- Thank you, Angela.
Hello everybody.
I'm Andres Martinez.
I teach journalism at our
Cronkite School of Journalism
at Arizona State University.
And I'm the editorial
director of Future Tense,
which is a project of New
America Slate Magazine
and Arizona State University.
And I'm thrilled to be here today
with my good friend and former boss.
Steve Coll, who is the
Dean of the country's
second best journalism school.
- (laughs) Oh, come on.
- And but also significantly
he's one of the founding
fathers of a Future Tense.
Steve has many accomplishments,
but we we'd like to think
that, that ranks high up there.
He is of course, a former
president of New America,
former managing editor
of The Washington Post
author of of many great books.
And so Steve really appreciate
your taking the time today.
I know you're very busy.
- Thank you, Andres.
Thank you for having
me back to New America.
I always enjoy that even
virtually and thanks to the group
who's with us for sharing
some of their confinements
with us.
That's my wife.
- Hello.
- And that Andres Martinez
in the middle of a lot of webinars.
- Excuse me, bye.
- A great writer and a great mind,
and she should pull up a chair.
- Okay.
- So, I can't imagine, I don't
know if checking in with you
is gonna make me more alarmed
or make me feel better,
a little bit better about
the state of affairs
around the world.
But I can't think of a
more authoritative person
to check in with about this
sort of a parallel epidemic
that a lot of people have taken note of
and are concerned about,
that we're seeing globally
when it comes to free speech.
And I should have mentioned that this is
the latest in a long
series of conversations
that we're having, that we have,
we're calling the Free Speech Project.
We're doing this in collaboration
with American University's
Tech Law and Security Program.
So I should have mentioned that.
So we were concerned about
the state of free speech.
Well, before the pandemic,
as a lot of other people
are in our field.
And along comes this moment.
And as we see with other crises,
particularly in the context of war time,
governments that tend to
have authoritarian tendencies
to begin with often take
advantage of these moments
to act against critics,
dissent control speech.
And of course the thing
about this pandemic
and this crisis is, I can't
think of anything else
in my lifetime that is so
universal in its reach, right?
It's not a regional issue,
it's not two or three
countries over here involved
in conflict or facing civil disturbance.
It's global.
And it comes at a time when
we had seen sort of a rise
in authoritarianism and some devaluation
and appreciation for some
fundamental civil rights
and also kind of a return of nationalistic
sovereign concerns that say
what happens in my borders,
I can control.
But so just, those are just
some initial observations
that I have and I wonder though,
if you feel that there is
something materially different
about the attack on free
speech that we're seeing,
I mean, you can pick your country, right.
Iran, Venezuela, Egypt,
Turkey, Azerbaijan, Hungary.
There's been a lot of, reporting to extent
that it's possible on what's happening
in a lot of these countries.
Is it materially different to reactions
against speech in the past?
Or how would you describe what's going on?
- Well, we're kind of living through
the end of globalization,
as we knew it in the period
between the end of the Cold War
and pick your date of decline,
but sometime in the aftermath
of the last financial crisis.
So yes, there's a general
kind of tightening of return
to authoritarian governments
that are on a unabashed
and that don't feel a need
to even create the appearance
of a regime of free speech
and free press in order
to have credibility
with the international system.
So if you think about
the repression of speech
and journalism worldwide,
it has clearly been rising
steadily over the last few years,
and as more and more
governments of different stripes
succeed in repressing, jailing journalists
with relative impunity in
the international system,
the more others are encouraged to follow.
And so you have regimes
like Turkey and Egypt
that have imprisoned more
journalists than ever.
They've been able to get away
with rationalizations of national security
that would have been tested and
even sanctioned in the past.
But then you also have
a rhetorical environment
of polarization populism
and attacks on the credibility
of independent journalism
that are certainly rising.
We have a president who
makes a daily sport of it,
but his embrace of that
language of populism
and his direct attacks on journalists
as part of a conspiracy against
himself and his followers
is being picked up and
echoed as a strategy
or he's adopting the
strategies of the Dutertes
and the Modis of the world.
I think the one thing, if he'd,
since your conversations
are centered around speech,
as opposed to journalism,
because I think they are
related, but distinct.
We are also experiencing
a world of speech in which
even as there's a closing
of a governmental policy
attitudes, repression
in diverse parts of the world,
including members of the
European Union, like Hungary
and in the United States at
least through political speech.
At the same time,
you have this huge
structural opening of speech
through the spread of
social media platforms
and bottom up communication
that governments attempt to
suppress with mixed results.
They're getting better at it.
But you still have this
competition going on.
When Egypt decides to
control political speech
in that very large and
politically aware nation
you say what's different,
it's not like the 1950s
when they could control the radio station
and the TV station.
And then what was left were the cafes
and the word on the street,
and maybe some underground
political organizing
and unions and lawyers'
guilds and that sort of thing
where speech could be organized
in defiance of the government's regime.
Now, instead of a handful of
unions and lawyers' guilds,
you've got all of the population
potentially with access to global speech.
And so you have this
Egyptian exile dissenter,
I think he's in Spain,
writing things that would
result in his immediate arrest
and prosecution, if he were
at home and it matters.
So there is a competition
between this new era of
authoritarianism, I think,
and the structure of open
speech that technology
and connectivity have created.
- Yeah.
And I feel like 10 years ago
when we were working together
in New America, that structural opening
was the cause of great optimism
and there was a lot of
euphoria about the Arab spring
and all the ways in which
the our newfound conductivity
and how empowering these
platforms were going to be.
And then we sort of soured on that.
And then in the last more recent years,
we've been very concerned
about how these platforms
can be weaponized in
ways that are pernicious
and disinformation campaigns and so forth.
And so one thing that's
been interesting to see
in this moment of the pandemic
is governments sort of
cynically perhaps saying,
okay, well, yes, we keep
hearing the misinformation.
And disinformation is a
source of grave concern,
even in democracies.
And so I know we'll just outlaw it right?
So this has been sort of a
trend where countries will
outlaw misinformation,
which they can conveniently
be the judges of what
constitutes misinformation.
So it's been interesting to see that,
that shift, we had a good
piece in the last week
about the, in Vietnam, that the
outlawing of misinformation,
if only it were that easy, right?
- Well in this country
too, it's interesting.
I mean Facebook obviously has been
the focal point of a reconsideration
of this kind of privately
owned public square
that Facebook in particular operates,
but you could say the same of YouTube
and some other important
platforms, but Facebook,
most dominant and most susceptible
the evidence shows to deliberate
campaigns of misinformation
and political manipulation even today.
Problematical because its
public square is closed
to researchers who even want
to document what's going on.
And Facebook now is gradually,
year by year, month by month,
attempting to get ahead of
the prospect of regulation
or other governmental
action in the United States,
which is already facing
and Europe and elsewhere
to get ahead of that by
attempting to self regulate
and to use both technology
and now this new panel
of overseers of experts
to try to get a grip on
what is permissible speech,
even if it's inaccurate speech
and what is unacceptable
propaganda or manipulation
or misinformation.
And the net result of it is you have to,
I think even if you are one
of those people, as I am,
who is appalled by the
pollution that Facebook allows
across its platform, and
then in the name of openness,
but in the context of a
program of profit-making
and the lack of
responsibility that Facebook
has been willing to take
for its role as a publisher,
its place as a public square.
So I'm appalled by that.
On the other hand, I ready to
admit that this tightening,
the self regulation is
going to have the effect
is already having the effect
of making marginal speech less possible,
less influential, less present.
And okay, if you are of the
school that thinks Alex Jones
and InfoWars should not
be part of a credible
publishing operation you
may be pleased by that,
but that it's always the
case that policies adopted
to silence a voice that
the consensus holds
to be unacceptable.
Also turns out silence
lots of other voices
before they could even get going,
which may be necessary
to our kind of system
of continuous self-examination and change.
So, yeah, I think there's
a lot of that going on,
if I can just jump into this
sort of darkness subject
though, because there's a lot
of darkness in the discourse
about speech and journalism
in, as authoritarianism rises
around the world and as populism polarizes
politics in our country
and in other countries.
But I just say, like probably
the kinds of people who
are listening to us now,
one of my responses to the
pandemic was to go back
and read The Plague by Albert Camus.
And it's quite a worthwhile
if not uplifting novel to read
in these times, cause it
has its prescience for
for what we're going
through is just stunning.
But well, or actually what it does is
it places what we're going
through in the proper,
accurate, eternal context
of recurring epidemics
and government responses to them
and the failure of governments
to get a grip on viruses
throughout history.
But anyway it made me interested in Camus
and I'm going to write
something about this
for the New Yorkers.
So you'll see it when
it, whenever it drops,
but it may be interested in him.
And I was reminded that he
joined the resistance in Paris
as an editor in 1943, in
1944 against Nazi-ism.
And I went back and read his
articles in the newspaper,
he added this clandestine
newspaper called Combat.
And he basically is trying to respond
to the German propaganda machine,
which I mean talk about a dark moment
in and manipulation of public opinion.
- Yeah, and his optimism in these.
And he's very forceful and clear.
I mean, he really is
kind of closer to Orwell
in the clarity of his political
language than I appreciated
as close as I've come
across on the Combat.
But anyway he basically just says,
facts will win out at the end.
The truth will win out my countrymen,
pay no attention to all of these lies.
Yes, if you tell a lie a million times,
it will have an influence,
but so will the truth.
And so we are going to
just stay that course.
Now you look back on what kind
of a person would write that
under false papers,
living like half a door
from the German
counter-intelligence service
that would torture him if
they knew what he was doing
and turn out to be right,
turn out to be right.
So I don't know.
I hate as a friend always says,
optimism is just a state
of brain chemistry,
but just when you look
at the kind of assumption
that misinformation, because it's growing,
because it's prevalent will win.
I think there's reason to
both moral and analytically,
there are reasons to fight
against that assumption.
- I like that note of optimism.
It's clouded in my mind by PTSD
from having to read that book in the,
it that's about as far as I got in French
when I was studying, I
had to read "La Peste"
and I still remember the
first line about his mother
is dead.
And it was like, the verb
content will be in my mind.
So I'm having some PTSD, but yes,
fortunately he did write very clearly.
So even for a student of a French.
I'll have to go back and read that
because there's also
been a lot of referencing
to Garcia Marquez and a lot.
So but I like that sense of optimism.
But I mean, what you're pointing to
when we talk about these platforms
and going back to your
comment that censorship,
isn't what it used to be in
the sense that you don't have,
the army surrounding the
radio broadcast station.
And that's basically like the job is done
even in a lot of these countries
that we're referencing,
there is a fair amount of openness
to social media platforms.
And so who is the sensor is
a different equation now.
And these platforms are
often in the U.S. context,
the debate has been, should
they exercise editorial judgment
and start thinking of
themselves as having the role
that you used to have
at The Washington Post,
in terms of deciding what's
credible, what's not,
what's newsworthy, et cetera.
But in a lot of these
other countries, that's,
they're kind of often the ones
who are asked by the government
to take down speech that,
ostensibly violates norms
that the government has
maybe arbitrarily decided
impose in that country.
And they don't, they're,
these platforms are sort
of caught in between
and they're scrambling to figure out,
should they stand up to the government?
Should they Google famously
pulled out of China
back in the day.
And so that, but just talk a
little bit more about that,
the evolution of how
Facebook in particular
perceives itself, once upon a time,
I think in Mark Zuckerberg said it,
I'm not responsible for anything that is,
for any of the content on this platform.
I'm just providing the public square
or the other analogies people made
is I'm like the phone company.
I mean, if people will
say obscene things on,
when they're connect that I've
connected, that's not on AT&T,
that's on them.
And so, all these analogies
were sort of imperfect,
but you're right.
Whether they haven't
explicitly embraced the fact
that they are in this, in the
business that you used to be
in The Washington Post,
but there's certainly
been an evolution.
And they're, just because of the outrage
and because of the threat
of regulation and whatnot,
and I feel like with the pandemic,
there's more and more vigilance
on in terms of the content
and then this oversight board.
I've heard, maybe people
have different views
on how effective that's going
to be and whether it's just,
window dressing or whether it's
going to be sort of a useful
Supreme Court type instrument to at least
make some of the tough calls.
But do you see things
evolving to a point where
Mark Zuckerberg or his successor,
running Facebook is going to
be sort of feel like they,
his or her role is the same
that, the Graham family,
when they were stewards
of The Washington Post
or the Sulzbergers at The New York Times,
or is it just going to be different
and we're not going to get
to something resembling that.
- I mean, I think, Facebook is
controlled by Mark Zuckerberg,
just the way The New York Times company
is controlled by the Sulzberger family.
And The Washington Post
company was controlled
by the Graham family.
He owns the A-shares.
So it's not a normal,
publicly traded company
in the sense that all of
these external pressures
that would normally drive a
public company towards reforms
they meet resistance from their owner
who I don't think will
evolve into the outlook
that the Sulzberger's or the Graham's had
as newspaper owners.
He's too wedded to the insights, I guess,
as he would call him that he'd developed
and creating the platform
and to the kind of philosophy
or ideology that evolved
as Facebook scaled.
Now he has been rethinking
some of the regulatory issues
as the, each time the
status quo became untenable.
He would think a little bit forward.
Now, the mechanisms that he has used
to try to get the
governments that influenced
Facebook's profitability
off his back have evolved.
Initially Facebook took the view
that a lot of Silicon Valley companies do,
which is surely there's an
engineering solution for this.
We don't need gatekeepers.
That's, we've already blown
up all the gatekeepers,
the newspaper editors, the book
editors, they're antiquated,
they're unnecessary, their
function is inefficient
and maybe even structurally damaging.
And so let's write code and algorithms
and build kind of crowdsourced insights
that will produce a better
experience for our users.
And so when the problems started arising,
like people carrying out acts of violence
using Facebook live, or
staging gruesome events
of various kinds that,
I just skipped past what those all were.
Well, their first response was to
try to write code that would
detect these and preempt them,
that didn't work because
the human complexity
that you have to manage
when you build a beehive
of the sort that Facebook represents
is just too great for
all code all the time.
And so then they started
hiring these kinds of editors
as they called them.
They turned out to be for the most part,
low paid workers in places
like the Philippines
in Southern India who had to
work shifts in which they
watched just unspeakable material
and decided, which was on the wrong side
of the free speech line
that Facebook was trying to enforce,
which I think was probably
not a very healthy
working environment for
many of those people.
But anyway also a very retail
and not traditional publishers approach
to the question of what content
is welcome on our platform.
Now you have this Supreme Court,
which is going to attempt to try to unify
the questions about policy
and access and so on.
And there's a notional independence
that's being given to this board,
but it's function is so circumscribed,
at least in the way it's
been initially described
that it doesn't actually
constitute management.
It seems like a safety valve for
the leadership of the companies
to basically be able to say,
well, that's not our
responsibility anymore.
So I don't mean to be cynical.
I mean, Facebook is a living organism
and Mark Zuckerberg has got
a long life ahead of him,
but when you say Mark
Zuckerberg or his successor,
I mean, wait 40 years,
if he has normal lifespan
and he doesn't seem in any hurry
to turn this over to anyone else.
- We had a conversation recently
with the FEC commissioner,
Ellen Weintraub.
We do these movie nights.
I don't know if you were still
here and got to go to any,
but we normally we'll have,
we'll ask somebody interesting
to pick out their favorite movie
and we'll show them the E Street landmark.
And of course we had already
scheduled it with her
when this situation came along.
So, but she picked "The Social Network."
And so we still had a
chat with her about it.
And so, and I watched that with
my son who had never seen it
Sebastian and he's 15 now.
And watching them high
five when they hit the,
when they get the 1 million and the,
it was interesting to re-watch that movie
and I forgotten how dark it is.
And I think that movie came
out the period of time between
the founding of Facebook.
Sebastian was also very
struck by the fact that
he's as old as Facebook is,
they were born in the same year
and that dorm room at Harvard.
And, but that movie basically came out.
I think it was roughly the midpoint
between the founding of
Facebook and where we are today.
So it was kind of interesting.
And it also left me wondering
how did the the twins,
the Vinkl Vi as Mark
Zuckerberg calls them,
how are they doing with
their Bitcoin investments?
Because for awhile there,
they were like heavily
into Bitcoin.
Do you have a view?
I mean, I realized this is
getting a little bit away
from the sort of journalism framing,
but do you have a view on
the sort of debate around
political advertising?
Facebook has taken one stance
and there's questions about
how much they should be vetting
political ads for veracity.
And then Twitter just said,
like, this isn't worth it.
We're not, we're getting
out of this business,
begs all sorts of questions
about what is political
and not, what's not political.
And of course that wasn't
a huge business for them
to begin with, but do you,
despite all of the the
difficulties of policing
these networks and the ways
in which their business model
might not have the right incentives
to act in a responsible way,
do you think there's a concern
if we just start throwing
our hands up in the air
and saying, a lot of this is just too hard
and platforms say when it
comes to public issues,
we're just going to say, don't do it here.
And of course they have that right.
There's not a first amendment issue
because they're private enterprises,
but I mean, a lot of this could fall under
the category of corrective
measures, but there's always,
sometimes that creates new problems too.
I mean, if I'm a political candidate
and want to reach people on Twitter,
I can't I guess can have
sponsored messaging.
And so I can go somewhere else, I suppose.
But over time, if we just,
if we decide that political
advocacy is too hard,
do you think that could
be a dangerous trend to?
- I'm not worried as much about that.
I do think, I mean, my
own views are shifting
maybe a little bit toward where
some people on the right are
about political advertising
just in the last year or two,
partly based on evidence.
But I'll say that, I think
there are some common sense laws
and goals around political
advertising that make sense to me,
like whoever's paying for it,
we should know who that is.
Transparency and one of the problems with
the post Citizens United
regime is the dark money,
which I don't think can be justified,
especially not in a speech
context where you're privileging
sometimes false political advertising,
often false or manipulative
political advertising
on a speech the basis, but yet there's no,
I know anonymous speech is also protected,
but anonymous financed speech
just seems inconsistent
with our political values.
That's one line that I
would wish to enforce.
And then of course, money
that is being poured
into the United States to
influence an American election
from international sources.
I don't think the law or our constitution
wants to see that become a
regular part of our elections.
But where I've shifted is
I don't think political
advertising as speech
is as dangerous as some of
our kind of Orthodox here
where it's certainly some
of the conventional wisdom
on the left has held it to
be post Citizens United.
I mean, election cycle after
election cycle over the last,
I don't know, certainly going back to 2008
all of these outside groups
with different agendas
have poured amazing amounts
of money into races,
through television and social
media, political advertising.
What's the evidence they have
actually influenced outcomes.
If you wanted to run an exam, I mean,
if you wanted to run a a
test of this hypothesis,
what we just had, one Michael Bloomberg
spent what $315 million
in, I dunno, two months.
And all it took was one-
- Debate.
- moment on the debate stage.
And it just, you might
as well have taken it
into the backyard of
his home in the Bahamas
and set it all on fire
for all the good it did.
And so there a sort of hysteria
about political spending
that I don't think is
justified by evidence of,
and it's not just that case.
I think there's a fair
amount of social science
that says yes, political ads
can be influential to some people,
people do take a lot of
information in about elections
on television and those ads
can influence some people.
But I don't see the
evidence that they are as,
so decisive as to justify
the costs in speech
to start trying to enforce
lines that are very difficult
to draw as to what is
acceptable advertising
and what is not.
And secondly, if you ask,
you don't have to take this
from a right perspective
or a left perspective.
If you ask political
professionals on both sides
of the competition who are really fired up
about their agenda of winning
and including on the left,
they don't want these restrictions either.
I was teaching a covering
politics class this spring,
and I had a woman in who
ran one of the democratic
primary campaigns that was
on the left side of the party's spectrum.
And she was fascinating
when people asked her about,
this was at the moment when
Facebook was trying to restrict
political advertising because of concerns
about what was coming from the right.
And she said, we don't
want to see any of those
restrictions imposed.
Cause as soon as they
go down against Trump,
they're gonna go down against us.
And we think if we can get
our message out, we'll win.
So we want everyone to get out of the way
so we can speak basically.
- Yeah.
No, it's interesting.
I want to remind everybody, who's watching
to feel free to ask questions.
I want to just sprinkle
them into the conversation
as opposed to they're coming
a time, I'm gonna say like,
"Okay, now we're open for questions."
So the Q&A function on
Zoom is great for that.
Steve, you mentioned
earlier the fact that,
there's been sort of a breakdown
of the international system
and globalization over the
past few years, past decade.
And so in this moment there aren't,
plenty of governments around the world,
if they're trying to
assess the cost benefits of
acting in ways that might've at one point
gotten them into trouble
with whoever was policing,
whether it's a United Nations Committee
or sort of the scold in
Washington or the European Union.
It does feel like there's a
lot more latitude for countries
to decide that the reputational
costs of acting in ways
that are not the most democratic
that reputational cost is
less than it used to be.
I sometimes feel that,
sitting in the States,
we can maybe overstate this
because we just feel like
everything revolves
around the United States.
And so if our president's activity,
everyone else around the world
is going to take their cue from that.
I mean, he does use as you pointed out
language like enemy of the people, which,
in other contexts has very
dire repercussions when,
leaders in other countries
just sort of appropriate
that language.
So I don't mean to minimize
that, but sitting where you sit
as the Dean of the Columbia
School of Journalism,
have you had conversations
with people in other countries
that do make this very direct linkage of,
"Hey, we we've been counting
on you, United States
"and now nobody has our back."
I mean, do you hear that from people?
- Yeah, I mean, I think,
I don't have conversations to recount,
but I don't think there's any question
that in the emerging world,
particularly in countries
like the Philippines
that have long historical
ties to the United States,
the influence of the permission
that the president creates
when he calls the American
Professional Working Press
enemies of the people is meaningful
and it is felt on the ground.
Maria Ressa, one of the
great independent journalists
in the Philippines came
and spoke to our graduates,
last year, I think it was,
and I spent time with her
and she is hanging on by her fingernails
and every time Trump
delegitimizes journalism
through his speech or uses
language of incitement
to basically incite
attacks on journalists,
it washes into a place
like the Philippines
in a very meaningful way.
I think, to step back from your question
the United States has already
surrendered leadership
in the realm of global
human rights promotion
or global free speech promotion.
So this is not a speculative question.
We're in the fourth year of
the Trump administration,
the European Union has its own problems,
but one of the problems it's
trying to address is that,
it can't count on the
United States to prioritize
not just speech and press freedom,
but to use the instruments
of the international system
that might influence governments
in a way that prioritizes human rights.
It can certainly critique
the European's own
ineffectualness to live
up to its own values.
But it's definitely a
world that is full of,
sort of a centrifugal force
around these subjects.
I mean, when you talk about human rights
and the status of the press worldwide,
I think you have to connect that
to the state of human
rights defense generally.
I mean, there's not a difference
between the status of the
press in Latin America
or in Asia or in parts of Europe
and the general state of
human rights and civil rights.
I mean, when governments
seek to repress all civil
and human rights, they also
suppress press independence
and speech.
And that's as worrisome
as the conversation we've been having
about the actual information
ecosystem in which we live,
because I think it's
hard for me to remember.
as an adult of a certain
youngish boomer age,
when in my politically aware lifetime
human rights promotion or defense
has been less salient
to international kind of power or course,
or the priorities of
international institutions,
including the UN, but also the IMF
and the World Bank and lots
of other organizations,
the big foundations, open society,
which I was involved in for awhile,
is back on it heels
kicked out of Budapest.
where George Soros created
an important university.
And who's defending these organizations
as they're forced to their retreats.
Rarely do their governments
put anything on the line
including the United States government.
- Right.
So here's a question.
It's an interesting shift of gears
as a dean of a journalism school.
Do you see a shift in, between generations
in terms of their overall
view of free speech?
I think there are a lot of
people of a certain age,
if you read op ed columns,
there's a lot of hand-wringing
about the state of,
how political correctness
is run amok on campuses.
And there's varied.
There's a lot less
tolerance for free speech.
That's threatening to
people or not comfortable.
And we're abandoning,
our one of the things
that was essential to
American exceptionalism
was this high tolerance
for obnoxious speech.
And going back to sort of the Brandeis
in view of that right,
and Supreme court cases that
defended the right of Nazis
to parade down Skokie,
Illinois, or wherever it was.
And, that there's been a shift
where people younger people
now might sort of assess
the cost of that unfettered free speech
that can often be hurtful to
people in a different way.
But then I also hear a lot
of colleagues say that.
some of that critique is over done.
And it's not that different,
but have you, you're sort of,
you're a still relatively recent arrival
to the world of academia-
- Seven years.
So it doesn't feel like yesterday.
- relatively.
But I mean so, and you're also-
- Yeah, i hear what
you're saying, i think-
- A journalism school,
so presumably you have the true
believers, but I don't know.
I do notice a slight difference
in terms of my students
and how we viewed things a long time ago
when I was in college.
But what's your thought
on whether we are seeing
a generational shift
and where we draw these lines?
- Well, I think you said there at the end
where I would begin, which is
that at a journalism school
we find that our students are much,
are very open to alternate points of view,
and aren't coming with an Orthodox
about what's acceptable speech there.
They want to become journalists.
They want to understand how to report,
how to think, how to write
and they're at the graduate level.
So they are purposeful
and we have had in my
time hardly any problem
with students not wanting
to hear a point of view.
In fact we are the kind of
vanguard at the university
for bringing in diverse
points of view sometimes.
And I think our students share
the outlook of our faculty
that that's what we do.
And I tried, the biggest deficit however,
in our faculty is conservative,
political conservative perspectives.
And so we try to, I try to bring in people
even from the never
Trump conservative press,
and they feel trepidation
about stepping onto
Columbia's campus and
coming into our school.
And then everyone of course
treats them way too politely.
And so nothing ever really
gets said, but I mean,
a couple of years ago Kyle Pope
who runs Columbia Journalism Review
had an editor from Breitbart come in
and had him on a panel with
someone from The New York Times
and someone else who was a former
Wall Street Journal reporter.
And it went reasonably well.
But there's not enough of that.
But that's really about
defining the range of journalism
that is actually relevant to
our society. In terms of speech
and this like the incident at
the University of Missouri,
where reporters were
turned away by protestors,
who basically said hostiley
and even were backed by a faculty member
who had some dual appointment
at the journalism school.
You're not allowed to ask
questions of these folks
because they're in a safe space.
There may be some students
who harbor sympathy
for those protesters.
I'm sure there are, but that
is not a form of activism
that arises in the classroom or that,
where that is trying
to reshape journalism.
- I mean, this year there was
the controversy at Northwestern, right?
Which was sort of similar
student newspaper.
- Yeah.
And I felt badly for that
editor who made some,
the kinds of judgments that a young person
without a lot of backup can
make and got eviscerated for it.
There was no ambiguity among our faculty
or students about what
was wrong and right there
from a journalistic perspective,
but there is some sympathy
for the peer culture that
this generation is shaping
for itself of respect, of inclusiveness.
And I have respect for that,
it doesn't need to be
hostile to journalism.
It can sometimes create unfortunate
decision-making has happened
in the case of Northwestern,
but there's nothing innately
wrong with trying to redefine
from generation to
generation who's included,
who's respected.
How are they respected?
I mean, every generation
that in an open society
full of social change and change
and civil rights consciousness
and goal setting goes through that.
So I don't feel threatened by it.
- Yeah.
So we have a couple of questions that are
in a sort of similar vein,
and you mentioned the
University of Missouri.
So I should hand a microphone
to Christopher Leonard
an old friend of yours,
a great journalist,
one of our star fellows at
New America back in the day.
Chris is asking how do you see
the unfolding economic crisis
affecting free speech,
particularly in America?
It seems that weekend media
outlets might be less likely
to challenge powerful government
and corporate institutions.
And there were a couple of questions
that had the similar vein
of the pandemic's impact
on the actual business of journalism
and what that means for
speech and journalism
that can hold governments
accountable across the country.
- I mean, I think the crisis,
the economic recession
and fallout from the pandemic
is going to accelerate
changes in the structure of media.
And so some, a lot of speech
that were already underway.
So the big get bigger, the big
platforms on the West Coast
consolidate and survive,
have greater control,
greater influence over what
speech reaches audiences.
Yes, they may be under regulatory pressure
to take more responsibility.
But as we were discussing before,
taking more responsibility
is almost certain
to marginalize speech.
And in journalism you see
the accelerating collapse
of commercially based local newspapers
all across the country, and
this was happening anyway,
and now it is accelerating.
And while there are important
and necessary responses
to the loss of local news reporting
out of these newsrooms in the
nonprofit sector particularly,
the scale of reporting that
these green shoots are providing
to their communities with
philanthropic support
just don't have the scale to
replace what's being lost.
And I think that is a profound danger
to the informed democracy
that our founders had in mind
when they privileged
speech in the first place.
They also had in mind
competition of ideas,
but the first amendment has
evolved in the complex age
of industrialization and in the atomic age
to in parallel with the rise of science
to try to privilege a
fact-based public discourse
and without locally rooted
journalistic institutions
to play a role in that system.
I think a lot of those
communities are really going
to lose something important.
And one of the things
they're gonna lose is
just the accountability
of their public officials
and their leaders.
I think a lot of, as an example
of the Indianapolis star,
which essentially played a
role in bringing to justice,
the serial child molester, Larry Nasser,
and when he was sentenced, the judge said,
if it weren't for the Indianapolis Star,
we wouldn't be here today.
And you look at that paper,
it's being crushed by the same forces
that are crushing a lot
of independent newspapers.
They still are, or
commercial, local newspapers.
They still have a strong news
room comes to work every day.
But you think about the
people who picked up the phone
to call the star when they
had run out of options
with the prosecutors and the court systems
and everything else.
I mean, journalism still functions
as a court of last resort.
We know our public institutions fail,
they fail again and again,
prosecutors they do lots of things well,
and then they miss or
they reflect political
or other institutional
biases and problems.
And we can't afford to
learn to lose journalism
as a court of last resort.
I've, in DC, there's all this talk
all the time about
whistleblower protection
and whistleblower mechanisms.
So just look at the way the
whistleblower system has worked
over the last two or three years.
Do you think that absent,
independent journalism
to create transparency around
what was actually happening
to the whistle blowers
and who was doing what,
that the whistleblower
system would have lasted
even a month?
And so we have robust watchdog
functions in Washington
and New York and San
Francisco to an extent,
but in these towns and
cities about a decade ago,
I was at some, when I was at New America,
I went to a hearing about
the future of journalism
that David Simon, the creator of The Wire
appeared at the former
Baltimore Sun reporter.
And I remember he said
to the assembled senators
during the hearings.
I laughed, but I didn't
think the senators laughed.
He said, "You should be really happy about
being a Senator at this time,
because with the collapse
of local journalism,
you are living in the golden
age of public corruption,"
That's more true 10
years later that it was.
- Yeah.
That's well, but let's end on fake news.
We have a question about fake
news in France and a case,
but also let's see Jen Daskal,
who is a con law professor
here at American university and
our partner on this project,
one of our intellectual Sherpas
that we're collaborating with.
She asks, she writes,
"Curious to turn the question
regarding fake news inward.
When the president of the
United States talks about
fake news referring to
clearly accurate stories,
what does it do to the state of journalism
in the United States and to our democracy?
We live in a world of
such divergent narratives,
including regarding
baseline factual issues
that we can no longer seem to have
one national conversation.
Should we be concerned?"
And I mean, I would add on,
is this something that you
feel journalism schools
can try to remedy in some way.
But these divergent net narratives,
I think it's a good way to
think about what we're saying,
it just seems to be accelerating
or like widening the
chasm between the two.
I don't know, what are
your thoughts on that?
- Well, I think when
the president does what
she accurately describes him
doing several times a week,
if not several times a day
he is executing a populous
political strategy
that seeks to motivate his base.
And which has the effect of
exacerbating polarization
in the country that extends
well beyond people's
attitudes towards professional journalists
and to virtually every
other cultural touchstone
that we're divided about these
days more divided than ever.
And polarization is a big
subject that has much more to do.
And it has to do with many
more things than journalism,
but within journalism, I have
one way that I think about it
and it is damaging and
can a journalism school
do anything about it?
We are a school that's been around
for more than a hundred years.
We were founded on the idea that
there should be a
profession of journalism,
not just a bunch of ambulance chasers,
taking photographs of dead bodies
and selling them in tabloids.
And that the purpose of the profession
would be to advance the goal
of an informed citizenry.
And essentially it was
a very farsighted idea
of why there should be
journalism education.
And it was linked to
the rise of professions
like medicine and law,
and eventually accounting
and the rise of the scientific method,
which was also happening at that time
and in at least an incubating way.
And so what we think of as
journalism today at our school
is lashed to the scientific method,
and it has a public function,
and it seeks to justify
its privilege in the
constitution by working honestly
and independently and toward the goal
of an informed readership.
And we recognize that opinion journalism
and ideological journalism
has always been a part of the
picture in the United States.
So that's not going away
and it has never gone away.
But the polarization that you see
in our political competition
around the legitimacy of journalism
is partly about economic change.
And the incentives that are
emerging in the media business
for publishers to basically
pitch their journalism
to their tribes.
So the collapse of advertising
has meant for example,
that The New York Times,
as it emerges as a survivor
from the collapse of newspapers
is 74% dependent on
subscriptions and rising.
Now, I don't know how
many of you subscribe
to The New York Times, seven days a week,
but it's up to like $90 a month.
I'm happy to pay it for
the hard copy version.
Maybe I need a discount.
But when people are paying
and when publishers are
driving their content
toward the deepening of subscription
and subscriber engagement, there
is an inevitable clustering
of identity and worldviews
that I think challenges some
of the postwar assumptions
about fact-based scientific
method and journalism.
Same thing happens on
cable more obviously,
why do Fox News and MSNBC and CNN cluster
around ideological audiences?
It's because the incentives
of the way they get paid
by cable systems, encourage
them to have passionate,
engaged audiences. In
a 500-channel universe
if you're being carried on Comcast,
which is in secular decline,
but not in danger of going away tomorrow
or if you're being carried
on Google TV, YouTube TV
you have to justify why the
carrier must have your channel
rather than National Geo 3
or any number of other thousand channels.
And what Fox News discovered was that
even if you have terrible demographics,
like the average age of a Fox News viewer
as well, North of 60,
and so you're really
useless to advertisers
except for a very
specialized section of them.
Nonetheless, Fox News is
indispensable to cable providers
because if they tried to pull it
their headquarters would be burned down.
And so everybody is incented economically
to get their tribe fired up.
And that's happening around news.
Now some of these stations
don't even pretend to
do reporting anymore.
They're just like radio talk shows,
but where it gets very
confusing for viewers,
I'm sure is where they mix in,
like the idea that we're field reporters,
we're gonna tell you
what happened yesterday.
And then they have these
panels full of people
who just are basically trying
to reinforce the tribal code
of that by reference to today's headlines.
And so these are huge structural forces
that are very difficult to reverse.
And yet I have a conviction,
we have a conviction on our faculty
that doing journalism,
the old fashioned way
from the facts backward and
challenging your own assumptions
and following the scientific
method, telling stories,
thinking broadly
about what should be
included in journalism,
that this will adjust as Camus said
when he was thinking about
this under extreme pressure,
it will win out over time,
but it's a harder time
to have faith in it than it was.
- Steve we're up on the hour.
So this last note about
where the incentives lie,
it could be another two-hour conversation,
but it is 5 o'clock where we are.
So I can't thank you enough
for this conversation.
- Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
- We'll all go read Camus
to try to find some hope.
- That's an oxymoron, but
anyway, I still recommend it.
- Thanks for tuning in everybody.
Bye bye.
- Thank you.
