Media

Renée DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University, discusses how disinformation and digital manipulation are undermining public trust and reshaping the media landscape. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent, nonpartisan national membership organization, think tank, educator, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR generates policy-relevant ideas and analysis, convenes experts and policymakers, and is the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. We are delighted to have confirmed over seventy participants from thirty-two states and U.S. territories. We appreciate your taking the time to be with us. I want to remind everyone again this webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. We are pleased to have Renee DiResta and host Carla Anne Robbins with us today to lead the conversation. Renee DiResta is an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She was previously the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of adversarial abuse in current internet technologies. Her work focuses primarily on rumors and propaganda, and in understanding how narratives spread across social and media networks. Carla Anne Robbins is a senior fellow at CFR and host of the Local Journalists Webinar Series. She also serves as faculty director of the Master of International Affairs Program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. And previously she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. I’m going to turn it over to Carla to have a conversation with Renee, and then we’ll go to all of you for your oral and written questions. We prefer you to speak them, so raise your hand and say your affiliation. And again, love to have this forum be one where we’re sharing best practices so we can inform each other’s work. OK. With that, Carla, over to you. ROBBINS: Thanks. Thanks, Irina, so much. And thanks, Renee, for joining us. This is—this is great. The work you do is extraordinary, if frightening. So, as journalists, we have been battling a hostile information environment for a long time and a steady erosion of public trust. Gallup—I don’t know if you saw this—they just released their annual measurement of trust in media, and it is once again at a new low. Twenty-eight percent of those polled said they had either a great deal or fair amount of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s just 28 percent. And that’s down from 31 percent last year and 40 percent five years ago. And Republicans’ confidence has dropped to single digits, to 8 percent, for the first time in the trend. And the numbers are even worse for young people. So, for someone who’s been in the news business for a very long time, that is a very frightening—I mean, frightening polling. And Gallup’s been doing this, and just if you look at the numbers and you see this drop, very—so what’s driving this, of course, is what I want to talk about to begin with. We talk about this challenge and the threats that are out there. You have written about the weaponization of rumor and elite amplification. Is this new? Is it different in recent years? And can you talk about where you see this starting? Because for the longest time we saw this as externally driven—as something the Russians were doing, something the Iranians were doing. This is domestically driven, I assume. And where do you date the beginning of this? DIRESTA: Well, so, on that front, I mean, I think you can look to things like Fox News, right. The partisan dynamics around that are not new. The marketing one outlet as trustworthy and all of the other outlets as non-trustworthy has been something that has been a marketing differentiator in the conservative media sphere for some time now. Yochai Benkler and Rob Faris wrote a book called Network Propaganda back in 2016 that looked exactly at this topic in the context of emerging media ecosystems on the internet, so not so much the influencer ecosystem—which we can talk about after—but more the what we might call, you know, new media, quaintly, a decade ago, but this idea of the small, emerging media ecosystem that really marketed itself very explicitly as being in opposition to mainstream media. That was its differentiator. That was how it framed itself, how it positioned itself. And it—and it leaned quite heavily into that for a particular partisan niche. So it’s not entirely surprising—I wish I had that up in front of me. (Laughs.) I didn’t realize that that had come out. But it’s not entirely surprising to me to hear that that has continued, because it is quite lucrative to position yourself as the one true voice, the one true outlet, and then to continue to lean into that with a particular partisan niche. We see influencers now doing this as well. That has—that began maybe five, six years ago or so, where they don’t even position themselves as media but as opposition in some ways to media, where they’re just talking to you as themselves—so a voice that is entirely not media, somebody speaking to you as somebody who is just like you, a member of a fellow shared identity, and relying on that notion of being highly trustworthy—they’re trustworthy because they are just like you, because they’re not professional media—when, of course, in reality they have the audience size of media, they monetize, they earn money from advertising, and they are potentially subject to some of the same audience capture and other dynamics that maybe lead them to shape their content in certain ways in response to financial incentives as well. ROBBINS: So can you talk more about influencers? Are you talking about people on TikTok? Are you talking about people on Spotify? Are you talking about Joe Rogan? Are you talking about more than—more than that? When I originally thought about influencers, I thought about, you know, girls teaching me how to put on makeup. DIRESTA: Well, so “influencers,” a term that refers to content creators who monetize their content usually, right? So they are earning money from the content that they make, because anybody can be a content creator now, you know. I think most people on the internet maybe are familiar with the idea of small content creators who are just regularly posting videos of themselves—as you mentioned, you know, the women who teach you to put on makeup. But some subset of them are also being sponsored by brands, maybe the makeup brands. (Laughs.) Some of them are being—are earning revenue share. So, for example, when you watch a YouTube video there is usually an ad that will play in front of a video that is monetized, and then the creator will earn some percentage of the revenue—the advertising revenue that YouTube earns. So revenue sharing is another monetization structure. It’s on all social platforms now. You can—influencers are oftentimes investing most heavily in one or two platforms. Some will be video-based. Some might be written-content-based. On even X, or Twitter, you can monetize your content now by writing good tweets—or, writing sensational tweets, maybe I should say. So there is a process that allows just sort of ordinary people who want to create content and earn money from that creation process to do so. And where it tends to intersect with media or to get out of the realm of just teaching you to put on makeup is that you do see people who are monetizing in, for example, the wellness space, you know, giving out health information; or in a political space you have political influencers who seem a little bit like pundits or commentators. So it really runs the gamut. There’s a very broad spectrum of topics, anything under the sun actually, that people can create content about and have the option to monetize that content to earn a living and to potentially earn quite a good living from it up at the upper echelons. And so that is a form of media that is sometimes not thought of as being media because it feels so personalized. ROBBINS: So has there been research—and I apologize if this has been done or you’ve done it—has there been research that looks at do these influencer(s) focus more on particular topics? Are they focused on health more than anything else? I mean, is it—did it begin with, you know, vax deniers? Or are they focused on don’t—you know, don’t support Ukraine? Or are they focused— DIRESTA: So it runs the gamut. There’s people across the—across all topics and spectrums. It didn’t start as a—I mean, I just want to be really clear that it’s not a negative thing; it’s just a way that people have engaged on the internet for a very long time. You can think about it, maybe, as, like, an outgrowth of the—you know, what’s sometimes called the mommy blogger culture in Web 1.0, where it was often women but people who were raising their children at home would write lifestyle content speaking, again, just as a person kind of mom to mom as content moved to being very video-focused—you can just kind of take out your phone, sit at your kitchen table, and produce this very highly-relatable content that, again, doesn’t feel necessarily like media. It’s not—it doesn’t have a wrapper of being the something Herald or it’s abstracted away. The person is speaking to you as themselves. It is very individual-centric. You know, very much you’re hearing from them as a person as opposed to a news-specific brand. ROBBINS: And how does that position—how does that undercut the credibility of—I hate the term “mainstream media,” but how does that undercut the credibility of those of us who do more traditional, fact-based, professional reporting? DIRESTA: Well, it doesn’t have to undercut the credibility necessarily, though, again, some of those—in the realm of the political some of those creators, some of those—you know, the influencers do position themselves as being, you know, truth tellers, or more direct, or more authentic, whereas mainstream media is positioned as being more corporate, more beholden to special interests, right? So this is something of a—again, I would argue a marketing tactic, personally. (Laughs.) That’s how I see it. That’s how I write about it, in part because the monetization is maybe a little bit different. There’s an argument that media—mainstream media might, for example, not cover pharma so directly because it might receive advertising dollars from pharmaceutical companies, whereas an influencer—and you’ll see—wellness influencers might say this quite directly—is being very hard on pharma because mainstream media won’t do that, right? And this is an argument that you’ll see presented, that influencers are more independent. On the flipside, oftentimes what influencers are producing or that type of content creator—sometimes they don’t like the term “influencer,” but we’ll just go with it for this conversation. What you’ll hear this—what you’ll hear from them oftentimes is more commentary as opposed to fact-finding. So if you want to know what is happening somewhere in the world, while there might be an influencer serving as a citizen journalist—meaning taking their phone out and actually physically showing you something that is happening in their neighborhood—oftentimes they are a degree removed and they are commentating on something that mainstream media has covered. So mainstream media and journalism is still doing that work of going out there and finding facts and doing that verification process, whereas influencer media I would say is a little bit more competitive with the commentary or opinion side of traditional media sources. ROBBINS: And that sounds organic. It sounds as if it’s—it may be good, it may be bad, it may be competing with the work that we do and driving further the mistrust in the mainstream media, intentionally or not. Do you see more of an astroturf phenomenon going on there, that it’s something that looks like it’s organic but is actually organized, that it’s being sponsored either by partisan groups, or? You know, it took us a while to figure out that the Tea Party was actually not organic, that there were—you know, that there were big money groups behind them. Do you see an astroturf phenomenon like that out there? DIRESTA: I mean, there certainly is in some capacities, but there’s also a lot of real people who are part of the influencer community. So it’s, you know— ROBBINS: I’m asking the question of are there—are there groups—are there money groups, are there partisan groups that are using this—we know about Fox News and Murdochs and whatever their political or economic interests are there. Are there, you know, particular political groups or money groups that are using these platforms or particular individuals to basically run against the mainstream press? DIRESTA: I mean, sure, there’s times when they’re—when they are, you know, doing things like undisclosed affiliate links, and things like that. There have certainly been—you know, I’m thinking of Ben Wofford wrote an article in Wired a bit ago, maybe a couple of years ago now, covering the extent to which political influencers weren’t disclosing that some of their posts were paid, that they were receiving affiliate links. Meaning—an affiliate link is when you share a URL and anytime people click on the URL or perform an action after clicking on the URL, maybe they signed a petition, maybe they purchase something, the person who shared the URL receives a percentage of the revenue, right? So that’s what an affiliate link is. For example, if I were to share an Amazon link and somebody—you know, I share that Amazon link, somebody clicks on my Amazon link, and then they go to Amazon and they buy that thing, I receive some percentage of revenue from that Amazon transaction. Is what an affiliate link is. I can either disclose that I have shared an affiliate link, or I can not. Different platforms have different rules. But the person who is doing the purchasing either knows or does not know, based on my disclosure. So that is how an affiliate link works. And there were—there are cases where political influencers will share content with affiliate links and not disclose that that is—that they are making money off of that. So there are dynamics where you do see political influencers who are not necessarily being transparent with their audiences about why they are sharing a particular petition, why they are sharing a particular website, a particular article, a webinar, for example. And so there is a monetization component that the audience might not necessarily be aware of. And that is an element that is—you know, it—I don’t know if—it’s not necessarily astroturfing in quite the same way, though, that has been a component of it at times. There’s also, of course, you know, opportunities where influencers will coordinate amongst themselves, political influencers will, who are ideologically aligned will coordinate, you know, to all share a message at the same time. Is that astroturfing? I mean, the line between astroturfing and activism is really blurry at times. And so that question of how do you ensure that disclosures are clear and required is something that we are sort of at the mercy of regulators and platforms to create ethical guidelines around. And what we have seen is that there are more ethical guidelines around the sale of material—of products, meaning the Federal Trade Commission has guidelines saying that an influencer must disclose to you if they are receiving compensation for promoting a product, but not compensation—the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, does not have similar disclosure rules necessarily for making sure that it is disclosed to you if an influencer is receiving compensation for promoting a political affiliate link. ROBBINS: So to look at, you know, the changes, what’s new about all this, it would seem to me that there are maybe two or 2.5 things in all this. One is this—what, this synthetic enhancement of rumors, AI. And we’ve all read about Sora. I don’t have a Sora link. I’m dying for one. (Laughs.) And which, of course, what—you know, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? And there’s that. There’s the disappearance of platform governance and fact checking, which is a reasonably new phenomenon. Just the platform governance issue. And then there’s the politicization of—you know, that fact checking is increasingly portrayed as censorship. So those are reasonably new phenomenon which makes our jobs infinitely harder. So I want to talk about all three of those before I throw it open. And I do really want to throw it open. So which one do you want to talk about first? DIRESTA: (Laughs.) We can go in order. Do you want to do one by one? ROBBINS: Sure. So, quote, “synthetic enhancement” of rumors. DIRESTA: So, I mean, this is something that, you know, a lot of us have written about and talked about for half a decade now. I know I have. Look, there’s two components to it. One, it makes it easier to deny the real, which I think is something that people don’t pay as much attention to, and they should. And then two, it makes it easier to believe the fake, right, to create unreality. And we’ve known this was coming for a very long time. The public is much more aware of it now. There have been a lot of educational campaigns trying to help people understand what is coming. The problem is there’s no good solution for it, because oftentimes it’s actually the somewhat mundane stuff that is what slides through more easily. There was a lot of focus on would it be deepfakes of politicians that would be the thing that would manipulate the public? And you saw this reflected even in legislation introduced by members of Congress. Senator Klobuchar introduced a few of these bills around, you know, trying to create laws about manipulative content related to politicians. We saw that in California as well. Interestingly, you know, politicians are the ones who are perhaps best suited to defend themselves—(laughs)— to say, that’s not me. This is me. This is where I was at this time. You know, there are usually more angles of videos. And I think there’s obviously the potential for faked audio. You can obviously create manipulation. It is a very real risk. But interestingly, I think that one of the points that several of us have made over the years is that it’ll actually be ordinary people who are going to be much more negatively impacted by some of these things. The likenesses of ordinary people who are going to be misused in certain ways, and placed potentially into videos that they don’t want to be in. And sometimes that is sexually exploitive content. You know, there is now at least things like the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which I know a lot of people have issues with some of the actual take it down provisions that go along with that, concerns that it will be misapplied and used to try to get platforms to censor content that it shouldn’t be applied to, but it is at least a recognition, I think, that AI-generated exploitative content in this form is something that we need to be taking very seriously. Particularly because it does impact minors as well. And so that, I think, is something that is now part of public awareness. But otherwise, you are seeing just a lot of areas in which it is manifesting in the form of spam and scams. And that is going to continue to happen. And so this question of how existing laws catch up to and are adapted to the continued prevalence of—the growing prevalence of inauthentic content is something that I think state legislatures and the federal government need to be much more proactive about thinking through. I think scams and—you know, scams in particular are really rising, and identity-based scams in particular are critical for people to understand how to think about, you know, you should have—particularly if you’re a prominent person, like a journalist or somebody where there’s a lot of audio content of you out there, even if you’re just an ordinary person with a TikTok account making a lot of audio content, there’s been a growing rise in things like identity theft and people trying to use your voice to authenticate with your bank and things like that. So just being very, very cognizant of how this is going to—actually beyond political manipulation—how this is going to have significant impacts on fraud. ROBBINS: So is there any good legislation out there? I mean, the EU tends to be ahead of us on this. The argument has been made that they’ve been, on AI at least, been ahead of us, but the technology has been so far ahead of the EU that there’s no point in codifying something because the technology is moving so quickly. Biden administration tried to do things with executive orders and at least the way the government behaved itself. The Trump administration has come in and said, not going to do anything, not to my bros. You see anything that has any value? There was talk about watermarking. Other people said it’s not possible. DIRESTA: I mean, it doesn’t work as well as people want it to. That’s the honest answer. I mean, look, I was a big supporter of watermarking. I think that platforms that produce generative content—you know, Sora and things—it makes sense for them to have it. There are also open-source models that just never will, right? And there are also—one of the real challenges is what do you want the watermark to convey? This is where there’s a thing that tends to happen, you know, like a—we call it sometimes, like, label fatigue. I don’t know if you ever been to California. You walk into basically any establishment, and I think it’s called, like, Prop 68, if I—I lived in California for ten years, I’m trying to remember the name— ROBBINS: Fetal damage, cancer causing chemicals. DIRESTA: Exactly, cancer-causing chemical. And you’re, like, whatever, you know, there’s, like, the cleaning fluid on the floor. You don’t even pay attention to it because you just, OK, yeah, whatever. Literally, every establishment in California throws this label on the wall that says there’s a cancer-causing chemical somewhere in here. It’s like the CYA approach to labeling your business, right? And one of the things that even people like me, who early on, you know, I completely admit, thought that labeling would be a beneficial thing, when we saw the platforms actually begin to roll it out, it turns out that if you use Adobe to edit one of your photos, there was the photographer who took a picture of Mount Fuji, which is real. You know, took it with his camera. And he used an Adobe product to edit the photo, you know, remove some dust, some lens flares, the sort of things that you would do in post-production. And I believe it was Threads or Instagram, one of the Meta products that did rapidly roll out labeling, labeled it “imagined with AI,” or, you know, labeled it “AI edited,” or “AI created.” Because this is a problem, right? Where is edited versus created? When you have things like in painting, where you can change a section of an image, that threshold between edited and created, you know, maybe it starts on a device and then you change nine tenths of it, right? So there’s some questions around that. And then with this particular instance, it is labeled as “AI edited,” even though it’s not edited in a deceptive way. It’s just a lens flare, right, that’s been removed. And so you have this question of, if we start putting these labels on everything, what people want them for is something that is deceptive, or something that is different, or something that has materially changed the tone or tenor of the image. Not something that has glossed it in some way. And so the labeling-like regimes, if you will, or, you know, rubrics are not quite there yet. It’s just not—we haven’t quite figured out what we want the labels to communicate. And so communicating that something is real or that something is true, these are not the same thing. Trying to highlight what is deceptive is, you know, something else entirely. And so it’s not quite clear yet what kind of—the term Google uses is “assertive provenance.” How do you assert provenance, wow do you say this came from this type of device, when you can create that label but somebody can take a screenshot of the thing, and then all of a sudden the metadata has been stripped, right? So there’s just a lot of different ways in which bad actors or offenders are going to be able to strip that out, whereas good actors will keep it in. And so this question of what is the labeling actually going to accomplish is one of the challenges that people who are in the field of thinking about provenance and labeling are really trying to work through right now. What is the best way to do this that informs the viewer of, you know, in the best way possible, without creating this kind of like Prop 68 fatigue, if you will. ROBBINS: So I want to throw it open. And I’m sure other people want to ask you the other questions that I asked. But I do want to point out that there’s the individual issue here, which is can you trust the individual photograph. And then there are the two broader questions, one which is the photograph or the story or whatever, is that could potentially, you know, set off a really bad reaction that’s, you know, the provocative that really is a screaming, you know, fire in a crowded theater. And then there’s the larger flooding the zone. And we saw the Russians do this in Ukraine with the shoot down of a plane and all that, that you get to the point in which you just don’t know what truth is. You get so overwhelmed with it. And that is, to a certain extent, what those other influencers are doing. You know, who could you possibly trust here? Everybody has their own version of reality. You have your reality. I have my reality. Why would I trust the mainstream media? That’s their reality. I will have my own reality. And that is, to me, that one of the most frightening things, which poses this question for journalists. Which is, those of us who spent our lifetime developing this craft have—in other people’s mind, have no more credibility than, you know, than a Sora video. DIRESTA: I think in the—this is one of the—one of the theories of the future, is that you will see increased trust return to mainstream media in these moments of trying to determine if a video or image is real, right? If you are an outlet that has a photographer in a war zone with a camera that has provenance tools built into it, and the tools—those sort of provenance—you know, the metadata and things are posted transparently so that users can go and look at them, that is potentially a differentiator, versus some random account—you know, some random clout-chasing influencer on X tossing something up there and saying, no, this really is. You know, I remember—just per the point about real and true, right—there’s a lot of real photos of, like wildfires that are, you know, a fire that was in—I remember wildfires in Brazil. And there’s these images of India that get attached to the—you know, to the to the tweets about Brazil, right? And so these are the things where creating that context, where you do have accounts that are seen as being more credible, like, that is an opportunity to differentiate and to sort of pull people back. And being in that—in that reliable realm, I think, is something that journalism can fill that gap. Even if, on the commentary front, people choose to look to the TikTokers and the Reels creators for their commentary, for their relatable commentary. ROBBINS: So I’m going to start calling on people if you guys don’t ask questions. I mean, I’m still asking—my other job as I’m a professor. Oh, we have a hand up. Yay. So Rob Ferrett. Oh, yay. Can you—Rob, can you identify yourself and ask your question? Q: Yeah. I’m Rob Ferrett from Wisconsin Public Radio. My question is, given some of your past work on Russian disinformation social media campaigns targeting U.S. culture and trying to heighten divisions, do you still see that happening now? Whether from Russia or other foreign actors, very deliberate disinformation campaigns? DIRESTA: Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, there’s no reason for them to give up, right? We’ve made it easier. (Laughs.) Look, there’s a few ways in which we’ve made it easier. First and foremost is that the U.S. government under this administration, for political reasons—purely political reasons—has chosen to largely exit the space of doing detection and mitigation. I wrote about this for Lawfare in February of this year, which for some reason feels like it was two years ago, writing about the dismantling of state capacity. And it only increased after that. So and, I mean, it was for purely political reasons. And transparently BS political reasons too, right? So there was the dismantling of Foreign Influence Task Force, certain aspects of, you know, work that the FBI did, the Foreign Malign Influence Center at CIA—or, at ODNI, I should say, perhaps, where Tulsi Gabbard decided that it had something to do with, you know, Hunter Biden’s laptop. Which was complete BS. It didn’t even exist in 2020. But that’s OK, Tulsi said it did, right? You know, and we have these little propaganda campaigns where they just say that this center, or that center contributed to the theft of the 2020 election by censoring something. And that is how the justification goes through. And then we dismantle the state capacity. And ultimately, what we do is we open the door for Russia, China, and Iran to continue to run influence campaigns without anybody in the government being tasked to look at them. Meanwhile, similarly, the academic institutions that used to study these things, many of them have been defunded and dismantled, again, because entities that worked on that were similarly tagged as being somehow, you know, censorious plotters who sought to steal the 2020 election, right? So utter nonsense, but again, this is how the politicization of that work went. And so the combination of the increasing sophistication of state actors recognizing that this is table stakes and they may as well do it, combined with then the platforms themselves deciding that they may as well walk it back because it’s expensive, time consuming. And there too, they are trying to please the administration, which has made it clear that it, you know, it has just decided to launch an entire reinvestigation into the very idea of Russian interference in 2016. You know, we’re relitigating things that happened a decade ago, that transparently absolutely did happen. And yet, the politicization of that has meant that nearly every sector that was responsible for looking at it has either walked it back or dismantled capacity. ROBBINS: Or been indicted. DIRESTA: Or been indicted. Yes. (Laughs.) ROBBINS: You missed that one. DIRESTA: Right. Yes, no, I think that’s actually happening—it’s tomorrow morning, right, is the Comey indictment, yeah? So yes. Or, sorry, the sort of courthouse appearance, yeah? So here we are. ROBBINS: Jordan Coll, you have a question from PantherNOW? Q: Yeah. Funny enough, PantherNOW back in my editor-in-chief days for my undergrad. But, yeah. I always try to change it, but at the current capacity I’m at New Jersey Urban News. I cover the state of New Jersey. But yeah, thank you guys so much for— ROBBINS: You look young enough to be an undergraduate in that picture. Q: Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. Totally. I’m also a professor, you know, at the moment. So, yeah, pretty young. But, Renee, I actually do know—well, I’m sure our names have crossed, because I know Emily Bell. I took a course with her at Columbia Journalism School. And she mentioned a lot of your work. And, again, pretty neat stuff with everything with the campaigns and definitely, you know, an inspiration. And I know Emily Bell speaks highly of you. So she was a good mentor of mine. But, yeah. I wanted to—I don’t know if this is working—yeah? Is it, because I’m seeing my face? ROBBINS: Yes. Q: OK, awesome. So, yeah. So I had two questions. One, again, it deals a lot with, you know, like the sense of AI, right, and these generated robocalls, essentially, where you have, you know, Joe Biden’s voice ahead of, like, New Hampshire’s, you know, like pretty much having political consultants coming in over these fake robocalls. I wanted to ask, how do you see, you know, like, in that realm of AI sophistication when it comes to intersecting with political figures, and then the recent image—I’m forgetting the grifter. It was like a grim reaper aspect of the Washington—I believe he was, like, the economy management director. I’m totally forgetting his name. But my question is, do you see—in your respective field, do you see there’s more of this sophistication, to the point that we won’t as reporters, you know, ultimately not catch this? And, again, this is something as a professor and I deal with, but it’s will the sophistication of these robo entities, these AI entities, be more, you know? You mentioned that, you know, we’ve essentially made it easier for these folks to come in. But, yeah, I wanted to hear your insights on that. DIRESTA: So the robocall, if I’m not mistaken the gentleman who did that got charged with—I don’t want to misspeak. I want to say impersonation or something. There are certain—you know, there are certain laws that that this is going to violate. But—so there was—if I’m not mistaken, there was actually a charging in that particular case. But, yes. I mean, one of the—one of the areas where you see this happen is, like, ransom phone calls where they—you know, they pretend to have a family member, or something like that, and then they have the audio of the family member and they demand compensation. You know, they demand money. Basically, they call you up. They’ll spoof a number. It’ll look like it’s coming from a family member. They’ll pretend that they are holding that family member hostage. They have that family member say something. And that’s how the scam works. The FBI has been putting out advisories on this. It’s been going on for a little over maybe two years now. This is also manifesting in the realm of the political, where they can make plausible audio of a political candidate saying something. There are still ways to do detection. One of the challenges is the gap between when this goes out and the detection happening. In the ransom moment, the reason that they use a ransom phone call is to create urgency, right? The sense that something bad is going to happen if you don’t respond immediately. And that’s where you see a lot of the time the sort of—the way that the scams work that involve voice cloning will often involve this sense of urgency. In the realm of the political, you’ll see these things drop maybe twenty-four, forty-eight hours before an election, something very time—you know, very closely timed. There was a couple of—I’m trying to remember where it was—but there was one where there was, you know, audio of a candidate saying something compromising. And I want to—maybe Slovakia. Where it took—it happened maybe twenty-four hours before people went to polls. And then they couldn’t authenticate it until afterwards, right? So, again, they’re trying to create that urgency or to create that that sense of shifting judgment before the authentication can happen. So this is a challenge for media and for authenticators. And it is going to—you know, it is going to continue to increase. You are seeing people who are trying to come up with lightweight ways to do some authentication on device, some ways to improve that so that people are standing by ready to do it ahead of key, important elections. But that is the—that is the challenge. I mean, as you mentioned, Carla, we didn’t talk about in that list of three things, fact checkers, you know? (Laughs.) Can you trust the fact checker, right? The reframing of fact checkers as somehow, like, being censorious or being in the tank for the left or whatever, that’s another, you know, political narrative that was done and undertaken quite deliberately, quite intentionally to create distrust so that the—you know, so that if this is—you know, so that that model of distrust can be potentially leveraged, you know, in service to other things as well. ROBBINS: Steven Kramer, fifty-six, of New Orleans, was acquitted. DIRESTA: Oh, was he? He wasn’t convicted of anything? ROBBINS: He was acquitted, but he still faces a fine from the FCC. What do you think the chances he’s actually going to be fined? DIRESTA: (Laughs.) What did they charge him with? Do you have it in front of you? ROBBINS: I’ve got the AP story on my phone. Would have faced a decade in prison if convicted. Let’s see. It said he was—he was about disrupting an election. DIRESTA: OK. OK. ROBBINS: And he and his defense argued that it was just a straw poll and it wasn’t recognized by the DNC. But I think it got caught up in that whole is this, you know, first in the nation, you know, primary—that whole thing. Anyway, he was— DIRESTA: There’ll be more of these. I’m sure there’ll be— ROBBINS: He was acquitted in June, so—but I don’t see something about whether the FCC has subsequently moved on this. Diego Lopez, can you identify yourself? Hi, Diego. It’s nice to see you again. And can you ask your question, or should I read it for you? Q: Hi. Thank you very much for hosting this. Good afternoon to you guys. It’s good morning for me. This is Diego Lopez with the Cibola Citizen newspaper here in New Mexico. I’m just wondering if you could explain a little bit about what the best way to make a layperson understand the danger of this disinformation is. I think we’ve all seen these videos with Sora 2. And it is just mind blowing how realistic some of these things are. So how can we help our people to understand the danger of this disinformation? Should we be writing articles in our local newspaper? Or are there other ways that we can do this? I struggle, because we are a print-based publication. Thank you. DIRESTA: Yeah. It’s hard to illustrate how good it is when people can’t see it. I mean, you can show some of the sophistication of even the still images, maybe? Just, like, this is a still screen from a video generated with whatever the tool is. I think that it is important to help people see it. I remember doing some of the PSAs. I remember NPR doing a PSA with us when I was at Stanford Internet Observatory trying to help people understand that people were using profiles with fake faces on LinkedIn to try to make you connect, to try to scam you. I think that scams is really the thing that the average person needs to be aware of, right? The potential, you know, for understanding that. You can actually do that with still images too. These are products that don’t exist. These are people that don’t exist. They’re asking for money for charitable donations for moments that never happened. You know, I’ve seen on Facebook the AI slop of—we wrote a paper on this—of, you know, wounded children or sick pets that don’t exist, right? So, helping people understand it. Elderly people saying things like, nobody ever supported me. Nobody said happy birthday to me. These sort of sympathy ploys. Helping people understand—oh, yeah. Helping people understand the most common scams, right? The most common ways that this manifests. So the combination of, look, this is where the technology is. This is how convincing it is. This is what it can do, right? So that’s important, sort of like almost tech articles. This is what it can do. This is where it is. This is how cheap and fast it is, right? And then, these are the common ways in which these scams are being deployed. And that’s almost like the PSA-type of reporting. Here are the common scams. Here are the ways it’s being used. And then, if you want to focus on the state actor and the way it’s being deployed in the realm of the political, you know, there’s always an election somewhere, right? And you’ll usually see something. There’s usually some story from—because these things are—you know, it is human nature, I think, to try to incorporate the latest and greatest manipulation technology and service to your political movement or candidate. You will usually have some example from a new election where you can, again, relate that story and say, in this election, in fill-in-the-blank, the Czech Republic, there is this—you know, this is what just happened over there, if there is an example that is relevant. And so you can illustrate it with stories. I think really telling the story is what makes it resonate with people and stick in their mind, as opposed to something that is communicated in the abstract. If you say, like, this creates a possible risk of that, then it feels very hysterical. People don’t know what to—what to believe. You don’t want to create moral panic or create a sense of foreboding and constant fear. But talking about what it is, what’s possible, and what people are actually doing, or you’re actually seeing happen that I think is, you know, using storytelling to help inform the public. ROBBINS: Clare McGrane, can you identify yourself and ask your question? Q: Yes. Hi. I’m a podcast producer and reporter here at KUOW Public Radio in Seattle. And I have a question that’s a little kind of tangential, but is relative related to what you were discussing earlier, about, you know, content creator—like, journalists who are content creators online, or content creators kind of masquerading as journalists. I’m working on a project right now that is aimed at kind of creating a conversational show for KUOW, for the station, that fits kind of the tone of content creator journalism that you might hear on other podcasts, but is backed with data reporting and comes from our newsroom. So this is our first attempt to try and kind of meet that younger audience where they’re at, like, with the kind of content that they’re used to hearing, but being very clear about the fact that it comes from our reporting and, like, really clearly drawing the line of, this is how we found this story, this is how we investigated this story. And, Renee, I’m just curious if you have any kind of advice on how media can bridge that gap and recognize that people’s, you know, preferences and patterns for taking in information has changed, and how we can try and meet our listeners and readers in the spaces and in the ways that they would like to be spoken to these days? DIRESTA: I mean, I think that that approach of storytelling and incorporating in the multimedia or the podcast style really does resonate with people. I know NBC, when Bandy Zadrozny was over there, did some interesting work on telling the story. There’s one that sticks out in my head of one of the nurses who fainted during COVID. She was very famous case during COVID. She fainted when she was getting her shot. So it was super early on. And then the conspiracy theorists on the internet decided she had really died and been replaced by a body double. And the—and the hospital didn’t do itself any favors by literally having her at a press conference where they didn’t let her talk. They had a mask on her and they didn’t let her talk, right? So it became a bit of a nightmare. And so this was a really great way to use storytelling and a multi-part podcast to tell the story of Tiffany Dover, was her name. And so I think it was—you know, many people wrote articles about this incident. But this was a way to really tell the story. And I think eventually, in the end, she managed to kind of track her down and get her to agree to an interview to kind of tell the story in her own words about, like, what the impact had—you know, had been for her, right, for Tiffany. And so there’s a lot of ways to do this. I think people really enjoy that model. I’m thinking there was also that one of—oh, boy. What was the name of it? With Adnan Syed. What was his name? This was the one with, like, the—was he guilty of a crime? Or there’s a lot of these— ROBBINS: Serial, the original one? DIRESTA: Thank you. Yes. There we go. Like, I remember listening to— ROBBINS: Podcast of all podcasts, the mother podcast, yes. DIRESTA: Yeah. (Laughs.) Yeah, Serial, that was the name of it. OK. So there were a few of these—like these models of where they become these, like, big cultural moments, and then everybody talks about them, and there’s, like—and I think that one—gosh, I mean, there were, like, several parts to that story that I personally don’t remember because I didn’t follow it very closely personally. But I know that, you know, I remember that there were multiple parts of it. So I think that that—and then I’ve also seen—there are a lot of journalists. I’m not really a big TikTok person myself, but you do see them going and creating content. You do see reporters kind of creating content and, like, relating the contents of their story, almost in video form. I’ve started doing that every now and then on Instagram Reels with, like, essays that I write. And I’m not a journalist. I just—I write for Lawfare. And so sometimes, when I write an analysis, I’ll sit there and I’ll give a three-minute summary of it, in hopes of just reaching people who only want to get it through video. Just because I think that, like, why not? Why not try? So just different ways of exploring the medium and experimenting with it is really important. ROBBINS: Well, the New York Times is doing that. I mean, they’ve got verticals on the front—on the front every day. I mean, it’s—people seem to—it’s the summary. And it personalizes it. So— DIRESTA: Some people literally just read their Substack articles on video. Like, literally will just be reading the first couple paragraphs and then say, hey, if you want to read the rest, you know it’s over here. ROBBINS: But there’s also—there’s also people who haven’t written the stories who are reading other people’s stories, with sort of snarky commentary. So there’s that as well. Carly Winchell has a question. Which is—Carly, do you want to read your question? Q: Hi. Sure. I’m Carly Winchell. I’m with the Ark Valley Voice from Colorado. And my question was just, what kind of advice can we give to the general public about identifying, like, AI generated disinformation? DIRESTA: Oh, it’s so hard now. (Laughs.) Q: I know, right? DIRESTA: I wish I had a better answer for you, because I remember, like, we did these—that handy PSA thing I referenced with NPR was, like, here’s how you can look at the ears, and the teeth, and the hair blends into the color. And can’t really do that anymore. Now it’s more of, you know, check and see does this exist somewhere else. Did this account come out of nowhere and share this one video and, like, that’s the only thing it’s ever posted? So sort of, like, almost like source provenance, you know, where what is the account that is sharing it? The account really does matter. There’s a mnemonic that we use in disinformation research when we do our own work, which is actors, behaviors, content, right? Where when we’re looking at our own stuff content is almost, like, third. And we’re looking at the actors—you know, who is sharing this, where did it come from, are these accounts all new? It’s hard for the average person to look at that, but you can usually tell if it’s, like, one video and, like, one account that’s come out of nowhere. That kind of helps. Similarly is, you know, what is the—when you’re looking at the content, is it incredibly incendiary and inflammatory? Sometimes that is indicative of something that is more out there to get a rise, as opposed to something that is real. I think that that doesn’t mean that there aren’t, you know, sensational moments of, you know, mean people doing mean things. That happens in the world. But oftentimes taking that extra beat is—you know, to try to verify it or to see what other people are saying about it, or to see if there’s another angle of the interaction. I think a lot about that moment Covington Catholic, that happened a few years back, of the kid in the MAGA hat and the Native American elder, at that—which was not disinformation, or false—you know, or generated video. But you did see over time multiple different angles of the video, multiple different shots, multiple different cuts that kind of, when put together, told a more complete story. When you have video that’s AI generated, you’re usually just going to see it kind of one angle, one sensational moment. You know, the investment is going to be made in generating one thing. And you’re not going to have a whole lot of different perspectives or other people talking about it. So right now, it’s going to be much more of a flat sort of single-shot thing with a—sometimes, you know, different accounts will be sharing it with inflammatory commentary in the tweet, but we haven’t yet seen, to the best of my knowledge, things that appear to have been shot from multiple angles of the same fake moment. So it’s hard, though. It’s really hard. That’s why I think more saying, like, take a beat and try to see if there’s other content out there or if somebody has verified it is better than trying to say, like, count the fingers, at this point. ROBBINS: Robert Chaney from the Missoulian, I think our last question. Q: Hi, there. Thanks. The Washington Post just had a story this morning showing multiple perspective fake videos of getting arrested for a DUI and getting in an argument— DIRESTA: (Laughs.) Q: —at a restaurant, where back and forth between, like, two camera presentations. So it was pretty scary. DIRESTA: Yeah, I mean, that was—I remember when the stills came out, one of the things that I was very curious about was how long it would take for you to be able to generate multiple shots of the same person in that way. And it was—you know, the answer was, like, a couple months. So it’s not—it’s not surprising that I guess we’ve got the ability to do that now. So, oh, there you go. Q: Anyway, I am with the Mountain Journal in Montana, which is also part of the Montana Free Press. We’re both digital-only, digital-native productions. In the last election cycle, we saw both the Republican and Democratic party’s operations setting up news sites that had, you know, local news in local communities, plus stories that were generated to, you know, be on the issues of their favorite candidates showing them in their preferred light, and whatnot. And then they just sort of dried up and blew away as soon as the campaign was done. But they pop these things up, like, you know, traveling circus tents, and tried to be a legitimate part of the news world. What I’m wondering is, have you seen any seal of Good Housekeeping watermarking, type of things that say: I am a human with a newsroom with editors and checks and balances and credibility of the old institutional kind, that is worth—is getting any traction on the positive side of saying, go back to the old institutional mainstream media model? DIRESTA: That’s what—I actually think that is what is going to happen. That is my personal feeling, that you are going to see that model of, you know, verified, credible, you know, somebody who actually attests proactively to: I am human. This is who I am. This is where I am. This is what I do. This is my device. These are the photographs I’ve taken with this device. You know, really just trying to establish provenance and credibility, and to—and to proactively offer that as a differentiator. I think that that is something that is going to become more valued and people are going to look for it as this sense of unease and not being able to tell what’s real becomes more pervasive for people. I was writing this maybe in 2020—(laughs)—saying that the killer app that AI is going to unlock is really going to be this notion of, like, how do you have privacy protecting credentialing? Or how do you have credentialing where people proactively and voluntarily indicate: I am real. This is who I am. And this is my sort of, like, vetted, validated content that I am putting out as this real person in the world. And I think that that is going to be something that you’re going to start to see very soon. ROBBINS: Maybe that’s our role. So this is—Renee, I just really want to thank you. And I’m going to turn it back to Irina. And thank you, everybody, for great questions. Been an extraordinary conversation. FASKIANOS: Yes. I second that. Thanks to all of you. And thank you, Renee DiResta, and Carla Anne Robbins. We really appreciate it. We will send out a link to this webinar recording and transcript. And, as always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the U.S. And, of course, we welcome your suggestions of how we can be a resource for you. You can email us at [email protected]. So, again, thank you both. And we hope you enjoy the rest of your day. ROBBINS: Thanks, Irina. Thank you, Renee. It was great.

This event was part of the 2025 CFR Local Journalists Workshop, which is made possible through the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. TRANSCRIPT ROBBINS: Hi. Everybody having fun? Great. I’m Carla Robbins. I’m a senior fellow here, and I’ve met some of you from the Local Journalists webinars and I’m hoping that those of you who attend our monthly Local Journalists webinars will persuade the rest of you to do it. I’m also a long-time journalist. I spent a good part of my career at the Wall Street Journal covering national security and diplomacy, and then the latter part of my journalism career I was on the edit page at the New York Times, and now I run a master’s program and I’m here at the Council, and it’s just really great to be here and really good to be talking about a somewhat—let’s face it, it’s not going to be an upbeat panel so but an important panel. So welcome to this session on “Press Freedom in a New Era of Reporting,” and you have the full bios of our colleagues. So just a few of the highlights. Aimee Edmondson is the associate dean and a professor at Ohio University Scripps College of Communication where she teaches First Amendment law, the history of American media, and data journalism, which is pretty eclectic and pretty wide. She spent a dozen years as a local journalist in Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee so she’s got great street cred. George Freeman is the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which is a nonprofit membership association for members of the media and their defense lawyers. He is also, in full disclosure, my former neighbor and a colleague at the New York Times. We rode the train together, and for over thirty years he was its newsroom and First Amendment lawyer. And Jodie Ginsberg, and she’s the chief executive officer of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the former CEO of Internews Europe and of the London-based Freedom of Expression Group Index on Censorship. She’s also a longtime reporter and foreign correspondent with postings in Ireland, the U.K. and South Africa. All with Reuters? GINSBERG: Yes. ROBBINS: So just a quick word on format. This is on the record. We’re going to chat for about thirty minutes up here and then open it up to Q&A, and we will finish promptly at 11:30 because there’s more interesting conversations as well as lunch to come. So, Jodie, let’s start with you. CPJ has issued a really powerful report—and if you haven’t seen it we really commend it to you—on the state of press freedom in the U.S., and I’m just going to read the first sentence of the introduction just to give a flavor of your findings: “These are not normal times for American press freedoms. In the first hundred days of President Trump’s second term there have been a startling number of actions that taken together threaten the availability of independent, fact-based news for vast swathes of America’s populations.” So in the first term, of course, the president attacked the press with really inflammatory and autocratic language. I mean, fake news—you’d expect to hear that from Putin but we heard it all the time. We almost became inured to it. So what’s so much worse this time around? GINSBERG: So in the first administration we heard a lot about language, right? We had the enemies of the people language, the administration or the president himself denigrating particular news outlets, calling them fake news and so on. But what we didn’t see were a high level of actions from the administration against journalists and news outlets. And so what we’re seeing now is very different because we’re seeing the administration take specific actions and that has taken a number of forms. So it’s taken the form that you’ll be familiar of, of the White House banning the Associated Press from the White House press pool, and one of the reasons that I think has perhaps garnered less interest is because a lot of people don’t know what wire agencies do. But, of course, for many local journalists I’m sure that many of your organizations will get an Associated Press feed, right? That’s how a lot of local news outlets around the world, not just in America, get their national news. When they can’t send someone they have an AP person there on their behalf and they’re getting the wire copy. So one of the things we’ve been trying to explain to people is why removing the AP from the pool isn’t just a question of, well, I just want to bring in some of my—some other people. We just want to bring in Breitbart and we just want to bring in the Daily Caller. It’s actually about having a source of news that’s available and delivered to hundreds and thousands of local newsrooms around the world. Then we’ve seen, obviously, the legal threats. Those started before Trump got into power so the defamation suits and other suits against organizations like the ABC, CBS, and others. We expect those to continue. Then you’ve seen the effect of dismantling Voice of America and RFE and other USAGM outlets, in addition to the threats that have been brought against PBS and NPR, and then we’re seeing more regulatory threats. So we’re seeing Brendan Carr, who’s been quite explicit about using regulatory means to target— ROBBINS: Brendan Carr being? GINSBERG: The head of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. So going after news outlets for perceived bias or not fulfilling their public interest duty as organizations and, therefore, you can take away their licenses. And then, of course, most recently we’ve seen the removal of a really important piece of guidance that was introduced during the Biden administration around leak investigations and subpoenas, and that’s a real worry. So the guidance effectively provided protections for news organizations so they were not going to be forced to give up their sources in public interest investigations, and those guidelines have just been repealed. I think we are going to see many more leak investigations. The last thing I would say is a lot of the focus is, obviously, at the top in the administration but what we know from experience—and the Committee to Protect Journalists has been doing this work for forty years globally—is that inevitably that has a trickledown effect and we’re already seeing that. We’re seeing it at the state level, at local level, the administration starting to look at bringing more defamation suits, to use local laws to go after news outlets that we don’t like. Since November CPJ has trained 500 journalists in the United States on digital safety and physical safety and security issues. That is completely unprecedented and I think signals the level of fear that people rightly have about what might happen not just at national level but at local levels, too. ROBBINS: So what happens in Washington doesn’t stay in Washington. GINSBERG: Absolutely. ROBBINS: So are we enabling this as journalists? David Sanger was asked this question here last night, which was when the AP was banned from the Oval Office why didn’t you all just get up and walk out? And, certainly, a question that I’ve thought about—and I say this as the former masthead editor of the New York Times—I think it’s a pretty big question and an important one. FREEMAN: I think the answer is yes. When we—we had a meeting before Inauguration Day, and you couldn’t really deal with the substantive issues because you didn’t know which of these many things he would do. As it turns out, he’s done about all. But there were no—it was hard to give substantive answers as to what action we should take before he was even inaugurated. But what we did agree on and everyone in the room agreed on is that we have to be coordinated. We have to work together. We have to be a team to resist these attacks, and if anything the exact opposite has happened. And one of the things I think you mentioned is the settlement of the defamation cases, which were totally meritless, by ABC, the likely settlement by CBS of a totally inane lawsuit about the editing of the Kamala Harris interview. On the AP thing there was some degree of unity— ROBBINS: A letter. FREEMAN: —more than in the other instances. But, really, I mean the history of Trump is that if you actually fight him he tends not to want to lose so he kind of backs off a little bit. But to get picked off one by one the way the law firms have done in instances where the law and the odds are on your side, really, I think is the answer to your question, Carla, which is that we have helped enable and we certainly haven’t in any coordinated or efficient way resisted. And so part of the burden, I think, is on us. I agree with you. ROBBINS: So, Aimee, do you think that the White House Correspondents Association—do you think the big papers—I think that President Trump really cares about what the New York Times writes. EDMONDSON: Right. ROBBINS: And, I mean, do you think the big papers should have all gotten up and said if the AP is not in the Oval Office—if the AP is not going to be part of the rotation for the pool we’re just not going to come to the briefings? We’re just all going to get up and walk away? It’s not like we wouldn’t get the information anyway. EDMONDSON: Right. Right. Well, you know, journalists don’t want to be the story. You know, that’s just not what we do. And so that definitely goes against our DNA, most certainly. But, of course, we’ve not experienced this kind of behavior before in our so-called commander in chief, and so I don’t know that that’s necessarily the answer. I do think that continuing to be transparent, who we are, what we do, this is the prime time to do that, which is a lot of people don’t know what we do. That we’re not stenographers, that we’re here to question our government and our leaders. Everything else is stenography and public relations. And so with that it is a really good time to get good at explaining who we are and what we do and what our function is in a democracy. ROBBINS: So, Jodie, back to you. Are we enabling them? Should they—should everybody walked out when the AP was barred from the Oval Office and from the press pool? GINSBERG: To be honest, I think that’s—I think there’s a kind of self-servingness about that where we’re, like, you know, we’ll walk out and everyone will notice and that will send a strong message, and I’m not sure it would do anything except reinforce a view that is held—and I agree with Aimee—quite widely across the country that journalists are really self-serving, that we’re all in it for ourselves. It’s all about the mainstream media. It’s all about the—maybe that’s Trump calling—(laughter)—and—from his jet. You know, it’s all about the, you know, left-wing work, all of—and I think all, potentially, that would have done is serve that argument. Actually, one of the things that we did when the AP—we did a letter with the Society of Professional Journalists. One of the things we did was also then support the society to reach many of its members so that they could lobby local congress people about why it mattered and I think that’s the key thing. And I totally agree with Aimee. Where we have, I think, failed as journalists is we expected people to understand the value that that brought rather than explaining it. You should just know that this is good for you. Take your medicine. It’s good for you. Instead of explaining why it has value and why it matters and what you lose when you don’t have independent, pluralistic media in your communities. And I think that’s the message that we’ve got to keep hammering home rather than sort of seeming to almost play to the tune of the administration which is that the media is all elite, out of touch, all of one political persuasion. That’s absolutely not the case, but I think we can do a better job explaining the value that journalism has to everybody that consumes it, and everybody does and everybody needs it. ROBBINS: Aimee, you teach the history of journalism. Can you put this in historical context for us? Are we hyperventilating? I mean, have we seen other times? I will tell you I have covered, you know, the national security side of many White Houses. Jodie mentioned the Justice Department change about our notes and the subpoenaing, but that’s something that changed under the Biden administration. Before the Justice Department was pretty—you know, liked to rough us up, and I will tell you that Obama couldn’t stand the press. It was really, really hard to get any information out of that White House. I’ve seen—the Clinton White House was a dream because they leaked like a sieve. (Laughter.) But, you know, there’s—this is—you know, it changes according to the different presidents. There’s been a lot of hostility to the press before. Now, is this just many orders of magnitude different? EDMONDSON: I think it definitely is. And to Jodie’s point, Trump loves chaos and he loves confrontation. So I think that is—you wouldn’t want to play into that game. But, yes, throughout history there has been that healthy tension between presidents and the press. We all know that. Of course, George Washington said about the opposing, quote, “party press” at the very beginning, “Oh, that rascal of an editor.” You know, fast forward to George Bush and the “major league asshole” hot link, right? So it’s there. You’ve got Spiro Agnew— ROBBINS: That was one of our Times colleagues he was talking about. EDMONDSON: Sure. ROBBINS: And we can talk about that guy, whether he deserved it. But OK. (Laughter.) EDMONDSON: So it’s healthy and it’s always been there. Spiro Agnew labeled the press the nattering nabobs of negativism. Of course, this was Nixon’s vice president, former governor of Maryland who—felony tax evasion charges, et cetera. So he had a lot of press that he didn’t love. So, you know, Nixon was really the big high-water mark, of course, until today and, of course, in January 2016 when Trump comes in with we’re going to open up libel laws and sue you like you’ve never been sued before, you know, that’s where we kind of knew he says game on and he’s having a good time. It’s another high-water mark. ROBBINS: So, George, can we talk about libel law for a minute? I mean, the law hasn’t changed. So is the implementation of the law different? Are the courts more hostile? Or is it that the administration is pushing? Is it—or is it more the regulatory environment? Is it—I mean, what’s different now if the law—libel law itself hasn’t changed? FREEMAN: You know, I think it’s important to underscore just what you said, that the law hasn’t changed. Libel law isn’t going to change despite the fact that Trump said he wants to open up the libel laws, whatever that means. It’s a pretty vague statement. If it means overturning Times v. Sullivan, which it seems to be what he meant, I don’t believe that’s going to happen and I’m not that worried about that. What’s changed, really, is the environment and he’s fostered that. I mean that really, I think, can be pointed right at the president. He’s fostered both the notion that it’s a good thing to sue. You can win by suing, which ABC and others have helped enable, and the fact is that this polarized society we’re in has made it easier for the plaintiff to win in those areas that are red states which are MAGA supporting, et cetera, because they have taken to heart his attacks on the media. And I think it’s one thing I would really underscore in terms of your own cases that you might have wherever you are that right now the greatest determinant of whether the media is going to win or lose a libel case has nothing to do with the facts of the case itself. It has to do in what court you’re in. I mean, compare New York where Sarah Palin lost the case despite the fact that the Times didn’t do all that great in the article that was at issue, but yet the jury found in the Times’ favor because there was no actual malice and they took the judge’s instructions seriously, with central Florida where CNN lost a jury case for $5 million and then settled the punitive damage part of the case, and the forewoman of the jury said she would have given the plaintiff a hundred million dollars of punitive damages, basically, because she doesn’t believe in the media. So if those two cases had been in the different places probably the results would have been diametrically opposed. So where you are and what court you’re in has become incredibly important and there that kind of leads to the next point, which is then you need good lawyers, I hate to say it. But if you have a lawyer who doesn’t think about those issues, about where the venue should be, you’re losing the first step of the game. ROBBINS: Jodie, you said that you had trained, what was it, 500— GINSBERG: Five hundred, yes. ROBBINS: —versus twenty. What does training mean? I mean, how do—what—do you train people? Like, I’ve taken training about how to go into a war zone. So what sort of training are you giving? GINSBERG: So we at CPJ offer digital and physical security training. So we have digital and physical security advisors who will talk you through how to keep your phone safe, how to keep your sources safe, how to—equally how to kind of start to think about protecting your newsrooms and your staff regarding online harassment, how to think about staying safe physically when you attend a protest and that sort of thing. There are many other organizations in this space and in fact we’re working together with a number of them who provide other kinds of support including trauma support, including legal support, like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. So there are many organizations that do this. I agree entirely with George. It’s really important that you know what you’re going in for. One of the things about libel cases and these legal cases is most of the people do not go in them to win them. They go in to tie you up in really expensive, time-consuming lawsuits so that you will stop because the cost to you of just being involved in it emotionally, financially, is too high. And so what happens as a result is people stop reporting. It’s very well documented that in environments where this is a repeated pattern journalists stop touching difficult subjects. If you know that there’s a particularly litigious, corrupt business you might decide that it’s just not worth it because you know you’re going to get caught in some kind of spurious legal action that’s going to put you on the hook for thousands, if not millions, of dollars. So getting advice in advance and making sure that you know what you’re going into is really important but, you know, it shouldn’t be the thing that deters people from reporting because otherwise all we’re going to have is reports about, you know, cats and maybe football. But that could be controversial, too. ROBBINS: So, George, did you want to say something about that? And I have a follow-up for Jodie after that. FREEMAN: Yeah. I was just going to say that it’s important to understand why Trump is doing this. You know, it’s not only because he doesn’t like the press. In fact, he does like the press. He said why he’s doing this once to Leslie Stahl in an interview. He wants the public not to believe the press. So his whole campaign is based on lowering the press’ credibility because when he knows inevitably the press will criticize him he doesn’t want people to believe the press in those criticisms because it’s all about him. Is always all about him. But he really spelled that out. That’s the reason why he says fake news and enemy of the people. It’s all part of a plan of self-defense that the public not believe what the press says. So he really is an evil enemy in that sense because he’s trying to for his own purposes lower the morale and lower the credibility, really, of the press to the public, which is not what a president ought to be doing. I should add, in terms of what Jodie said that my organization, which is really made of lawyers, we’ve done a lot of seminars on—not so much on the security and, you know, tape type stuff, but really on the basic legal fundamentals and we’ve done that at conferences, conventions, and sometimes to individual newsrooms if there are enough people. So we’re available to do that if people are interested. ROBBINS: So—and I want to talk to Aimee because Aimee wrote a book about Sullivan and also you train people. But I want to just follow up quickly with Jodie, which is when I worked at the Journal and I wrote a difficult story we had great lawyers—really well-paid lawyers, and you’d go through line by line by line, and usually what I found with the lawyers the lawyers were always saying things like—pushing the editors, saying, yeah, we can do this and the editors were going, you sure you could do this. The editors were usually wimpier than the lawyers. In fact, one very famous conversation with a lawyer screaming at the editor, saying, I’m the only f-ing one on this phone call who actually has a law degree and I’m good with it. But in the environment now, particularly when news organizations have far less money than they used to have and when local news organizations are particularly strapped, they don’t have a bunch of really high-paid lawyers on call all the time. So given how nervous everybody is and generally, what do you do to avoid the defensive crouch you’re talking about? How do you give people the—you can say to people they’re trying to harass you, they’re trying to intimidate you. Is there a twenty-four-hour hotline that somebody can call to say— GINSBERG: Well, actually, RCFP does have a twenty-four-hour hotline. But I would also say there are—networks of pro bono lawyers who will do pre-reads. There’s now a new organization called Reporters Shield that people can join that’s also an insurance scheme and they will do prereading as part of that initiative. So there’s a number of initiatives out there to try and give you that. The other thing I would say that may be really important for this room is it’s not just libel anymore. You know, so many of the queries that have come to us in the past six months have been about immigration law and 501(c)(3) status. You know, these are not things that we would normally advise people on because we’re normally dealing with media law related things. But very many people now are worried about their 501(c)(3) status, given what’s been talked about— ROBBINS: Nonprofit status, the tax—the tax law. GINSBERG: If you are a nonprofit newsroom that, perhaps, they can come after your tax status if you report on certain things or you do certain things, and immigration. Many, many people have staff working for them or are covering ICE raids and so on who are deeply concerned. We know of people who are now taking their bylines off stories, particularly in student journalism, because they do not have citizenship and are concerned that that will be used as an attack vector, and that’s a real fear. I mean, you mentioned we’ve done a lot of exceptional things this year including issuing a safety travel advisory for the United States because of the number of queries we were getting from journalists internationally about how they could ensure that they could travel safely into the U.S. without, for example, their phones being looked at and their sources becoming vulnerable. ROBBINS: So we will share with you all a list of resources from all three of these people. So I know we’re writing down names but of—including this. I didn’t know there was this twenty-four-hour back read hotline. I love that. That’s a great thing. That sounds like an absolutely fundamental. So, Aimee, you shape young minds or distort young minds. Just think of the power you have. So—and you also wrote a book on Sullivan. So how differently are you preparing students, given the environment here? EDMONDSON: Right. Well, we spend a lot of time on libel law in our media law classes because it really is complex, and the law hasn’t changed but to understand it from the very beginning from 1964 takes a minute. And so I think that gives students and journalists a sense of freedom to know that the law is really, in Justice Brennan’s words in the opinion in Sullivan, we must be uninhibited, robust, wide open in our public discourse about these important issues of our day. And so if you think of the context of Sullivan, it was the height of the civil rights movement and it was about police brutality. The case arose out of the cops in Alabama—Montgomery, Alabama, beating civil rights protesters, right. So what an amazing thing. Fast forward to today and you think about what’s happening with the DEI-related issues and so many things that are so similar to the 1960s with the crackdown on libel. L.B. Sullivan was the police commissioner, the top cop in Montgomery, Alabama, who was probably a hero in his community for brutalizing African-American protesters. And so did he truly feel libeled? No, probably not, but he was going to punish the New York Times for coming in to write about this story. And so with that, I think if we can remember that history, and it’s the idea that before Sullivan if you got anything wrong in your story you pay. But with Sullivan 1964 you could make an error by accident, right, because we are human beings. And so what you have to show is that you did not act with actual malice, right, which is I got the information, I thought it was right, and so we went with it. Actual malice is did you publish with knowledge of falsity? Did you publish something knowing it was wrong? No. Journalists aren’t going to do that, right? And so—or should you have known it was wrong. And so with that, this is just basic journalism. The court wasn’t looking for superhuman strength but every now and then we’re going to make an error and we’re going to correct it. And so with that actual malice standard we are much more free to report at the time on things like the Vietnam War, Watergate, et cetera. And so it was really a new era of American journalism, and I agree with George and many others such as David McCraw. The Truth in Our Times is a great book. He’s the lawyer for the New York Times who did say, you know, Sullivan is going to hold. We do have two justices that are getting kind of grumpy about it, Thomas and Gorsuch, but it’s going to hold. It’s the other stuff McCraw said and so many others have that it discredits the press. You better believe that Trump and his ilk read the New York Times and the Washington Post, et cetera, but they don’t want their supporters to. FREEMAN: Just to add one thing to what was said and that is that I think you said that the motive of L.B. Sullivan was to punish the Times. The real motive that was going on was that the Southern segregationist establishment didn’t only want to punish the Times. They wanted to get the Times out of Alabama because if there was no national media covering Alabama for fear of these kind of libel suits then they could go on, you know, beating up on the civil rights workers and the blacks with impunity because the word wouldn’t get out to the rest of the country. There weren’t thousands of media entities the way there are now. There were essentially two or three national newspapers, AP, PI, and maybe two television networks, and that was—and Time magazine, and that was it. So if you could get those guys out of Alabama then they could—the Southerners could do whatever they wanted and the rest of the country wouldn’t learn about it and no pressure would come on them to stop it. And that—you know, that’s even more similar to the playbook that we’re seeing now, the idea of scaring the press so that they won’t report the bad stuff the government doesn’t want reported on. ROBBINS: So I want to turn it over to the group but before I do we started out with this question of we don’t like writing about ourselves, and I can understand that because we shouldn’t be in the story, and I’ve always been very uncomfortable with the I in a story, even though it’s become he told me. I mean, who else did he tell? (Laughs.) I mean, it’s just—I understand this is now the cool convention in stories—(inaudible)—the wall just always made me crazy. OK. So but you in the CPJ report cite some Pew polling, and if you don’t use Pew polling—and Pew has done some great work on lots of different topics but including on media consumption. But Pew found in 2017 that 94 percent of Americans knew about the state of the relationship between President Trump and the press, and nearly three-quarters—73 percent—felt that the situation was impeding their access to news. That’s really the key thing. If people feel that they’re not getting information, people, I would think, would start getting rather peevish about it. Relationship arguably worse more recent, much less awareness of it in the Pew polling. Here’s the question. Given the fact that all the Edelman polling, the Trust in Institutions polling, the Gallup polling, all of which is that people have lost trust in pretty much everything—the banks, you know, the churches, the universities and certainly in us. The good news is people trust us more than they trust Congress but that’s a pretty low bar. FREEMAN: I combine this because I’m a lawyer and a journalist, so therefore I’m kind of at the bottom—really, at the bottom of the ranks. ROBBINS: I can’t believe I ever rode a train with you, when you think about it. But should we be writing about attacks on us? GINSBERG: Yes. ROBBINS: OK. Tell me the— GINSBERG: Yes. I mean, I think you should—I mean, I love writing about the—that’s what we do all the time at CPJ. Absolutely, we should be writing about attacks on the press, and one of the things I would say— ROBBINS: Can we do that without looking like a bunch of hissy babies? GINSBERG: Of course, you can. Of course, you can because, look, journalists engage in—should be engaged. Largely, the job is identifying and disseminating the facts, news, and information. You can do it in such a way that doesn’t require you to, you know, have a hissy fit or sound like, you know, you’re speaking from the pulpit. You can just do it in a fact-based way. There are very many ways to cover this as the story that it is. If in your local community your local police chief is raiding your newsroom that is a news story. If your local governor is suing you to stop you writing about things that the governor has said—factually said—that is a news story. Those are news stories. And the thing that, you know, I keep coming back to is explaining why that matters. It matters because if this is what they’re doing for this piece what are the other things that we don’t know? What are they trying to conceal from us? And going back to people and showing that, there’s plenty of studies that show the link between a lack of independent information providers in communities and democracy, corruption, return on tax dollars. You know, it costs you more money to live in a place that doesn’t have a free and independent media. There’s plenty of research that shows that. So it matters to people, and there are plenty of organizations I think doing really good work, particularly at the local level, to rebuild that sense of, you know, this is why it should matter to you as a local individual and a reader. So, absolutely, we should write about those and we don’t have to write about it from a kind of highfalutin, principled stand where we all beat our chests. We do it in the way that journalism, you know, at its core exists to do, which is provide facts to people so that they can understand how that impacts them. ROBBINS: George, a story that you want to read that isn’t being written enough? FREEMAN: I agree with Jodie. I mean, I think that the niceties that we’ve lived on as principles for all these years really has come to be overcome and should be set aside. I mean, we’re at war now and I think we have to realize that. To say, oh, we shouldn’t write about ourselves or we shouldn’t get together with a competitor in town and talk about how to deal with the local government and maybe unify our forces a little bit, oh, that will lead to an antitrust suit. It won’t lead to an antitrust suit. It’s not what we usually do. But these are unusual times. So I agree and would go further, I think, than Jodie, and a lot of people disagree with me that we shouldn’t give up our old principles. But I just think these are kind of emergency times and some of them, like, let’s not write about ourselves I think need to be discarded because of the emergency we’re in. ROBBINS: Last word to you. EDMONDSON: I think sticking with that traditional documents-based reporting where you are—constantly have these FOIA requests out. You know, if you hear talk about FOIA Fridays, check in and see where are your public records requests. Are you hounding the county commission, the city council, what have you, and really sticking with that kind of government transparency traditional work that we do where you link directly to the documents, et cetera, and just keep doing what we do is really going to be the best way to handle what’s going on. ROBBINS: So turn it over to you all. We have mics. Wait for the mic. State your name and affiliation. And right back there to start, the gentleman, and then I’ll only call on women after that. (Laughter.) Q: Hi. Jeff Parrott. I’m with the Salt Lake Tribune. Jodie, one, thank you. I’m one of your 500 so I appreciate it. I can’t recommend enough if you guys all get a chance. So thank you. ROBBINS: What were you trained in? Q: We were targeted by some Trump fans earlier this year after running a story about some folks that were working with Musk that were in Utah and were getting a lot of online hate and a lot of doxxing threats, and so I think we have all deleted me at this point and so things seem to be calming down. Not my question. My question is especially—it’s especially a legal one. What are we doing to screw up, like, so obviously in some of these lawsuits where you get off the phone with the newsroom and you’re like, God, why’d they do that? Like, what are some of those things we’d stop doing? FREEMAN: I think there are three things that you should be aware of—without giving a whole legal seminar—that cause 90 percent of the lawsuits out there. The first is reliance on confidential sources. That’s an important thing to do, yes, but legally it’s very dangerous. You know it’s true. You’ve got it from a confidential source. But if you get sued how are you going to tell the judge or the jury that I knew it was true, it is true, without saying anything at all about who your source was and how you got the information? You are really naked in court, I used to tell my students, because there’s no way you can prove that and it’s really a dilemma. At the Times, I mean, which has a lot of resources or had a lot of resources, you know, the story really had to be important enough to take that risk. So you have to weigh a lot of factors. How likely is it that the confidential source might renounce their confidentiality and come clean and come to court to help you? How likely is it that the other side will sue? I mean, if it’s the mafia and you rely on a confidential source they’re probably not going to see you anyhow. So you look at a lot of factors but, A, relying on confidential sources needs a team to decide whether it’s worth putting that into print. Secondly is implication. If you can’t say something frontally—you can’t declare it but you want to say it through the back door by putting a couple of hints together, don’t do that. That’s a formula for getting sued and it’s a formula for losing the suit because libel by implication is a valid cause of action. So if you’re afraid to say it frontally you shouldn’t say it at all. And the third thing, which is the most basic kind of libel law thing that people don’t get, is you can’t just put into the paper what someone says. Because someone said it to you that’s not good enough of a backing of support to publish it yourself. You have to be convinced it’s true. You have to test whether that person you’re relying on is reliable enough. See if you can get corroborating information, et cetera. But a lot of people think it’s a defense. Well, the agent of the singer said that the opposing singer was a drunken drug-dealing person and I can put that in the paper, right, because that’s what they told me. Well, no, that’s wrong. If you don’t believe it you’re guilty of actual malice and even if you don’t check it you’re negligent, perhaps. So you can’t just rely on what anyone out there says. If it’s a court document or an official statement then you can but if it’s just someone off the street or someone who’s not official and governmental in a governmental forum you have to go through all the checks as though you’re saying it yourself. So those are the three things I think you should keep in your head as to what to watch out for, in answer to your question. ROBBINS: The woman right there. Yeah. Q: Hi. I’m Janet Wilson with the Desert Sun and USA Today network. I’m the one who asked the infamous question last night— ROBBINS: Thank you for that. Q: —about the White House press corps. So I guess to Aimee and Jodie, I want to stick to the facts here. I don’t want to inject my own opinion too much. So you did have an opportunity there. Even Fox News said that week that the Trump White House had overstepped. So I wasn’t just talking about the print organizations. I was talking about everybody stepping out. I mean, he breathes the media and now instead—I think it’s just this week, the past few days—we have WH.gov. It’s a new wire service that the White House has just started to put out complete stories to be used by smaller, regional, whoever wants them, news outlets. So I guess my question is if the moment has passed or there’s just not enough consensus that we’re in these extraordinarily bad times with the president, what else can we do in terms of Trump, not just educating, in many cases, our very loyal readers who do trust us at the local level—not everybody. There’s definitely the MAGA haters. But what can the American press do to counteract what’s going on with Trump and all of these influencer outlets and, you know, not news outlets that are in the White House now? That’s a little jumbled. Sorry. But do you collectively sue? I mean, what can you do? What can we do? GINSBERG: So I think there’s—I’m going to separate that question into two parts, right? So I think what I understand your question to mean is, like, what is the front foot action collectively against the administration, right? So I’m going to take that one in a second, and then there’s the kind of what can we do on a more existential level, right? And I think both are key because I think it’s very easy to think that if we can just find the right collective action that will stop this and I think the lesson that we learn from every single authoritarian regime—and make no mistake, this is why we called it this is not normal times—what you are seeing in America is exactly what has happened in Hungary, exactly what we’ve experienced in places like Brazil, exactly what we’re seeing in Hong Kong. You know, I don’t want you to be under any illusion that it’s somehow different here because you’re America. I’m sorry to tell you this as a non-American it is no different and, in fact, everyone I know who has experienced an authoritarian regime—going from a democracy to an authoritarian regime says what they’re seeing exactly reminds them of that except at warp speed. So this is happening really, really fast. So and to take us back, therefore, the experience of a lot of those places is collective action can go so far but it’s not going to stop this because once you’ve kind of embedded within the structures the ability to essentially control the narrative it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter whether CBS, Fox, News Corps, and the New York Times all get together and say no more because you’ve already got control of the means of information dissemination, which we’re already seeing with the inclusion of these other news outlets that don’t follow, you know, traditional journalistic practice, don’t necessarily follow codes of ethics, being brought in and now with things like the new White House press service. So I think there needs to be collective action in order to signal that the press has value. I’m not convinced there’s necessarily a single action like everybody sue the president that is going to have some strength. We joined the AP lawsuit as an amicus. There were lots of reasons. You know, it’s hard to see at the moment because he’s picking everybody off individually what collective action legally you might be able to take. But George will speak to that better than me. But I do think collectively speaking out for the value, doing it on the front page, I’ve noticed a number of local news outlets really putting front and center stories about threats to democracy and those increasingly, evidence shows, are playing really well. You know, putting those stories about this is illegal, not Trump is unsure whether he has to abide by the Constitution. You know, this is illegal. This is illegal, and I think actually making much more in the news reporting of the acts that are illegal—if not illegal, you know, are a massive threat to democracy and the Constitution I think is part of the way that you can see push back. ROBBINS: Aimee? EDMONDSON: There was a big study done in the ’70s and ’80s in Iowa relating to libel and some academics found all the libel cases they could in this decade or so, and then reached out to the plaintiffs—why did you sue, et cetera. And so the first thing that someone does when you write something that they don’t like they don’t go to court. They call you. They reach out through email, et cetera. And so while—and this is in the context of libel but this is much bigger—my point here in a minute—and that is we’re going to win these libel suits because truth is the ultimate defense, right? If it’s true you’re not going to lose the libel suit, and we can talk about other ways in court like tortious interference in a minute. But in that context people told the researchers in the Iowa project, I called and was treated rudely, or, I didn’t get a call back. And so I just remember as a reporter when I’d get the call that said you made an error and I’d be—oh, I mean, you know, your heart just falls. What did I get wrong? And then it’s, like, OK, walk me through what happened. And, you know, it might be twenty or thirty minutes later but they just wanted to vent. They did not like what you wrote but there’s no there there legally. And then they got to know me, Aimee the reporter, and so it’s almost like an each one take one, which is incredibly laborious and time consuming. But I really did feel at the local level we could do some good and even do a little care and feeding of sources. Maybe they’ll call me for a different story at a different time. And so I think that really ground level work, you know, it’s a lot to do but I think we don’t have a choice and that’s something we can definitely control. We can control. Yeah, I think that it would be really helpful when people hear what a Trump or Trump like person says such as Kari Lake or, you know, any of these, you know, state, local, public officials who go, oh, fake news, and I think that a really interesting example out of—it kind of has Ohio roots as well as Florida, and that is the Melissa Howard case. This was a woman who was running for state legislature in Florida who said she had graduated from college at Miami of Ohio University in Oxford. Well, she didn’t, and so it was reported that she did not actually get her degree as she’s running for this state office and she’s, oh, fake news, and it was just that very Trumpy you don’t like it, fake. Well, she even goes up to Ohio and supposedly gets her diploma, takes a picture of it, posts it on social media, but turns out she doctored it. And so finally Miami of Ohio did put out some information that said, no, she did not graduate from college. And so then the—Melissa Howard, the candidate, then dropped out of the race and said, you know, I’m sorry. I had an error in judgment. And that took a lot of work but it’s very Trumpy when you think about what it is. And so it’s—the bigger concern to me is it’s not just Trump. It’s this blueprint that has been wildly successful with this ability to manipulate information. ROBBINS: George, do you have— FREEMAN: The only thing I would add to that, and I agree totally with what you all said—the only thing I would add is that part of the problem, and maybe it goes back to a couple of questions, is, you know, everyone’s afraid to give their opinion because newspapers aren’t supposed to give in their news pages opinion. They’re supposed to give facts. And at the Times this came to a crescendo in September of 2016 when the Times for the first time said that Trump was lying. Lying sounds like a word of opinion, you know, because how can you really— ROBBINS: No. They didn’t say he was lying. They said he had lied. They used the word lie in the lead. OK. FREEMAN: The question is people—a lot of people use that as evidence for their argument that the Times is giving too much opinions and you can’t rely on it because it doesn’t give the facts. But the fact that—I should not use the word fact—the fact that Trump is a liar is a fact. I mean, there have been so many occasions, so much evidence of that, that the answer is that you got to tell the readers what the facts are and the facts are that he makes up stuff and lies time after time after time, and the Washington Post said 30,000 times during his four years in office. So I think that one shouldn’t—one has to be careful not to be victim of the argument you’re giving opinions, not facts, but what’s a fact and what’s an opinion has always been a difficult question and in the case of Trump is an even more difficult question. But it shouldn’t shy people away from giving the facts about what he really is up to and what he’s doing. ROBBINS: I think that there’s another question that was raised here, which is, and I—and certainly as more and more local newspapers are being taken over by investment funds and the economics of it—which is if the administration is offering its own wire service, and newspapers can’t afford it or they decide they can’t afford it, and you can get free—a free news feed that’s actually closer to, like, Fars News in Iran or in Xinhua in China or something that becomes the official state news agency, then there is the danger that the news space and—that they are defining what the facts are, that it’s easier—it’s not just what’s said from the lectern in the briefing room. They start defining everything and that that becomes particularly—it’s not just that the AP is in the Oval Office. The entire news feed becomes that and that is pretty damn scary when you marry it with the economics of what’s going on in local news, and I do think that that’s an enormous challenge for us. And to put it in an international context itself, I mean, first they were going to completely dismantle VOA and it goes to the courts and the courts say the Voice of America and they can’t—that Kari Lake can’t dismantle it. And what are they doing? They’re going to use a news feed from One America News Network, right? GINSBERG: ONN. ONN. ROBBINS: And so that is the international version of that is that they’re going to have their official news feed from that. That’s what people overseas are going to get and they think that that’s going to be when VOA has been a hugely independent news organization and by law it has to be an independent news organization. So I think there’s a danger there of that cognate happening and the challenge becomes that news organizations and editors have to say, we’re not going to run that. We’re going to stick with the news under a huge amount of economic challenges. I don’t think you can sue for that. I think it’s the challenge that—it puts even more pressure on economically pressured news organizations. So it’s—you know, it’s hard. It’s hard. There’s no question. I’m glad you raised it but it’s really terrifying. Next question. So right here in the front. Q: Hi. I’m Liz Ruskin. I work for Alaska Public Media. I just—as you’re talking I struggle to—you know, I’m thinking about a lot of us here in this room need to preserve our neutrality. We are not opinion writers. We every day have to write. You know, how do we hit hard back at the things that the Trump administration is doing or that the president himself is doing without losing that voice of neutrality? I mean, your point about calling something a lie I understand that. I find that the word “liar” and “lie” is not good for me to use because it gets in the way of me being able to say, he said this and this is wrong. It just gets everyone all inflamed and because it sounds like opinion and it does require that you understand the— ROBBINS: Intent. Q: The intent and the mental state and, frankly, I think a lot of the time the president is—whether something is true or false is immaterial to him to the point that I can’t say that he’s intentionally saying something that’s false. I don’t know that true and false matter to him as much as what he’s trying to achieve. So anyway, that’s one example on using the word lie. I’m just—I try to avoid using it. But I wonder if you had any advice on how to preserve our neutrality or whether we should, whether this is just—these are extraordinary times and we should give up that idea that we should be a neutral voice. ROBBINS: Is neutrality really the word or just that you’re actually reporting the news? That’s the—I think that’s the issue itself. Yeah. I mean, we’re pretty good on time here. EDMONDSON: Just one sentence about this. I really appreciate the Trump said falsely, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and then put the reality in the sentence right below it and then keep going. Rather than saying lie just said falsely and not getting to motive. Yes. ROBBINS: I mean, just this whole—this whole question, truth sandwiches—there’s been all sorts of studies about you tell the truth and you say what the false thing was, and there’s been studies about—it’s the same thing as writing a correction. Do you say the right thing first and then the wrong thing? What sticks in people’s minds? What gets flagged? I mean, we’ve all struggled with this. And certainly lie means intent. I think this is—I think it’s a really hard—a really hard thing. I mean, how many people here think that their job is to be neutral, you know? How many people think that their job is to be as objective as humanly possible? I mean, that’s the way I always felt as a reporter, you know, and it’s hard in this environment. So—and that’s as someone who went over to the dark side and became an editorial writer. (Laughs.) So another question. So the woman back there. Thank you. Q: Hi. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton with the Denver Post. So in my newsroom we have a running joke that it’s only a matter of time before we get rounded up and sent to CECOT. Realistically, what is the worst-case scenario that you guys are preparing for? ROBBINS: They have really nice clogs, though. Q: What was that? ROBBINS: They wear crocs, I mean, so it won’t be that bad. Q: (Laughs.) But what is the worst-case scenario that you guys are preparing for under Trump? ROBBINS: You mean for reporters? Q: Yes. ROBBINS: This is the worst-case scenario person here. GINSBERG: Oh, yeah. Arrests and—arrests and—well, the worst-case scenario is that we always plan for arrests and killings. I think what is likely here is arrests. You know, we may likely see many more people be detained for their reporting if it starts to become—you know, if we see new foreign agent laws, for example, or increased use of the Espionage Act, or certainly as a result of increased leak investigations I certainly think that you might see people detained for contempt, for example. So many more arrests before we get to that level. I think, obviously, a sharp uptick in legal threats is likely and one of the things that you can certainly expect is an environment in which those who are supportive of the administration get much more leeway to own and run local news outlets. So to the point about, you know, the White House press service will be replicated across the country in a variety of local news outlets that have—you know, are allowed to operate under new FCC regulations and so on. And so what that does is, if you look at places like Hungary and elsewhere, that squeezes independent press to the margins to the point where then often those people who are doing that reporting are either hounded out through legal threat or actually jailed. The absolute worst-case scenario, obviously, is that journalists are physically targeted, including killings, and one of the reasons that can happen is if you continue to push this narrative that journalists are the enemy and they’re bad people. So you turn up to a protest and someone thinks it’s OK to attack you or they think it’s OK to show up at your workplace with a gun because you wrote an article that they didn’t like and that—again, that’s a very, very real concern in a place that has the highest personal gun ownership of any country in the world by a very long way. ROBBINS: George? FREEMAN: I’ll just try to make one bright spot out of some of this. (Laughter.) ROBBINS: Please. FREEMAN: And that is that when we started going down this road the question was, you know, who is going to stop the administration, and it’s pretty clear—incredibly clear—that Congress is not the answer. Congress is enabling the administration. But so far I would say, and disagree with me, that the court system has done better than I would have predicted in repulsing to some degree what’s been going on and the question really is, it seems to me, looking forward, whether the court system will be stronger than it has been in those other autocratic countries that have been referred to and will continue to do its job in the way that the lower courts so far have done. And I think the jury is out on that. There’s some good signals from Chief Justice Roberts that he’s not going to give in to some of this stuff. But exactly how that’s going to play out, number one, and number two, the real question of what’s the downside or what’s the worst-case scenario seems to me is if the courts say, no, you can’t do this, that and the other and the administration goes ahead and does it anyhow then we really are in a major crisis. And to me, that’s kind of the answer to what’s the downside or what’s the worst case. GINSBERG: And just to say—you asked me the worst-case scenario. There are ways to push back against this, right, and I think that’s the key thing. There are ways to push back against this. One, I think you’re absolutely right. I think the courts are really holding very strong at the moment. The second is, and this is something that everyone will tell you if they’ve experienced this, is what’s called—what the historian Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience, right, where you just kind of give up ahead. I’m not going to write that story. I’m not going to use this kind of language because it’s going to annoy this person over there. I’m not going to cover this story because I know that will rile them. That’s what creates the space for increased autocracy to fill is actually that everybody else steps back from the space because they are too frightened, too nervous, too exhausted, to economically challenged, to push back in this space. And so continuing to call things out, report things as you see them—you know, call out when you see something that’s wrong, unfair, and do it in defense of your colleagues is really important and so— FREEMAN: And do it together. GINSBERG: Yeah. And so, you know that is the worst-case scenario. That doesn’t mean I think that’s what’s going to happen in the U.S. but it does mean that I think—and that’s why we called the report “Alarm Bells”—we can’t just pretend this is normal. We can’t just sort of say, well, you know, I don’t know whether he’s telling the truth or not telling the truth or, you know, oh well, you know, they’ve just dismantled—they’ve just sacked, what was the latest one? You know, they’ve just sacked the head of the Library of Congress. You know, oh, well. You know, these things should all be making everybody really, really alarmed and we need to say that stuff publicly. And that’s not having an opinion; that’s just calling it for what it is. Putting it in context—this isn’t normally how things are done, people. You know, putting—that’s what we do as journalists. And so I don’t want people to come away and think, oh my God, you know, we’re now going to become a full-blown dictatorship. But I do think it’s really important that people recognize what’s in front of them because I can tell you now I’ve also never lived through an authoritarian regime. It doesn’t look like how I felt it would look because everything else is normal. Here we are sitting in this lovely room with these beautiful flowers and you probably had a lovely dinner yesterday, and the subway is still running and it doesn’t look like you imagine autocracy to look. It doesn’t look like boots on the ground. Guess what? That’s the experience of all the other people who’ve just gone through this over the last ten years. They also had running subways and, you know, running water and they going out for dinner and it all looked normal. Meanwhile, all of their rights were being taken away. So I just think we’ve got to wake up and recognize and call it for what it is and that’s part of the way—and support one another when we see that our colleagues are being attacked, that we will push back against some of this. We’re not helpless. ROBBINS: Another bright spot is that in places like Poland people did seize it back and they seized it back through voting. So I’m not saying we should just sit back and wait for the next election but it’s just—you’ve got Hungary and then you also have the example of Poland including the attempt to stack the courts and the attempt to completely seize power over journalism. GINSBERG: South Korea, or—yeah. ROBBINS: Yeah. So this is just—but yes, pretty frightening. Another question, please. The gentleman here, and then we’ll go back to this side. Q: Hello. John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight. I just want to talk about the “telling our story” piece that you guys began with. My daughter is fairly well informed and she actually does trust the press because she’s, you know, mine but most of her friends— ROBBINS: Like, what choice does she have? Yeah. Q: Yeah. Right. Most of her friends get their news the same way that she does, which is on social media, and this Pew report that came in our background materials talked a lot about that. What do you think our relationship should be with the kinds of people who make their living on the original reporting that we do by talking about it and often reaching more people than we do? How do we tell our story? Do we have a relationship with these people? Do we try to be that? What are your thoughts on this? ROBBINS: Aimee, are you training influencers? EDMONDSON: I think so. We are training the next generation for jobs that we didn’t even know existed, and then I’ll hear, oh, I got a job in New Orleans. I’m the social media voice for this celebrity and I can’t tell you who, and I’m, like, that’s a job? (Laughter.) Of course, that was about five years ago and it’s now, like, well, of course, it’s a job. So yes, and when people say they get their news from social media my next question is, OK, well, what do you mean? Is it the New York Times on a particular channel or is it a particular—is it the local newspaper or television station? And so I always tell my students that the social media is the channel through which they get the information. So if we’re there as journalists that’s incredibly helpful because we know everybody is on their phones now. And so the—I think one of the big things we really need starting in probably the eighth grade is a return to true media literacy training. We used to call it civics, and I know that that’s still there and—but, you know, when we think about the small percentage of people who go to college so you got to grab them young to be able to distinguish between, you know, what is news and what is a journalist, because the word journalist and media are not synonymous, right? Don’t call us the media. We’re journalists. So there’s a lot of work to be done there and to meet them where they are, to answer your question, is an incredibly good idea. ROBBINS: But I also think—I mean, yes, wouldn’t that be fabulous but I think the most immediate and pressing question is what do we do about the people on TikTok who are actually reading our stories and are reading them more persuasively than we could read them because they are doing it with flashing lights or funny, great accents or whatever it is, and they seem to reach more people than the New York Times TikTok channel would. EDMONDSON: Right. Right. And then, of course, the legal brain would be going Hearst v. NIS from, like, the 1920s and then there was an outlet that stole AP story after story after story. And so, you know, that’s not a sustainable business model when you’ve got a handful of media outlets doing the reporting and everybody else just repeating it. So there’s that. FREEMAN: You tell ‘em. EDMONDSON: (Laughs.) There were two court cases, one from the 1920s and then one more recently in the ’90s that showed that’s not a— ROBBINS: But it would be whack-a mole, though. I mean, there’s just— EDMONDSON: It would be. ROBBINS: —there are too many people on TikTok. So do you just say as long as they’re accurately reflecting my reporting for the sake of democracy at least they’re getting the information, or does that mean that they’re not coming to my website? They’re not coming to my reporting? They don’t actually even know where it’s coming from, so they’re even less likely to ever subscribe to a newspaper. I mean, isn’t that the dilemma? Is that what you’re asking? EDMONDSON: Yes, I think so. You make friends. I do, and then it would be really great, friend, if you could attribute this. ROBBINS: Include a link. Include a link on your—yeah, for more— EDMONDSON: For more information. ROBBINS: —for more information, for better information you could go to. I think that’s—(laughter)— GINSBERG: And I think you already see this happening, right, in the number of people that are actually leaving traditional media to set up on their own in this kind of way and actually I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing to provide newsletters or to go on TikTok. You know, I think the format always shifts. The key thing is that people understand that they’re getting information that’s trustworthy and credible and they understand how that’s being sourced, whether it has bells and whistles or not on it. I think that’s, to me, the key thing. I’m smiling because we’ve just done a whole series—a piece of work within CPJ around this who is a journalist question because, obviously, we get asked that a lot. It’s in our name. And that gets really complicated when you get into the area of commentary, you know, because there are people who are taking fact-based information and commenting around it. Does that make them a journalist, question mark, I think, is a really key one and traditionally within—commentators within newspapers have been considered as such because they worked within that framework but anyone outside has not. Well, is that still a valid—is that still a valid distinction? And I think it’s a really important one to ask when we think about, well, what is it that we do and how does it have value. Lots of things have value. That doesn’t necessarily make them journalism. Lots of things have value for democracy. It doesn’t make them journalism. So I think really kind of getting to the core of what is it that we do that has specific value is really important if we’re going to be able to defend it. ROBBINS: Then there’s the question of the challenge of monetizing it on a local level. GINSBERG: Yeah, that’s a—yeah, that’s a— ROBBINS: Which is a pretty—I mean, having watched the New York Times come this close to going under before we decided to go pay, I mean, it’s just a—and the Times is thriving but very few other news organizations are. So you have a half an hour to make it to your lunch discussion, which will be at 12:00 p.m. You know where it is. There will be food outside the room. But you have—it’s not—it’s a big building but not that big a building so I’m going to volunteer these people to talk to you if you didn’t get a chance to do it. I just really want to thank Aimee and George and Jodie for a great conversation. (Applause.) (END)

This event was part of the 2025 CFR Local Journalists Workshop, which is made possible through the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. TRANSCRIPT FROMAN: Well, good evening, everybody, and welcome. Just walking around the reception out there it’s just great to have you and all the energy here. It’s one of the events we look forward to the most all year and I hope you guys all get a lot out of it. It’s a great pleasure to have one of our longstanding and most active members of the Council here with us, David Sanger, who you all have his bio. I’m not going to spend a half hour going through it. But you know he’s been part of three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently on Russia’s role in the 2016 election. He’s the author of four books, one of which you will get a signed copy of tonight as you leave, his newest book New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Save the West. And, of course, this being a conference full of journalism this is an on-the-record discussion. So we’ll try and make it both interesting and, as somebody said, people use the word Chatham House rules. I hate Chatham House. Like, why do they get to, like, own this think tank space on attribution rules? So we came up with at CFR— SANGER: If it’s on the record I’ll just say no comment and that’s off the record, right? Yeah. FROMAN: That’s it. That’s it. Exactly. That’s exactly right. Or somebody told me the other day the Council rules is you can’t be quoted but you can be fired. (Laughter.) So that’s somewhat of a higher standard than Chatham and the Chatham House. Let me get started by first just talking about how you got started in this business, you know, what your origin story is as a journalist, and we were in the Dillon Room beforehand and I learned for the first time that actually it’s in your blood. I mean, your family has a long history in the media empire world. SANGER: Well, I’m not sure I would call it an empire. Well, first, thanks very much. I’m delighted to be here. You guys are the incredible vanguard. I get the pleasure and occasional burdens of working at the New York Times but you guys are, like, the last bastion these days, and local journalism has had a really tough time. So I am just really delighted to be here and particularly delighted to be here with my friend Mike. We’ve known each other for what now, thirty years? FROMAN: Thirty years. Thirty-plus years. SANGER: Yeah. And he won’t tell you this because he’s too modest but the other day he got the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese emperor. So I now have to actually treat him with respect after all these years. (Laughter.) FROMAN: And bow a little lower. SANGER: And bow, yeah. I did that before. Yeah. He didn’t think I went down low enough. But anyway so it’s terrific to be here and I really look forward to the conversation with all of you. My origin story is really boring. Family did—was in—early on in journalism. My grandfather was the co-founder of WQXR which, for any New Yorkers around here you will know was the first classical FM station in the country. And he founded that in the middle of the Depression and they basically did it from a transmitter sitting in New Jersey right by where the Hindenburg blew up actually and all that. And they had this crazy idea that they could actually extend the reach of WQXR across the country with a series of transmitters that would run it all the way to the West Coast. It was incredibly expensive and completely failed but the station stayed on and it was bought by the Times in 1945 and in what was the biggest electronic media purchase at that time—I think it was about a million dollars—of which the family got absolutely zero because they were—the whole thing was so in debt. But he kept running it, and the first job I ever had at the New York Times and probably the last one I was qualified for was sitting quietly in the announcer’s booth, because they had this crazy vacuum tube system in the old Times building where they would put news bulletins into these tubes and shoot them through the vacuum tubes to WQXR, and my job was to open them up and unfold them for the announcer, and then I’d draw a picture and put it back in and send it back down. So that was my first newsroom job. FROMAN: How old were you at the time? SANGER: Oh, six or so, something like that. (Laughter.) FROMAN: Child labor— SANGER: Yes. FROMAN: —in the years of the Depression. SANGER: We’re not paid a whole lot better than we were then. So anyway, he had long retired by the time I came back to the Times. But I had done, you know, high school journalism and college journalism and all that and was planning to go to law school like Mike did but decided I really wanted to try out life in the Times. So I got a job as a news clerk there, and it happened to be the summer of the Son of Sam murders. Do you remember those? FROMAN: Sure. Sure. SANGER: And all that, so that was my first taste of it. And then I worked in the business section of the Times writing about technology. I was—kicked around New York with Steve Jobs the week that they were bringing out the Macintosh, which really dates me, right? And then ended up being put on the team that investigated the causes of the Challenger crash on the day that the Challenger went down because we thought it had been computer errors and I was covering computer technology and all that for the business section. And we ended up finding the guys long before the Presidential Commission even was formed who basically said it was too cold to launch, and was able to sort of prove that NASA knew that this space shuttle was a flawed machine and had nearly had an accident fourteen times previously. So this was more like manslaughter than it was like an accident, and that won a Pulitzer in 1986 or ’87 for work done in ’86 and I used that as a moment to get to Japan. So that’s the story. FROMAN: Excellent, and now chief national security correspondent and White House correspondent. SANGER: White House correspondent, and yeah, I’ve had lots of different jobs in the Washington bureau, and they just keep making up titles but I’m essentially doing the same thing. (Laughter.) FROMAN: So one of the challenges over the next day or so is to really try and connect these foreign policy issues, the complex issues that we cover here at the Council, with how do you cover it locally, and some of them lend themselves probably more to local connectivity than others—trade, cyber, maybe some of the issues around military—military families, et cetera. What’s your thoughts about how to take the big, complex issues and for them to go talk to their editors or the editors who are in here and say this is why we need to write about it for our paper or our meeting? SANGER: So this is a tough challenge. As I needn’t tell everybody in this room, it’s hard for you guys working in local journalism to make the Iranian nuclear program or North Korea or even the war in Ukraine, although I think there are some ways to go do that, seem deeply relevant. I think it’s a lot easier on immigration, certainly on trade. I mean, the tariff story is, you know, and was until last night something that I think was going to show up on the shelves of Wal-Mart and may yet, actually, you know, that these tariff levels could well. Cyber, certainly, and I’ve spent a lot of time on cyber in my book— FROMAN: You wrote a book. SANGER: —just before this. It was called The Perfect Weapon, and it’s also a HBO documentary about the rise of cyber as a short-of-war weapon. But think of all of the municipalities from Baltimore, to Atlanta, to small towns in Texas, to hospitals across the country that have been shut down in ransomware attacks, to banks that have gotten caught up in cyber incidents that have cleared them out or at least shut them down. And frequently these have been Russia-based, less China, some Iranian-based operations. FROMAN: North Korea. SANGER: And so those are all places where you can, I think, do some really great investigative work and really great just civics work on all of that, and also in the cyber arena the fact that we now have China through two separate attacks—one into the utility grid, not only electricity but gas, water networks, and one into the telecommunications networks—Salt Typhoon—that affects each and every person. I mean, the Chinese are doing this through routers that are sitting on your desks and in your newsrooms. There’s a reason Pete Hegseth and everybody was on Signal, because everybody in the U.S. government was basically told stay off the commercial phone lines. So, you know, there are opportunities in each of those and we can go in deeper on those, I think, to make those incredibly relevant local stories. FROMAN: I think one of the most impactful things over the last couple weeks has been on the issue of trade, how stories have emerged with regard to how the tariffs are affecting local businesses—small businesses—and you see it in many different outlets but those stories and, again, these journalists probably are closer to many of those small businesses having to make decisions. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: Do they stay open? Do they hire or fire people? Are they able to get access to the parts that they need to continue. Than folks sitting in the New York Times or the Washington Post. It creates a real texture behind how policy affects individuals. So my humble suggestion is to keep writing it because it actually is having an effect. I think it’s when the White House and Treasury heard how many small businesses were being adversely affected by this that there is a view we need to kind of pull back and really rethink some of these issues. SANGER: I think that’s right. And you know, I shouldn’t—Mike should be discussing. This is like a fingerpainter telling Picasso here how to paint. FROMAN: Just bow. It’s OK. Just bow. SANGER: Right, yeah. (Laughter.) But, you know, everything I can tell from our White House coverage is that President Trump and many of those around him had no concept of how complex the supply chain was, say, to auto manufacturers. And the very idea that a part would go over the border and come back half a dozen or a dozen times, and what it would mean to be putting a tariff on it each time, I think had to be driven home by the carmakers themselves. So particularly on the Canada side, Canada and Mexico part of that, I think that’s an incredibly dramatic story. I agree with you on the local suppliers and small businesses, but also the retailers—I mean, just the crazy distortions that are going to come out of this. And you know, one of the things that struck me the most about the Trump administration in doing this is this has been an obsession of Donald Trump since 1987 or thereabouts, when you first heard him discussing this topic. But he also has, when you talk to him, an image in his mind of an American economy that is sort of like 1957, you know? I mean, he’s interested in manufactured goods, but not at all in services. He doesn’t really count the many services that are exported from places that you’re all covering. He, you know, complains endlessly about Canada. But if we just stop buying oil and gas from Canada, we’d be in surplus with them, I think, right? So it’s a really interesting thing, because he is sort of perpetuating this old concept. And I think you saw a little bit of that when the Commerce secretary, Mr. Lutnick, got on TV and talked about screwing together the circuit boards for iPhones in the United States. Is this really what Americans want to raise their kids to be doing? So I think there’s, you know, a lot of opportunity to go find the local example and then match it up with the national debate. FROMAN: That’s right. You know, on the national security side, you said those are sometimes harder issues beyond cyber. SANGER: Yep. FROMAN: Let’s talk about Ukraine war or other wars going on around the world, or even the military competition with China. How do we—how should local journalists think about making those relatable? Is it the fact that they’ve got military bases, perhaps in their state or in their locality, or their military families that are home while their soldiers and sailors are away, Marines are away? How do you try and link those issues back home? SANGER: So during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was fairly easy to go do I think the bases issues, because one of the odd things about an all-volunteer force is that it’s fallen incredibly heavily on communities, really, in the middle of the country that have had a long tradition of contributing to the military, and very little in New York and California and so forth. Frequently, people are going into the military for the job opportunity. But Ukraine’s been a little bit different. Ukraine has exposed the fact that after the Cold War, we basically shut down building many of our most conventional weapons, and we ended up building instead weapons that have extraordinary capabilities, that are designed for thinking about war with Russia or China, but ignored the technologies that we needed to be working on for a war like Ukraine. And one thing that I was struck writing “New Cold Wars” about is the degree to which Ukraine has been a real testing ground for the United States of technologies that we have built here, frequently by small startups, not by the big defense contractors. And in some cases, we’ve discovered things that work spectacularly well. In other cases, we’ve discovered complete disasters. And there was a drone company that was selling to the Pentagon on sort of an experimental basis. They put a couple hundred of their drones into the hands of the Ukrainians, and the Russians took them all out within about two weeks. And that was a case where we were spending tens of thousands of dollars per drone, and here are the Ukrainians sitting in old schoolhouses and abandoned warehouses building unmanned aerial vehicles that are basically 300 (dollars), 500 (dollars), $700 each, some larger ones that are beginning to carry sophisticated weapons, and last week, one of which took out a manned Russian fighter, which we had not seen happen in some time. And we’ve been having a hard time getting details of the incident, but we are fairly confident it happened. So these are technologies that I think you can probably trace back to startups in, you know, many of your districts. You know, this is not something where Northrop Grumman or Boeing has owned the day, and certainly places where you can go back to university research done in your districts, which raises the next one, which is the slashing of basic science university funding and the effects that’s going to have not only on the military but on competition with China and in the semiconductor arena is pretty high. FROMAN: The president’s on his way, I guess, now to the Middle East. SANGER: Yep, he should land in about eight or nine hours. FROMAN: Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar. SANGER: Yep. FROMAN: What do you expect to come out of this trip? SANGER: So we wrote a piece this morning that went up on the Times site that described the degree to which the president has built this trip around deals—this will not shock you—rather than around a vision of foreign policy. And in some ways, this makes it easier for you guys to write about Trump and his foreign policy, because when you are so focused on the deals, it’s the economic impact of those deals that become the issue. But at times, it is completely distorted from the question of what you’re trying to encourage these countries to go do. Democratization is off the table as a discussion. Even joining an alliance is off the table. The president’s concept of how you conduct foreign policy is very much a United States is the biggest military and economic power, and we are at the peak of our power when negotiating individually with states, and we lose when they gang up together in The European Union, even in the successor to NAFTA, which the president himself negotiated in the first term and called one of the great trade accomplishments of all time, because he was probably thinking about what you were doing the previous time—right?—and now has dismissed as sort of an interim deal, right? So these all give you opportunities. When you have a president who’s this transactional, the transactions are going to be happening where you’re reporting. FROMAN: Yeah, in fact, one of his officials was at the Council a couple months ago and said everyone knows and talks about the president as being transactional. But for him, the transaction begins with economics, and it’s the how much are they going to pay us, or it’s the mineral deal in in Ukraine, it’s how much are they going to invest in the U.S.—which, by the way, seems to be working. You know, even on the trade side, the tariffs got China to the table. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: We now have a negotiation underway. It’s going to be ninety days. We’ll see what the what they come up with. But I think there a willingness to use U.S. leverage to get other countries to come to the table, one has to say, at least at first glance, appears to bring them. Now what the long-term consequences of that remain to be seen. SANGER: So, you know, this is a question I’ve been trying to figure out how to go write about. I mean, the approach Trump takes is to come in with this maximalist demand. And as you say, it got the attention of the Chinese this time. But at what cost? In other words, you know, they agreed to come down to something that’s just outrageous, 30 percent, that will be inflationary, presumably, if it goes on for very long. But the mystery out of this is, if your problems with China are so much broader—the fastest developing nuclear program around, their interest in the South China Sea or Taiwan—and we should come back to Taiwan, because that’s an interesting local story for you as well—do you distort the entire discussion by making it all about tariffs at the beginning? FROMAN: Tariffs. That’s a good question. David, let’s talk about Taiwan. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: That’s an interesting local, global story. SANGER: So you’ll see in the book that we’re giving you, there’s a chapter on Taiwan Semiconductor, which is, to my mind, one of the most interesting global companies around these days, because they make virtually all, about 95 percent, of the advanced chips that go into your iPhone. So if China moves in on Taiwan, do not break your iPhone, because they don’t have an alternative right now as a place to build the product. FROMAN: Is there anybody here from Arizona, by the way? Yes? Raise your hand. There you go. OK. SANGER: They are building their facility in Arizona. They’ve got a lot more that they’re getting ready to build here. And yet, the president has opposed what came out of the CHIPS Act during the Biden administration, which is a program to help finance the building of new fabs, semiconductor fabs in places around the country. Anybody here from Ohio? The New Albany plant, which you all know, it’s an Intel plant. It’s running now, what, three or four years behind schedule, something like that? But it’s a really critical facility to all this. Now, to my mind, and what I argued in the book, and I’ve argued in the paper, what we spend, whether it’s in private sector or public, building fabs is probably more important than what we’re spending building aircraft carriers and the like. And it’s interesting because they cost roughly the same. The last big aircraft carrier the U.S. built was the Gerald R. Ford. After all the cost overruns, it came in about $15 billion for one big aircraft carrier. And 15 to 20 billion (dollars) is about what one truly sophisticated semiconductor fabrication plant costs, and you build them in two packs. So if you went to Congress today and you said, oh, my God, the Chinese have a bigger navy than we do, or they’re building a bigger navy than we do. I think you could get the money for ten more aircraft carriers, although they’re big sitting ducks. I’m not sure you can get the money for ten fabs right now. In fact, almost certainly you could not. And yet, for our own sense of independence, national defense, having those fabs in the United States so that you are not completely reliant on getting your chips from an island that’s a hundred miles off of the Chinese coast—Trump always says five miles off the coast—but a hundred miles off the coast that the Chinese want back, that’s a pretty wild story. And why the Intel plant is three or four years behind after all the US has poured into this is also a pretty interesting story. FROM: You cover the world. You’ve been around for a while. You’ve seen the ups and downs. What currently—I’ll ask a two-part question—what currently keeps you up at night and what gives you hope? SANGER: What keeps me up at night is that our greatest adversary right now is us. You know, it’s not only the divisions within the country which you’re seeing in your own communities, but it’s an inability to sort of develop a sense of national mission. It doesn’t strike me as particularly hard to come up with a strategy that a lot of Americans could get behind, to build those semiconductor fabs, to pour that money into basic research, because we know what that did after World War II, and we know what that did at the beginning of the personal computer age, and we know that, you know, Google was the product of Russian immigrants and a local culture around Stanford that enabled the company to truly grow. And yet, what are we doing? We’re cutting that basic research money, and we are downgrading the instruments of our soft power to use the phrase that Joe Nye, who passed away last week, but the great Harvard professor used so well. So what worries me is we’re wasting a lot of time while the Chinese have a pretty directed investment program. The second thing that bothers me is we have lost a sort of core agreement that democracy promotion, along our allies and as a way to attract other countries to a Western alliance—not a democracy that looks just like the United States—is being lost, and that we’re closing down things like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia that were so critical. I mean, when I was traveling around Asia, people were listening to Voice of America, partly to learn English, and partly because it was the only decent news source that they had access to. So that’s what worries me. What gives me hope is I still see among students, my students—I teach a national security course—but others as well, the term members here at the council, folks like you, are really deep interest in making sure that America does not just pull behind walls. You know, a strategy that has a perfect record of never working to keep us out of conflict, right? So the fact that, you know, I think there are people who are beginning to sort of think about the world more broadly—no one thinks about it more broadly than farmers, right? And when USAID closed, who were the first people to complain? It was the farmers who had huge USAID contracts. And you watch, the administration is going to end up paying off those farmers for what they would have sold to USAID when we could have turned that produce to great soft power use. FROMAN: Great. Let’s open it up. This shouldn’t be a shy audience unaccustomed to asking questions, so let’s open it up for about a half hour of questions been and then we’ll head to dinner. Oh, come on. This has got to be—there we go, right here in front. One second, the microphone’s making its way. SANGER: And please tell us who you are. FROMAN: Please stand, tell us who you are, where you work, what state you’re from, favorite color. Q: Blue. FROMAN: And make it a question. Q: That blue. I’m Janet Wilson from the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, which is part of the USA Today network. (Applause, laughter.) FROMAN: You can clap. That’s good. Q: And I actually—do I need to stand while I ask the question? FROMAN: Yes. Q: OK. (Laughter.) So I would like to ask about something a little different. You are a White House correspondent, and the White House has been pretty cavalier in terms of the White House press corps. SANGER: That’s a polite way to put it, yeah. (Laughter.) Q: Yeah. So granted, I’m not right there, but you know, in the old days, when I was a very young reporter, if a mayor, a corrupt mayor, tried to diss a member of the press corps, everybody would get up and walk out. You know, they would not get the media attention. And I’m just wondering why there hasn’t been a stronger response, a more direct response from, yes, they insulted the quote, “fake media” or whatever, but the traditional, really hardworking, really knowledgeable journalists like yourself to what’s happening in the White House? SANGER: Great question. So the issue that really brought this to a head was when they banned the AP for not using the phrase Gulf of Mexico. First of all— FROMAN: Gulf of America. SANGER: Gulf of America and instead saying Gulf of Mexico. And then I think the AP style was to say, “which President Trump is trying to call Gulf of America.” First of all, it’s interesting that they picked them out, because the Times uses Gulf of Mexico, you know? And we will also say, which the president is trying to rename, and on this trip you may see him try to rename the Persian Gulf, which I understand from geographers we do not abut, to be the Arabian Gulf, an idea that came up a number of decades ago. It’s been the Persian Gulf, it looks sounds like, since about 350 BC, but anyway. To this, raise the question, if they’re banning the AP, do we all walk out? It’s very tempting to go do, right? Because Donald Trump obviously lives for the media attention. He did a press conference today based around his announcement on prescription drugs that I think went on for more than an hour and made him late to his airplane to leave, because he just kept going on and on. And you see this now, you know, a few times a week. The problem with doing that is two-fold. First of all, the groups that would leave would be the real reporters likely to ask really tough questions, and the groups that would stay would be the conservative influencers who they’ve brought in who start their questions like, isn’t it terrible that the mainstream media covers you by focusing on X? So the first question was, would we be falling down on our primary responsibility to ask really hard questions to all kinds of—to presidents and others? And then I think the second question came, what happened if the media didn’t all come to the same answer on that question? If you’re the networks, or you’re doing any kind of video, you need the video of the president speaking. And so, you know, you might have been in a situation where print journalists or just wire journalists left or something. So instead, people were feeding material from the pool directly to AP and so forth. But it’s not a solution I’m particularly happy with. And on the trip that the president is on now, he is flying on Air Force One in the first presidential trip I can remember with no wire service reporter aboard. FROMAN: Interesting. Q: Can I have a follow-up? FROMAN: Let’s go to somebody else, and if there’s time, we’ll come back. Yes, in the back. Q: I’m Ella. I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s also like—especially with Americans right now—there’s burnout, and there’s also this culture of individualism and sort of an apathy towards politics, especially in the Midwest, in countries—or areas where we don’t see how federal policies really start to affect us. How do you write in a way—how do you go about telling these heavy policy stories in a way that intrigue and interest Joe Schmo, who doesn’t know why that affects him or doesn’t seem to care because it doesn’t affect him? FROMAN: Good question. SANGER: Well, if we started off by saying some of them, like the Iranian nuclear program, not likely to affect their lives—and you saw that, you know, Trump got elected because he focused in on a story about the economy that resonated with people, even if, statistically, it looked like the economy was doing about as strongly as it could go do. But my guess is that when they closed post offices or Social Security offices or stop buying from the farmers because AID has been shut down, it becomes a pretty rapid direct interest. When the tariffs make it hard and the reaction to the tariffs equal tariffs being put on by buyers make it hard for local businesses, it will come home. And you know, we’ve always been in these cycles of American history between isolationism and engagement, between thinking that we could tune out the news and then discovering the war sweeps over us, or just government policy sweeps over you. I think people were pretty tuned out in the 1920s. They paid a lot of attention in the 1930s. People were tuned out after World War II because they wanted to bring everybody home and focus on that. But when the Cold War came along, it seemed pretty existential. So I think you have to view this as something of a cycle in American history. Sam Huntington wrote brilliantly about this—actually, wrote a book about the cycles of American history. And you could argue about whether this goes in seventy-year cycles or some other metric, but we happen to be right now, I think, in a sort of isolationist dip. And my guess is that the man who’s going to bring us out of it is Donald Trump as the effects of some of these policies become clear. FROMAN: When you say isolationist, yet this is the first president in a while who’s wanted to acquire more territory. SANGER: That is really fascinating, and he is—I think the public has something of an isolationist element. I do not believe Donald Trump is an isolationist. FROMAN: I agree with you. Not an isolationist trying to take over Greenland, Panama, and Canada. SANGER: You forgot Gaza. FROMAN: And Gaza, excuse me, that’s right. SANGER: There’s going to be a great, great resort there. (Laughter.) No, I mean, you know, that is really a fascinating element. And you know, for any of you who are operating near the Canadian border, the most fascinating conversation that Trump had with Trudeau—I don’t know if he brought it up again with Carney—is rewriting the, I think, 1908 border treaty that established the border between Canada and which Trump is now referring to as sort of an arbitrary straight line. It’s anything but as you get to it. I was going to propose that story to the Times right around fishing season, this summer to try to map out the— FROMAN: You could go up and do a little field work. SANGER: Yeah, right. FROMAN: Yes, this gentleman. Q: Bill Dorman from Hawaii Public Radio. Military families, as one area, when it comes to Japan, South Korea, the United States, biggest overseas presence of U.S. forces, that triangulation of relationships, and given Trump in first term, very personal, transactional, but relations with Shinzo Abe, with the head of South Korea, helped get him to the border and the photo op and all of that, different political situations in both places now, how do you see that playing out? SANGER: So it’s really fascinating. In the first term, Maggie Haberman and I went off to go interview the president when he was running in 2016, and that was the interview in which he declared that he wanted to pull back all of our troops from any country that we were running big trade deficits with—a connection I can’t remember any other president sort of making. I mean, the troop presence is there for us more than it’s there for the local country, but you could argue there for both, but in any case, somewhat distended from the trade relationship. And then I asked him at one point during the course of that interview, if we pull back our troops, do you mind if they get their own nuclear weapons? Because they’re no longer going to rely on us. And he thought about it for a while and said, no, no, that was fine. And then that led to an uproar, as you can imagine. But this all began to go away a little bit as he developed a relationship particularly with Abe. And what’s interesting to me is he has not brought that threat back. He has brought it back a little bit with Europe, but I have not heard him talk about pulling troops back in Asia. FROMAN: And I think it’s more shifted to burden sharing. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: And the fact that the Europeans are now—I think he’s been quite effective in getting the Europeans to commit to a higher level of defense spending, and the Germans to do something they never thought they would, which was just to take on more debt in order to invest it in national security. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: But you’re right. It’s been less about pulling troops back and more about making sure that the others are paying their fair share. SANGER: By the way, I have a journalistic confession to make coming out of that interview. It was a Friday afternoon. We knew we were writing for the Sunday paper. How many of you have been in this? We’re doing this interview, and of course, it’s Trump, so he’s all over the map. And I’m thinking to myself, I need a theme out of this, OK? So finally, I turned to him, and I said—because he had never used this phrase yet, although it’s hard to believe now—and I said, you know, what you’re describing to me sounds like the old America First movement. You can look up the transcript. We have it on the Times site. FROMAN: So it’s your fault. SANGER: And he looks at me and he said, you know, I kind of like that phrase. (Laughter.) Like what leader would not want their country to be first? And I’m like, oh, right? So we move on. I barely mentioned. He goes on about America First some. I barely mentioned it at the end of the story. And that next Sunday—I think he was in Dallas; I may have the city wrong—and he was doing a rally, and apparently, for the first time, he starts yelling, “America first.” Now I think he would have gotten there anyway, or so I tell my friends. But anyway, he starts doing this. So the next morning I come down, I’m making coffee in the morning, and the TV’s on, it’s CNN, or Morning Joe or something. And my wife, Sherill—and Mike knows well—comes down and she watches Trump yelling America first, takes a sip of coffee, and in that biting phrase that only a spouse can deliver, says, “I hope you’re really proud of yourself.” (Laughter.) FROMAN: That’s a better origin story. Yes, over here at the edge. Q: Hi. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, immigration reporter at the Denver Post. You said that immigration is a beat that’s easy to localize, and I agree. But what do you think existing coverage is missing right now? FROMAN: Great question. SANGER: That’s a really great question. So the first question that comes to my mind that I’m still trying to figure out, is, what has stopped the flows across the border? Is it just the president talking about this increased—because we don’t have that many more troops on the border, and he has not actually managed to deport many more people than got deported during the Biden period, you know, if you look at the overall numbers. FROMAN: He’s deported them to interesting places. SANGER: He’s deported them to interesting places in some cases, but even the numbers to El Salvador, you’d measure in the hundreds, right? Then, there have been these extremely high-profile but very inefficient ways to deport people, which is, you know, go find out what somebody wrote in the Columbia Spectator, or in the Boston College papers, and go after them one by one. But there’s no less efficient way to go deport people. That’s all symbolism. So is this spigot actually turned off? Is it sort of a temporary thing? Is it a fear level he has created? What is it? And then the second part, which I think has been reported really well at the local level and at the national level, is the legal basis for some of these deportations, particularly those without process. And you know, when you’ve got pretty clear Supreme Court interpretations that anybody in the country has at least some due process rights—it may not be the full rights that that U.S. citizens have—watching that play out place by place, you know, having the judge in Vermont say, no, you bring her back to this jurisdiction for—you know, I mean, this is the most basic constitutional clash, and it’s playing out in very local, fascinating ways. FROMAN: Interesting. Yes, right there. Q: Hi, Erika Slife with the Chicago Tribune. I have a question that really defined for me when I saw the coverage the difference between local and national news was during the helicopter and plane crash over the Potomac River, when somebody asked President Trump if he was going to be visiting the site, and he answered very callously, “What am I going to do, go swimming?” If Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago had answered that way, that would have been our headline. Like, this is how he’s answering to the victim question. So I just wondered on a national level, like the New York Times, how that quote just gets buried sort of in the article and not that emotional response to this is how I respond to my constituents. SANGER: Well, maybe because it was the second most outrageous thing he said that day. I happened to be in the press room that day. It’s a rare day, but we rotate weeks where we go to the press briefing. And so I asked him the question that followed that one, which was he basically charged with no evidence while people were still in the river and bodies were still in the river, that this was a—that the pilot had been a DEI hire, right? And he had no way of knowing. You know, turned out she was a quite experienced pilot, and was not the only one flying the helicopter that day. May have made some big errors, but that didn’t prove the DEI part. But you raise a really interesting question, because Trump has managed, over the years, to sort of have a different standard about him. I mean, I was thinking of the same issue today in this morning’s talk, when he was asked, well, don’t you think it is ethically inappropriate to take a $400 million aircraft from a foreign state? They didn’t even go into the emoluments clause, right? And he said, well, if somebody’s going to offer you that aircraft for free, what are you going to do? Turn around and say, I want to pay you a billion dollars for it, or something like that? He said, of course not. Of course we’d take it for free. In a different presidency, I think that would have been covered quite—I think we’re all a little bit inured to what this president says. FROMAN: But do you think that’s a step change forever, or do you think it’s particular to this president? Have our standards basically changed? SANGER: So you’re asking the really fundamental question about this administration. Has our standards for presidents changed? I mean, ten years ago, it was considered to be a scandal that Barack Obama showed up in a tan suit, right? I mean, we’ve gone a long way from there, OK? And I think on the foreign policy changes, and even on the domestic policy changes, the things he’s dismantled, are they permanent, or do they bounce back? I think it’s really hard to go recreate the Consumer Protection Agency that he closed down, or change the nature—you know, rebuild USAID. And he tore down in a matter of weeks, stuff that took decades to put together. But your question is, has Trump forever changed the presidency? And I don’t know. We asked that question after the first term, and Biden managed to sort of restore it to, you know, something that seemed more meaty and if a little bit sleepier, right? And I’m not sure that’s possible after the second term. FROMAN: Yes, this gentleman. There’s a microphone. Q: Ben Kieffer from Iowa Public Radio. And I wanted to shift a little bit because the last few answers have been sort of like Trump the all-powerful when we know he has backing of many members of Congress. Iowa, a former purple state, now the deep red state. And I wanted you to speak, David, to the position of GOP members of Congress vis-à-vis Trump on foreign policy, because on a lot of areas—not just Greenland, Panama Canal, and so forth—it’s been a 180. SANGER: Yeah. Q: And we haven’t heard a lot of resistance there. Just, well, they don’t like to be asked by it. So what is going on there? And how do we report with our members of Congress? And we know how the Republican Party was traditionally in international relations and security around the world, and now it’s a completely different world according to Donald Trump, and our GOP members of Congress are like, right? SANGER: Well, first of all, if I was contending here that he was all-powerful, I’m not sure that’s right. I mean, there will be a moment that he will—where his power will peak out, and I’m not sure whether we’ve hit that yet or not, but you’re certainly seeing more resistance to him now from the courts and from the townhall meetings and so forth. But you’re raising a really interesting question, which is, how do you explain the fact that even in the first term there were members of Congress who were consistently voting for aid to Ukraine who stopped doing so as Trump entered the campaign period, including Marco Rubio, who had been one of the strongest supporters, and the only ones who stuck to that position are people like former Leader McConnell, who’s not running for re-election? And you know, I think you folks have done a really great job of putting the individual congressmen on the griddle on this question, because it gets to fundamental Republican orthodoxy that if you allow the Russians to do this to Ukraine, they’re coming after democracies in NATO next. That used to be what they said when Zelensky would visit, and he was treated like, you know, Churchill in a T-shirt. FROMAN: Did you make that up, Churchill in a T-shirt? SANGER: No. Many others have used that. You’re welcome to it. FROMAN: That’s good. SANGER: That’s good. And so, you know, they’re scared. I mean, you heard this from Lisa Murkowski. FROMAN: Can I ask, maybe if you could bring the microphone back, when you’re interviewing your members of Congress, what do they say? Q: Well, when we get to interview them—and I’ve been around doing a daily public talk show in Iowa back—you know, Iowa voted for Obama twice and then went for Trump three times. OK? So I watched this evolution from purple to red. And it used to be that we would, of course, have all members of our Congress agree to be on public radio. And now—and this is another question, how the media structure has changed?—they have friendlier media, or they just don’t need us, because they get elected anyway without appealing to more of a middle cross section of the state so— SANGER: And can be in favor of defunding you as well, right? Q: Yeah. And what do they say? They often don’t say anything, because they aren’t—they don’t have the time to be on the show. SANGER: No, I think it’s fascinating. Looks, one of the things we have to sort of admit that that President Trump and the Republicans did very well was trying to isolate and identify real journalistic organizations as somehow left-wing bias, whatever, even if they were doing real investigative work. And the president in his first term admitted at various moments that he does this because if they write something bad about him, he wants to be able to establish that, you know, they’re not credible. I thought it was really interesting he went after AP, because what else does AP do? They collate the vote on election night—right?—for both midterm elections and presidential elections. And so attacking their credibility, attacking the credibility of an NPR affiliate, is all part of the strategy. And that strategy has spread, and all you have to do is walk inside the White House press room now to see it. It’s not that they have thrown any of the traditional media out. It’s that they have invited in these influencers and treated them as if they were real media organizations. And certainly, they have audiences. Some of them have bigger audiences than we do, but most of them are not news gatherers. FROMAN: You know, one more question. Sorry, I was going to add on a homily here, but we’ll do a question in a sec. Q: I’m standing up even though I’m right in front of you. My name is Peyton. I work for the Fargo Forum, but I cover kind of statewide North Dakota politics. I cover the State House. I’m that correspondent. So kind of speaking to what you were saying, and kind of that sentiment that media is left wing all of a sudden, I have sources in the State House, in the Capitol, off record saying, I don’t agree with this. This is bad. A lot of the things, from the cuts—domestic cuts to, let’s say, AmeriCorps, to the tariffs, to all sorts of things like that. But they’re saying that off the record. They’re saying, well, I can’t say that to anyone, because no one will believe me. No one will understand, and I don’t have enough sway to actually make any change. But these are traditional, for lack of a better term, conservatives, self-identified Republicans that have been there for decades. So do you run into that? And if so, how do you go about those interviews and covering those people? SANGER: It’s frustrating because obviously they’re not going to go on the record with that. I hear it in things like President Trump’s apparent desire to normalize relations with Russia, something that most Republicans I know have a hard time with. And some of them say, look, I can’t oppose him in public. You see what happens? You get one bad tweet, and then you get primaried. Others say, look, it’s not going to go anywhere. You don’t need my voice in this one. Where I think you will begin to hear that crack is when they close down facilities, like I said, Social Security or whatever, in individual districts and people are stuck without getting, you know, on long hold lines, which you get anyway, yeah. FROMAN: We are incredibly fortunate at the Council. It’s a membership organization. We have 5,300 members. About 500 of them are leading journalists and media executives, and none more thoughtful and insightful than David Sanger. So please join me in thanking him for being with us. (Applause.) SANGER: Thanks, Michael. FROMAN: Tomorrow morning, at 8:45, we’re going to demystify tariff trade and the economy, but now you get to demystify dinner upstairs, or downstairs, somewhere, and enjoy the evening. It’s great to have you here. Look forward to a really great day tomorrow as well. Thanks. (END)

Elise Labott, the 2024-25 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR, discusses the shift away from traditional news sources to social media and the implications of segmenting audiences through outlets such as Bluesky and X on local communities. Bobby Allyn, technology correspondent at NPR, speaks about his experience covering Silicon Valley companies and the ways they are transforming society. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. We’re delighted to have participants from forty-two states and U.S. territories with us today so thank you for taking the time to be with us, especially as I know you’re probably under a deadline. I want to remind everyone that this webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. We are pleased to have Elise Labott, Bobby Allyn, and host Carla Anne Robbins with us. Elise Labott is a 2024-25 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR and a leading journalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy and global affairs. She has reported from more than eighty countries and is a former CNN global affairs correspondent. She’s also the author of Cosmopolitics, a Substack publication focusing on U.S. policy and international relations; and the founder and editor in chief of Zivvy News, a nonprofit digital platform that engages youth on political and global issues, civic engagement, and media literacy. Bobby Allyn is a technology correspondent at NPR. He reports on big tech, startups, social media, artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley, and other tech-related topics. He was previously a staff writer at National Public Radio, the Oregonian, and the Tennessean. And Carla Anne Robbins, our host, she is senior fellow at CFR and co-host of the CFR podcast “The World Next Week.” She also serves as faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, and previously she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. So welcome, all. Thank you for being with us. I am going to turn the conversation now to Carla to explore new frontiers of local news. So, Carla, over to you. ROBBINS: Thank you so much, and thanks, Elise, it’s great to see you. And, Bobby, it’s lovely to meet you. I listen to you, so glad to meet you. ALLYN: Oh. Good to meet you. Thanks for having me. LABOTT: Same here. Same here. Nice to be with you and all of you. ROBBINS: My first job, I was a researcher at NPR, so. ALLYN: Oh, really? Oh, wow. ROBBINS: Yeah. So—I was Deb Amos’ researcher, just— ALLYN: That’s amazing. That’s back when we had researchers. So, wow. (Laughter.) ROBBINS: Actually, I’ve hung out with Deb many times since then but she’s never—I’m always very deferential to her. OK. So I thought we would start out with some very interesting data about social media news from Pew, one of my favorite go-to places for data. So they do regular research on—ask people about their news consumption habits so they asked people how—what are their preferred sources for news in 2024 and they said about a quarter of U.S. adults—23 percent—said they prefer news websites or apps as their sources of news. Eighteen percent said they prefer social media. But the trajectory is always very important. Polls are snapshots, and that’s up 6 percentage points since 2023. So if we’re going to start being calm about the notion that news websites are leading they’re not leading for long. Twelve percent preferred search. Five percent preferred podcasts. When they asked people where they got local news they found that they often or sometimes—70 percent of them said they got it from friends, family, and neighbors, 66 percent said they got it from local news outlets, and 54 percent said they got it often or sometimes from social media. Age, of course, predictably, had a huge impact on how people answered the question. Seventy-one percent of U.S. adults age eighteen to twenty-nine get their news about local government and politics from social media, compared with 36 percent of those sixty-five and older. And, finally, I thought this was really interesting about which platforms are most popular for sources for news. Facebook and YouTube—about a third of Americans say they regularly get their news from there. Instagram, 20 percent. TikTok, 17 percent. X, the site formerly known as Twitter, 12 percent. Reddit, 8 percent. Something called Nextdoor, which I’ve never even heard of, which is 5 percent. Snapchat, 5 percent. And once again, demographics, political affinity, and the trajectory are all incredibly important here because people who said that they went to these sites regularly and which sites they relied on more or less for news 59 percent of people who say they use X say they get their news there. Fifty-seven percent of users who go to Truth Social say they get their news there. Fifty-two percent of TikTok users say they get news there, and that’s up from 43 percent just in 2023 and 22 percent in 2020. So increasingly people are turning to TikTok for news. I don’t know if you find that comforting or not. I don’t find it especially comforting. So given all of those stats my first question, which I’m going to pitch to both of you, is why do these stats matter for us as, shall I say, legacy media people other than depressing us about the future of our business? You know, how does social media fit into the professional lives of those who do this? You know, is it because we should be covering this because everybody else is getting their information there? Should we be using social media to leverage to get our own work out? Should we be emulating it in some way? You know, why—we know they’re eating our lunch but why should we be paying attention to it? So with that, I think I’ll throw it to Bobby first. ALLYN: Yeah. I had a NPR editor who liked to say, we’re not only competing with commercial news on the radio but we’re competing with Taylor Swift too, right? It’s this idea that it’s the attention economy. If not consuming one of our stories whether on air or on the website you’re going to be doing something else. And I just think there’s this big credibility gap, right? I think increasingly young people find the most authentic way to consume news is through a content creator they already have a relationship with and trust over a legacy media organization, most of which are full of reporters who have been professionally trained to not put their personality first. And I think—I mean, I started my career—my first ten years of my career, you know, I was working for local newspapers and local radio stations, and I think there is a real opportunity to after you file your story go to TikTok and do some version of it. Hit Bluesky and X and Mastodon and all the other social media sites you could think of to do other versions of it. Now, that’s—you can see that’s sort of, like, unpaid additional labor and that’s really not fair. But, increasingly, if you do not do that somebody else will. I mean, I file stories all the time and then go on TikTok and see a twenty-two-year-old in Denver doing a video on it that went viral and it’s better than I could have done and it maybe reached a bigger audience than I would have done. And there’s no reference to my reporting and that’s fine, but the point being if we’re not doing it somebody else will and often when there’s a content creator doing a video aggregation of a story for TikTok the details are wrong or there’s causation explained where the causation didn’t exist, and it just really pollutes the news ecosystem. So especially with TikTok I really, really have been pushing my colleagues to just go and do a direct to camera two-minute explanation of breaking news when you have it because you just never know it might go viral, and if you don’t do it somebody else will. ROBBINS: So mainly what you’re saying is if you don’t do it someone else will so if we do it we at least get it right. ALLYN: Yeah. ROBBINS: But it’s also cannibalizing our work. But maybe our work has already been cannibalized. ALLYN: Yes and no. I mean, I don’t—there’s so many incentives on platform, on TikTok, so that people do not leave the platform. I don’t know that most people who are watching a TikTok of my explanation of some story would have ever gone to NPR.org or turned on the radio. Our own internal surveys have found that there’s a huge distinction between our broadcast audience and our digital audience and I’d be willing to say that that’s also true on people who primarily get their news from TikTok, and it’s really difficult on TikTok to link out to a story. So it’s just, like—I don’t know. I mean, I just think we have to be putting ourselves out there. We have to be hitting as many platforms as we can. But, again, it’s really, really dicey because the ones who are the most popular tend to have the biggest opinions and the biggest personalities and sometimes that can chafe against the standards and the practices at legacy media institutions that really want you to surface the reporting before you surface your personality, right? So I think that’s caused some internal strife at a number of news organizations. ROBBINS: I want to come back to that, but I want to go over to Elise because I want to talk about the different personalities of the different websites in a minute if we’re going to do this. But, Elise, why should we care about this? LABOTT: Well, I think, you know, Bobby hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways but I think one of the big elephants in the room—there are two elephants in the room. Actually, one of them is, you know—let’s just say Bobby works for NPR. NPR is no longer just radio. You know, it’s a twenty-four-hour digital organization, multiplatform, and I think journalists really need to think of themselves as if you’re with a newspaper, if you’re with the local TV station, you can’t think of yourselves as just that. We are all multimedia journalists now and these are the places where, you know, we’re getting our audience. And it doesn’t matter if you’re listening to the story on the radio or whether you’re, you know, as Bobby said, doing a thing on TikTok. Your audience is where you find them and sometimes we have to go where—we have to meet the audience where they are and if they’re not listening to the radio, you know, as Bobby said, maybe we can go on TikTok and get them to listen to the NPR or, you know, I really like this guy—and that goes back into the whole idea is that, you know, especially young people where I’m really focused now through Zivvy News and also through my—some research I’m doing at the Council young people are turning away from legacy media in droves because they don’t feel, like, a connection to the—these news organizations. They don’t feel that there’s enough authenticity. And so I think this is a real way to get new audiences to meet them on TikTok, trying—you know, they’re looking for personalities. They’re looking for—you know, I like to say, you know, news—they call them news influencers now. We called them newsmakers back when. Influencers aren’t—nowadays they aren’t just, like, booty dancers, you know, doing that TikTok latest craze; they’re people on TikTok that are delivering the news. Some of them are journalists and some of them aren’t. And as you said, people have the greatest—you know, some of the people that have the greatest followers have the greatest opinions. That’s true in some ways but there are others that are just, you know, going on, being their authentic self, deliver the news and particularly young people are really identifying with that. And so if we can go on and we can give—as you said, we know we’re going to do it I’d like to say with legacy media ethics and standard but animated by, you know, what’s new and what’s next. So I think it is a real opportunity to gain new followers and also meet potential followers where they are and also show a little bit more of your personality because nowadays that’s what audiences are looking for. ALLYN: And I’ll just add to that, Elise. I think you made a lot of really good points. If you’re wondering how creators on TikTok may be explaining their stories, one very common way of doing it is talking in front of the green screen feature and they put up on the green screen the article and TikTok— LABOTT: Right. ALLYN: AI can actually read the byline. So you can go onto TikTok and just type your name in and you can see how people are explaining your story. I mean, I did that. At first I was, like, oh my God. Like, there’s really, really talented people. I mean, they are—some people—some of the TikTokers are incredible entertainers, incredible performers. They don’t always get the facts right but there’s something that we can learn from them. I really think there is. ROBBINS: When we talk about what makes them good performers and whether or not that fits within—and I’m not—I mean, Elise has known me a long time. I’m not stuffy despite the place that I work. I will tell you that when I was—I was at the edit page of the Times and Twitter was really taking off I would say to people, you can’t get ahead of the edit page on Twitter. You can’t stake out an editorial position that isn’t the editorial position of the Times. I don’t think that was unreasonable of me. A lot of people hated me but that’s another story for another day. We can talk to my shrink about it. But journalism, obviously, has changed an enormous amount. There are people who complain that journalism is too editorial. Usually it’s if they don’t agree with you. OK. LABOTT: Right. Right. ROBBINS: The people on the left don’t like right opinions. People on the right don’t like left opinions. How do we—what makes the people who are performing your articles, Bobby, or performing your articles, Elise—what makes them compelling, authentic, without—you know, that you could possibly do that would still be within the standards of journalism and that would be not playing into this notion that somehow you were overly politicizing your work? LABOTT: OK. I’m going to give everybody a cautionary tale on this because it is a delicate balance. Some people on this—Carla may remember and maybe Irina does—but years ago in 2015— ROBBINS: (Laughs.) I don’t like the Carla will remember years ago conjunction. LABOTT: Well, you’ll remember—well, only because we are friends. We’ve been longtime friends so you’ll probably remember. (Laughter.) It has a lot of mythic proportions in my head, maybe not in others. I was suspended from CNN for two weeks because I tweeted something that was deemed to be editorializing. And what did I tweet? I tweeted—you know, Bobby’s shaking his head. He may remember too. It was—it was about the Muslim ban or the Syrian ban of all refugees. And I said something like—you know, this was when Twitter was just coming up and just kind of gaining traction, and they were looking for us to be a little voicier—a little bit voicier. And I said someone like, oh, I thought it was un-American. It wasn’t—it wasn’t partisan, but it was a(n) editorial position. This is un-American. The Statue of Liberty is bowing her head in shame, I think I said. Now, at the time it was a little bit provocative but it wasn’t what we’re hearing on TV today or what we’re seeing on Twitter today, and someone from the Washington Post wrote this article on how dare she, she’s editorializing, and this was, like, a cautionary tale of what not to do. And, you know, I felt at the time, like, when everything happened if I’m going to die defending defenseless serious refugees—defenseless Syrian refugees. That may be a good hill to die on but it was editorializing and I learned my lesson, and I used it as an opportunity to never do that again. (Laughter.) Whereas we saw how journalism, especially in the Trump era and with this polarization we have—any journalist can talk about whatever they want. They say whatever they want. There were no guardrails and I really think the public is responding to that—that if you’re going to go to mainstream media you’re not looking for an editorial and you’re—except if you’re looking on the editorial page. And I don’t want to hear an anchor say they’re outraged or I don’t want to hear their anchor say, I’m embarrassed to be an American. They want—they think that the bias is there and so if the bias is there why can’t I listen to the bias from someone who follows my bias? And I like that. ROBBINS: But then how do you square the circle with going back to being authentic and entertaining and getting—pay attention to you? LABOTT: Look—I mean, we’re doing it—we’re doing it right now, right? I mean, when I would go on TV and—you know, we like to say, oh, I’m not a performer but, you know, we’re performing. We’re giving our personality. You can show personality and you can show a little nod or a wink or a, you know, inflection without saying, you know, I feel this way about this person or I feel this way about this story. Look, we’re all making editorial kind of choices based on how we write and how we tell a story so that—we’re already kind of indicating, and we don’t like to admit it, Carla, but the way we tell a story is indicating our bias. We all have biases. The thing is to not, like, beat someone else over the head with it and, unfortunately, what we’re finding on, you know, a lot of these sites is that there is—it’s a free for all in terms of, like, that’s what it is. It’s people giving their opinion and if they don’t like your opinion then they don’t want to hear from you. But there is a way of, I think, showing your personality and showing, like, how unreal this story is or this is crazy or, you know, kind of using emotion and using inflection without taking a side on the story. And I think that’s the delicate balance we all, everyone on this call, is trying to feel right now, and you can’t control what someone else is going to do about your story but you can control how you do it. ALLYN: Yeah. ROBBINS: Bobby, we’ve got a question from Leoneda Inge but—who, which fits in with what I wanted you to answer as well which is what did you learn from watching the person reading it that you should be doing differently and what Leoneda is asking is, I figured out years ago if I produce a story I want it delivered at least three different ways—what ways do you recommend under deadline. So I’m going to kluge onto that my question which is if you’re going to do it three different ways you’re going to—obviously, you’re going to have to package it in three different ways, depending on the medium, and it’s—I would suspect all those three different ways are not going to be the NPR way. So— ALLYN: Yeah. I mean, especially for, you know, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, TikTok audience it’s not going to be an NPR script where there’s, you know, a twenty-five-second host intro, a question that maybe confuses half the people, and then a very formal answer. Here’s—(laughter)—here’s what’s in it. You saw that thing on the news. ROBBINS: (Inaudible)—public—(audio break). FASKIANOS: We’re trying to get Bobby back on and I’m going to turn it back—oh, here he comes. OK. So, Carla, over to you and we’re going to send out a note to our participants that we’re back on. So why don’t we continue and we’ll get everybody back on? ROBBINS: That’s great. Thank you. Bobby, you were saying? The question, of course, was multiple platforms. The question different platforms, different, you know, norms—esthetic norms for them. How do you do that and how do you still sort of maintain your standards? ALLYN: Yeah. I was just saying it wouldn’t really land if you did a standard NPR two-way, a Q&A for, you know, TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts audience because they want you to cut to the chase faster and, honestly, NPR should probably do that more often as well. (Laughter.) A lot of, you know, vertical video news videos that you’re seeing on social media it’s people very immediately just saying, you saw this thing in the news. Here’s what’s up. Here’s what it means. Here’s what I have to say. Honestly, often the writing is really sharp, it’s really compelling, and the editing is really fast, and I think everyone in broadcast news has something to learn from content creators on platforms like TikTok. And, again, when it comes to breaking news this does get a little hairy because as any reporter knows when a story is breaking and unfolding there’s a lot of key questions and areas that remain unknown, and when a sort of younger, you know, social media audience will see legacy journalists saying, we know A and B but we don’t yet know C, because of the environment that we’re all in some people automatically assume that the news is hiding something, right—that there’s a conspiracy, that there’s something happening from like, say, the masthead on down that wants a piece of information to be silenced. We all know that is not true but there are many people on social media saying that and they often have very loud megaphones and you’re up against that. So sometimes the question that I’m often asking is do I entertain that to disabuse people of that theory or is that giving it more oxygen. LABOTT: Yeah. I— ALLYN: And reasonable minds can differ on that, right? LABOTT: Yeah. I mean, I have been struggling that with myself and I say am I giving it currency, am I—by even, like, addressing some of the most ridiculous things, like—let’s go back to, like, the Pizzagate or, you know, what are those things where it’s just so utterly ridiculous and people are talking about it do I even start talking about it and say, oh, I—you know, and I find now CNN is or, you know, my former employer or others are engaging in mainstream media, like, they feel that they have to engage to be able to compete with some of the, you know, chatter on social media. Are you covering the fact that there’s a phenomenon on social media or are you actually, you know, engaging and reporting out a story that we know is not true, and I do feel like sometimes giving things currency and, like, even having to say, like, I spoke to my sources and they say that’s not true gives currency to things that, you know, maybe we do have a—if we have a responsibility to kind of, you know, be the adults in the room in terms of some of the journalism that’s going on I think that’s a good way to start is not to go down the rabbit holes of some of the conspiracy theories that are, you know, having oxygen. But, I mean, a recent one that we faced was remember with the dogs and the cats and they’re eating the dogs and they’re eating the cats, and that became such a thing that that became a news story in and of itself and I just—like, I had to disengage for a few days because I was really disturbed by this that it became, like—you know, we’ve talked about this before, I think, amongst all of us but in this age of, you know, where truth is even being questioned we’re having to engage in talking about nontruths. So it’s not just about content, which I do agree with Bobby, like, there needs to be different kinds of content for different types of platforms. You can also play with, you know, kind of graphics and Canva is a great way to, you know, inject some, you know, color and things into some of your content. You know, we could be a little bit more creative with the visuals, I think, on some of these social media platforms that we can’t do on others. But in terms of the stories that we select I think we still need to be, you know, what people look for. Then we’re just, you know, kind of what makes us different than some of these other creators that are out there if we’re not kind of animating our presence on social media with those legacy media ethics and standards. ROBBINS: Well, I want to have other people ask questions of the group. So, please, either put questions in the Q&A or raise your hands so we can have you guys join as well as talking about your experiences with this because I’m sure you guys have questions as well and answers as well to share with us. And while you do that and formulate your questions Andrew Bowen, who’s the Metro reporter at KPBS-FM in San Diego, you had a question which got wiped out when we disappeared. So can you voice your question? Because, I’m sorry, it got wiped out when we—when the gremlins took us away. Unless Andrew had to go back to work. While we wait for Andrew— Q: Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me? ROBBINS: OK, great. Yes, absolutely. Q: Yeah. I’m wondering what the—whether there’s any reason why someone—you know, a public media journalist making a video on TikTok shouldn’t include a call to donate in every single video. Because we already do this on the radio, we do it on TV, and if the news consumer is finding their way to donate to nonprofit media via TikTok instead of FM radio or linear television then what’s the difference? ALLYN: Yeah. That’s— LABOTT: Bobby, you want to take that? ALLYN: Yeah. It’s an interesting idea. I mean, fundraising is a little outside of my bailiwick but I will say on TikTok if you start hawking something the authenticity meter is going to go off pretty fast I think. Even if it’s for, you know, something that we all think is—you know, has value like public media it gets a little dicey because it just looks like we’re sort of there to sell them something, and there’s already a lot of ads on TikTok. So I really just don’t know that that would land. I’d be curious to see what the conversion rate would be. I would imagine it would be extremely low. But, I mean, why not experiment? Why not try new things? Why not try to, you know, make the case that there is value in public media? But, yeah, I don’t—I just think there’s maybe, you know, potential for that to backfire if it becomes overly sales pitchy because that’s not really the vibe of TikTok unless you’re actually looking at an ad. But this is totally outside my expertise, so I don’t know, you can listen to what I’m saying on this. (Laughs.) LABOTT: Yeah. Or another thing you could do is say, if you like this video follow me or link in bio, and then in the link in the bio that’s where you could, like, go to—like, people have a link tree now, which is like a link tree is all of the different platforms that you’re on and that’s where a lot of even creators are asking for, like, here’s my Patreon or if you want to donate. So instead of doing it in the content and being like, hey, how about a few bucks, like, you can say, if you like this follow my, you know, link and bio and that’s where you can find it. So it is good to put it there. Probably maybe not in the video. ROBBINS: Can we talk about the different—I mean, the different platforms, which are all very—you know, three platforms, potentially but many of them have different political coloration to them and we all seem to be splintering into different—into our different ecosystems themselves. Bobby, have you—or Elise, have you ever posted on Truth Social? LABOTT: Never. I don’t even read it. ALLYN: I have an account that I’ll use to confirm that something Trump, you know, supposedly wrote there—he actually wrote but I don’t really go to Truth Social. I mean, you know, X has basically become so extreme that when I occasionally lurk on X I feel like I’m getting some flavor of Truth Social. There’s been a bit of a migration from Truth Social over to X. So I think I’m definitely getting a window into that world just by going through my timeline there, and there’s just such a link penalty on X. People have noticed that—I mean, Elon even admitted it recently that if you tweet or post, I guess, we say now and have a hyperlink in your post it’s going to be—the algorithm down ranks it. So that’s why you’re seeing people write something, they put the link underneath it. But even then there’s a penalty, and the whole—I mean, the whole point—because the whole play in the world of social media is engagement so whenever you have a hyperlink that is basically asking people to leave the platform. The less time on the platform the less advertising revenue they could bring in. So I spend a lot less time on Twitter than I used to. I would say I spend now about 80 percent of my social media time in terms of looking for and sharing news on Bluesky—I really like Bluesky—maybe 10 percent on Threads and 10 percent on X. But Bluesky has been great for journalists in terms of engagement, in terms of—a bunch of news organizations have come out recently and said they’re actually getting more referral traffic from Bluesky than they are X. So I think there’s a lot of hope with Bluesky. A lot of people are excited about it. But it’s still very young, it’s still very small, but I think it has potential. LABOTT: You could offer— ROBBINS: One second, Elise. I just want to follow up with both of you about Bluesky, which is that Bluesky is where people go when they’re fed up with X. So it’s a very self-selected political audience. So, I mean, aren’t we basically just putting ourselves into a news ghetto if we’re just posting on Bluesky? ALLYN: I think that was maybe true in the beginning but Bluesky is becoming more diverse. You know, the so-called shit posters—you know, the kind of people who just post nonsense all day—are increasingly coming to Bluesky. I’m seeing more, you know, right-wing provocateurs on Bluesky. It is a lot of folks part of the so-called exodus—you know, people like you’re saying, people leaving the Elon Musk ecosystem. But increasingly it is not just one type of person. There are other social media platforms that are more ideologically striped but—I don’t know, I find that I’m getting a pretty wide range of opinions and reactions to my posts on Bluesky. I’m not using it as much as I use used to use X but, yeah. No, to your point that’s why sometimes there’s this sort of fallacy in talking about social media and that people just use one. You know, we’re just on this one place. We’re talking to people on this one platform. We’re sharing links. But what you should do is share your link everywhere you can. I mean, I have some colleagues who are now sharing all their links as their first social media site to LinkedIn because they noticed— LABOTT: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. ALLYN: —lots of engagement on LinkedIn. I mean, why not just share it everywhere? I mean, what’s the downside of just trying every single platform? I guess the downside is it’s just really exhausting. (Laughs.) But if you have the energy for it put your link everywhere and see what works and just constantly experiment and iterate, right? LABOTT: Yeah. I would say that I’m using LinkedIn a lot more. Can you hear me? ROBBINS: Mmm hmm. LABOTT: OK. I’m using LinkedIn a lot more and I feel like LinkedIn now—it used to be kind of about getting a job but now I think it’s a lot more of a professional—a place where professionals are discussing and people that want to have a little bit more thoughtful of an engagement are discussing on LinkedIn. So I’m using that a lot more. And then also Substack, you know, isn’t traditionally necessarily a social media platform but I have a Substack. A lot of journalists are moving to Substack to put out their content and they also have a new kind of Twitter-ish feature where it’s called Notes where you can have thoughtful discussion. So I think, you know, Bobby is right that we need to, you know, kind of move out a little bit beyond the Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok and, you know, just post everywhere you can. Usually, I just have a thing is where I’m going to post something I may tweak it a little for each different platform. I’m going to go to Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads, you know, Instagram and TikTok, you know, and, you know, Substack is my primary platform so obviously I’m going to do that. I would also love to know what everybody in the audience is using. If you want to put it in the chat what you guys are using we can—love to hear about that. ROBBINS: Thank you, Elise, for asking that question, which is what—I would love to hear this as well what people are using and I’d also love to hear— LABOTT: And why. What do they like about it. ROBBINS: Yeah, or tell us. You know, speak up. I’d love to hear from you all, and I’d also love to hear whether or not your editors, or if you are an editor, does anyone still have a conversation whether there’s a potential to monetize the use of social media or has everyone just thrown their hands up and said, forget it, we’re not going to be able to monetize this? They’re too big for us. They’ve overwhelmed us. We give up. Because you—both Elise and Bobby said in the beginning of this that somehow as you were saying about the downloading the links in X. But is there any way to create followers to get them to come back to our sites or is this really our job here is that at least we’re depolluting—we’re cleaning up the bay? We’re correcting misinformation. We’re getting more information ourselves to see what people are paying attention to. We’re using this because it’s better to depollute the ecosystem. But there’s no way we can monetize it and even though it’s basically gobbling up our space. ALLYN: Yeah. Again, when it comes to the business side of journalism it’s just really outside of my expertise. I mean, I have thoughts on that but sometimes those thoughts come against, like, institutional priorities. I mean, NPR we’re obviously public media and so because of our public—you know, public interest is supposed to drive our newsroom and, you know, we’re a nonprofit. We don’t have a pay wall. But, you know, my colleagues at other publications who do have hard pay walls because, obviously, journalism costs money they’re constantly up against this question of, do I go to all these social media apps and give a summary of all my reporting and that does actually create a bit of a cannibalization because you’re creating a disincentive for anyone to ever become a subscriber to your publication if you’re doing that for every single story. But it’s a matter of tradeoffs because not doing it means you’re missing a huge and growing audience so what do you do, right? I think one of the questions we’re kind of trying to strike at here is how do we get social media passive consumers to become active participants and people who will pay for our news product, and I think lots of people are trying to figure this out. I don’t have any perfect answers. But it’s a tricky one. It is. I mean, I know myself I’ve been in the news business my entire life, which isn’t that long. I’m thirty-seven. But it’s the only career I’ve had and I sometimes— LABOTT: Me, too. ALLYN: —I’m sent a link and I see a pay wall and I don’t pay. This is what I do for a living. So I have some sympathy with people who see a pay wall and say, well, I want to read this article but I don’t want the publication for a year. (Laughs.) So, I mean, obviously, that’s how it is for a lot of people. LABOTT: Well, yeah. I would say, I mean, it’s—you’re going to—if you’re looking for, you know, people to look for your content it’s going to be on the quality of your engagement on social media. So if people really like you on social media and they want more of you they’re going to go look for your content wherever they can find it. If your content is good people will find you. So creators are making—and by the way, you know, each individual is going to be different with each individual news organization. But people are monetizing on social media and creators are making a lot of money on social media through the platforms. And we’re—you know, someone just asked whether we’re—YouTube is—I think YouTube is a little bit more for an older audience and there’s not as much engagement as some of the others. But certainly I also, you know, put my stuff on Facebook and those—people are making money on Facebook. There’s also YouTube. So, you know, I think if you want an audience it doesn’t—there are two things. You either want an audience and you want to—and/or you want to monetize. If you just want an audience it shouldn’t matter. You’re Carla with the New York Times or Bobby with NPR or Wall Street Journal or whatever, and wherever it is—wherever they find you that’s where it is. If you want to monetize you have to give a little bit of yourself to kind of, like—you know, and in your—maybe we don’t want to say, you know, please donate to NPR but you could be, like, if you really like my work come visit me on NPR. ALLYN: But then— LABOTT: You know what I mean? And that’s an authenticity that, you know— ALLYN: There’s another tension, too, from the institutional perspective because we want legacy media, public media, to be encouraging reporters in the field to become social media personalities. but if they become too good at it they won’t need their institutions and they could probably make more money without their institution. So from the sort of management perspective do you give them a really long leash and then they say, actually I can make more money by monetizing my videos—goodbye? I don’t know. ROBBINS: I don’t think that’s happened to a lot of people. I think most people who’ve ended up on Substack have, shall we say, their newsrooms have been shrinking. ALLYN: There’s also people on Substack making many millions of dollars, so it just depends— LABOTT: Well, or they didn’t like or they didn’t—or they felt—they left mainstream media because a lot of the reasons that audiences are leaving because—you know, like I said, mainstream media has this, like, cachet but let’s not pretend that most of them aren’t as biased as the rest of them anymore. They all have an agenda and, like, some people are more—you know, some of the creators online are more honest about it. So, again, I hear from a lot of young people and, you know, I’m doing this research at the Council on this very topic. I had a focus group with a lot of young people about where you’re getting your news, social media, and they say, look, you know, I—what is—you know, the mainstream news media is biased so what does it matter if I get my content from a biased creator or a biased New York Times? Like, you know, when—again, when truth is—and facts are not really the primary driver people—these young people, a lot of them even know that some of the stuff they’re reading on social media isn’t true. They don’t care. So I think that we need to go. We need to be able to be—we can still be ourselves—accurate, informative, vetted sources. But, you know, as we’ve been talking about we can learn a lot from, you know, some of their creators and what they’re doing. ROBBINS: So John Allison from—he’s the news editor of the Tribune Review. John, you raised a question about Facebook. Would you like to talk a little bit about that or anything else about your experience with social media as an editor? Q: Unmute. Hello. ROBBINS: Hey. Q: Have I reached you? Yes. I brought up Facebook because it feels like the old folks home of social—(laughter)—media and it seems also to be hostile to media. You know, you talk about link death. You put out a news story on Facebook—very little reaction. Put a picture of my cat having a crème brulée, boom—you know, great activity. But are we just chasing one thing after another? Is it—are we just looking for the coolest place to land and is it a mug’s game or are we going to really find a real—we, I say we meaning a traditional newspaper publisher here. Are we really going to find a partner in social media or do we have to build something ourselves again? And I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m raising it. I’m not—I’m puzzled by it. ALLYN: Yeah. I think with Facebook I just know from NPR’s internal numbers on digital story traffic it long ago cratered and that was a decision, you know, made at the executive level to downrank and deprioritize news links across the board. And you know, Facebook justified that by saying this is not why people log on to their apps. They want to know what their friends and family are doing. They don’t want to learn about what’s happening in their city council or what’s happening in Washington. You can quibble with that but it had a huge effect, at least at NPR and probably other places, in terms of the amount of referral traffic that we get from Facebook. But, I mean, it’s still a platform with billions of users. It does skew a little older, John, to your point. I’m reminded of—again, I’m not sure some in this room remember this—my first newspaper job at the Tennessean I started there around 2010, 2011 and the—you know, the now famous sort of pivot to video and it’s, you know, a Gannett newspaper. We were all given these stabilizers for our iPhones and we had a mandate to do four videos a day regardless of quality, upload them to Facebook. They were terrible, right? But we had a grant at the time for Facebook and we were trying this new experiment out. But the news leadership there—I don’t think it was true of just this one newspaper—didn’t take social media seriously. I think a lot of the industry kind of dropped the ball with social media and thinking it was a fad and thinking it was cute and just having a little too much confidence in their own delivery methods and a little too much confidence in the idea that people are always going to log on to NPR.org to find out what’s happening, and look what happened, right? I mean, I think we kind—that ship has sailed a little bit. We should have been thinking about building our own digital platforms and delivery methods a long time ago and I think we’re so kind of screwed at this point, honestly. And we saw what happens when we become overly dependent on, you know, the Silicon Valley companies. They realize they can make more money elsewhere and they say, screw you. So it’s—not to be overly cynical but I think there was an opportunity a long time ago and we didn’t take social media seriously. LABOTT: I think that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and some others are doing a very good job at kind of transitioning to digital. The Washington Post, for instance, has an excellent TikTok account. I think it’s a little—you know, at first it was kind of funny. Now it’s a little gimmicky. But it’s got a million followers. And as, you know, I think, like, people know the guy—they call him the Washington Post TikTok guy. So every time they’re saying Washington Post TikTok guy the name Washington Post is coming up. Are those people going to the Washington Post? Some of them are, you know, and I think now more and more people are getting more referrals from digital than they are from, like, you know, traditional kind of marketing. But, again, I just think we need to think of ourselves as multimedia organizations and nowadays—and, I mean, the thing about X and the link kind of notwithstanding, you know, the name of our media organization is our brand but the distribution is wherever we can get it. And I think as opposed to finding new ways of, you know, distribution we need to find new ways of—our news organizations—the business model needs to change. For instance, the New York Times is making a lot more money now off games or off cooking, and kind of news is more of a public affairs function that’s subsidized by cooking or games or things like that. And so if news is, like, the kind of, you know, haute couture of publishing or broadcasting or news and information then some of these other business models are going to be what subsidizes it and there—and look, there’s a lot of money right now in local journalism to figure these things out and I think—I’ve, you know, been trying to talk to people at some of the foundations and one of the things they’re specifically looking at are business models—sustainable business models. This is what we should be thinking about right now. We shouldn’t be thinking about whether we should be on TikTok or Social or this or that platform. We should all be on all of them, if you feel comfortable. ALLYN: Yeah, I— LABOTT: But we should be thinking about what the business model is. ALLYN: Yeah. No, I agree. But what’s really in vogue now is not even social media but it’s large language models, right? Increasing—I mean, Google search is—has been declining for some time in terms of quality and overall usage, especially with young people. Lots of people now go to ChatGPT, they go to Perplexity, they go to Claude, and they say, what’s that bill that just passed, and they get bullet points, right? So we learned a lesson as a news industry that we didn’t take social media seriously. We let all of these Silicon Valley companies eat our lunch. We should be building our own large language models and the Washington Post, to their credit, unveiled one recently where it is trained on the data of all of our articles and there would be a little pop-up and you can ask it a question and it just pulls from New York Times stories, Washington Post stories, you know, NPR stories. So we know it’s valid. We know it’s vetted. Otherwise, these large language models really are the future. You’re getting analysis. You’re getting, you know, the facts. You’re getting information rapidly, right? So I really think there also needs to be an emphasis on should news organizations be building their own large language models because, as we know, AI is a huge part of the future when it comes to how people are going to be informed and how people are going to, you know, learn how to sort of navigate their world. ROBBINS: I would—we’re almost done. I would make one further argument which is this is—yes, monetizing is sort of an essential notion here. I’m not sure that smaller papers are going to be able to do that. Certainly, smaller papers can’t monetize games. Smaller papers can’t monetize cooking. Smaller papers can’t do the things that might— LABOTT: I just said it to, like, say that we need to be thinking of new— ROBBINS: Yeah. No, certainly I—but I think that this other question here about social media is can we in some way take lessons from them about their definitions of authenticity. I don’t know. I think that’s something that we have to sort of figure out that sort of balance here, particularly because of the lack of trust in institutions generally and how we find that balance and that’s really a hard thing for us. That’s one thing. And the other thing is I think that we need to consider that there is a whole world out there of conversation going on in social media that we as journalists have to cover and that goes back to your question, Elise, about the cats and the dogs. I mean, when do we get to that— LABOTT: When does it become a news story. ROBBINS: Yeah, and when do we—and also when are we missing it? Because I—certainly, if you go back to something like Trayvon Martin, I mean, the Trayvon Martin story was going on for a quite a while on social media before all the big papers and the small papers even noticed it. And I know most organizations can’t afford to have a full time reporter just monitoring and trying to make assessments like that but we are all intuitively on social media anyway and it’s our responsibility to raise this question. There’s a world boiling on out there that we’re not part of quite often—that there is a news conversation and some of it sounds wacky and some of it’s absolutely, utterly legitimate news, and because it’s couched in language that doesn’t sound like news we have a responsibility to translate that into news, and it’s not easy. LABOTT: Yeah. No, it’s not easy at all and my question to you would be on this cats and dogs thing is how do we cover that. I think the decision is—I mean, not how to— ROBBINS: J.D. Vance made it very easy for us. He started talking about it. So, you know, once a politician is talking about it— LABOTT: Well, you know, I mean, but— ROBBINS: It was Vance, wasn’t it? LABOTT: —to me the story was not whether dogs are—whether they’re eating dogs or cats. I mean, it was pretty quickly kind of debunked and then it became about the phenomenon of it, like, with this—with the story of—and I covered both this and the story I’ll get into with the killing of the health care—the United Healthcare CEO. Like, it was a legitimate story that he was killed but the conversation—and it was—and it’s a legitimate thing to talk—you know, it became, like, this whole conversation about, you know, the pitfalls of health care in this country and, you know, people were saying that he deserved it and things like that. That conversation was, I feel like, legitimate news. There was a whole other conversation on social media about how hot the shooter was and that he became this kind of big celebrity on social media. Now, that’s a conversation. I thought the phenomenon was very interesting about it but, like, how do you—that’s a conversation. Like, I think we—it is a real conundrum of what—at what point—like, what are we discussing about these big conversations that are happening. And I think it’s going to be—I think the jobs of editors on what we cover for social media is going to be one of the most important jobs as we continue to work on social media. ROBBINS: We’re running out of time but I did want to—since we did lose a little bit of time I’m going to go a tiny bit over. But I did—wanted to ask Bobby and I wanted to ask everybody else who’s with us how many of you actually covered the phenomenon of the hot shooter, you know, of how it was being experienced particularly with young people. Because I also teach and that’s the way my students were talking about it. Bobby, did you cover that? ALLYN: No. I’m on NPR’s business desk so that kind of was outside of our lane a little bit. But, I mean, sort of zooming out from that I think culture happens on the internet. As some people like to say, the internet’s going to internet, right? There’s going to be outrageous and over the top, things that go viral, the meme-ification of everything. Often this is tawdry. Often this is inappropriate. Often it causes legacy media to clutch their pearls. But look, increasingly culture happens digitally. It happens online and I think we have to grapple with that and incorporate that into our reporting but in sensitive ways, right? I mean, only focusing coverage, obviously, on people who think the shooter is hot or some of the really, you know, lurid assessments of that case is missing the story. But that’s not to say it’s not part of the story, right? It just has to be dealt with sensitively. But I don’t think we can look away from digital culture. ROBBINS: And it is not a culture separate from us and that’s sort of the challenge of it, and how we balance that is really challenging. Well, I want to thank Elise and I want to thank Bobby and I want to thank everybody else. I don’t think we’ve answered—we certainly raised—(laughs)—it’s a conversation we could come back to. Irina, I want to turn it over to you. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And I second the thanks to Elise Labott, Bobby Allyn, and Carla Anne Robbins. We will be sending out the transcript and the video. We’ll splice it together for the part that we missed for our technical glitch to you all so you can share it with your colleagues. I’m not sure whether I should share your X handles or not but I will @Elise Labott, @Bobby Allyn, and @robbinscarla, and, of course, I’m sure other social media sites, and you should subscribe to Elise’s Substack and Zivvy News. ROBBINS: I signed up to Zivvy News this week. FASKIANOS: I did, too, in advance of this. LABOTT: Thank you. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And listen to Bobby for his great reports on NPR. And as always we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the United States. We welcome your suggestions for speakers and future topics we should cover. You can email [email protected]. We appreciate your being with us today, for the work that you’re doing, and happy holidays, and we will reconvene in 2025. ROBBINS: Thank you, Irina. LABOTT: Thank you. ALLYN: Thanks, everyone. LABOTT: Thank you, everyone. ROBBINS: Elise, thank the—thank the Panera. (Laughter.) ALLYN: Thank you very much. LABOTT: (Laughs.) Thank you. (END)    

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