that were learned starting in the 1930s about the power of media beyond print and what it could do to populations, how it could reeducate a whole population. And we've we are now seeing the result of having done that, you know, and that includes the public education system. You defund that and then people have no basis for making judgments. So that's the price we're paying today. That's what we see today. I don't know, though, that people talk about fake news and we have to do more in high school, we have to do more with our students and so on. And I've done the work with my students and it's true they they're they're they're capable of misinterpreting to an extraordinary degree. And these are Berkeley undergraduates, what they read. But my sense is that a lot of the people who receive this this kind of the sorts of reports, some believe it. And some feel I don't have to believe it, I can do whatever I want. I don't know what proportion of Trump supporters actually believe that there were three million illegal voters, as he put it. Some do. Others say, you know, he can say whatever he wants. And and he can get away with it. And the truth of it is subordinate to the to the polemical role. I agree. I mean, I think there are two kinds of Trump voters. And not like Killary's, you know, deplorables and whatever. They're the people who voted for Trump because he's an asshole. And the people who voted him despite despite the fact that he's being an asshole. The first group we're not going to we're not going to reach the second group or the group that we want to think about how to communicate. Coming back to Marisa's point, how two people can look at the same thing and see different things. I was looking back, I was thinking about the phrase, the word truthiness, you know, and to my surprise, that's like, you know, 12 years old, 2004, 2005. Colbert's for one of his first shows are and so what he said in that segment of the word to daily word, I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. That's what's pulling our country apart. You know, and it was funny. But, you know, in a way, you know, that's I think what you were saying in a way, people may not think that there are three million illegal votes cast, but they feel somehow that there was something there's too many people voting that shouldn't be voting, we got to ask for their ideas. I think that's like the basis of a lot of the sort of anti agreement, in immigrant sentiment that is being stoked by Trump and this sort of false narrative will immigrants, you know, commit more crimes. That's factually untrue. They actually commit less crimes than average citizens. But I think, again, there's fear, and there's sort of, yeah, the sense of wanting maybe to have a scapegoat in some sense or to have an explanation. And I think that, you know, sort of back to your original question, there's also the sense that the media is in on it, that there is a system that is not serving sort of average Americans, and that we are part of it. And so whatever that means to you, I think that sort of gives license to distrust actual facts, even in the face of, you know, a lot of proof. I think we have to be much more forthright about the reality here. This is a, a, in part, a reaction to the changes in racial policies in this country. This is a change in sexual discrimination policies. This is a, this is a reaction and an unwillingness to accept what we would call politically correct behavior. And it's something that needs to be listened to. But it is really what Trump is taking off on. And, and that's where the constituency comes from. And if the surveys are right, the, the income of the people who back Trump is not people who are in lower middle class or almost upper middle class in many, many households. So this is a, this is a situation that hasn't been dealt with directly. And I'm again, come back to public education and the media, when you're talking about the media in the broadest sense, not directly confronting this and talking about it and dealing with it. And, and I don't, I think ignoring it is one of the reasons we have what we have. Yeah. You said at the very beginning, Lowell, that the reason people don't like the media is that we tell the truth. And it makes people try to tell, try to tell the truth. Again, you know, I'm not a fan of a lot of my colleagues in terms of how they handle the media, how they handle this particular situation. But many people do try to do the best possible job they can. And I think we do have, it's, it's interesting to me when I, I live in Berkeley and, and I have for the last, almost 40 years and, but I spent a lot of time with sources, for instance, in Washington and in law enforcement and in agencies, you'd be surprised to talk to me. And, and the fact is, they feel that they are exploited by the local media, meaning the Washington Press Corps, because everyone is racing to beat each other on a story and not taking time to look at what's going on. But they are very sympathetic to the idea of being covered. You talk to judges around the countries. They hate the idea that the media has disappeared and are not in their courtrooms. Here in San Francisco, ask them, the journalists show up for the opening arguments and the closing arguments. And that's it. But they won't give us passes to film or record anything. Well, no, they're the local court. Yeah, you got to get a court, you know, like a right. No, but I'm saying, I mean, that's part of the, the tension, right, as there's this desire for coverage, but also not always an openness to providing that access. Well, for electronic media, there are various reasons. If you were in Britain, they don't give you any access. You're in Canada, you have none, right? But you have respect for the system. And I think the system respects the press in many, in many countries. So, and I don't think that's really that different here. I think that I think we have to understand that the number when you say, do I trust the media or do I like the media? That's such a broad generality that that I don't take it seriously personally. It's, it's funny to me that, you know, Republicans generally, you know, they're about, they say that they're against big government that are bent against sort of centralized power and, you know, send everything out to the states to, to control their own lives. And yet so many of the people who distrust the media aren't Republicans. And even as we're reporting on things about government, we're sort of holding government accountable, the government that they don't trust. And yet they seem to not react to that very well. Is that, you know what I'm saying? Like, they don't trust the government. And yet, so when we're holding the government accountable, they don't trust us in doing that either. It's sort of a contradiction. One point that follows on what Lowell is saying is that journalists can give the public and, and as readers of the, of the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post style of, we want facts, we want numbers, we want reliable accounts and so on. But what drives most people isn't facts, but the, the narratives they build around those facts. And language is where language comes in. I mean, John Dewey said this 50 years, 100 years ago, that, that the important thing is, is how you build a narrative around those facts. What, but not, not whether undocumented immigrants actually fewer crimes than. If you show somebody who did. But what's the narrative I'm going to tell about that? And it's, maybe it's a, that's a, maybe that's a narrative about how these are people who come here just seeking a better life for themselves or something. Or maybe it's a narrative about how they're all rapist and whatever, but, but it's going to be in, in those terms that people are going to make up their minds, not in terms of the numbers themselves or, or, or, or the facts. Yeah. I think also, like, as a political journalist, when you talk about Republicans, you're talking about Republicans in government. And it's sort of, like, they don't, like, nobody likes the mere tip back on themselves. I mean, ask the media, we don't like it, right? So I think that maybe your average, more conservative voter would have a different point of view on that, perhaps, than somebody who's in government and is feeling the heat of that attention. Yeah. Yeah. Jeffrey, as a linguist, this is a, you're a boon time for you. I just want to read you one thing that Steve Bannon said a couple of weeks ago at the conservative political action committee. He said, talking about the media, they're corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed, adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. I mean, just unpack those phrases. Oh boy. Well, economic nationalism is the name that Bannon and his cohort give to what's in fact a white, let me say white nationalist or cultural nationalist agenda that involves preserving what they feel are the lost privileges of white Christian Americans. And you can't talk about it that way. I mean, some people in the fringes do, but Bannon's going to talk about it in terms of economic nationalism. Though if you read what goes down and Breitbart, it goes well beyond that. I'm interested in the way this gets covered in the in the press. I mean, I'm just writing a piece about the word provocateur because it's become it's become it's a word that's much more widely used now than it was even 20 years ago. And it's attached not just to people like, you know, Christopher Hitchens or George Orwell who were, you know, act provocateurs. But Bannon and Milo where it is a job description like, you know, power forward or something like that. And they're not provocateurs. I mean, a provocateur is somebody whether you think of Hitchens or Lenny Bruce or or or a public enemy, you know, whatever, is is is someone who tries to shake people out of their complacency in order to induce them to see the, you know, what what what what what they have to do. These guys are trolls and the last thing they wanted to shake anybody's complacency, they're not looking to to reform anything but to to get giggles, lulls as they call it from the people backstage. So this word provocateur. I'm going on about this word, but it's just one example. This word provocateur is used to dignify and legitimate a lot of people who are far from provocateur and whose motives are far from reformist in that sense. And it's one example of the controversialist and so on. It's one example of the way the press has deployed certain language in order to not have to deal with the with the nature of these people or these activities. I could not agree more. And I and I I said this on the air recently. I mean, about Milo, it was like, why are we calling him like he's a troll? I mean, and that's a nice word for him, right? Really, he's racist and sexist and misogynistic and a lot of things. But I think that they're and this gets back to something we were talking about earlier with this whole fair and balanced sort of notion that, you know, Fox took over and ran with, which is and actually back to the whole deregulation issue, which is that, you know, I think there's a sense that to to be fair, we have to give equal weight to both sides. And in some cases, that's not being fair because one side's just wrong. And I actually think that climate change, climate change is a great example, because it's really clean cut. But this is something I've run across covering criminal justice a lot, where like the police or the law enforcement community keeps pushing a narrative that has been disproved and disproved by research and after research paper. And but there's a sense that in order to be balanced, we have to give both sides equal weight. And I think that that gets to this and I think it is really a sort of punting on the part, especially of like network media where they don't want to be seen as as calling shots when at a certain point, that is our job, right? Like we have time to be experts. And your average person is going to their job and doing other things and doesn't have time to really dig into the weeds on this. It's just the case of climate change. The times there was a character that Bush that talk about that slip that Trump was thinking of a money to to the EPA, he didn't in the end, but who was a climate denialist, Scott Niles. But there's before him was another guy. And the Times described him as a climate contrarian. And I want to contrarian, you can be an interest rate contrarian. You're not a climate contrarian. That's like being a Holocaust contrarian. So so all of these these these words, one after another, impose a certain picture on the world and tell you how to interpret that. I think that one of the really central issues, which hasn't really been engaged yet, but I think will be caught eventually because of the some people put it the coming catastrophes that will afflict us is is that the internet back in 1997 was described by the US Supreme Court as like the printing press and therefore should not be regulated as to what appears upon the internet. It's you can do whatever you want. 10 5 billion people can see it. It doesn't matter. There were no scales, no quantitative look at the dissemination of information. It was clear in the 1930s and 40s, 50s, 60s that, for example, in Jackson Mississippi, when the White Citizens Council took over the news and was doing the local news every night, that eventually the Supreme Court said that can't happen on the public airwaves. The internet, unlike broadcasting legally cannot be regulated at this point the same way that broadcasting can. But to be able to have access to a mass audience, as Goebbels said, we did it with radio. Okay. If to have that kind of access to a mass audience that's unfiltered and with no restraints is dangerous. And that's that's been known for decades. And that's one of the central questions that hasn't been engaged yet. And it will probably take a catastrophe of some kind before that reckoning takes what kind of restraints you envision? Well, just you can't yell fire in a theater, right? You can't at one time you couldn't go on broadcast television and call people names and do various things. The license holder was held responsible. People could go down to the station, the local station and fill out complaints in a book. And every year the FCC came around and read them. So you could have that privilege to make lots of money like Les Moongies was talking about. But you had a price to pay for it but the problem was it's anonymous, right? I mean, you know, if you go on TV, at least, you know, we know who you are unless you're in the shadows. You know, all technology can be at one point or another gets regulated in some form in a modern society. And I'm afraid that we don't have that and that's part of the price you're paying. You know, I mean, it disappeared with cable. Then you saw what happened with cable, right? Or you saw when they lifted these regulations that made Rush Limbaugh possible. Yeah, one of the words that's been kicked around a lot is a three letter word beginning with L, lie, L I E and the New York Times uses it on occasion and they've explained why they use it and when they use it. Marisa and I sat through a meeting a few weeks ago from NPR's ethicist talking about why NPR does not use the word a lot, hasn't yet used the word, you know, in referring to things that say Donald Trump says, what are your thoughts about that? I mean, the reason NPR has decided not to is they say because they don't know they can't get into Donald Trump's head. It's like perjury, right? You have to know what his motivation was. I know. Did he really not know? Did he really know it was, you know, not the truth? That's that's what the Wall Street Journal said as well. Maybe he really thought Obama was born in Kenya. Maybe he really continues to think that three million people voted illegally. And there's something disingenuous about that at a certain point. The Times was very selective in when they use that word. But this is a case where it is a lie. But you can use that word too much, right? I mean, but no, the only once or twice in, I don't know about that. But wouldn't you argue he's been lying? I mean, the Washington Post, Politifact did a account of how many lies he's told every day. I think it was one day about three weeks in that he didn't tell. I think there are other I mean, untruth and untruth. And and in other words, the I gave my students a list of headlines the other day. And I said, do you think these are objective? We're talking about objectivity. Do you think these are objective? And they were headlines that contained from the Times and also from USA Today and NBC dot news dot comments that contained the words baseless bogus, groundless in reference to I think all in reference to the the illegal voter claim is it was this an objective? Yeah. Or the white map is that an objective? It is this objectively bogus. What did they think back? About half of them thought it was and half of them thought it was it was interesting. Some of them thought that word should be reserved for the editorial page. You know, we're going to make a case that this is objectively just bogus, right? It's not a matter of so it's up to the in the sense of using the word media, it's up to the media organizations, given the current way things are organized to police what goes on and where they who they allow to use their platform. And that's why that whole question came up with the president and Twitter. The terms of service of Twitter are something that he pushed to the very edge. Twitter says you're not allowed to have hateful conduct. You may not provoke violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories. Does that include the president? Yeah. No, it doesn't apparently, right? So you can do whatever you want and say whatever you want. I think that while there's a great obvious privilege of having freedom, the question really is being put before us, I think, on a daily basis, what are the edges of that freedom if it's manipulating the population? The phrase fake news, I think, originally was referring to these like sort of news mills in Eastern Europe that were tied to Russia during the election, but then Trump appropriated that word and applies it now to stories that have unnamed or anonymous sources. You've gotten a lot of stories from unless what? Well, unless he's relying on them to promote baseless claims. Yeah, there's that. But what do you like? People, would you say, is it fair to say I don't know what these folks think about anonymous sources? I mean, is that a cop out? I mean, sometimes you have to do it for various reasons. The New York Times didn't have any anonymous attributive sources that they quoted until 1970. And there's always been a debate with amongst journalists about whether you should have any anonymous sources. But what happens when you don't have the recognition of anonymous sources is you used to have government, the president of the United States, called up the New York Times one day in the early 1960s and said, please don't run that story about these people who are about to invade Cuba. And they didn't say they didn't run the story or edit the story because the president called. But later, when the Bay of Pigs happened and was a disaster, the president of the United States called back and said, John F. Kennedy, I wish you'd run that story. And so there is the, I would say, responsible use of anonymous sources for a variety of reasons. And almost all news organizations that I know of are pretty responsible about how they do that because you know there is legal consequences. You can be sued or various things can happen. There can be criminal investigations. And so it has become part of the way we do business and have discourse. And things are learned by the public. By the way, the fact that there's fake news is obviously not new. There are many wars we've gone into long before I was born based on fake news. It's a regular kind of part of the diet. We do attempt, in this country, at least historically, and I learned this just on the ground level when I got into the business, that there is a way in which in this country we actually have, in a sense, more care historically about what we put into what we call media, news media, in general, than most other places in the world. That's the best I can say about it. So I made a joke about, you know, unless it's something that Donald Trump is relying on, and I'm referring to his wiretapping allegations, which I think a lot of people think now that kind of came out of a Breitbart news article that relied on anonymous sources. And somebody I know from college who is, I could affectionately call a right-wing troll, I saw on Facebook make a joke about it like, oh, this isn't reliable, but the New York Times anonymous sources are. And I think this gets back to my point about how you view things. But it also kind of struck a chord with me, because I see if you don't trust the media, then why would you think that the New York Times anonymous sources are any more credible than whatever site you're reading? I mean, I could go down the list of why, but I don't think I'm going to convince someone like him. But I do think this, again, gets back to people not fully understanding the way we do our jobs. And I think one of the things about anonymous sources, if you're the national security reporter for the New York Times, you're going to use them a lot more than we do covering state politics for KQED, for obvious reasons. I mean, the people talking to you could not just lose their jobs in a lot of cases, but be criminally prosecuted for the type of information they're sharing. And I think that... Couldn't you argue that they shouldn't be sharing it then? Well, maybe, but I think there's an argument also that that's a check and balance in our system. And that what I was, you know, what I think, again, people don't always fully appreciate is how much of our jobs rely on, even if we're not quoting them or using them, but are informed by people that don't want to talk on the record. So how many conversations do you have in an average week with somebody as a political reporter? It's not some... Yeah, it's not a CIA, like WikiLeaks type conversation, but they, you know, they have a boss they don't want to piss off or they have a political party they don't want to piss off. And so they're willing to exchange information with you or share information with you based on, you know, you protecting them and not, you know, I think we might call that a background conversation versus an off the record conversation. These are sort of journalistic terms that people need to understand if they're dealing with us and that they probably don't understand in the general public. But I think that, you know, almost every story you read, even like the one about a library ground breaking, probably there was somebody who had an off the record conversation before that went to print. And so, you know, obviously there are levels of it. But again, I think that there's there's real misunderstanding. I mean, a lot of people won't talk to the press and I don't blame them at all because if someone knocked on my door, I wouldn't talk to me either. It's amazing that people talk to us. I think they do. I'm amazed every day. I just I don't again, this is the language talking. I don't I never like the term fake news. It's it seemed to me too broad and particularly in the world that Lowell talking about where we have this pollulation of new forms of communication on the internet and so on. It makes it very difficult to to make the kinds of distinctions you want to make when in 2005 the several of the Bush administration cabinet departments were caught out producing fake news segments of that that were pushing administration policy on this or that and giving them to the local stations to run as if they were the news propaganda. Well, it was it was interesting at that point, John Stewart ran a bit on it and protested that he said, we're the ones who do fake but the Times ran a an editorial and described it as counterfeit news. And I like that term because it went to what they were doing or what these people in in Croatia are doing, but not necessarily to somebody who runs a story pretending which which pretending it has greater news value than it does or to something that uses unattributed. So there may be other words for that, but it seems to me that counterfeit news is is is one of the things people are worried about may turn out to be the easiest to police in the end on on on Facebook and the rest just because it's so baseless. Well, it's baseless. It's easier to get at these. I mean, you can you can build algorithms that will actually get you those. Well, I think Facebook has hired like an army of people to kind of sift through stuff. It turns out that if people forward a story without reading it, it's more likely to be fake news than if they've actually read it first. They're all sorts of things that are that are interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But there is there is the there is the reality of people creating. I just had it happen. So I went forward to be a story and I read it and it was a person I know who's in favor of it's like using an NRA member. He's in favor of gun possession, etc. And it was all about somebody who apparently sat in his window of his house and noticed something going on across the street and his neighbors being kidnapped and and and they were being tortured and he could see through the window and he took out his sniper rifle that he was just cleaning by chance. And he shot he shot the people who were torturing his neighbors was fake news. And it said something like Seattle Examiner was the title and he sent it to me and I said Seattle Examiner never heard of that. And I had to in fact didn't exist and it was fake. So that stuff is out there on the internet in general. And I think it's proliferated. But I do. I did want to talk about this to Lowell Bergman. I love that. But the the anonymous source issue I think is an important question because I do think the news meaning the regular news media in my experience gives and Washington in particular like you call some up in Washington and they start talking to you say this is off the record and they sort of start talking. Right. And you know you want to stop them and all of a sudden have to do this with students all the time and tell them you've got to stop them and say OK this is the deal if we if I give you anonymity this is what it means. But it's it's become sort of the accepted parlance in the business and it should actually have some kind of restraint to it because in there are real situations where actually there is a need for anonymity and those should be carefully crafted because there are consequences and all kinds of other things can happen when we promise you anonymity that is a contract under the law. It can't you can enforce it against us. There are financial damages that can be gained from us or our employers and it has been upheld by the federal courts. Most reporters and definitely young reporters don't know that and it has does happen. So it's a serious situation. Actually. And it's not that simple. What you said earlier that most news organizations are responsible with their use of anonymous sources. What's an example where that wasn't the case that you can think of or what are just even an actual example or a situation that comes to mind that could be that. Well I think that that was one of the great difficulties in the Judy Miller case where in a sense she was being a New York Times reporter who was being fed information by the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney over lunch in Washington in a typical Washington situation. And and it was information that he shouldn't have been talking about. It was information that she then tried to defend him defend her anonymous source and a whole series of things happened where she went to jail for a while. But the anonymous source that can result in the manipulation of what the news media is saying and doing which we can't reveal if somebody lied to us etc. Or fabricated and it's part of the system of it's become a regular kind of way to manipulate information. And I mean that's where the responsibility lies on the reporter whether it's something of that caliber again or just a conversation what what does this person have what do they want from me why are they sharing this information. I mean that kind of critical thinking is important whether you're doing a city hall story or a Washington D.C. story and I think that you know some of this is the fact it's funny I was thinking about because I've done a couple panels recently where we're talking about like us as the enemy and as I said I think that there's been a real sort of rallying around journalism in some ways like you look at the subscriptions and the donations that are happening. But for years every panel I was on was like what are we going to do about the death of media right media is dying newspapers are dying and the script is sort of flipped and I do think that some of that when we talk about anonymous sources and the sort of norms and ethics of journalism have to do with the fact that we did lose a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of really talented people when there was this huge contraction of you know a good part of our media ecosystem which was newspapers largely. Well I have some good news you know I'm old enough to remember when afternoon newspapers were going out of business I'm old enough to remember when we had two and a half networks we used to call ABC almost a broadcasting corporation. I'm old enough to remember when there were no jobs basically and if you could get a job like an examiner chronicle or so on with the newspaper guild was impossible to get in basically into that closed world and the result was it was technological change on a variety of levels from offset printing to the expansion of television and so on and then there were more and more news organizations by the way with some help from Congress there was an antitrust lift on all newspapers in 1970 by Congress and government assistance and the result was a very prosperous growing news media industry which we now seen in the last 10 years go into decline but I do think that for the first time we're starting to see the emergence of not only a proliferation of quality news sites and people doing more online news organizations with instant distribution but also for the first time nonfiction video of quality is making money and you see it in the proliferation of documentaries you see it in the sites online and that's a very positive sign so I deal with young journalists all the time at the graduate school journalism in Berkeley where I teach and I try to tell them hey it was really I have to bring a typewriter down to the seminar show it to them I've never seen one and which I call my encryption machine by the way seriously and but I think that right now for gathering information doing creative work in the digital age getting it distributed getting it laid out remember lay out tables and all that stuff after line of type I mean so there's a lot more information available there's a lot more opportunity and and I see a commercial end and I think you'll see the development I know at our program we are just created with the university's assistance of a private production company that's affiliated with the university and we it looks like we will have commercial outlets for our work so there are new forms of revenue beyond philanthropy for instance and collaborations right and collaborations going on we're going to give you all a chance to ask some questions in just a few minutes so be thinking of what you want to say or ask you know a few weeks ago Steve Bannon I think he was at the New York Times he was talking with them and he said you know you guys ought to just shut up and listen for a while remember that he called them and yeah he called he called them in and he talked to them on the phone I think he called them about a profile they were writing or something and I was anyway he was you know that some people are shocked some people applauded and I thought about it afterwards I was like well that's kind of what we do you know we ask questions and then we shut up and we listen I mean I wanted to fuse like confusing what we tend to do with these CNN and MSNBC panels where people are just talking and they it doesn't matter it's just opinion you know and that's what cable news has really become I mean once upon a time CNN and they did real reporting and they still do on the international channel but now it's just I mean I can see why he would say just shut up because I feel that way myself don't you think? I mean my sense is that he was running this story he's been running about how the real America you miss the real America you miss the story that's what shows because you're not listening to the demonstration of your of your incompetence you missed the story you missed what was going on with the people yeah which has become almost a very tendentious word for Trump and Bannon and so on and so forth and you want to you want to now tune into what they're thinking in in Alabama and Kentucky and all of these these these these places that voted for Trump as if every newspaper television state magazine in America hadn't been sending people out to Trump rallies to interview people and to cold country and so on and so forth you couldn't open a newspaper without without picking up that story over the course of the campaign Marisa you said at the very beginning that there are lessons to be learned from this last election I don't know what you had in mind but do you do you know if you want to expound on that a little bit or what like what what is the media what should the media takeaway be from this last election anybody well I mean I do think that people like seeing themselves reflected in the media like whoever that is right that's the reason that you know hometown papers do like the high school football coverage or puppies or you know whatever and so you know I think you're right but I do think that there was a sense by some people that that it was a parachuting it right it was a it was coming in with the Trump plane and covering the rally and then leaving I don't I don't think that's true across the board and I think this gets to some of what we talked about is like what is the media are we talking about cable news are we talking about network news are we talking about newspapers are we talking about NPR they're different animals and I and I think you know not that I'm biased for NPR right now but you know if you listened if you did listen to NPR there was a lot of I think good reporting where they did go in and actually spend time and what do you want to call Middle America I mean the thing I'm really grappling with right now as a reporter who covers politics but is not in Washington is partly some of the stuff we've talked about in terms of like does it matter what I say or how I do my job if 30 percent 40 percent of of the people out there don't believe a that what I'm doing is real news and don't want to listen that they're not going to hear it and and I don't really know what the good answer to that is because sometimes it feels like you're preaching to the choir I think you just have to keep doing good work basically I'm not I don't like covering stories that everybody else is covering so usually sit out elections and and and I and I did in this case but one of the and but one of the things just observing what was going on we never report the obvious facts whoever gets elected in an American election gets elected by a minority of a minority right we don't vote in the United States and and it's covered like it's a sports game you know it's yes and so on and and Moon v. says miss state you know he wishes he could take it back I suppose but for the cable broadcasting companies for for many of the networks this was a boom time Donald Trump raised ratings you remember when he didn't show up at one of the debates and the ratings went down so they brought him back even you know they needed him to keep the game going every week and so he got two billion or plus we estimate was in free advertising he didn't have to raise money he's a brilliant salesman right he can sell almost anything including Trump University he can get away with trying to demean a federal judge and nobody you know holds him accountable so so I just think that that what happened was this was advertising in America with a huckster who was from reality TV and he played everybody out and they went along with it so I think money yeah I totally agree and I think that that's he's not just a salesman right he's he was he's an old like the ultimate communicator I mean he knew exactly who he was talking to and how to get across to me the question now is like how do we cover him and how do we in our role as watchdogs um I because I think there's been a real move towards like this access journalism right the sense that if you have to be in the briefing room to get the story which is totally BS like that's not where the story is generally I think the story is usually as well as saying where people aren't looking they finally are getting rid of the White House correspondence dinner which I always found to be just a travesty almost obscene um you know Obama could be by the way it was jailing our sources yeah and the and the White House correspondence were going there and applauding it well you know so there was no it's a celebrity game and that's the way it looks to me and I think it's going to change actually yeah because of this administration I think there's going to be real changes but you know the point you make about Obama and going after journalists or leakers you know the same could be said about judges I mean that there was that state of the union address after citizens united or you know where he called out the Supreme Court remember there was that famous interaction with Alito or Alito said that's not true and then the media didn't really criticize him for that and I wonder is that an example of sort of a bias you know look all the deportations that were happening under Obama you know a lot of the attention that's going the media is giving now to these ice raids a lot of those things were happening under Obama I mean I understand there's also the executive order and it's so I mean some of the concern and anxiety is justified but is that an example of the kind of you know the bias that you know that Trump rails about I mean maybe to an extent but I do think that the tone the rhetoric the the sort of I mean dog whistle is maybe too mild because I don't know if it's even dog whistle anymore if we all know what's being said I mean I think there's been a real shift in tone and one thing that I think is different because the law is absolutely right and you know we talked to New York Times reporters who were being prosecuted under Obama but let's face it we all know the statistics about deportations because of the press right so it's not as if that was completely under covered I think that what is changing and has changed under Trump is this open hostility and this sense that not only that there's an adversarial relationship but that we should be dismissed in the sense to sort of undermine the press in a way by undermining our legitimacy which is why I think like there's real conversations happening in newsrooms as you mentioned about not just whether we use the word lies but how do we cover this do we even go to these press conferences when he won't let somebody into a press briefing do other media organizations sit it out do we decide not to ask another question if somebody's is an answer and I think that those are really sort of interesting questions for a profession that's based on a type of adversarial relationship with each other and competition and it's something that I'm really interested in and that I'm trying to have conversations with my counterparts in Washington and other places about. This is speaking as the non-journalist but it seems to me that if there's a bias here in what both Maurice and Lowell are saying it's that old bias for personality over issues and policies which is just what journalism has always had to confront but that now the personality has become such a swollen grotesque that it's hard to cover anything else and my concern is here not even as they weren't covering sufficiently the deportations under Obama and so on are they going to be covering all of the things that are going to go on even if Mike Pence moved into the White House tomorrow the relaxing of environmental protections work protections, labor, privatization of education all of the things that are going down that just are not as newsworthy or whatever or sexy or easy to cover but that when the dust clears are going to be the real damage done hopefully that's the worst it could get worse but they're going to be the real damage that are done real quick and then we're going to open up I think that one of the things and one of the things that I agree with with the let's say the supporters of Trump and all of this is that there was uneven coverage of who was backing whom who was in a sense the Hillary side, the Clinton Foundation story was not adequately covered by the media in terms of looking at what its implications are and the fact that it's true that in the Obama administration we've had a change in the sense that oligarchs are now running the government of the United States for the first time openly but the other side of the story is Hillary and the Clinton Foundation represented oligarchs from around the world and that story was not covered adequately and was not investigated during the election and I looked at it based on other things that I'm doing as kind of humorous in a way that we have not accepted the idea that we are no longer no longer on the way towards a pluralist democracy is a big step backward in both income inequality and who actually has power in America and that's part of what the background is to what's going on here and until we air that out in reporting I think we're gonna be confused and we're gonna be chaotic and Vladimir Putin will have his day. All right, let's take some questions and we have a couple of wireless mics here so if you have a question just raise your hand and I would ask that you not give a speech but ask a question, yeah.