Journalists Discuss Trust in National News : CSPAN3 : June 10, 2024 7:07pm-8:02pm EDT : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive (2024)

media landscape. >> ladies and please welcome special correspondent vanity fair and former host of reliable sources on cnn. [applause] >> good afternoon and thank you to our hosts for bringing us all together on this lovely afternoon. i will set up our next conversation and bring up our next panel by framing the conversation about national news media. we heard insights about local media and how to help communities feel seen on the local level. now we talk about national.

so much more in common then apart, but often times it is hard to see the commonalities. that is why i am thankful for earlier this week for the clips because it was a moment where people felt a sense of belonging, community, commonality and it was not just that. on sunday the ncaa basketball championship, the country rallying around caitlin clark. another moment of unity, we have more in common. i'm struck by those examples because those were national events. basketball games are support produced by different

weightings, but the eclipse coverage was brought by nasa, taxpayer funded cameras and major american networks. millions of people tuned in for that experience that brought us together. you know i'm saying that because i'm going to turn in a darker direction, but it is important to recognize news is not always bleak. it can bring us together. as people like to say, the world is trapped in a destructive loop of toxic polarization. us versus them thinking, extremism and hate. we must break the loop. that is a critical factor in breaking the loop. we need a media culture to see each other more clearly, what we have in common.

we are getting the opposite on the national media level, a special from partisan media outlets. outlets that exist to sell. let's survey the landscape. this is a chart from a media bias chart. it is not perfect because no chart is perfect. there is no really ideal way to show the vast landscape of the national news media, but i appreciate the attempt because it tries to show the ideological spectrum that exists, that many of us were fans of. i would like to point out some of the distinctions between the brands on the screen and these

distinctions are more important than blue versus red. over there on the left, msnbc. the new yorker employs the best journalists, allowing them to spend years to produce investigative journalism in different areas and closer to home. the new yorker is one of the strongest journalistic organizations and i would suggest there is no equivalent on the right side. where most of the coverage, not all, but most is regurgitation, aggregation of views. i wrote a book last year about donald trump called network of lies and fox news is a small operation and a big opinion operation helping the gop. the news organization does

exist. what those brands do is not report the news, but complained about other people reporting the news. take in what others are reporting and complain, rebut, debunk etc. but this chart lets us think about what these brands do and another form would organize outlets based on original reporting. analysis and opinion is critical to help people make sense of the world and we need outlets that specialize in opinion. the highest value-added is original reporting like you see from the new yorker and atlantic and razor magazine. as we talk about what we have in

common there are real revisions -- divisions. partisan media are not jetting these up out of nowhere, exploiting for creating something out of thin air. this is a really helpful institution titled worlds apart, showing a distinction between americans who think they're mostly good people and those who feel lives are threatens by terrorists, immigrants and others and we must protect ourselves. that is the country's divide and everything else is mapped on this chart. presidential election, donald trump in court, many media conversations are on this chart.

what kind of society should we have? in different partisan media outlet speaks to the different segments. the conversation is about trust and how that impacts democracy and trust is related to the previous charts. it is complicated and i cringe when i hear people say no one trusts the media. i reject that. everyone trusts some media. suntrust fox and others trust cnn and it is hard to communicate because they live in different realities. one of which involves original reporting. this is a key point about distrust, the rise of distrust in media has been driven by republican distrust.

what we see is trump voters only trust pro-trump outlets. everyone else is more dispersed. think about nikki haley. interesting divides are within the republican party. nikki haley made appearances on the view to reach moderate and independent and republican voters not i fox bubble. that is driven by republican distrust. whether you are a trump or biden fan or not of the above, when there is an people generally do trust the news as a brakes. i happen to live right near the epicenter of the earthquake in new jersey last weekend 99% of my neighbors on facebook all believed it was an earthquake.

they all went on to find information. the fact that most of us were stuck on facebook getting the information is not an ideal circ*mstance. one more chart here showing this divide between pro-trump outlets and others. we see from prr i, people who trust most far right sources favor box. people who most trust the mainstream media detests trump. i bring this up because trump is a proxy for all conversations about the partisan media divide. for as long as he is a political actor, he will dominate the conversations about the national news media. there is no way around it. we are here at the lbj library. people didn't talk about being anti-lbj are pro-lbj. people didn't talk about whether you are pro-bush or anti-obama. that language did not exist in our dialogue. we are now in an environment where everything is anti-trumper pro-trump. you have to choose. we can reject this false

dichotomy and we can end up in a better world in the future. but for now, trump told his fans to distrust every media source except for his personal favorites and it worked. republicans have very little trust in any source except fox, newsmax and oann. this is the way they want it and it's incredible to see the skews where you have democrat leaning readers trusting almost every outlet more than republicans do. showing the divides this time based on age where americans get their views based on age. facebook and tiktok in a conversation and how younger people are more visually oriented. they want to watch more than they want to read. americans, this is an ap poll, they thought the news media was dividing the nation, but not all news outlets are created equally. think about what america would

look like a fox news was not on the right. let me bring up the other speakers on the moderator. let me introduce the editor-in-chief of the texas tribune. the veteran of the l.a. times in the new york times. the d.c. bureau chief of usa today. her third book comes out later this month that's called the rule breaker, the life and times of barbara walters and times of barbara walters in our moderator, executive director of george w. bush institute and vice president of the bush presidential institute. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] >> these are deep seats. i hope i can get up. thank you so much for kicking us off and setting the stage. i want to say congratulations to mark from the lbj presidential library on for putting this

terrific event together. it is a real privilege for me to be here. i want to jump right in with this terrific panel on restoring trust, responsible journalism and earning trust in a partisan media environment. we have a perfect panel to dive into this. let me start with you with a basic question, how do you think news organizations are doing these days in terms of restoring trust and what more could they do? >> i think we are doing some things better, not everything better. the problem is still very much in front of us, but here are things we are doing better, we are doing better at covering politicians who tell lies over and over again and won't stop. it's not an experience we have experienced before until 2015, but we have figured out more responsible ways to cover that situation. for instance, the truth sandwich is now a policy at usa today. you tell the truth, you tell a

lie, you tell the truth so that no one can get to the live without telling the truth. we will wouldn't run a headline that said barack obama wasn't born in this country, people say -- some say. we would say some people repeat a debunked conspiracy theory that barack obama was not born in this country, in order to force people to hear the truth even if they believe the lie. i think there's one other thing we have become better at, we have become more transparent about how things work in journalism. that's how you go about reporting a story and how many people you talk to. a little bit more transparency about who we are so people can see who is reporting the news and decide whether they can trust them. >> how are news organizations

doing these days? >> we have done horribly or we need to do a much better job. i see the crisis of trust taking several dimensions. in general there is an erosion of trust and all authority. in erosion since the 1970's and all institutions, even including the judiciary. the military is our most trusted institution in those numbers are moving. i want to say a few things. i think journalism needs to do a better job of reconnecting ourselves and our work to the lives of ordinary people and communities. there's a lot of criticism that political journalism is focused on arguments and rhetoric's rather than policies and realities. i think -- i want to be clear, i do think that german -- journalism is worthy of americans trust and i think that that faith attacks our profession and our institutions

have really hurt. i also think the best way forward is not to merely assert trust but show that we can be trusted. how do we do that? we need to be in more communities across america. we need to encompass, when we say diversity, we need to be diversity of every form, that means including communities of color historically neglected in the news. it also means people from military backgrounds, from conservative communities. yes, people from conservative and faith-based perspectives. which i think we have done a poor job at. i don't think we are already doing a poor job because people are trying to exclude, it's a question of self-selection. journalism has always been authority challenging. perhaps there is a bias in terms of who comes into the field.

>> that's the main issue that comes to my mind as we talk about this. if we go from an environment where there are a few major nato -- networks and a few major papers and one for your down and now you live in an environment that is so radically different that most of us cannot keep up, it's a wonder that we are doing as well as we are. because the fracturing, the

fragmentation happened so quickly, it's a bit like the ai revolution, our brands are not wired to keep up with the rate of change happening right now. if we apply that to the national news media, you're clicking on brands and links to outlets you have never heard of. many that didn't exist 10 years ago. we are better off to have more because there is now more outstanding journalism being made than ever before. it's a situation where we are all, forgive me for this image, i like the truth sandwich better, we are all stuck in a garbage dump. at the garbage dump, there is treasure in the trash. there is a decent amount of treasure. great little gold nuggets, antiques and heirlooms within the trash, but we are all forced to pick through it ourselves and separate the trash and treasure. that's the environment of media we are in these days. when i was booted from cnn a

couple years ago, which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because now i'm a stay-at-home dad. i was at the county fair with my daughter and i got an email from h fact checker who said there's a website that says you have been arrested and sent to guantanamo bay. i laughed, like you all did, because that's insane it a couple weeks later the same websites that i was sentenced to death and was executed at gitmo. i got tweets from people that said, i thought you were dead. in that environment, that's the trash, then their operations are the treasure. unfortunately, the pressure is on everybody in this room and outside this room to separate brian got executed at gitmo versus your investigation of what really went wrong in uvalde. that's the environment we are in. it's very unfair to the average american. >> i would like to say i'm glad those reports are not true and that you are here with us today. >> i'm still here, alive and well.

>> in case anyone was wondering the trustworthiness of this panel. there is a survey that was done that i share with you, the most trusted media organization in the u.s., does anyone know what it is? it's the weather channel. imagine if you can be most trusted and you get things wrong half of the time. pbs was next, bbc, usa today made that list as number seven or eight. what does that say about where we are? >> we are in a sorry state and it has taken us a long time to get here and it will take us a long time to get out. the weather channel is connected to their communities, is giving you information you need to know and it's not putting a political spin on it. i am not surprised that the weather channel is the most trusted news outlet. but we all need to aspire to

some of the qualities of the weather channel in being connected to our communities, telling them things they want and need to know. and for doing it in a way that makes them not suspicious that there is hit in political or other agenda behind the information we are giving them. >> there are some very notable news organizations on this list. i mentioned pbs, bbc, wall street journal, forbes, what are they doing that engenders trust that others are not? >> before joining the texas tribune i spent 20 years at other newspapers. i think you shouldn't trust them because they have existed since the 19th century. you should trust them because they've got processes and procedures in place. i advise looking at the trust project. these are two initiatives that

try to explain why certain sources like usa today and cnn should be trusted. they include the published letters to the editor. we correct errors when they are identified to us. we have a complete procedure so that if you are feeling upset, you can go to someone and be heard of, your argument. there are a lot of procedural things that legacy media still has. the problem is we are facing an unregulated tsunami on the others. 25 years ago no one could go online and say -- was executed in guantanamo. there is a cognitive overload. i don't see anything is ever all good or bad. media was going to become more democratized, was going to become more equitable. everyone has a voice now and a perspective. the problem is that that fragmentation occurred without quality control and we can discuss section 230, but i think the legacy institutions, there's

a whole department of people committed to standards and ethics. whether you think they've always made the right choices or not, they have a department of people that spend so much resources, ap, usa today, my organization, all ethics policies are online. every person who gives the penny identifies by the amount online. so the disclosure, transparency or the new sources of authority and trust. >> missing from social media are editors. people who can check and verify things that are being written and claimed. but even more mainstream organizations seem to be coming back on copy editing and things like that. what impact could that have on the level of trust? >> it can have a serious impact. i noticed my name was spelled wrong in my local paper and i laughed about it. but i can see how if that happens to you, you might get a

little bitter, you might not resubscribe next year. you might not let your subscription right. i thought, maybe i should be a copy editor or volunteer. i think that's a real dynamic. we could try to make these institutions stronger by subscribing, supporting, helping out, volunteering or let them fight a little bit. trust in news is a game of inches. it's when a couple of inches at a time or lost a couple of inches at a time. there are days, weeks, months i was on cnn where the environment was so intense and the volume was so loud that it was hard to win anymore trust. i think we are in a political environment where if you tried to side with reality and stand up for what is true, you are going to take a lot of people off and end up losing trust from another direction. there's only so much news outlets can do about that.

these are outlets that donald trump never targeted and doesn't often target. maybe every once in a while but he has his outlets that he wants destroyed. if elected he wants to investigate msnbc. that works the entire conversation. i say that not in order to take away pressure from individual interests, but to recognize the limits of the media power when in a political environment. when we were there the same time, when i would screw up in one of my articles in my editor would call me into his office, the memory of those moments where just a quick little condo boosted the chats, i remember every single one of them because being held accountable by your editor for misspelling someone's name or messing up facts sticks with you. that's how it needs to work. to the extent that there's less

of that happening, to the extent there are fewer editors, it has a real impact. >> what war can the national media do to regain trust or can they just stick to their mission, which is reporting news? >> you stick to your mission but you cannot restore the reality that fewer people believe what you are writing. for mainstream news sources like the ones that we work for, we need to have the trust of people to have democracy work. the stakes here are not low, it's just not whether we can have a profitable news model for the news industry, so we have to figure out new ways and we are. one of the realities that we faced are the disintegration of the way we used to financed the journalism we want to do. this is the subject of enormous experimentation and you see different ways on this stage of approaching that.

i think that is probably job one. having five or six different models that work would be a first step towards doing a kind of journalism that could regain the trust of people who have losses. >> susan's point gets me to the business side of things and how that impacts the job that reporters do, editors do. what is the driving mission? you have to stay afloat, but is the goal to get as many viewers and clicks and hits, or is the goal to objectively report the news, or is it a combination thereof? >> in america it's a combination. in western europe we don't have a state broadcaster, we have a voice of america but its mandate is to oversee not broadcasting domestically. which a lot of us have issues with. even though there's arguments for it.

hyper-partisan media is not new. we had it in the mid-19th century, we had the yellow press, we had accusations. the idea of a professionalized press that cherishes the notion. whatever you want to call it. it's a progressive area. it's a more complex demographic that we needed. we needed journalists to serve as gatekeepers. but we would talk to experts, social sciences and help interpret a more complex world for a public that was becoming more educated and more literate. i think that goal is still noble and it needs to be preserved.

it existed in somewhat monopolistic or oligarchic situations. there was more centralized ad revenues and so the goal -- the golden age is not really the golden age. it was subsidized by a national procter & gamble and works in the sense because you have the editors and the executives at cbs and elsewhere being that firewall saying, we will have the news divisions separate from the entertainment divisions. the sec had certain requirements because the public owns the spectrum and the fairness doctrine until the 1980's until it went away. there was public trust that went away. but even in my own career, the number of family-owned newspapers has dropped. you have some family-owned papers left but the majority of the nation's papers are owned by private equity hedge funds and there's an interest misalignment

. one final thing. in some ways it has been good for our business that our economic interests have moved away from advertisers because they went away and more aligned with customers and readers. that's not a bad thing per se because we want to be on the side of our readers. the challenge that can come in as if all of our readers are coming from one side of the spectrum or the other, you cannot please them. we have to be careful about separating news and opinion and being careful about not just giving readers what they want because sometimes they need to be told things they need to know, not just things they want to hear. i think there is that commercial -- there's always going to be that intersection of principal. i don't think it's affordable -- avoidable, but you should be about making sure the advertisers didn't have too much sway. it has to be about not just giving the readers the red meat that they want to hear were consume. >> we had evident in cows --

in-house conversation at the bush center and a colleague said the media don't report on the thousands of flights that take off every day and make it from point a to point b. the millions of car rides that occur without any tragic accident. it's the negative stories, the tragedies. is there a tendency in the media to focus on the negative? i've noticed abc is on here, david muir has these segments to the end, american made her america proud, do those also resonate and just aren't getting enough attention? >> those segments great really well in those segments are there to get you to stay tuned to watch jeopardy, which always works. but it is also there as a palate cleanser because they know the rest of the half hour is rather bleak. i think that negativity bias is something that is baked in. there's very little that

individuals or institutions can do about it because fundamentally the house on fire is a news story and the other houses are not. i see a business market opportunity, i see a lot of market opportunity for startups and news outlets to fill in these blanks and take advantage of what's broken about what we are describing. for example, imagine a start up news video operation that's made for your phone that tells you in a minute or two everything that happened without trying to scare the be jesus out of you. that tells you you don't have to's pay attention to this or that but should watch out for that. speaking directly on camera, that kind of content would resonate with a wide audience and would take advantage of the flaws of existing national news media models. right now we have an incredible amount of news fatigue in this country partly because folks don't want a rematch between biden and trump, partly because they are disgusted by the state

of the national -- but it is also in opportunity for individuals to deliver news a different way. we have seen a little bit of that of good news outlets, people trying to do more positive coverage, it's difficult to create a brand just about positive news because it's a contradiction within the phrase. of it but i think there is an opportunity to say i was a part of this. i was on cnn for news and i love nothing more than breaking news stories and we would go wall-to-wall for hours, yet, i know you did not need to watch every minute of that coverage. for news junkies, it's great, but i have a feeling there are 10 million people who would rather have that little on camera moment. >> it's like people are yearning for context. it's not about only doing good news stories, that probably wouldn't fill very valid but not every controversy as is watergate, not every -- is the

biggest news of the day. we have to supply context, we have to dial back. we might need to slow down a little bit. it's really hard in this age. we get our emails in the morning, we look at our phones at night. that kind of pace doesn't necessarily allow us to reflect. one thing news can do is not necessarily tell a story but we have to provide context. how did we get here and how did the situation get to the point it sat? what are the players position. it calls for attention of public policy and not just politics. that's what we try to do in our newsroom, stay focused. >> you mentioned about the breaking news. breaking news, a tree just fell in maryland. a lot of it just seemed like, really, this is breaking news?

>> the bridge falling is one of the few stories of the year that's actually worthy of the breaking coverage. there has been conversations of cnn about how high should the volume be and we shouldn't be at the same decibel level at any given time. my friends who are still there certainly feel that way i want to make sure the volume is relative. not always easy to do in an environment or in a television infrastructure where the banner on screen is the same sties -- is the same size whether it's a one or a 10. structural impediments to cable new structures. i had an idea i shared with a colleague and said there should be a channel called breaking in a channel called fix. we will tell you about breaking news and we will tell you about fixed news. it's all over x, it's all over what elon musk has done to twitter. that's available now all the time of is it real or true.

the publisher now will be fixed news, verified news. we are going to need, as ai takes over everything, a verification layer on top of the world to know what israel and what and that might not be real. i am banking on the texas tribune in usa today's at vanity fair, but thinking on those brands being able to provide those verification layers. >> you want to define mainstream media it would be, news you can trust that is put into context, tells you what you need to know and the bad news, and tells you the good news happening or the responses to bad news that are encouraging. that is the definition of our mission. >> the old-fashioned print front page. nowadays it's always going to be something going to grind our gears. there's always going to be some stupid article out there that makes no sense, that's on your facebook wall, that your mom, dad or brother sends to you. we will always live in an

environment were -- where there will be a lot of that trash. how do we emphasize the treasure? >> i will ask the panel in the audience to indulge me in a pet peeve of mine. this is about tv programs. often the anchors don't use program. they say, thank you for being on our show. the use of the word show suggests they are performing for their audience, not delivering the news, does that contribute to this or am i making too much of it? >> i think it's a little subtle, but maybe it does betray -- maybe they are performing and shows sounds more exciting than program. >> i have been guilty of this. the way i realized it at cnn is television and journalism are the venn diagram. some mornings on cnn if we are covering space launch, it's really good television but it's

not the most nutritious journalism. it's mostly a tv show. other days, we are not putting on a good tv show but we are producing excellent journalism. the dream is at the venn diagram is as big as possible and you are putting on great tv that's great journalism. but all too often it ends up being a great show. >> i think it's an interesting point that you make. we have to always remember that our lingle -- lingo as journalists is not normal human language. i tell our reporters when you go on the field, journalism is not a huge profession. if you are talking to someone you might be the first journalist are only journals they have encountered. if you are interviewing members of congress you are the three hundred thousand journalists they have encountered. someone who suffered a tragedy like a mass shooting or natural disaster, you are representing not only yourself and your institution but our profession. that means frontline journalists of america are underpaid

twentysomethings. they are trying their best and going into a profession that does not pay well but they are doing it because they care. i think in doing it, they have to remember and most of them do remember that journalism is inactive curiosity. it's an act of empathy and open-mindedness. we go into the field that way. if we present ourselves that way, not as arrogant corporations but rather people who are interested in telling truth will stories to inform america, we could start to rebuild that trust and i think terminology is a part of that. >> you mentioned your truth sandwich and it leads me to a couple of questions. is that a good thing to do, does it depend on the issue that's being covered, how important is it to get the other side's position that you know is just reflecting inaccurate and false position?

>> both sides is a terrible side because it's given equal credence and weight. one side is telling the truth on one side is telling a lie. it's important in your reporting and writing to reflect a diversity of points of view. there are things that are true and false but lot of things are shades of gray. it's important that you are sophisticated and nuanced in describing what a story is in describing various sides of it. there used to be a very reflexive side. i mention the conspiracy over barack obama's birth certificate. i remember when i first came up and we had a debate about whether we should report on it because it was seen frenchy and we would give it more oxygen by reporting on it even if we labeled it alive. we realized everybody knew about

it whether we were reporting on it or not and people were believing it. we started by doing stories that would say, donald trump says barack obama was imported in this country but obama says he was. that is the wrong thing to do because you can figure out who is telling the truth and who is telling a lie. you start to do tougher coverage and they would say, donald trump is telling a debunked conspiracy theory about barack obama's birthplace, which was hawaii. we've gone to a better form of both sides that avoids the traps that we were in initially. >> you have to remember journalism is still a craft. a lot of decisions editors make are not about including or excluding. it's more about tenor, tone, completeness, fairness,

robustness, the tone of a story, the framing matters. i mention that not to be too abstract. probably 30 years ago there were stories where noah was warning about greenhouse gas in 1988. at the time there were a lot of climate skeptics and deniers. it would be illegitimate to quote a climate change denier. it doesn't -- advocacy german -- journalism. it's extremely complicated. should there be market based incentives, international treaties, how much pressure should be on car manufacturers, how much emphasis on personal consumption and changing our habits as westerners. it's not both sides but it also recognizes that the world is complex and gray. journalists need to recommit ourselves to that. at a time when people say outrageous things, there's almost in urge to that is so vin dacia is that we will go the

other way and not even entertain that. i think we get into danger. there is a lot of people who support president trump, for example, who asking them who are you supporting won't get useful information but if you ask people what their life experience is and what have they experienced in their lives and how they got to their voting behavior of where they are now, you might elicit real stories and experiences about anything from automation to industrialization of people's perception that they don't see their lives represented in the media. that they don't feel they are getting dignity and respect from the media. it doesn't mean it's justifying whatever falsehood they believe in, but it doesn't mean we can afford to discount, overlook or write off people because they have those political beliefs. we cannot write off what their life experiences that lead them to have those beliefs. is that distinction that i'm making clear? >> this picks up on where he was

going, the rise of fact checkers . they are not editors, but people either in newspapers or on tv cable who after someone makes a statement -- statement, then sets the record straight. the question is, the important safe play, but would be better to more those inaccurate statements to be made or do you leave out what people need to know that so-and-so said something that's a lie? >> we could spend an entire semester of journalism school debating this. we knew more of them. there is so much numbness right now associated with political letterheads that a lot of the stuff is not going check. i have noticed whenever something that happens in the world and crazy conspiracy

theories start to spread on x, for example, the baltimore bridge collapse, news out -- news outlets rushed to point at them to say, you crazy people. i read those stories and i laugh. let me go back to the idea that most people have a lot more common than we think. there are more norm he's in this country than it can feel like when you are on next. there is a silent majority that just wants to know what is true in the world. that includes some trump voters and many other republican voters and independents, democrats and nonvoters and people that don't care about politics. there's just a big, wide world out there that you don't hear represented when you are on social media feeds and when you read these stories about the conspiracy theory of the day. it's hard to say what percent of folks prescribed to her wet

looney tunes theory is out there on any given day. not enough attention to us normal people. maybe i need to come up with a media brand for normal people. i guess it's called usa today. you know what i'm getting at, this idea that, how can national news outlets help the average, more reality-based voter be heard? >> we only have a couple minutes left. i want to ask each of you how do you keep your lane straight? if you are invited onto a talk show, it's one thing if you are with other reporters, and i don't mean that disparagingly, you can analyze and talk about what you've learned in the course of your reporting. what happens when you are on a panel with a republican

strategist and democratic strategists, how do you keep your lane straight so you don't sway into the opinion lane and risk undermining your credibility as an objective journalist? >> if i'm on a panel with a republican and democrat it's easy because i'm the truth teller in the middle. i love that situation. but i do fox news every month or two. sometimes i'm on a panel with a trump republican and an anti-trump republican in me. the real risk is that i want to try to respond to what they are saying in a way that makes me the democrat. that's not the position i want to be in or a roll i want to fill. my rule of thumb is do not say i think. say, my reporting says that. an offer context and history, do not offer opinion.

>> i'm a traditional in the sense that it's not a journalists role to go from chronically observing, bearing witness, reporting, covering into the realm of advocating a particular outcome, either policy or electoral outcome. critiques are worth listening to from the right in the left. the right asks if you are objective, come off your high horse and the left says, you claim that you are not advocating an outcome but are you then just justifying all this injustice and oppression that is unfortunately the status quo. both critiques need to be taken seriously. but i take them intellectually seriously but i don't think that should change the core of our journalistic practice. we are ultimately here to bear witness and to kind of describe history in real time and hopefully inform and improve our democracy in doing so. the moment we make the leap into advocating what people should do and certainly what they should believe in what they should

think is a very dangerous territory. >> it was making me think about the morning in november 2020 three weeks after trump lost the election when he called his friend on fox and lied and said he had won the election and said he was going to win and go to the supreme court. i had to rearrange my entire show -- sorry, program the next hour because in my view the president was delusional and it was dangerous. to go on the air and say this is set for the country, set for trump, wears his family, why won't they intervene, those are statements a journalist is not comfortable making. i was an uncomfortable saying he is delusional and he still in power. but i want to defend the role of prospective journalism for 10 seconds. there is a value of having perspective journalism, analysis, a point of view

especially on television, podcast and digital. to have someone you trust give you a sense of what's happening. there is real value to that. some might call that opinion journalism. but as long as it's rooted in facts and what we know to be true. here's where the real highest value is in journalism, it is not in the television anchor giving you a speech on camera, it's inputting new information out into the world. that's the highest value. opinion is important, and analysis and perspective are important, but the highest value was putting a new fact into the world. that's where the industry need support, financial support, phthropi support, subscription, to have boots on the ground gathering raw facts. with those raw facts and pieces of new information, putting that new information out is the highest high in journalism. the best feeling of awe when you have introduced a new fact into the world and that is how journalism, in my view, best defense democracy.

[plus] --[applause] >> i want to ask a real quick question. we have an election coming up in case you didn't realize. this is going to overgeneralize things grossly, but is the media world prepared for this? do you feel they are confident or are they feeling stressed out? >> i would say stressed out. this is a replay election, so we have been through this with the same two candidates, two major party candidates before, so there are some things we know, but i think it's tough on voters and tough on journalists. >> i always use the word unprecedented because we have that one president, the incumbent, running a can someone trying to come back but no one was alive in 1982 -- so we cannot uphold them on what it

was for cleveland and harrison. jay rosen, who talks about the truth sandwich a lot, he talks about the importance of covering the stakes, not just the odds. i really think that's right. we have to cover what's at stake in this election and we have to do it not just in the grand perspective of the survival of our democracy, but what it means for ordinary people. we have to connect the rhetoric back to what would happen for ordinary people depending on one outcome or another, not just the presidential, governorships, state house. we need a full picture of our democracy. the three plus thousand legislative seats. a big problem is it's consolidated. we keep thinking about washington but so many decisions that affect people's daily lives public health, k-12 education, roads and bridges and highways is all state and local, we need

a balanced perspective on our democracy, walk folders through what are the stakes at not just the odds of who's likely to win or who's ahead in the polls because we are not certain until all the results come in in reality. >> individual journalists are up to the challenge, the real question is about owners of media outlets. the owners of the institutions, will they succumb to pressure, many think biden will threaten them. right now it's trump threatening these owners. while they succumb to pressure or will they stand strong? today i'm feeling optimistic, i think they will stand strong that that's what i will watch in the media reporter, what are the owners doing when the pressure comes? >> thank you for a fascinating 40 minutes. and somebody help me up. [applause]

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Journalists and stakeholders discuss the media landscape and the various challenges it poses to democracy at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

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