Speaker 1: Thanks for downloading Making a Killing. I'm Bethany McLean. We've
Speaker 1: had some amazingly fun conversations so far in the series.
Speaker 1: My favorite, I think, is my old friend Alex Gibney
Speaker 1: talking about the line between a visionary and a fraudster.
Speaker 1: It's a theme that we returned to again and again.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen ninety five. I got my start in
Speaker 1: journalism when I joined Fortune Magazine as a fact checker.
Speaker 1: Well we had more august titles. They called us reporters,
Speaker 1: but we were fact checkers. We are responsible not just
Speaker 1: for the accuracy of individual facts. Is the car blue?
Speaker 1: Is it pale blue or dark blue? But for the
Speaker 1: defensibility of the point of view that the story is boast.
Speaker 1: I'll always remember being given my first story to check.
Speaker 1: It was something about four one K plans, and it
Speaker 1: sounded very convincing, but it was all wrong. That was
Speaker 1: the first time I realized that authoritative, seeming words in
Speaker 1: black and white can be extremely misleading, if not outright false.
Speaker 1: I know that sounds hopelessly naive in an air aware.
Speaker 1: As Bloomberg just reported, fake news is such a threat
Speaker 1: to US security that the Defense Department is launching a
Speaker 1: project to repel quote large scale automated disinformation attacks. The
Speaker 1: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, wants custom software
Speaker 1: that can unearth fake stories, photos, video, and audio clips,
Speaker 1: maybe even eventually detect malicious intent and prevent fake news
Speaker 1: from going viral. Of course, the big social media companies
Speaker 1: are also trying, I think sort of. In late twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: after the deluge of criticism about online disinformation during the
Speaker 1: presidential election, Facebook announced its third party fact checking project.
Speaker 1: Independent organizations would debunk false news stories, and Facebook would
Speaker 1: make the findings obvious to users, even downraking the relevant
Speaker 1: post in its newsfeed. Google also has a problem that's
Speaker 1: supposed to help news organizations tag stories that debunk misinformation
Speaker 1: so that Google News can more easily feature the correct information.
Speaker 1: But is it a losing battle. We're not just fighting
Speaker 1: plain old mistakes anymore. We're fighting bias infiltration by foreign
Speaker 1: powers and maybe even our own government. President Trump's political
Speaker 1: allies are trying to raise at least two million dollars
Speaker 1: to investigate reporters and editors at The New York Times,
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, and other outlets, according to Axios, in
Speaker 1: order to make allegations of bias by social media platforms
Speaker 1: a core part of their twenty twenty strategy. The consequences
Speaker 1: of this are huge. By the time twenty twenty is over,
Speaker 1: trust in all sources of information will be low and
Speaker 1: perhaps unrecoverable, wrote Axios as Mike Allen, who also said this,
Speaker 1: a nation without shared truth will be hard, too impossible
Speaker 1: to govern. So I'm excited to talk to Kyle Pope
Speaker 1: about this. Kyle is a longtime journalist who's been an
Speaker 1: editor at Conde Nast in the Wall Street Journal, among
Speaker 1: other places, and he's currently the editor in chief and
Speaker 1: publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, which says its mission
Speaker 1: is to be the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing
Speaker 1: world of journalism. CJR just published a piece about how
Speaker 1: Facebook's fact checking program is in fact, falling short, and
Speaker 1: of course CJR is also avidly covering this larger issue
Speaker 1: of fake news. So, Kyle, you've been a journalist for
Speaker 1: a really long time. So take me back to when
Speaker 1: you got started in your days as an editor in
Speaker 1: the old world of print and what the fact checking
Speaker 1: process was all about. I started my career in local
Speaker 1: and regional newspapers and there wasn't really a fact checking
Speaker 1: function then, even though it was all print. My first
Speaker 1: real experience with fact checking came at the Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 1: where I worked for ten years. And when I started there,
Speaker 1: it was like I think nineteen ninety two. The first
Speaker 1: thing they had, which is instructive because it doesn't exist
Speaker 1: pretty much anywhere, they had like a they call it
Speaker 1: a spot news desk, and they put you through like
Speaker 1: a boot camp, so you had to work there. You
Speaker 1: had every new reporter, no matter what you were hired
Speaker 1: to do, had to come to me or I was
Speaker 1: hired in Dallas to come to New York and spend
Speaker 1: a week going through this boot camp where they would
Speaker 1: just they would teach you the basics about how to
Speaker 1: write an earning story, how to read an SEC document,
Speaker 1: what databases you could access to find people, and it
Speaker 1: was a real tutorial. I remember distinctly. The woman who
Speaker 1: ran it was like she was dead serious and really
Speaker 1: sort of enmeshed in this, and every time you would
Speaker 1: do an earning story as a young reporter, she would
Speaker 1: look it over and she would come back to you
Speaker 1: and say, Okay, well you did this wrong. There's a
Speaker 1: difference between operating income and net income that you don't understand.
Speaker 1: You need to figure that out. And anyway, there was
Speaker 1: a whole process. I don't remember, frankly, whether there was
Speaker 1: a separate fact checking operation for the whole newspaper. The journal, though,
Speaker 1: was extremely heavily addited. I mean there was like two
Speaker 1: or three people, at least two would read over every
Speaker 1: story and really comb through it. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that was the case for a lot of newspapers. I
Speaker 1: mean the fact checking function was most robust at magazines. Yes,
Speaker 1: not so much in newspapers. And then what happened is
Speaker 1: as we moved from print newspapers. You know, in hindsight,
Speaker 1: we didn't realize at the time, but we had the
Speaker 1: luxury of time and we had forever right to do
Speaker 1: these stories. And I'd get stories a week, a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks before they were due to run, and then
Speaker 1: be turned over to me as the fact check. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the magazines had this like crazy robust fact checking
Speaker 1: operation that all that has sort of gone away. I know.
Speaker 1: It's actually it's astounding because there's a woman named ros
Speaker 1: Berlin who was the chief of reporters at Fortune, and
Speaker 1: when I got there, she taught me how you checked
Speaker 1: facts and it you know, if it was if it
Speaker 1: had already been reported, it had to have been reported
Speaker 1: in three places. If it hadn't been reported in three places,
Speaker 1: you needed to call. You had to use a red
Speaker 1: pen to check things and a bluepen to do other things.
Speaker 1: But it was this whole elaborate procedure around around fact checking.
Speaker 1: You know what's sad about that? And when you say that,
Speaker 1: I mean, I imagine the response we would get from
Speaker 1: a lot of quarters is how over the top that was,
Speaker 1: and how like unnecessary in a way? And did it
Speaker 1: really make a difference? And I think you know you
Speaker 1: talked in your intro about trust and media. I think
Speaker 1: it did make a difference. I think I think readers,
Speaker 1: I mean, the most damaging thing you can do a
Speaker 1: store in a story is get a sort of simple
Speaker 1: fact that the reader knows is true wrong. So if
Speaker 1: you say Smith Street is runs parallel between eighth and ninth,
Speaker 1: and they know that it's between ninth and tenth, it
Speaker 1: discredits the entire piece absolutely, even though it's a little
Speaker 1: tiny thing that may not even be that relevant to
Speaker 1: the argument that you're making. And readers, I think are
Speaker 1: seeing more and more of those kind of mistakes because
Speaker 1: of what's happening in the journalism business. So do you
Speaker 1: think before we even get to the social media sites
Speaker 1: like Facebook, do you think we're sewing the seeds of
Speaker 1: our own demise in some ways? Yeah? I mean we've
Speaker 1: got we've gotten incredibly sloppy. And can we be anything
Speaker 1: but sloppy given the deadline pressures that we can? I
Speaker 1: think I think so too. I recently I had a
Speaker 1: job opening for an editor because of the market. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of people in the market. I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how many people I talk to editors whose job
Speaker 1: it was to read twenty thirty pieces a day. Wow.
Speaker 1: These are like st a content farms, right, and they're
Speaker 1: just these mills. I mean a couple of them are
Speaker 1: names that you would recognize, and I actually would feel
Speaker 1: really like, what a terrible thing for like a really
Speaker 1: talented twenty something in your old journalists to be doing
Speaker 1: spending their day like trying to just hash through twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty posts. That is a business model that we
Speaker 1: set up to get as many clicks as we can
Speaker 1: a lot of times to feed the private equity owners
Speaker 1: or whoever it was that are owning these news outlets,
Speaker 1: and our job is to sort of fight back and see,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, no, we're doing journalism here. We can't
Speaker 1: do twenty or thirty posts a day and do real journalism.
Speaker 1: You know, if that doesn't work, we've got to do
Speaker 1: something else. I was actually thinking when you were talking.
Speaker 1: I mean, how much the world has changed and whatever.
Speaker 1: It is fifteen to twenty years from the days where
Speaker 1: you'd have three editors on a story, on one story
Speaker 1: that might take them two weeks for all of them
Speaker 1: to look through it and check everything. To one editor
Speaker 1: being responsible for twenty to thirty pieces a day. That's
Speaker 1: just it's a shocking transformation. But did we have a
Speaker 1: choice given the existential threat to journalism? Is there a
Speaker 1: turning point or was there a turning point? Well, our
Speaker 1: decision on this didn't turn out so well. Right. We
Speaker 1: made a decision to go this way to try to
Speaker 1: sort of salvage the business, and it didn't work. Right.
Speaker 1: This all reminds me of my ill fated and painful
Speaker 1: year and a half I spent working for Jared Kushner, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who who owned the New York Observer. He had bought
Speaker 1: it right, and I came in as his first editor,
Speaker 1: and he was one of these people that he's not
Speaker 1: a journalist, and he didn't care about journalism, and his
Speaker 1: whole thing was like his role model was business insider yep.
Speaker 1: And he would say to me like, they have whatever
Speaker 1: the numbers were, they've got only they've got twenty percent
Speaker 1: more people than you, but they're doing two percent more stories,
Speaker 1: Like why can't you keep up with that? And I
Speaker 1: was like, well, they don't do the kind of stories
Speaker 1: that we do right and take more time. And he
Speaker 1: just could not see it. He was like, that makes
Speaker 1: no sense to me. You guys are idiots. And then
Speaker 1: of course it all blew up and I got fired,
Speaker 1: which probably in some ways was was not bad. Well,
Speaker 1: in hindsight, it's one of the great badges of honor
Speaker 1: that I have. But that was the mentality at the time,
Speaker 1: and there weren't enough editors who are willing to stand
Speaker 1: up to people like him and say, you know, this
Speaker 1: is all this is frankly bullshit, and you know it's
Speaker 1: not journalism that you're talking about, it's something else, right.
Speaker 1: It does show the myriad ways in which journalism can't
Speaker 1: be slotted into the things that are important in the
Speaker 1: modern world, by which I mean productivity, right, number of clicks.
Speaker 1: All of those measurements, business measurements don't really apply to
Speaker 1: or shouldn't really apply to journalism, and yet we embraced them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was just sort of profound insecurity at the heart
Speaker 1: of it, you know, like we just we didn't know
Speaker 1: how we were going to keep the lights on at
Speaker 1: any of these places, and we didn't know what journalism
Speaker 1: was going to look like. So we tried all this
Speaker 1: experimentation with volume and with speed and with brevity, and
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, even though it's still it's
Speaker 1: an incredibly difficult time financially, I almost think that we're
Speaker 1: in a better place now only because I think our
Speaker 1: our mission and purpose have been clarified. Yeah, right, And
Speaker 1: I think I think that we have a better sense
Speaker 1: of like we can try all this stuff and it
Speaker 1: may work briefly, sort of like the pivot to video
Speaker 1: or can I say the pivot to podcasting, pivot to
Speaker 1: pocasting exactly, But you know what, unless it's unless there's
Speaker 1: quality there and unless it's good and unless there's real
Speaker 1: value to readers and in terms of telling them something
Speaker 1: they know that they can believe then it's going to disappear.
Speaker 1: And so I'm trying to think about how this change
Speaker 1: in the way we all did journalism intersected with the
Speaker 1: move towards social media, and it strikes me a sort
Speaker 1: of a vicious spiral downward where we did what we
Speaker 1: did in response to the rise of social media, and
Speaker 1: then the dissemination by social media exacerbated that. The problems
Speaker 1: is that is that how you think about it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's going to go down. Is one of
Speaker 1: the great mistakes in communication. This idea of like turning
Speaker 1: your content, your relationship with your audience over to somebody
Speaker 1: else that doesn't share your values to be sort of
Speaker 1: like having somebody say to me, you know, if I
Speaker 1: spend a lot of money to send my kids to
Speaker 1: private school, and they say, well, we can we can
Speaker 1: educate your kids for like a lot less. Right you
Speaker 1: spend thousands of dollars, we can do it for a
Speaker 1: few hundred bucks. And but but be not like taking
Speaker 1: any initiative to find out what's up with these people
Speaker 1: or do they even know what they're doing, or do
Speaker 1: they even care about the same stuff that I care about,
Speaker 1: and then be shocked that they did a lame job,
Speaker 1: or that they even did harm. And it's almost like that,
Speaker 1: I mean, the relationship we have with our audience. I
Speaker 1: mean that is like that's built up over decades and
Speaker 1: decades and decades. And if you think about you, Bethany McClain,
Speaker 1: have a have a brand in the market right because
Speaker 1: of work that you did, I suppose, although it pains
Speaker 1: me to think that way, but yes, you do. And
Speaker 1: it's because of work that you did that has a
Speaker 1: certain amount of excellence. And there are people in who
Speaker 1: follow especially business news, who knew you and trust you
Speaker 1: because of stuff that you did, sometimes decades ago, and
Speaker 1: you didn't screw it up along the way, so you
Speaker 1: still have that right that took so much effort to get.
Speaker 1: And these media organizations had that, and then they then,
Speaker 1: for this desperation for clicks, they turned it over to
Speaker 1: these silicon ballet companies who'd had none of those values
Speaker 1: and none of those interests, and it was all a
Speaker 1: black box like they would say, hey, can you tell me,
Speaker 1: like how you reach people or what kind of algorithm
Speaker 1: you use or do you track people? Don't know. We
Speaker 1: can't tell you that it's a trade secret. Please, no,
Speaker 1: we can't Okay, fine, it's going to end up being
Speaker 1: a massive mistake. And I think we're all now recognizing,
Speaker 1: recognizing it's more obvious. It's interesting what a giant loss
Speaker 1: of confidence, a collective giant loss of confidence, can cause
Speaker 1: you to do right. You know, here we have Facebook
Speaker 1: has access to all these people. We want access to
Speaker 1: all these people. We sort of trusted them to take
Speaker 1: our content. We didn't trust them, but we didn't even
Speaker 1: we didn't want to think about what the consequences were
Speaker 1: of not going that way. Are We chose what looked
Speaker 1: like the easier path, right. I think about this irony
Speaker 1: all the time, because Google and Facebook couldn't exist without us.
Speaker 1: In a sense, they're parasites, right, and yet the parasite
Speaker 1: became more powerful than the host in many ways. And
Speaker 1: if they destroy journalism, they destroy themselves. I think about
Speaker 1: this every time I send out a tweet, like, I'm
Speaker 1: basically producing content for these people, right, Yeah, I'm doing that.
Speaker 1: I don't make a penny out of it. They're profiting
Speaker 1: from it, and it's my content. I had actually never
Speaker 1: thought of it that way, and that is so obviously true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why are we doing that? Because somehow we've fought into this,
Speaker 1: so let's move to Facebook. They're trying, right, Is that
Speaker 1: a fair way to characterize it, to combat fake news?
Speaker 1: I think they're trying to get good pr I think
Speaker 1: they want to look like they're doing something. I don't
Speaker 1: really think they want to do something, and why because
Speaker 1: it doesn't fulfill their business interests. I mean, their job
Speaker 1: is to get as many clicks as they can and
Speaker 1: to get as much engagement as they can, and trying
Speaker 1: to incentivize people not to click on stuff that's not
Speaker 1: what their business is about it And in fact, the
Speaker 1: more of our base instinct that they can appeal to
Speaker 1: and the more that gets people to respond, the bigger
Speaker 1: they get. Do you think about the tragedy of the
Speaker 1: gap between that rhetoric from Silicon Valley about make the
Speaker 1: world a better place and this very harsh business reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't see it as tragedy. I find
Speaker 1: it to be completely cynical, cynical and calculated. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've really since I came into job at CJR, I've
Speaker 1: really turned a corner. As you can hear. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can fund of these companies and I've spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time with them, because I've really been trying to
Speaker 1: like get my head around all of this, and I've
Speaker 1: been trying to get my head around what makes them tick.
Speaker 1: First I was like, why can't they seem to get
Speaker 1: their arms around this? Then I became convinced that they
Speaker 1: have no interest in getting their arms with that, But
Speaker 1: that too was interesting. What convinced you of that? What
Speaker 1: were the key moments? What did you hear and see?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not an open secret. There's been a
Speaker 1: lot of eff recording media journalist and yes New York
Speaker 1: and I assume elsewhere, and they would have these dinners.
Speaker 1: You probably went to one or two of them. I
Speaker 1: don't think I've ever been invited actually, which maybe maybe
Speaker 1: just like you're getting fired from the New York Observer,
Speaker 1: I'm right, I'm gonna I'm gonna take a dinner where
Speaker 1: they would invite journalists and it was all very like
Speaker 1: one very swanky, nice restaurants, but also just it was
Speaker 1: like we're just we just want to listen, and we
Speaker 1: really are interested in what you're up too. And because
Speaker 1: this is right when they were launching their news initiatives
Speaker 1: and they were sort of partnering with local people and
Speaker 1: they would be talking about that with great enthusiasm. But
Speaker 1: then I was sort of watched it long enough to
Speaker 1: see what they actually did that came out of that,
Speaker 1: and it was ended up being so inconsequential. Then CJR
Speaker 1: hosted a mini conference in Silicon Valley trying to sort
Speaker 1: of put journalists and the social networks together to talk
Speaker 1: to each other. We called it can this marriage be Saved?
Speaker 1: And it was just so obvious to me that their
Speaker 1: worldview and our worldview were entirely different. But when we
Speaker 1: were talking about objectivity or facts or rigor, they like
Speaker 1: honestly did not understand what we were talking about. They
Speaker 1: just fundamentally don't get that language. They totally didn't get
Speaker 1: the language. And it was all about, well, if people
Speaker 1: are engaging at how can it be wrong? And what
Speaker 1: business of it of ours is it to tell them
Speaker 1: they can't do that if they're doing it, the mere
Speaker 1: fact that it's commercially successful and that it results and
Speaker 1: clicks as a defense of what it is, and you
Speaker 1: journalists are sort of like somewhat old traditionalist who want
Speaker 1: to stifle speech. She trapped in a world where you
Speaker 1: believe there's a truth, Trapped in a world in which
Speaker 1: you're trying to defend your own reason for being yep.
Speaker 1: Why do they want to engage with us? Why do
Speaker 1: they care about participating in this? Because they realize they
Speaker 1: can't exist without us, so they have to keep they
Speaker 1: have to plagueate us. I think they're scared of regulation, yep.
Speaker 1: And I think they view us as sort of part
Speaker 1: of their lobbying effort. What's been really interesting is they're
Speaker 1: trying to hug us, to make us one and the
Speaker 1: same with them in terms of protecting against encroachments on
Speaker 1: free speech. So they're trying to say, like, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: in the same we're in the same game. Yep. Like
Speaker 1: if they go after us, they're going after you, so
Speaker 1: we need we're on the same team, right right. Whereas
Speaker 1: they want free speech, I think about this a lot.
Speaker 1: They want freedom of speech without responsibility, and to me,
Speaker 1: those two things have always gone hand in hand in
Speaker 1: the old world of journalism. You get freedom of speech,
Speaker 1: but with it comes enormous responsibility. Right. They're very clear
Speaker 1: on the fact that they make no claim to the
Speaker 1: veracity of what they run. I mean, they keep pushing
Speaker 1: back against this idea that they're editors or that they're
Speaker 1: a news organization, And it's because if you're if you
Speaker 1: are that, then you get held to your point, you
Speaker 1: get held responsible for what you say. Yep. I was
Speaker 1: thinking about that when I was looking into this and
Speaker 1: reading what you guys wrote that the past six months
Speaker 1: of headlines about Facebook's partnership with all these fact checking
Speaker 1: organizations too, that it paints a pretty bleak picture. You've
Speaker 1: had Snopes come out and walk away from from it
Speaker 1: saying they're not serious about this and that it just
Speaker 1: it isn't working. Is that what you're seeing more broadly too, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean people are saying one, they're getting no feedback
Speaker 1: from Facebook on what they're what they've seen as a result,
Speaker 1: so we don't know whether this is resulted in less
Speaker 1: So they still won't won't provide transparency. Just it's the
Speaker 1: same answer as it was when we would go to
Speaker 1: them early on and say, what's going to happen to
Speaker 1: this content? It's a lack of transparency is the issue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the people who are in these partnerships are like,
Speaker 1: we really believe this word partner and we thought we
Speaker 1: were in this together, but you're not telling this anything
Speaker 1: about what the impact of this has been so again
Speaker 1: it's a one way partner organizations feed information to Facebook
Speaker 1: and then it goes into the black box, right and critically,
Speaker 1: Facebook puts out a press release that the partner organizations
Speaker 1: are involved in this. But there's also this really interesting
Speaker 1: thing happening with academics too, where they had been brought
Speaker 1: in to work with Facebook and on dealing with some
Speaker 1: of these problems. And we're promised access to more of
Speaker 1: the back end of Facebook's data yep, and they're just
Speaker 1: not getting it. And a lot of them are again
Speaker 1: are saying like this is a pointless exercise, like we're
Speaker 1: being used as window dressing, big leafs, window dressing to
Speaker 1: make it look like they care in our trying and
Speaker 1: they're just not get And then there's this sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, bobbing and weaving Facebook's part, well, you know,
Speaker 1: there was a misunderstanding of the kind of the data
Speaker 1: that we were going to be giving you, or yeah,
Speaker 1: it's coming, it's just taken us a while. Legal is
Speaker 1: reviewing it, and I just don't buy it. I don't
Speaker 1: buy it. What about Google? Do you see any difference
Speaker 1: between how Facebook handles this and how Google handles it
Speaker 1: or is it less important for Google? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: it's somewhat less important. I mean they also don't have
Speaker 1: these third party back checking partnerships, right, I Mean the
Speaker 1: issue with Google is it's a bit harder to pin
Speaker 1: down having to do with what they surface. But ultimately
Speaker 1: that's that really gets you into the black hole of
Speaker 1: nothingness and trying to understand how these places work. But
Speaker 1: to their credit, I guess they haven't spent quite as
Speaker 1: much effort on the pr front yep as Facebook. As
Speaker 1: they're not trying to portray themselves as a friend and
Speaker 1: a solver of these problems, they're also not facing quite
Speaker 1: the same storm of controversy that Facebook is. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the sort of closer corollary to Facebook is Twitter, yep,
Speaker 1: because they're right in the heart of a lot of
Speaker 1: these issues. And what do you see Twitter doing? I
Speaker 1: don't know, me. I'm so fascinated by Jack Dorsey. Whenever
Speaker 1: he talks about this is like the world's head explodes usually, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to know from what he says what
Speaker 1: that actually translates. Yeah, but you have seen this, it's
Speaker 1: a similar issue where you have seen like them trying
Speaker 1: to like figure out, what do you have to say
Speaker 1: to get banned? Yeah? Where'es that line get drawn? And
Speaker 1: then and then that sort of forces them to sort
Speaker 1: of lean into their role as arbiters of speech. But
Speaker 1: it's like Alex Jones is clearly bad, right, But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who are like see things like
Speaker 1: Alex Jones that are still on there. Has anybody that
Speaker 1: you know, have taken a look at this and seen
Speaker 1: if there's any consistency and who gets banned, who gets silenced,
Speaker 1: who's allowed to continue speaking work on it? It tends
Speaker 1: just to be very anecdotal and at hawk. Yeah, non systematic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not systematic. I mean I just I sort of laugh.
Speaker 1: I have to laugh. They just get tied up in
Speaker 1: balls over this stuff. Like and again it goes back
Speaker 1: to what I was saying about the difference in worldview. Yea,
Speaker 1: this is so not what they want to be doing. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's fundamental. It's a fundamental conflict in the way they are.
Speaker 1: It involves a judgment call, it involves something other than
Speaker 1: data responding to demand, and they just are constitutionally really
Speaker 1: ill equipped. I was struck by it was some quotes
Speaker 1: from a story about Facebook's lack of transparency that they
Speaker 1: just don't provide clarity that you don't know how many
Speaker 1: users the fact checks reached, how many people clicked on
Speaker 1: the related links from a false story. Do these fact
Speaker 1: checking projects slow or even halt the spread of any disinformation?
Speaker 1: And all of that is still a black box. How
Speaker 1: does this all come to a head in the election
Speaker 1: that's coming? Do you think? I mean, I fear that
Speaker 1: we're going to be entering a whole new zone of
Speaker 1: this because of the move towards closed networks. Ye, both
Speaker 1: on Facebook and by the way, I think they're doing
Speaker 1: this in part to escape scrutiny, but also and what
Speaker 1: do you mean by the move to closed networks? Well, well,
Speaker 1: they've now sort of announced that they're tweaking their focus
Speaker 1: to be about more tighter groups that you're invited into.
Speaker 1: What's app is a closed network. What you're going to
Speaker 1: see is like targeted campaign messages. I was in Brazil
Speaker 1: during their presidential election, and they did blast out TV ads,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the campaign messaging was over WhatsApp
Speaker 1: groups and it was location based. So if you lived
Speaker 1: in this certain district, everybody who lived in that district
Speaker 1: was getting this message, and everybody who lived in that
Speaker 1: district was getting a different message, and it made it
Speaker 1: really hard for journalists to like understand what these campaigns
Speaker 1: were saying because they were saying different things, because they
Speaker 1: were saying and if you, as a journalist, weren't in
Speaker 1: that area, you weren't seeing it. So that's going to
Speaker 1: be happening in this election. That tactic has already been
Speaker 1: previewed in other countries. It's previewed and by you know,
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon was working with Ballsonaro in Brazil, so you're
Speaker 1: going to see it happening here. So if you think
Speaker 1: about that, you know, if you're in a contested race
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin versus Michigan, versus Florida, you're going to be
Speaker 1: seen from the Trump campaign different messages and it's going
Speaker 1: to be really hard for journalists to sort of parse that.
Speaker 1: That is actually incredibly frightening speaking about got back to
Speaker 1: this idea that is a nation to function, you need
Speaker 1: at least some idea shared idea of what the truth
Speaker 1: is right and if you can't even if there's no
Speaker 1: truth even around what a political candidate is standing for,
Speaker 1: and no ability to get to look into that because
Speaker 1: It's different depending on who the message is being given to.
Speaker 1: It's like taking these private dinners where you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: people record them and catch them, you know a Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton or say saying something terrible. But now that's taken
Speaker 1: to a whole new level, right yeah, yeah. Do you
Speaker 1: think that even if given that the active efforts to
Speaker 1: let's just say, misuse these platforms, even if they wanted
Speaker 1: to do something, could they and we'll just stick with
Speaker 1: Facebook for the sake of keeping it clean? Is it
Speaker 1: such a game of whack amole as well funded interests
Speaker 1: try to figure out how to use this to their
Speaker 1: own advantage, that even if they were serious, could they
Speaker 1: get out in front of it. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: self reporting that goes on, especially on hate speech and
Speaker 1: dangerous speech. I mean you see this when there's a
Speaker 1: christ Church shooting and the shooter is live streaming. I
Speaker 1: mean it took a little while for Facebook, I mean minutes,
Speaker 1: but they quite quickly took it down. So and that
Speaker 1: was part partly because people were like, hey, you have
Speaker 1: to take this down. This guy is doing this. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of self reporting that goes on. They can mobilize,
Speaker 1: but that's specific and egregious rather than subtle and a
Speaker 1: judgment call. Right, And so isn't the ladder where they
Speaker 1: get into trouble? Yeah, it is where they get into trouble.
Speaker 1: Although let's remember that these companies have pretty much unlimited resources, right, right.
Speaker 1: It's not like our newsrooms where we're we're getting rid
Speaker 1: of the copy desk because we know we need to cut.
Speaker 1: But it's it is about the very ethos of these
Speaker 1: things and sort of what do they see them as. Again,
Speaker 1: they don't view themselves as content players. I mean, they
Speaker 1: view themselves purely as sort of connectors of people. Even
Speaker 1: if they wanted to tackle this, it seems to me
Speaker 1: that the threats are growing so quickly now with this
Speaker 1: when Mark said that Facebook made an execution mistake when
Speaker 1: it didn't act fast enough to identify this doctored video
Speaker 1: of Nancy Pelosi where her speech was slurred and distorted,
Speaker 1: and the tools that can allow somebody to present a
Speaker 1: distorted image of reality that isn't even obviously false in
Speaker 1: the way that in the way that in the old days,
Speaker 1: if I call the CEO and said, back to my
Speaker 1: intro with your car blow, is it pale blow? Right?
Speaker 1: We can all agree on that color. But when images
Speaker 1: of reality that we perceive are being altered, what do
Speaker 1: you do in that case? I think ultimately they're going
Speaker 1: to have to figure out what sort of brand they
Speaker 1: want to have, and there's not a lot that media
Speaker 1: organizations can do to affect that. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: the big mistake that was made was again turning over
Speaker 1: this audience. But then what that What that did was
Speaker 1: it put journalism in the same feed as bullshit and
Speaker 1: cat videos and Russian disinformation and listicals. And if you're
Speaker 1: a reader of your Facebook feed, the New York Times
Speaker 1: story doesn't look any different from the Daily Caller story,
Speaker 1: from the video of your kids first day of school.
Speaker 1: It's all there. That's a really interesting point. It's not
Speaker 1: just that we supplied the content to them, it's that
Speaker 1: it also stripped any ownership. An't way any any obvious
Speaker 1: signs of ownership or branch just ownership, but sort of
Speaker 1: like authority, it's stripped away any differentiation. Differentiation looking for
Speaker 1: between you as a serious journalist and the very earnest
Speaker 1: citizen journalist and the very manipulative citizen journalist, and the
Speaker 1: and the active information disinformation agent. Like we all look
Speaker 1: the same, and so I think, you know, and we
Speaker 1: we as media companies turn that over to Facebook and
Speaker 1: we said it's cool to do that, right desperation, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so I think the onus, I think is going
Speaker 1: to be on media companies to say, you know, Facebook,
Speaker 1: you can't put our shit on your on your platform,
Speaker 1: you don't have the right. You can do that, you
Speaker 1: can do that, you can do that, and has anybody
Speaker 1: done that? One of the biggest papers in Brazil is
Speaker 1: like basically said we want nothing to do with Facebook.
Speaker 1: We're off really yeah for you? And when? What was
Speaker 1: Facebook's response to that? And what was Is it too
Speaker 1: soon to see the business referencequation? Too soon? And I
Speaker 1: haven't seen what that all means. Yep. But we can
Speaker 1: walk away if we want. And it doesn't even matter
Speaker 1: At CGR. We have our own relationship with Facebook as
Speaker 1: a platform, and we are like everybody else is they
Speaker 1: as they've doesn't centibize news. I mean, everybody's traffic on
Speaker 1: Facebook is dramatically less. So it's hard to good because
Speaker 1: it's it's totally easier to pull the plug. What else
Speaker 1: do you think the press can do? Given the belieguered
Speaker 1: state of our industry, which isn't getting any better despite
Speaker 1: all the bad decisions we made to try to save ourselves.
Speaker 1: How much can we affect the discourse and how much
Speaker 1: how much can we shape truth? How much power does
Speaker 1: the press still have to do that? That's a big goal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: shaping truth. Yeah, well the truth with a ca smaalty
Speaker 1: instead of with a CAPITALT. Okay. I think this conversation
Speaker 1: about social platforms and what they how they view the world,
Speaker 1: and what they is important. But I think we sort
Speaker 1: of have to stick to our own knitting in a way. Yep.
Speaker 1: I think we have to sort of control the things
Speaker 1: that we can control, which is we've got to make
Speaker 1: sure we ourselves get stuff right. So you know, going,
Speaker 1: this is how we began this conversation, like moving away
Speaker 1: from like just fire hose content that may or may
Speaker 1: not be totally true, and repeating things that other people
Speaker 1: have published, Yeah, repeating things that other people have published.
Speaker 1: And also, like I mean, right now, the thing that
Speaker 1: I fear is that we're in this kind of like
Speaker 1: ridiculous spiral of nonsense. Like I mean, I've been following
Speaker 1: this whole thing with Trump and the hurricane cone and
Speaker 1: how he used a sharpie to broaden, did you follow this?
Speaker 1: I actually did not, and I'm proud of myself that
Speaker 1: I didn't. But that's the point. I think you made
Speaker 1: the right call. So what just if I can give
Speaker 1: people the ten second version of this? So the National
Speaker 1: Weather Service had you know, they do these maps that
Speaker 1: show we're the likely direction of these hurricanes. What the
Speaker 1: direction is? Trump made some comment that Alabama was in peril.
Speaker 1: The National Weather Service hadn't said that Alabama was in peril,
Speaker 1: and he kept and people were calling him out, saying, like,
Speaker 1: you're the president, You're telling Alabama's to be worried the
Speaker 1: National Weather Services They shouldn't. That's not right. So Trump
Speaker 1: actually took a sharpie and doctored the National Weather Service
Speaker 1: map and added his own cone and then held it
Speaker 1: up and said, hey, look see. And people are like,
Speaker 1: actually you added that if you think maybe that maybe
Speaker 1: this is a positive sign given that Trump was one
Speaker 1: of the original proponents or users of fake news, right
Speaker 1: if he's now getting called out on it. But to
Speaker 1: your point, like, so, there's been like endless, endless coverage
Speaker 1: of this sharpie gate and these cones and endless commentary
Speaker 1: about this, and does that really contribute to the trustworthiness
Speaker 1: of news organizations. I think the outrage meter is sort
Speaker 1: of broken and we just go everything is a kind
Speaker 1: of like five alarm fire, and I think that ultimately
Speaker 1: costs you credibility. And part of what exacerbates that also
Speaker 1: is the rise of a lot of I'm going to
Speaker 1: call them publications, but it's making opinion pieces out of
Speaker 1: somebody else's news, right, So it causes this mass proliferation
Speaker 1: of anything that people deem interesting, because it's not just
Speaker 1: Facebook and Google that are sort of parasites on the
Speaker 1: back of news organizations. It's many other news organizations that
Speaker 1: are parasites on the back of things that might be
Speaker 1: reported by the New York Times in the journal and
Speaker 1: then are turned into opinion pieces by others, right. I
Speaker 1: think it's I think these social networks have become kind
Speaker 1: of distractions for us to stop to not look closely
Speaker 1: enough at our own failings. You know, it's fun to
Speaker 1: sort of beat up on them, and I like doing it,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot that we need to do to
Speaker 1: sort of police ourselves. Can we do it given the
Speaker 1: state of our industry? Is that realistic? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: it's sort of It has to be necessary. It may
Speaker 1: not be sufficient for our survival, but it's necessary. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I think journalism is going
Speaker 1: to survive the practice of writing down stuff people say
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out what is real and what's
Speaker 1: not real. And now you're sounding like the believer in truth.
Speaker 1: Well it's not true. I mean, well, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: you ultimately have to what's the alternative? What are we
Speaker 1: in this business for? I mean, I do think that
Speaker 1: you know, the world is as confusing, and I you know,
Speaker 1: it goes back to sort of very career schooly kind
Speaker 1: of things about like, you know, telling the truth, holding
Speaker 1: the power accountable, standing up for people who don't have
Speaker 1: a voice. I mean, all of these are kind of
Speaker 1: journalistic bromides that actually are real, that actually not true.
Speaker 1: Everything important you need to know you learned in kindergarten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, I mean one of the
Speaker 1: we publish out of Colombia and I have a kind
Speaker 1: of side view into journalism students, and those values are
Speaker 1: really evident in this in the students have coming over
Speaker 1: the last couple of years, you see a return to idealism,
Speaker 1: really idealistic, not idealistic about the world, but idealistic about
Speaker 1: the potential for journalism to do something about it. What
Speaker 1: you can accomplish with honest words, fairly reported, and meticulously first.
Speaker 1: Now these students are super convinced of that, whereas, which
Speaker 1: is great because, I mean, there was a time recently
Speaker 1: where there was a lot of cynicism in journalism. Do
Speaker 1: you see specifics happening in our industry that make you
Speaker 1: optimistic that we're that we're turning the tide. There's been
Speaker 1: some amazing reporting around Trump and there's been some amazing
Speaker 1: lead terrible reporting around Trump. There's been both. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm happy to see a little bit more sense of
Speaker 1: accountability among these organizations. Although we recently launched a project
Speaker 1: that was a little bit cheeky, but we installed public
Speaker 1: editor We announced that we have public editors for the CNN,
Speaker 1: the New York Times, Washington Post, and MSMC. Because they
Speaker 1: don't have them, there's no way for readers to have
Speaker 1: any sort of meaningful feedback with these places, and so
Speaker 1: we hired people to do that job for them. And
Speaker 1: then I gotta say, I mean, the Times especially has
Speaker 1: been pretty engaged with us on this, So I think
Speaker 1: I think that's positive. I mean, I wish they would
Speaker 1: have to bring back their own public editor because I
Speaker 1: just think that that feedback loop with a public You
Speaker 1: want people to feel like you're standing up for them
Speaker 1: and you're asking the questions that they would ask. But
Speaker 1: if you have no mechanism to know that, it's hard. Ye.
Speaker 1: Would it make you optimistic about the media's interaction with
Speaker 1: social media if you saw, say, the New York Times,
Speaker 1: are the journal do what the paper in Brazil did
Speaker 1: and say we're out? I think so. You know, I've
Speaker 1: always I've been intrigued to see the number of journalists
Speaker 1: who have said individual journalists who have said I'm off,
Speaker 1: and they always come back. I know, are you on
Speaker 1: or off? So I don't use Facebook, Twitter, but I
Speaker 1: am on Twitter and I come and go. I'm half
Speaker 1: hearted about it, but I think it is It is
Speaker 1: such a source of information, particularly about financial news, that
Speaker 1: in such a way to get in touch with people.
Speaker 1: I would argue there's a little bit more to the
Speaker 1: Twitter universe than seeing your own name and how good
Speaker 1: you feel when you get likes on on your tweet.
Speaker 1: It also is a very real tool. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: think it's hard to disconnect. Yeah, maybe there. And I
Speaker 1: think it would probably be hard to disconnect if your
Speaker 1: political reporter too, because so much breaks there. I mean,
Speaker 1: to your point, we've given them the power come back
Speaker 1: to some way in which this is all going to
Speaker 1: get better. Yeah, I mean, I think journalism is no
Speaker 1: different than the rest of the country. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think we're in a really unsettled, unsure, uncertain time. But
Speaker 1: it's just it always is striking to me when you
Speaker 1: leave the country and just see and realize how deep
Speaker 1: in this soup we are here. Yeah, right, yes, and
Speaker 1: being over there, I mean I actually was reading the
Speaker 1: Murdoch owned newspaper there and it's sort of like it
Speaker 1: struck me that I was about three fourths of the
Speaker 1: way through the paper and hadn't read Trump's name yet,
Speaker 1: and I was like, wow, that is amazing and it's awesome. Yep. Right,
Speaker 1: And then of course they did have it at the end.
Speaker 1: But and that's back to your point about how we're
Speaker 1: all playing the game of clickbait every every bit as
Speaker 1: much as Google and Facebook are. We have to look
Speaker 1: in the mirror ourselves. Yeah, and that's why I brought
Speaker 1: up this like Trump hurricane thing there was like, there
Speaker 1: was a story after story after story after story about this,
Speaker 1: and I think it sort of feeds our It heeds
Speaker 1: this narrative we have in our mind that he's either
Speaker 1: an idiot, or he's dangerous, or he's he doesn't care
Speaker 1: about truth, and all of those things I think frankly
Speaker 1: are true. But hitting them over and over and over
Speaker 1: again for hours and hours in like really big national publications,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure as helping any of us. Yea, when
Speaker 1: you think about this broadly and you look at how
Speaker 1: quickly this is mushrooming with the ability to doctor images,
Speaker 1: do you think the government needs to get involved. You've
Speaker 1: got DARPA announcing this program where they're going to try
Speaker 1: to assess out fake news and halt it. Can you
Speaker 1: envision a world in which government regulation can be helpful?
Speaker 1: I hope, I know, no, hope. We can fix our
Speaker 1: problems ourselves. They have to, and I just don't. I mean,
Speaker 1: if if we thought Facebook and Google had a hard
Speaker 1: time defining the line, do you really want the US
Speaker 1: government defining what the line is? You really don't. I mean,
Speaker 1: you see you see this in I mean I worked
Speaker 1: in Britain for a while and they have a pretty
Speaker 1: aggressive regulator there that gets involved in some of these issues,
Speaker 1: and inevitably it's not good for or free speech. That's
Speaker 1: actually interesting. If you have government defining what truth is,
Speaker 1: then it's antithetical to the very notion of freedom of speech. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's I don't think that's the answer.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure we got to the right answer, but
Speaker 1: it was totally fascinating, And thank you so much for coming,
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me truth be told. That's not the
Speaker 1: way I expected the conversation to go. I thought Kyle
Speaker 1: would be far more focused on Facebook, on social media,
Speaker 1: on blaming these companies for all of the problems in journalism.
Speaker 1: Of course, all of this is an issue, but I
Speaker 1: hadn't thought about how much we, meaning traditional media, sowed
Speaker 1: the seeds of our own problems, and how we continue
Speaker 1: to do so. I'm not sure I see the way out,
Speaker 1: but it's actually nice to think that we that I
Speaker 1: do have some degree of control, maybe just by remembering
Speaker 1: those lessons I first learned as a fact checker all
Speaker 1: those years ago. Double and triple check everything, details matter, fair,
Speaker 1: try for truth. Makia Killing is a co production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth
Speaker 1: Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison McClain
Speaker 1: no relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin
Speaker 1: is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is
Speaker 1: by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin
Speaker 1: and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclin. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac
Speaker 1: twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.