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Defending The Facts 2

Ryan Jenot42min

Speaker 1

00:00

Today's discussion part of the annual meeting of the Poynter Institute's National Advisory Board, where we gather to discuss common challenges in journalism and how to improve our practice of the craft. Today's topic is defending the facts in journalism. How do we counter ongoing attacks on independent journalists, fact checkers and evidence based reporting. And how can we improve our work to be sure the audience finds its value? I'm Angie dropnik Holden. I'm director of the International fact checking network at the pointer Institute, where I work with fact checkers like PolitiFact fact check.org, and Washington Post fact checker in the United States and fact checkers around the world to promote accuracy and public access to high quality information when it comes to defending the facts, the landscape in 2025 is as challenging as I've ever seen it. Social media companies like meta are rolling back fact checking programs, entertainment driven podcasts and viral video are shaping the political conversation, and the United States President has repeatedly challenged facts and fact based reporting, and he's using lawyers and the powers of The Government to wage legal battles against an independent media at this panel, we will not have any silver bullets, no magic solutions, no story book endings, but I do want to argue that there is hope. There is hope in that fact based reporting is more important and more needed than ever. I believe that journalism is about preserving reality and resisting false narratives. And I also think that journalism preserves a space for the public to think critically and make good decisions about their lives and the kind of government they would like to see. I wrote about this recently at length in a story that's now up on pointer.org and on Nieman reports. The story was called the case for facts to help us all think critically about these issues. Today, I'm joined by two terrific journalists, Eric Diggins of National Public Radio and Anita Kumar of Politico, and I'd like to just kick off the conversation by having you introduce yourselves. Tell us about your daily work and how you think about the audience and the case for facts?

Speaker 2

02:23

Sure. So I'm Eric Diggins. I'm TV critic, media analyst and guest host at NPR, and also do a lot of other things, to interviews for KCRW, the business and freelance work for the New York Times and other places. So my daily work mostly involves trying to get a handle on what's happening on television and then translate that into either discussions with anchors on NPR or reported stories or reviews that lend you some kind of insight. So a lot of what I'm trying to do in this moment, related to what we're going to talk about, is just get a handle on where the trends are going. I'm very active on social media. I have a lot of different social media platforms, so I can get a sense of how the audience is responding to these things, what the viewers and readers are expecting from us, where we're falling short and where their expectations are unrealistic. I think a big problem is that people don't understand how journalism works, and we haven't done a great job of explaining that either. So it's a really, it's a concerning time, but there's also a lot of opportunity. We have learned there's a lot of opportunity when there's disruption.

Speaker 3

03:41

Anita, tell us about your job. I'm senior managing editor at Politico. I wear a lot of different hats, as we all do in journalism, everybody has too much to do. I help sort of run the day to day coverage for Politico with a couple other folks. So that means kicking off the morning meeting every morning, sort of what are the key topics that we're talking about that are in the news that we should prioritize and working with editors and reporters through the day on sort of what those stories should be and and reviewing them later. I also was Politico's first standards editor, so I'm really thinking a lot about, are we being accurate, obviously, but fair in what we cover across the board in particular stories. I mean, there's no way to not think about this topic every single minute, really, it is, you know, and I'm always preaching to everyone in the newsroom, sort of people are watching every single thing we do. It's a tweet, it's a headline, it's a caption on a photo, and of course, it's the stories and videos and podcasts. And so we really need to be mindful. Some of that is from the President of the United States. Some of it's from people that want to sue us. Some of. Is just simply sort of what what it looks like when it's on social media. And so we're thinking about that all the time, but I do feel like with hundreds of staffers, it's really difficult to to get a handle on that, and you really need everyone to really be part of that effort, with you, and it's sometimes hard. We're busy, and we're doing a lot of stuff, and people aren't thinking about it every minute the way they should be.

Speaker 1

05:23

Yeah, one of the questions that I have for fact checkers and for you is, who is our audience today, the audience seems highly diverse, very fractured. It seems to often disagree with itself. You're going to have people who say you got it wrong one way, and another part of the audience that says, no, no, you got it wrong, absolutely the other way. Do you think you have one audience? Do you think you have multiple audiences and and how do you deal with this, like highly diverse audience, where different stories are going to hit them different ways? I

Speaker 2

06:00

mean, I think NPR has a fairly defined audience, and in some ways, we've been trying really hard to to add to that and to expand to that, and to reach beyond that. You know, college educated, sort of middle age, middle class people seem to be kind of our sweet spot, but we've tried, particularly through our podcast, to reach towards a younger audience, and that audience expects different things in different ways than you know, the people who listen to Morning Edition every day, or listen to all things considered every day. And I also think it's getting to the point where individual content creators have different audiences. So I have a feeling that the people who gravitate to the work that I do might be a little different than the people who are Steven skip stands, for example, and they may expect different things. But I think for NPR, that audience is devoted to the idea that facts matter, and they appreciate that we try our best to be fair. And maybe they may be frustrated with us occasionally, because we're careful about things, and you know, to be honest, as an employee, sometimes I'm frustrated. You know that we're careful about things in a way that that I might not agree with, but ultimately that's a big part of our brand, is that, you know, we move carefully, we try to be fair, we try to reflect the nation, and we're working hard every day to verify the facts and bring the truth, and if we get it wrong, we try to admit it. And we even have a public editor who can intercede on the publics we have and ask us questions about our coverage if we're not asking those questions ourselves. So the struggle is to keep delivering news that excites people and brings them to us at a time when news is more and more personalized, and people are less and less tolerant of messaging that doesn't fit what they already believe. Yeah,

Speaker 1

08:08

Anita, the question of the audience and polarization, I think, I imagine this must go to Politico's challenges all the time. You cover the news in Washington, we've got the Democrats and the Republicans. I think it's fair to say they're at each other's throats. How do you think of that audience? I mean,

Speaker 3

08:25

we really have a lot of different audiences. Probably every outlet really kind of does, in some way depends on the platform, right? So we have a subscription service where a lot of people that are really looking at the granular policy implications of, you know, energy or agriculture are sort of buying our journalism right, and so that might be a lobbyist or a trade association, you know, then we have the home page where it's a lot of different people, and it is Democrats and Republicans. We have people that get our journalism from social media or from a newsletter that they subscribe to. So I know it's very different, and I think you can package the journalism differently and put it out there in different ways for different audiences. And of course, we want to appeal to them. We all. We want them to read what we have written or produced in video or podcast. But I don't think it really changes. It might change how you deliver it, but it doesn't actually change the journalism. Right? I feel like at the core, it's always the same, which is, we're trying to provide about whatever topic that is, we're trying to provide fact based journalism. What's happening? What do they what do people need to know? How do we want to tell them? Might change, but the other part doesn't change, but, but I think you're right. It is difficult when we hear from people all the time. And you know, for us, politics is everything right. That's what we cover so and we are hearing from people all the time. Sometimes they believe what we write, sometimes they don't. Do you

Speaker 1

09:55

think you need to make the case or facts to your audience? Or do you think, like Eric was saying. NPR audience, that they get it, that they expect politico to be accurate, and that's what they want from it. Oh, I

Speaker 3

10:06

don't, sounds weird to say I don't think they think that. I think that's just where the media is right now, and, you know, and maybe NPR listeners are slightly different. But I feel like, No, I mean, I feel like there are a lot of people that read and think this isn't they read it, which is great, but then they don't believe it, which isn't great, right? Or they believe it. Some of the times when they see something, that's what they already believed, right? It's they want to see something that they already believe. And if it's something different, then they don't believe it, you know. And it's really difficult, you know? I mean the old saying used to be, if you know both sides were telling you that that something was wrong, it was probably, you probably did a good job, right? You're probably fair. But I think it really is. It is really difficult

Speaker 1

10:51

when, when I think about the work of building trust with audiences like the best stories that I hear are about what I would consider relatively small programs where journalists meet individual audience members on a one to one basis, and they have that human interaction, but that's incredibly hard to scale to a national audience. You can't meet every individual audience member and talk to them about their personal hopes and wishes and desires for the media. So, like, that's a big challenge if we want to communicate with audiences at scale about the importance of facts. I'm curious, what do you think should be our tone? Should it be like finger wagging? Like this is really good for you eat your broccoli,

Unknown Speaker

11:37

because that always works.

Speaker 1

11:42

Or should it be like, this will make you this will make you better at your job, and you'll get ahead in life. Or should it be like a moral civic like, it's wrong to lie be a good citizen?

Speaker 2

11:51

Yeah, that always works too well. I think the big challenge we're facing is that exact question, how do we how do we communicate the importance of facts? And I feel like, writ large, what's happened is that we get distracted, and then something happens outside the political process or the media process that is undeniable, where facts absolutely matter. The Great Recession happens, and the housing market collapses. And all of a sudden it doesn't matter whether you're liberal or conservative, you just want to save your house, you want to save your job, you want to save the economy. The pandemic happens. And all of a sudden it's not about whether you're in a red state or a blue state, it's about how can I not die from this thing? And how can we get past the point where everybody's stuck in their homes and, you know, sanitizing their mail? So unfortunately, I feel like we get in these periods where we get wrapped up in this point of view politics and point of view reportage and then something, some giant calamity, has to come along to shake us out of it. But to me, ultimately, that's one of the biggest arguments for the importance of facts. Is that at some point, you know, as a society, we come to situations where you cannot interpret what is happening. It is a factual thing that is outside of what you believe. And I think one of our biggest challenges is the growth of what Stephen Colbert called truthiness, where people increasingly believe that because they believe something intensely, it must be true. And we're now in a political system where some people are trying to make that a reality and but the problem is, eventually you come up against actual reality, right? So, so I think that's our argument. Is that you know, if you were too trapped in your point of view, then you start to lose sight of how to create vaccines that you know might cure cancer, how to advance the science that you know might deal with climate change? You know, we have to sort of deal in facts, or eventually we lose control of these things that are outside of our belief systems, that are rooted in real things.

Speaker 1

14:16

Now, Eric, one of the things I admire about you is that you're very good at arguing with people on social media.

Speaker 2

14:23

Oh, great. Thank you for saying that to the world about

Speaker 1

14:28

Yeah. I mean, I've seen you confront people on social media about factual matters, and to my view, you seem to always maintain your journalism standards while you do it. You don't lose your head. You don't insult anybody. Yeah,

Speaker 2

14:43

I've decided that there's a certain way I want to communicate online, and it is not about insulting people, and it's not about dunking on, you know, people love to do what I call dunking on people. Oh, you thought that was true. Will let me tell you about this, you know. And it just it. You into, it leads you into these bizarre conversations where it's more about winning the argument than it is about, you know, having an exchange of ideas. And so I just try to remind myself, and I'm not saying I succeed at this all the time, but I do try to remind myself it's about respecting the person that you're dealing with and understanding that this is a conversation that's happening in public. Like, sometimes I'll have people come up to me and say, well, that person's just a troll. Why are you even engaging them? And I'm like, Well, I have a whole audience of followers who is watching this conversation go down, and it's probably some sort of idea, some sort of notion, that they've encountered elsewhere in the media sphere. And I want to just deal with it, you know, let's just talk about it. And at least you get a sense that, you know, I have a different perspective on it. And here's my receipts. You know, I had some somebody on social media tell me that, you know, Donald Trump hadn't really been covered by the media from 2020 till he seriously started running for re election in 2024 and I'm like, he was president until January 2021 like, of course, he got covered. Well, he wasn't on TV after January 6. Well, you know, he talked to the press on January 12, right after January 6. And here's a link to the CBS News coverage. You know, it's just, you know, because there may be a ton of people out there who kind of thinking, well, maybe that's a good point. Okay, here's the here's the facts. And you can see that, you know, what I'm telling you isn't just about what I think it's about the facts that I already know, because I've been covering this stuff. And then, you know, if it is about something, I think I'll say, you know, my hunch is this, but, you know, maybe we can't be sure, or maybe this is something we need to research more, just to get people, just to teach people, and give people some tools for talking about this stuff that isn't I believe this, so it must be true.

Unknown Speaker

16:56

Anita, what are your take on some of these online? I'm

Speaker 3

16:58

smiling because I think I disagree a little with my friend here. I just, I don't know, Angie, if I knew the answer to your question, then we would be saving journalism and and I wish we could do that, but I haven't figured out, you know, there's no silver bullet, as you said, and I haven't figured out what it is. I think I figured out a few things that it's not, and it's not for me anyway, personally and for us as an organization, at politico, I don't feel like we're should be out there, you know, teaching people or telling them to eat their spinach. As you said, I actually don't. We have this debate all the time, Eric, which is why I'm sort of smiling about it at work, about whether we should push back on social media in a in a respectful, polite way, to sort of set the record straight. And invariably, we always, generally come down on the side of no that it doesn't it doesn't work. I don't know what does work, but I think we found a lot of things that don't work, and it's still a problem that people don't believe us. And I wish I did know what the what the answer is. I just think it's really, it's really difficult, and I think it's, I know we're talking about journalism and media, and of course, it's a problem for us, but I really just feel like it's a problem for all institutions right now. And so it's, this is not an answer, and this is not me giving up and saying, Well, it's everything, so we can't do anything. We do need to do something, but it is about a lot more than just journalism. People don't believe just institutions that they used to believe in this country. I actually think Eric Interesting enough, I think, and maybe it's because we covered it so much during the pandemic. I really do think that the pandemic was really it was what you said, but it was also very partisan. You know, the schools closures and openings, wearing masks, vaccines themselves. You just look at the California fires that we've been talking about. It's really partisan about the disaster aid. So I think we're at a point that that it's sort of there are no resets. There's no moment where we're all together and saying things aren't, you know, that we believe or that we can set aside differences. I really feel like we're not there. This is sort of depressing, but, but I do think it's more society than it is just journalism.

Speaker 2

19:26

Well, the thing I will say, though, about the pushing back thing is that I've also realized that there are other people out there who want, who do want, to believe in NPR and politico and traditional journalism. And when we don't push back, it looks like it looks like the other people are right, and we're pulling an OK, and we can't defend it, and that's why we're not pushing back. And one of the things I've found is that if I push back respectfully, there'll be other people, other followers, who go, Yeah, you know. Yeah, you know. So. I think we got to be it's hard to be open and transparent when people are attacking you. It is and it is tough to push back when that pushback draws more people criticizing you, but you've got to be aware that there's a whole bunch of other people watching what you do and hoping that you'll win and hoping to make the case, and if you don't make the case, then you've let them down. And I feel like there are people who believe in traditional media, who feel let down by us because we so often said we're not going to have that fight, or we're not going to push back, or, Oh, we're going to be more respectful, or we're just going to put our heads down and do our work, and they're like, No, defend facts because somebody's got to do it. So so I don't know if it's the answer, but I do know that the only way to maintain support amongst people who want to believe in us and want to support us is to get out there and earn it by fighting for I

Speaker 3

21:00

think we, we, we wish there was one answer, and there's probably not. And there's probably 10 answers, there's, yeah,

Speaker 1

21:08

I talked to fact checkers around the world who are facing increased attacks and online harassment. Some of these are journalists who are working in countries where there's no strong tradition of free press, where the rule of law is iffy, and when we talk about whether they should respond to specific attacks, our consensus has been, if it seems small, if it seems like it's not gaining traction, ignore it, but the minute it seems Like it is gaining traction, counter it, counter it with facts and evidence. One of the one of the examples that we had writ large, was last month when Mark Zuckerberg said he was ending the fact checking program, and he released a personal video where he said that fact checkers were biased and destroyed trust. And as a community, we said, we can't not respond to this. We have to respond to this. This is too damaging to our core mission. And we wrote a letter where we tried to very respectfully rebut what he said. And it did a couple of things. It set the record straight for anybody who comes years later and says, Hey, what was that, that fact checking controversy about? We tried to leave the door open to meta, so if they changed their mind, we could work with them again. But I do think it raised the spirits of the fact checkers themselves to feel like they had agency and they were sticking up for their principles. And I think when we think organizationally and how we're working with individual journalists, I think journalists need support right now that their work is important, I

Speaker 3

22:49

think you hit it right there, Angie, though, which is, they're not all examples are the same, right? So it might be, you know, a small thing or something on Twitter. X, it might be a big institutional thing, and it sort of just does depend, right? I mean, Politico put out a statement last week about something too and, and we did, you know, set, try to set the record state. So I do understand what you're saying. And I think it really just depends on the the person and the circumstance. Absolutely,

Speaker 1

23:17

if you were going to see the media report more about ourselves as journalists, as our place in the information ecosystem. What would you like to see us? What would you like to see us report on? What would you like to see us explain better? Would it be something about our place in democracy, or would it be more about our processes, or would it be about the history of freedom of the press and how it relates to political freedom? The

Speaker 3

23:46

questions I get a lot, and I think we've tried to do a better job generally as an industry, is to talk about the process, which sounds boring, but sort of, how do we make decisions I know we don't want and and how do we report out things? Not that we're going to give away, sort of all our secrets and and reporting techniques, but just to help the public understand what we do and how we make decisions, I think has really helped a lot. Just it's been very eye opening for people to see that. Now, does that mean that everybody's believing every single thing? No, but I do think that once you sort of calmly tell people and explain things to them, they kind of get an idea, or at least some of them do, and are more receptive to that. That is that's been at least the situation that I've seen and personally been involved in. I mean, it's why we sometimes, I think we do this more now than we used to sort of explain how we if not every day, of course, but like, if we have a big project, we might explain how we got the data, or why we set about doing this particular project, or something like that. And I do think that's helpful. Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 2

25:00

I do think we have to be more open. I mean, you know, when we have big scoops about things, we don't often explain how we learned what we learned. And I think it's led some people in the in the audience to assume that we can just find out whatever we want to know about, whatever we choose to report on, whenever we choose to do it, and people are not aware of all the hard work that goes into turning big scoops. And I think we need to get past not talking about that kind of stuff, even when it involves sensitive subjects, even when it involves stuff that might give your competitors an advantage, because we're at a point where the public is not giving us the benefit of the doubt anymore. And you know, we saw this with the controversy over how CBS edited its interviews with Kamala Harris in the past, people assume that if you do a big, long interview with somebody and you edit it down, that if you're a traditional journalism organization, you made responsible choices. The public generally sort of went along with that. Well, now they're not. Now they're saying, prove it, prove to us that you didn't deceptively edit this. And you know, I at NPR and at CBS, you know, we resist releasing the raw audio, or we resist releasing transcripts of the raw conversation because we're worried about the precedent that would set, and I certainly understand that, but we've reached a point where we don't have the benefit or the doubt from a lot of people, and sometimes we just have to put out a transcript and be like, Okay, here's what the original interview was, and here's why we cut all this stuff. And it was mostly for time, you know. And then people can understand that, and they can see that, and it won't necessarily convince the people who are dead set in their belief that we are fraudulent. But there's all these other people watching this. It's like, it's like a schoolyard fight in a weird way. There's all these people watching it go down, and what you're really trying to do is convince them of what you're doing, because the people who are coming at you, you know, many of them, their critiques are not even fair. You know, they're not even handed. But there's a bunch of people watching from the sidelines saying, Okay, well, is this true? And then, and you got to, you got to do something to show them that that it's not or that you handled it ethically, or that even if you did make a mistake, it was an honest one.

Speaker 1

27:28

Yeah, one of the debates that we have in the fact checking community is the difference between fact checking individual facts and examining overall narratives. And I think that's a big challenge for all of us, and especially getting to the point that we have a president who is uniquely fact challenged and has a long record of saying things that are simply not true, and now he's come in with the new administration with more supporters who seem to endorse that like they say things that are that you can easily disprove. Elon Musk on Twitter has repeatedly amplified false claims, and they're using it to build narratives to further their political agendas. Are we doing a good enough job of covering narratives. And spoiler alert, my answer is, No, I don't think we are so like, how can we do better at this? And how are we going to deal with this administration right now that has so many challenges around factual accuracy?

Speaker 2

28:40

Go for it. I mean, you know, that's the 24,000 64,000 million dollar question, man, it's like, how do you fight propaganda? That's what it is. How do you fight propaganda? Maybe part of it is just calling it what it is, and and facing and facing it as a messaging problem, more than you know, some of you know we, we nobody is more critical of media in some ways than media. Yes, you know, we are always willing to say we got this wrong. Oh my god, we're not doing this right. Oh my god, we're not reporting enough. We're not doing this enough. But the answer might not be in improving our product. The answer might be in figuring out how to counter the messaging which is different than you know, doing better journalism we now. I think the people who have advanced these false narratives are very astute about sensing the weaknesses in traditional media and attacking them. One of them is, in fact, our reluctance to release the raw reporting product, and so they know they can make allegations about how an interview was deceptively edited, or how this was done, or how that was done, knowing that. A lot of our bigger institutions just will not release a transcript that would prove that what they were saying was not true, and they already have a great deal of buy in from their supporters. Their supporters already don't believe us. And so trying to convince somebody who's already convinced that you're lying to them, that's very, very difficult, but I do think we have to maybe see this as more of a messaging and propaganda problem as much or more than it is a journalism quality issue.

Speaker 1

30:29

Yeah, you know, one of the pieces that politico ran recently that I really admired was Jonathan Martin's interview with the USA ID worker unnamed, whereas the administration has been putting out this narrative that USA ID, which manages foreign assistance programs worldwide, and a lot of it is very humanitarian oriented. And some of the things Elon Musk has been saying is that it's criminal. There's waste, fraud and abuse here. And what Jonathan Martin of Politico did was he did a one on one QA with the USAID worker who defended the program, talked about the bipartisan support it had, and talked about how frightening it was for these workers who are all over the world and have lost communication with Washington, DC and don't know what's going on. And I thought that was a very powerful way to take this big story and sort of puncture the misinformation on a factual level, but also on an emotional

Speaker 2

31:32

level. But you know what they're doing is they find an obscure corner of government that people in general don't know, and then they define it before that corner has a chance to define itself. And pushing back against that is really difficult. I mean, that was, that was great interview, but Elon Musk controls Twitter, and he's telling a completely different narrative about an agency that most people have never heard of. And I

Speaker 1

31:59

think that goes back to when we were talking about like, this is a societal problem, like lack of civic knowledge. People don't know as much it feels like, as how their government works as maybe they used to, or maybe they never knew, but but one of the things that we find in studies about misinformation is that people are better at resisting misinformation when they have a lot of contextual background knowledge about a topic that they can turn to. And to me, this suggests the need for, like, more explainers, more kind of background pieces. Now, unfortunately, like those don't always get clicks, and we do have some serious business model issues in journalism that are that we can't be entirely educational. We have to compete in the marketplace of attention, and that seems also quite challenging and a societal problem that's a bit beyond journalism. Yeah,

Speaker 3

32:58

I just, I think we have, I mean, that other people have big platforms, but so do we? I mean, all told together, we have so many places that we put out our journalism. So you know, as long as those you know the facts and sort of pushing back against individual things that are wrong. But to your point, Angie, the bigger narrative is in everything we do. I think the message is going to get out there. I mean, is that going to solve the problem? No, but is that going to be one of the things we can do? I certainly think so. But, but I've been surprised sometimes that people are so used to sort of how things are right now, that they forget. You know, when writing about someone, something they said isn't true, they forget to actually say in the story what is true. But I think it's not. It's just that we're so used to it now. It's things have changed so much, and I really feel like we need to say that every single time, right? It doesn't have to be belligerent, it just has to state what's accurate, both in those granular stories, but also the bigger narrative pieces. I mean, we have huge platforms all combined. We have a lot of information that we put out there, and we just have to remember

Speaker 1

34:18

them. Okay? We've talked about some depressing trends and topics today, I want us to end on a positive note. Good luck. I have to say, I feel very energized as a journalist, because I feel like we're needed. We're needed right now. So if you're looking for some meaning and purpose, I think it's easy to find right now. I want to know, what would you tell a young journalist entering the business about why journalism is a worthwhile craft to practice for a career.

Speaker 2

34:55

I have always been passionate about telling stories i. That might bring change, even if it is, even if it only changes one person's mind. And when that happens, it is an amazing thing, and that's what I would tell them. You have a chance to tell stories that bring change.

Speaker 1

35:20

Yeah, and don't you think we're playing a long game here? I mean, I think people sometimes expect journalism to have, like, immediate impact, immediate consequences, when, like, I think of the journalism that I most admire, the problems they were writing about took decades to resolve, and it was not one individual story that solved a problem. I'm thinking about Ida B Wells and her coverage of lynching in the in the late 19th century, early 20th century. I mean, she did amazing reporting and changed minds and helped people, but it wasn't like her reports came out and everything was fine afterwards. No, it was part of social progress there was decades in the making.

Speaker 2

36:01

Yeah, what's sad is that I am more and more looking back to examples like that to process the current moment, to understand that there may be quite a long period where the government is coming after us in ways that we are not used to, and reminding myself that there were pioneers who had to deal with even worse. And now we elevate them, and now we talk about how wonderful they were, but and in that moment, they didn't have any guarantees that their work was going to reach people or change things or matter at all, and they did it because they knew it had to be done, and that's where we are now.

Speaker 1

36:45

Anita, I know you work with a lot of young journalists at politico or people entering the career. They're entering the profession. Where do you see signs of hope, and what do you tell people about what you've gotten out

Speaker 3

36:55

of this? Something very similar, but really, I wouldn't say the word change, but more like education, and that could be anybody, you know, someone reads something and they decided how they wanted to vote, and they learned something and they made a decision. Or, you know, having worked in state houses, you know, the governor reads something that you wrote, or heard something that you said and learned something and made a decision based on something. I mean, really, it's education

Unknown Speaker

37:27

that's bringing change,

Speaker 3

37:31

different way of saying it, but, but change and sort of implies, like, I think it should go in a particular direction, and I don't actually, and so that's why I'm saying it a little bit differently, which is, I'm letting you know something that I've discovered, and you can make that, you can process that and make a decision. So for me, the optimistic times are when I hear one person tell me, and I heard one last night that he read something you know, in Politico or wherever happened to be working or any news outlet, you know, and that made someone think about something, and they learned something new. To me, those really specific examples are the, you know, the optimistic, the reasons I think, to get into journalism, still a great and fun profession, too, but really just Yeah, telling people things they don't know. When

Speaker 1

38:19

I was working on my story, the case for facts. I I got in touch with Professor Larry diamond at Stanford. He studied democracy all over the world. He's advised governments and student activists all over the world. And he said it was very important for journalists to have courage and to stand up to power. And he said it was very important to what you're saying, to not take sides, to not think of journalism as a political project. Because he said, If you think you're helping democracy that way, you're really not. It's really important for the rule of law that journalists be able to stake out this area where they are seeking truth and facts without preconceived ideas and preconceived notions.

Speaker 2

39:04

But I would say that that is a that's a tough that's a fine line, because we're standing up for democracy. We're standing up for journalism values, which is free speech, which is, is it equality? I mean, I'm assuming it is right. We have very definitive values that we do stand up for every day, and to get that confused and have that be seen as taking a political side, we support ex party or we support ex politician in a way that people who are attacking us. That's what they want. They want the public to see the stands that we're taking for journalism values as political stands. And those are two different things.

Speaker 1

39:51

Would you say that there stands for public welfare? That's what I would say. Yeah,

Speaker 2

39:55

yeah, for the Civic good. You know, our. Role as the fourth estate. But, you know, I've said this many times. You know, if you're if you say one of your journals and values is to be the voice of the voiceless, right? Well, then that might mean the kind of coverage that some people would see as overtly political. But at the heart of it is you're just trying to elevate voices that don't get heard because they're not wealthy, or because, you know, they're disadvantaged, or because they don't know how the system works. And we're trying to level the playing field, or we're trying to hold big institutions to account. We want government to explain itself to people. We want to make sure that big corporations don't have carte blanche to do whatever they want, whether or not it hurts people. You know, we have all these journalism values that we bring to our work, and some people are trying to say that's political, and sometimes it can be, if you're not careful, that's the line that we're trying to balance. But, you know, I would be careful. I'm just concerned because it sounds like, in some ways, what that person you were quoting was saying was kind of buying into that idea, and I strongly resist that.

Speaker 1

41:14

Well, read my piece. It's on pointer.org and Neiman right now, and see what you think what I appreciated about what he had to say was that we always need to put facts and accuracy first. We can't shade findings for some perceived benefit or cause that what makes us journalist is our commitment to truth first. I think we all agree on that Absolutely. All right. So with that, I would like to thank Anita and Eric And thank you all for listening into our conversation. You

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