[music]

Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, this is America, Are We Ready? Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Lehrer from wnyc.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Brooke and I co-host On The Media.

Brian Lehrer: We're here for the next two hours. The basic questions we're putting on the table in this hour are, do you trust the professional news media more, less, or about the same as you did when Donald Trump first hit the presidential campaign scene in 2015? How do you think they're doing at covering Trump versus his opponents this year? Brooke, let's talk about misinformation and disinformation that professional news media organizations have to keep playing whack-a-mole with more than in past generations, I think. Let's start with some basic definitions. What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation?

Brooke Gladstone: Misinformation is false information that is spread regardless of whether or not there's intent to mislead. Disinformation is, "deliberately misleading or offering biased information, manipulating narratives or facts, which is propaganda," and we've seen a whole lot of both over the last few months.

Brian Lehrer: You got any most high profile, most egregious mis or disinformation narratives we've been hearing in the run-up to the election? Some examples.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, yes. How far back do you want to go? We could go all the way back to Kamala not being sure if she's Black or not. More recently, you have the lies around FEMA workers stealing money from the people who need it in the wake of Hurricane Helene and giving them to migrants. Can you imagine such a thing? Well, obviously it's total BS I guess it started on X. Trump doubled down just yesterday.

That one's there. That has consequences. It's resulted in threats against FEMA workers. Then you have JD Vance spreading the false story from a Facebook group. He's doubled down, too. He walked it back, then he's come back. Then he said the whole thing was for a high moral purpose. The whole immigrants eating the pets thing, which has also resulted in a number of threats and has even caused some schools to close for a while.

The problem with our media ecosystem right now is that you have so many politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, of course, Donald Trump pushing lies unchecked. The lies are checked, but it doesn't stop them. It doesn't check them. Tou have a social media platform with zero guardrails right now run by Elon Musk, who has now the ability to spread more lies than anybody else on that site and to have greater impact than ever before. We're in trouble.

Brian Lehrer: Micah, as you've covered on your show, many of the conspiracy theories around this election were born before and after the last election. Have things that are known to be false stuck around as a factor for a whole other election cycle?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, yes, absolutely so. After the 2020 election, we heard a whole host of conspiracy theories about voting machines and software companies, Dominion and Smartmatic that were thrown around on Fox News, on One America News Network, on Newsmax, by the network's pundits and their guests. Since then, we've seen a host of large settlements in favor of Dominion and Smartmatic because of lies about how they were supposedly flipping votes for Joe Biden.

We also saw conspiracy theories about mules. These are people who were going to ballot boxes and stuffing them with fraudulent votes.

Brooke Gladstone: They made a whole movie about that.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, yes, yes, by Dinesh D'Souza, the director of the film. He also wrote a book. The distributor of that film, and I believe the publisher of the book, had to apologize and walk back those claims. Yet the beliefs and the conspiracy theories persist. At the same time that Rudy Giuliani is having his assets liquidated because of having defamed two election workers in Georgia. We have Elon Musk rallying in Pennsylvania suggesting that there is something to this Dominion conspiracy theory.

It's pretty troubling to see some semblance of justice enacted after these lies and yet they don't go away. They continue because they are so politically useful. Just last week, Marjorie Taylor Greene elevated a story that started, again, on Facebook about a poster saying, "Well, my friend had trouble voting using one of these voting machines, and I tried to vote for one candidate, but it locked in the wrong candidate."

It turns out this person had a little trouble with the voting machine, but they ultimately were able to vote for the person they wanted. The vote was perfectly fine. Some game of telephone made its way to Faceboo, it was picked up by somebody else, fast forward, Marjorie Taylor Greene is sharing it on X, where it's seen 3.5 million times. She then goes on Alex Jones and again pushes out this conspiracy theory about voting machines in Georgia flipping the vote. These stories won't go away.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take our first caller, and it's Aaron in New Orleans. Aaron, you're on America, Are We Ready? Thank you for calling in.

Aaron: Yes. Hey, thanks so much for taking my call. I just like to say after listening to that diatribe, it's very rich because in 2016, we were told by the legacy media over and over again a false conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian asset, and that the Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign. Now we find out it was a pack of lies.

However, the legacy media pushed it for those four years and then even gave themselves awards for it at the end of those four years, and they never came out and said that this is a conspiracy theory, this is false, this was based on a pack of lies. That's how dishonest the legacy media is and has been for the past-- since 2016, since Trump first ran for election.

Brooke Gladstone: With respect, the fact is they couldn't pin anything specifically on Trump, but there was great clarity over the fact that, say, the hacking of the emails of Hillary Clinton was a Russian operation and it was done in order to further Trump's campaign. There are also documented meetings. There was a lot of circumstantial information that was available. In terms of not tying anything down, the media was following the investigation as any media would.

I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a little bit beyond what it was. It was a collection of circumstantial evidence and proved information that the Russians wanted Trump to win and obviously, lots of communication between the two camps. They weren't able to connect the last dot.

Aaron: Well, I wish that you would give the same benefit of the doubt to Donald Trump when in 2020, he said there were irregularities with the election. However, that's not what the media did. They said that it was based on a pack of lies, that Trump was lying, but you didn't give him the same benefit of the doubt that you gave him during the whole Russia gate.

The difference is is that for four years, the media pushed that our election system was not safe, that it was not free and fair because Russia had hacked it. Then as soon as Joe Biden won, now, the narrative in the media is our elections are totally safe, and it's the most transparent and free and safest election ever. Why? Because Joe Biden won. That's how dishonest the legacy media is in our nation.

Brian Lehrer: That's apples and oranges, Aaron, isn't it? Let me ask you to give me one more take on this because Trump and his campaign went to court over 60 times to claim election fraud. They never even had the evidence to officially claim election fraud in court. The courts always found that there was no election fraud or no procedural irregularities that would indicate election fraud. Why wouldn't you see it as just objective reporting that that theory had been-- that claim by Trump had been disproven?

Aaron: There was nothing objective about it. It was a narrative that was being pushed. Every time Donald Trump comes up with some assertion, the media says he has said it without proof. However, the legacy media has been saying for four years that Trump was a Russian asset with absolutely no proof. Once Robert Mueller proved that it was not true, that it was based on a pack of lies, the legacy media gave themselves awards for it and said, "Let's move on to the next story," which is, oh, Trump said that the election was stolen. This--

Brian Lehrer: Aaron, I'm going to leave it there for time. We're up against a break, but we really appreciate your call and engaging. I think the Mueller report was more nuanced than that. Micah, you want a quick comment here before we have to go to a break in about 30 seconds?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, I remember--

Brian Lehrer: We have another minute. I'm sorry, I'm reading the clock wrong. Go ahead.

Micah Loewinger: That's okay. Early on in Trump's presidency, I believe he set up his own investigation board, his own task force to investigate claims of voter fraud. If I remember correctly, that task force found next to nothing and was quickly disbanded. We could also look to the multiple audits in Georgia, which was the subject of a lot of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Over and over and over again, these audits found that the election was free and fair and that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The problem is that there seems to be no credible response to these conspiracy theories that will satisfy the so-called election integrity skeptics. They're always moving the goalposts and it leaves officials and people trying to just run an election in a lurch.

Brian Lehrer: Brooke, now with 15 seconds before the breaks, Aaron's call is an example of how distrust runs both ways.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, absolutely. In fact, a lot of the loss of trust in this cycle is Democrats in the legacy media. That's the first time that's happened. They're very frustrated.

Brian Lehrer: We continue with America, Are We Ready to find election information we can trust, no matter what our personal politics may be? Let's go next to Liz in Philadelphia. Liz, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hi, There.

Liz: Hi, Brian, thanks for taking my call. You may recognize my voice. I live in your neighborhood. I am knocking doors in Philly and one guy, when I asked him like, "What's your most important issue?" He said, "Well, I don't really like Trump, but I'm worried about Harris because her number one priority is making sure that prisoners get sex change operations." I thought, clearly this guy is [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: That is a Trump campaign commercial, explicit claim. Just so you know. You probably do know, but so all our listeners know.

Liz: I didn't know that.

Brian Lehrer: That's where that comes from. That is an explicit claim in Trump commercials with a clip of Harris from a few years ago saying that people who are incarcerated should have access to the same medical care. When asked if it included that, she said, yes.

Liz: Yes. Access to healthcare for incarcerated people, sure. It really blew my mind that this guy's takeaway from that was that that's her number one priority. I know that advertising is different from news media, but there seems to be a real blur.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call, Liz.

Liz: It's shocking to me that folks believe this stuff.

Brian Lehrer: What about fact-checking, Brooke? In a live setting, you may have to let some lies fly. They come so fast and furious. I've been in this position as a host where some candidate or another is lying and lying and lying, and I say, "But wait," and I call the candidate on a few things and then later I get complaints from listeners who say, "You didn't call the candidate on this." Well, that was line number nine in those 30 seconds, but you can't follow up on everything in real-time. What's the solution?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, you have to do what you do, Brian. You have to curate the lies. Which ones are important? Which ones matter? The racist trope of immigrants eating pets had real-life consequences. The same with Trump's lies about FEMA stealing money allocated for hurricane relief to give to migrants. Does it really matter that Trump's Bibles were printed in China? Hypocrisy, and there's so much of it is delicious red meat for the Democrats in this case, but it's not all that salient. It's not going to change anyone's mind or inform their vote.

You've heard of empathy fatigue, right? CNN's Chief Fact-Checker Daniel Dale describes a similar phenomenon. You could call it mendacity fatigue. I wonder if you guys could play this tape we pulled A2, Daniel Dale.

Daniel Dale: You hear old-fashioned football coaches be like, "Keep running the ball, keep running the ball. They're stopping you now, but eventually, they'll get tired." I think Trump has successfully tired out much of the US media saying, "Well, we got a lot of new stuff to cover. This is old stuff." I think it's incumbent upon all of us that as long as he is still saying this stuff, we got to fact-check it just as frequently.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. There's also the reporting on demeanor. These are perceptions, something that the candidates have focused on but until recently, it's been difficult for the press to do it because you almost have to say, "Well, he seemed this way, he seemed that way." There is a desperate desire on the part of the press. It's 50 years that they've been worried about making sure that they don't appear biased, even if it means that they aren't necessarily going to give the complete truth to the people or to offer it in a way that is contextualized and true. It is a huge problem, this bending over backwards to appear fair at the price of actually presenting reality the way it is. Go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: This goes to the perception of our first caller, Aaron in New Orleans. What I think I hear you saying, Brooke, and maybe you want to further explain or defend it, is that Donald Trump just tells more lies than Democratic candidates who have opposed him. Painting him as the Liar in Chief is just objective journalism even though we see where it leaves Trump supporters in terms of their perception of the media.

Brooke Gladstone: It actually is so disturbing to have to concede that Stephen Colbert, back when he was talking to the White House Press dinner years ago during the George W. Bush administration, made a joke about reality having a well-known liberal bias. There are times when one side does lie more than the other. LBJ lied a lot during Vietnam. I'm old enough to remember that.

Now it is different. The lying is so fast, so furious that it is almost impossible to keep track of. You have to understand that the media need to cope with this issue. Often they do it by nitpicking one side in order to be able to talk about the other. I have Dan Froomkin, who is a media critic. He talks about basically what this new word that we've heard called sanewashing. Nitpicking Trump's words so that they make sense and nitpicking Kamala's so that they can show themselves to be truth-tellers.

Dan Froomkin: From the beginning of the fact-checking movement, these fact-checkers have seen themselves as above the fray. They feel like being impartial means you have to attack both sides ferociously. What that leads to is that unfortunately, tons of Republican lies go unchecked while they nitpick and split hairs over these minor Democratic misstatements, or even sometimes accurate ones. Instead of exposing the vast gulf in truth-telling between the two parties, they're effectively hiding it.

Brian Lehrer: Now we have a caller, I think, who's going to speak to that same point. Maybe it would be grossly stereotyping everybody to say this caller from Brooklyn is going to be quite the opposite number of the earlier caller from Louisiana. Mark in Brooklyn, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hello.

Mark: Hi there. How are you Brian, Brooke and Micah? I enjoy both of your shows.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Thank you.

Mark: My question is, what do you think-- Well, first of all, I think that the mainstream media has normalized, and you've heard that before, normalized Trump's behavior. I'm wondering how you think the coverage would be different by the mainstream media if Trump were, say, a Black man or a Muslim man or an Arabic man or woman saying that awful, outrageous things that he says?

It just seems as though the mainstream media, I don't know, because he's a white man, is allowed to-- It's just treated as normal. Now, granted, yes, his supporters are going to be there no matter what he says, but I think that you guys in the mainstream media have a responsibility to do something about how you cover this guy rather than just, "Oh, it's Trump being Trump."

Going back to what Michelle Obama said recently about the double standard in the coverage of Harris versus the coverage of Trump, there is clearly a double standard. I don't see the mainstream media treating a candidate the same way. If Trump was saying the same kinds of awful, just hateful, misogynistic things, if he were a Arabic, Muslim or Black.

Can you imagine the coverage if Barack Obama was saying some of the things that Trump has to-- or a fraction of the things that Trump has said about women and about other racial groups? Imagine a Black man saying the things that Trump says. Imagine a Black candidate saying those things about a group of white people. What would the reaction be? What would the coverage be of the [crosstalk]?

Brian Lehrer: Your question implies what you think the answer is. It's a hypothetical. Micah, any thoughts?

Micah Loewinger: Well, it's honestly hard to imagine that candidate building a critical velocity of support in the United States. I understand the suspicion that there would be a double standard. I think with Donald Trump, we've kind of lost the language to capture just how often these lies come about. I was reminded of Brooke, when you Were talking about sane washing, I was thinking of this piece in The New York Times that was discussed quite a bit looking at housing policies between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

For Kamala Harris, the headline was something to the effect of "Both Candidates Have Housing Plans, Economists Are Skeptical." Then we went through both of both of the candidates' plans. For Kamala Harris, we saw that she is proposing something like a $15,000, $20,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. Her plan to build a lot more housing. Later in the article, we heard that Donald Trump's housing plan was to deport all undocumented people.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. That would free up the housing stock. It is absolutely unbelievable. There is no doubt there is a massive, massive double standard. Right now, he doesn't have to, the caller doesn't have to imagine a hypothetical. We're watching it right now. Trump has been given a pass and I think it's partly because he has amassed this fantastic, unprecedented following.

We said at the beginning when he was elected the first time that he took the game where everybody's playing and he just threw the board in the air and that's the end of it and now nobody knows the rules. The press were still clinging to old rules with a candidate that doesn't follow them and it's left them really just hopping around, not knowing what to do or how to do it. It moves very, very slowly from its traditions, I'm talking about the mainstream media traditions of trying to appear fair and it turns into false equivalency in both sides-ism.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. April in Sioux Falls in South Dakota. You're on America, Are We Ready? Hi, April.

April: Hi. No, I feel like I'm playing mental whack-a-mole all the time trying to see what actually matters. I don't hear anything at all from the Trump side that matters. I only hear horrible things. Then any little mistake at all on the Democrat side is blown up because they made a mistake, somebody misspoke and it's huge for days.

On the other side, it's how is the news media supposed to deal with it because you can't argue with crazy. It's just where, at the point where you're arguing with the crazy person trying to point out the lies, have you become the crazy person? I think that's where we're trapped. Again, it's a side-by-side. We felt like we need to represent both sides equally, so we let this side say and that side say. It goes back to like when I was in Junior high and 99% of climate specialists say there's climate change. One guy paid by Exxon to say climate change isn't real but we still give them 50-50, we still give them each half the air time, even though 99.9% of people, no one is truth and fact. You just need a crazy bait click lie on the other side and it gets the same representation.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call, April. Kind of to her point, for many straight-ahead news organizations, there is this tension that many have experienced that I think they would describe as between showing Trump too much just to gawk at outrageous things as they perceive it that he says, or even to earnestly raise the alarm about those things, thereby giving lies and smears more exposure, more oxygen, in the process helping those lies and racism and other outrages spread. Versus showing too little Trump, ignoring things that should be exposed and discussed, normalizing hate speech or lies in the process of trying not to spread them. It's a real tension. Brooke, right?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. Yes. We spoke to, well, Micah spoke to Chris Hayes about this. He said it's a dilemma that MSNBC is always struggling with and we pulled a piece of tape of that, too. That's A1.

Chris Hayes: We took him live the other night in New Hampshire because, again, it is newsworthy and important to see what the nominee is going to say. Then he lied about who won New Hampshire within a few minutes.

Donald Trump: We won New Hampshire three times now. Three.

[applause]

Donald Trump: We win it every time. We win the primary, we win the--

Chris Hayes: We came back out after he did that.

Rachel: This is part of the issue here. Donald Trump saying that he won New Hampshire not only in previous primaries but that he won New Hampshire in the general election is not true.

Chris Hayes: Rachel has been very clear on this on air. She basically said this is a policy we revisit all the time. We think there's a cost to a news organization to air false claims, which there is. It's hard to not be exhausted by his presence. He really did try to end American democracy in its current form, and he really is promising to do it again in no uncertain terms.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings me to another point that I want to make from Dan Froomkin. This is tape A4. He said that the news media too often omit what he calls the why behind the lie.

Dan Froomkin: I'd like to see motive addressed. Why are they lying?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, the why behind the lie.

Dan Froomkin: Voter fraud is a great example. Why do they argue that there is voter fraud when there is basically almost none? The answer is it's an excuse to suppress voters of constituencies they don't like. Readers deserve to know that and who's funding it. These lies are not there by accident. Every lie has a purpose that is entirely missing from the coverage in traditional media.

Brian Lehrer: Tim in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, is not buying it. I think he's on Aaron's in New Orleans side. Tim, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hi there.

Tim: Yes, hi. Well, I think the whole assumption, the whole premise here is wrong. I don't think the media should have a place in fact-checking and trying to determine what lies are and what lies aren't. Why don't we go back to real journalism that reports what people said and what people projected and not try to get into this fact-checking because [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Well, would that be journalism, Tim, or would that just be stenography?

Brooke Gladstone: Stenography.

Brian Lehrer: As we say the same word at the same time, gents.

Tim: Would be what?

Brooke Gladstone: Stenography. You just repeat one thing is true, one thing isn't true, and it's not our-

Tim: No, no, no.

Brooke Gladstone: -job to curate what's true and what isn't.

Tim: No no, you're mistaken. No, no, no, you're not listening. No, no, no, you're not listening. No, you're not [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Tim. We have 20 seconds before a break, but go. Use them.

Tim: Oh, you're going to cut me off. Okay, you just go back to reporting and not editorializing. They used to put editorializing up on the screen when somebody was making a point. It's all activism. You are--

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry. I have to go to a break, but I'm going to follow up on that, Tim, when we come back. You're drawing a-- maybe not drawing enough a distinction between analysis and editorials, but there's big news about editorials, too. Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's America, Are We Ready to find election information we can trust from the professional media? Later, we'll get to social media. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC with On The Media co-hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger. We've been talking about professional media information misinformation, disinformation, including with your stories and questions.

Micah, I wonder if before we talk about this, big breaking news from The LA Times and Washington Post editorial boards, if you can pick up on where we left off with Tim in Elmo Lake, Minnesota, just before the break, because I think if we proved anything so far for the millionth time during this hour, it's that distrust of the media runs deep on both sides of the aisle. He was saying the news media should just do journalism, which he described as reporting, not editorializing. He said we shouldn't do fact-checking. Fact-checking, just to be clear, is not the same as editorializing. Micah, do you want to go with that a little bit?

Micah Loewinger: Sure. It's my belief, and I believe Brooke's belief, that journalists should be the public's institutional memory. We should be the ones to say, "No in 1992, this lawmaker voted against that bill. They're not telling the truth when they said that they did." That seems like a pretty obvious public good to me.

I would also add that sometimes in these conversations, we can think of the word bias as this very wholly negative thing. I think that there are some basic biases built into journalism that are totally normal, that we've come to expect, like the idea of speaking truth to power. There is an ideology implicit in that, which is that, or, for instance, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. These are golden age maxims of journalism from this rose-tinted era of journalism, we love to compare to our present.

What that suggests is that journalism embodies a natural egalitarian spirit of standing up for the most vulnerable in our society. That is a kind of bias that is good, especially when billionaires, like the kind who run newspapers, aren't always looking out for what's best for our democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Does that mean journalism is a form of class warfare?

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] I think it's simply an effort to level the playing field. In decades past, Jefferson himself said, "You need the press," and there were times when he hated the press, but you need it to agitate the waters so that they stay clear, I think was the phrase that he used. When listening to the other guy, to the caller we just had, I'm reminded of the famous Daniel Patrick Moynihan expression, which is, everybody is entitled to their opinions. They're not entitled to their own facts.

When did we get to the point where facts became the same as opinions and correcting them and checking them was an editorial idea?

Brian Lehrer: Let's stipulate that we have separated the art of fact-checking from the art of editorializing. I would say, and to continue to take Tim in Minnesota's call seriously, that he also doesn't trust the media because of a lot of editorials. There's this breaking media news in the last few days about the owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times canceling endorsements of Kamala Harris that their editorial boards apparently were ready to publish.

We could spend the whole show just on this. From the reporting I've seen, spiking these endorsements seems to be for very different reasons at the two papers. Brooke, what's your best information about what happened here?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, we know The Post saw 200,000 subscriptions canceled. The Times, which has less than 400,000 subscribers to begin with, lost about 7,000 as of Monday but the canceling keeps going on. Obviously, in this media climate, every canceled subscription is going to hurt. As for the differences, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Bezos, Jeff Bezos, the owner. Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post and Amazon, said it was the appearance of bias he was addressing by nixing the endorsements.

Others see it as a business decision should Trump come in. He's tried to punish Bezos before and he might try again. Bezos denies this. As for The LA Times, the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, said that he wanted to ease the "sharp divisions" surrounding the election and he trusted readers to pick the best candidate themselves. I was just going to say, but Soon-Shiong has interfered in the coverage of various stories at The LA Times before leaving one of the editors-in-chief, Kevin Morita, to quit. Patrick Soon-Shiong wasn't so thrilled with what they saw as coverage that was too hard on Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take this one step further because, Micah, there is an argument to be made against news organization endorsements, or I guess, editorials of any kind, that they may have this firewall that's real between the journalist reporting the news and the editorial board that writes its opinions about the news or the columnists but the public doesn't trust or doesn't understand that your information is fair and balanced when your company has an official position on what to think or who to vote for. That, in fact, is exactly the Jeff Bezos argument for why he doesn't want to do presidential endorsements at The Post anymore. Does he have a point?

Micah Loewinger: All this is a bit mixed up because The Washington Post in 2018, I think, changed its motto to "Democracy Dies in Darkness." That was an explicit promise to its readership and a statement that The Post would stand up to the lies of the Trump administration. It's a little rich for Jeff Bezos to now kind of just say, "We believe in this pure neutrality," when he knows full well the relationship that his paper has had with his readers.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a 16-year-old calling in and so let's hear Avi in New York City. Avi, you're on America, Are We Ready? Fact-check me. Did I get your age right?

Avi: Yes, I'm actually 15, but that's good enough. I just want to start off by saying that I've been listening to NPR, specifically WNYC for just about eight years, since 2016. My parents had it on slowly grew into a love for public radio and a big fan. I am really concerned about what I'm seeing in the media landscape in general. I'm looking around post-2020, especially when I now have a lot more access online and I'm seeing a lot of bias on both sides of the media.

I think kids my age, there are a lot of kids, especially my class, who still follow the news channels on different social media platforms. They will still follow the news from the direct source. This is leading a lot of people off. There's a lot of misinformation going around. I personally recently I've been watching C-SPAN just to get a more unfiltered version of what's going on, debates and hearings and whatnot. I think I also use ground news which they compare the stories. What would you advise to people my age who are trying to get a well-rounded and unbiased for the most part, or at least unbiased as you can get these days, view of the news so they can stay informed and be informed when they go out to vote in however many years?

Brian Lehrer: I knew there was one teenager watching C-SPAN. Now I know who it is. Avi, thank you

Avi: You're welcome

Brian Leherer: -for your earnest question. Brooke, Where would you start?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I would start by telling him to do what he's doing in part which is to consult with a variety of news sources. Definitely go to C-SPAN. You get the unvarnished blather frequently of the Congress and it's useful, it's educational to know that. It sharpens your skeptical powers. Then do consult the legacy media, but also go around the edges, go to various sites that focus in especially on particular issues.

There are organizations like ProPublica, the Marshall Project that specialize in things like criminal justice or political corruption and they do incredible investigative work. They are there, they're free, for the most part, to consult and they are a reliable source of good information.

Micah Loewinger: I would also add we often speak about news outlets as monoliths. I would recommend finding individual writers and reporters whose perspective and past work you like.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great point.

Micah Loewinger: Try to build your own kind of stable of people who you think have high integrity and perhaps share your worldview.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get into the world of individuals who are detached from news organizations in our second hour, often called influencers these days and on platforms that are not officially news organizations. That's going to be another thread of conversation here coming up, but let's take another phone call. James in Slidell, Louisiana, you're on America, Are we ready? Hi, James.

James: Thanks for having me on. God bless. I like to start off with middle-aged men and how I think the press hasn't done enough to go after middle-aged men. Trump and his supporters like Elon Musk have done just tons of work. Really, just the whole past 20 years, well, 10 or 15 years, the media has ignored men. I think it goes a lot with-- What basically happened is these men now who are being picked up by Elon Musk and Trump and all that are going to basically gamestop the election while they're bringing in, going after these people who were the F-you vote back in 2016, which got Trump elected because they're mad. They're mad, they feel left out. I know I live down here in Louisiana and like I just see a missed opportunity, like with people in the metal or rock scene who are middle-aged, who are always anti-fascist.

Every time you went to shows, punk rock shows back in the day were pretty much anti-fascist but now you see a lot of my Trump supporters and all that. I see these are people who could use policies that Harris is talking about, like being able to watch a family member and get paid. A lot of guys, I love to see them be first-time homeowners and be able to use that $25,000. They feel left out and they're mad and they become the F-you vote.

Brian Lehrer: James? What would it look like if you've thought it through to this degree for the media to pay more attention to the middle-aged men you're talking about?

James: These stories, we like, man. Descent stories aren't some bands instead of just Taylor Swift. These stories aren't how bands form the punk rock age are stlll around. Down here in Louisiana, we got bands like Down, Crowbar. They're torn all over the place. Metals blowing up. If y'all don't realize it, y'all really missing out on something. The tours are selling out. Ministry, there's all kinds of bands have been around for years, are doing great right now. ICP Gore and y'all, there's nothing about them. No kind of advertising towards them. Any media, no interviews.

I think it's got so much where women are so and women are a lot of the media but find that age group of men as being creepy and just because a lot of them don't have educations or, you know, I'm saying?

Brian Lehrer: I think I know what you're saying.

James: They still are a part of our community.

Brian Lehrer: James, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much for your call. Gamestop the media. Not a phrase I thought we would heard here tonight, but there you go. Let's go next to--

Brooke Gladstone: Can I just say one thing about that caller?

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Brooke you want to say something? Sure.

Brooke Gladstone: Because he has pointed to something that is a long-term problem for legacy media, which is that they are generally of a particular class and they are generally clustered on the coasts. The kinds of coverage that he would like of cultural issues of interest to men who maybe aren't educated or aren't elitist, in a sense, he's right. Local media that might cover that stuff has, of course, taken a horrible, horrible hit.

Their interests and their concerns do tend to slide by a little bit without perhaps the same focus that goes to other groups. He's not wrong.

Brian Lehrer: Not on the coasts is Yaseen in Knoxville. You're on America, Are We Ready? Hello, Yaseen.

Yaseen: Hi, how are you doing, guys? Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk. I just want to share some like really important personal emotion. We've been through right now as an immigrant, as a Muslim, as somebody from Syria, you can imagine everything happening around us and how that affect the family, affect us every time there is a lie around immigrant, around Muslims, around our community.

It just feels so bad when this happened and you see it in your eyes and you hear it. It's just like why the media is now why politicians going to lie. It's like where is the real media where even if they support that politician, they will stand up and say, "This is not good, this is dangerous for our community?" I'm not going to talk about one side. Oh no, but it's just seeing this and knowing the value of our American community and knowing the people in the ground that will make make us scared and dangerous.

Brian Lehrer: Yaseen, a lot of people in journalism might say that they are pointing out Trump's anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, those kinds of biases all the time. Trump says, "That's all you talk about. You don't talk about my policies." I think a lot of people in the professional news media think they're calling this out all the time explicitly on the eating people's pets, on Muslim ban, whatever it is. You feel like it's insufficient.?

Yaseen: I feel like it has to be even both sides. Even if you don't like as a media, the boss who doesn't like Trump or doesn't like Kamala, I think the media, they should be the real voice of the people. If somebody do this lie, no matter if it's Trump or anybody else, they should stand up and say, no. They should not be advertising for it because when a politician lie or anybody lie, they doesn't know that that lie can kill people. That lie can create crime hate around. When they throw it there, there is a crazy people will hear the lie and that will make it into crime.

Brian Lehrer: Hate crime. Yaseen, thank you very much for your call. We appreciate it. Yes, Micah, we can talk about lies and the media's role and fact-checking lies, but as Yaseen reminds us, there are real world consequences of these things, not just on paper or things people say.

Micah Loewinger: Absolutely. What concerns me about the kinds of lies that we have seen going viral around Hurricane Helene and around FEMA is that oftentimes lies and conspiracy theories have this kind of populist energy where the enemy of the conspiracy theory is elites, it's government malfeasance, it's the rich people behind the scenes controlling our society, what have you.

The victims of the lies are often people on the front lines just trying to do their jobs. It's hospital workers, it's election officials, it's teachers, it's people who are so far away from the meat of the conspiracy theory, and that's just been something troubling to see with all this.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Micah. I need to jump in because we're at the end of this segment. That's the first hour of our two hour America, Are We Ready special tonight. America, Are We Ready To Find Election Information We Can Trust? Stay tuned for our second hour in which we'll talk less about the professional media and more about influencers and social media. We'll have a different call in question for you on that, folks around the country.

We'll preview election night with an eye toward not getting fooled or going insane, if you're watching the return. Stay with us. This is America, Are We Ready?

[music]

Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, this is America, Are We Ready? Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC. It's America, Are We Ready To Find Election Information We Can Trust? The fourth of our Wednesday night election specials. I'm joined by my colleagues at WNYC, Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger, the hosts of On The Media.

Micah Loewinger: Hey, Brian, thanks for having us. Trust in legacy media seems to be continuing its long slide. For the third consecutive year, more US adults told Gallup that they have no trust at all in the media and 31% said that they had great or a fair amount of trust in mass media, which leaves about two-thirds, again, who are not very happy with the state of journalism.

Currently, 54% of Democrats, 27% of independents, and just 12% of Republicans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media. That is a downward trend over the past several years.

Brooke Gladstone: One thing that Jeff Bezos said in his editorial was that now the mass media, the news media, have dropped below Congress in terms of public trust. I guess that was a new low. The fact is, we've been here before. There was a precipitous drop, according to Gallup, a few years ago when we went-- we dropped 10 points in one year. Now, what was that year? Oh, yeah, it was 2016. Anybody remember what happened in that year? Maybe it was the year that we were called scum, an enemy of the people and all-- It's when Trump basically was proclaiming his war with the media all through the campaign trail.

Micah Loewinger: While there is decline in trust in the media, there is a contrast, though, with the majority of US adults who express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems. 67% said that they trusted their local government, 55% said that they trusted their state government to address state problems. Perhaps this is yet more evidence of that national versus local dichotomy we see.

Brooke Gladstone: I just want to make one other point, which is that if you look at when the media were popular and when they weren't, during Watergate, the media were very unpopular, but then post-Watergate, when things shook out, they became very popular. During Katrina, the media were very popular, but then post-Katrina, we saw that there was a lot of bad coverage.

Why do these ups and downs happen? They happen because the media aren't-- people think that they want accurate, fair and balanced, but what they really want, and this has been proved over and over again, is to hear themselves reflected in the media. We're not just an informer. We're a reflection. We're a voice. Now with a culture so riven and with the role of the media to not just inform, but to express what the public feels, naturally, we're going to go down, down, down, because this is a nation divided, and obviously, as we've heard from previous callers, we aren't even drinking from the same pool of facts anymore.

Brian Lehrer: To reference last hour a little bit and some of the callers who, as you say, did not feel like they hear themselves in the media. Before I put out a whole new call in question for the rest of this hour, that stat that you cited, Micah, 54% of Democrats have confidence in the media, just 12% of Republicans. We heard a couple of Republicans on the phones last hour who feel like they are definitely not reflected in the media and the media is biased against Trump, biased against them. If there's a lot more than 12% of the country that's Republican or it's that lopsided that such a larger percentage of Democrats has confidence in the media than Republicans, does that mean the media is not being fair?

Brooke Gladstone: Can I just say that we know exactly how powerful the Trump message has been over the last eight years. The media have become the enemy. Just as the brands of beans or everything that could possibly be politicized has become politicized, the media are the ultimate lightning rod, the ultimate expression of hatred of the establishment.

I'm not saying that many people, that the Republicans aren't feeling that they are left out of the mainstream media. I'm just saying that the rage and the inability to draw from media that doesn't necessarily reflect you but can still inform you, it's just not possible anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Against that backdrop of distrust in professional institutions, including the media, more and more Americans, not just the youngest among us, not just Gen Z, are getting their news on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Obviously those three, others as well, following individual influencers or alternative media accounts.

Listeners, we're opening the phones now on this hour call in question, what platforms other than major news organizations are you getting election information from, and why? How are you deciding whose information you can trust when they're not with professional media companies that have editors? 844-745-TALK. 844-745-8255. Again, what platforms other than major news organization organizations are you getting election information from, and why? How are you deciding whose information you can trust when they're not with professional media companies? 844-745-TALK. 844-745-8255.

You can also say what candidate interviews other than with professional journalists you've watched or listened to and why. Perhaps you want to bring one of those up. Was there a particular moment when you realized you were consuming as much or more social media election content compared to professional media election content? Some people are calling this the podcast election. 844-745-8255.

How are you deciding what to forward, or repost, or otherwise share? Is there anything you have found interesting that you've decided not to share? The basic questions, again are what platforms, other than major news organizations, are you getting election information from and why? How are you deciding whose information you can trust when they're not with professional media companies? 844-745-TALK. I'll say that again. 844-745-TALK. That's 844-745-8255.

Micah, when we talk about news influencers, for people who scratch their head still when they hear that term, what does it mean? Can you give some examples or a definition?

Micah Loewinger: Sure. News influencer is not the scientific term. It's not even the term that some of the people I'm about to talk about might use to describe themselves. A lot of them just refer to themselves as content creators. A lot of them focus on a particular issue. I would say this is a mushy category of people who talk about news on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube or Twitch or some social media platform, but don't necessarily work for a news outlet.

Some of them are effectively doing what seems like journalism. Others are closer to a pundit or political commentator. One person who I've seen kind of described as the prototypical news influencer is a person named V Spehar. They host a show on Instagram and TikTok called Under The Desk News. They do explainers on current events. They are often sort of inserting their progressive perspective into the news.

They've been able to build a big enough audience that they have been invited to go to the White House press briefings, to go to Paris to do original coverage of the Olympics. I would consider V Spehar of Under The Desk News, an independent journalist who uses commentary and is open about their political beliefs, but is ultimately someone kind of devoted to doing plain spoken and informal coverage of news events. Then you have--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, then you have people like Kelsey Russell, who is one person among many on TikTok and Instagram that bring news to their followers by reading news articles from legacy outlets. When you watch their videos, they have a green screen behind them and you can see the headline and the text or you can see them reading an article from The New York Times or from The Atlantic or The New Yorker explaining the news, literally reading it out loud and for a lot of people, this is just a great way to keep up with current events without having to do the work of reading through articles themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Micah, if legacy media is shrinking and in many cases news organizations are literally dying and new media is growing so much, do you think "news influencers" can replace legacy journalism? Not entirely, obviously, but to a large degree.

Micah Loewinger: I don't think so and I, and I hope not. As a journalist, I feel that I have to, I have to celebrate and support people wherever they are being engaged with current events, whether it's reading an article in The New York Times or listening or watching somebody speak about information that they learned about from legacy outlets. That's a lot of what we see. A lot of the news content creators are drawing their information from legacy outlets.

I do think that there is something that mainstream news organizations can do that so far content creators cannot, which is go really, really deep into topics with great expertise without the concern of what's viral or what's sexy. I think that what we want from legacy news organization is people devoting months to investigating corporate malfeasance, or sitting in a courtroom, or in city hall and really devoting their lives to beats.

We see some content creators build expertise, but I want people doing deep dive investigative reporting and not worrying about what's trending on TikTok, not worrying about how to go viral. Unfortunately on these very algorithmically driven platforms, you need to be a great marketer in addition to a good researcher or a good writer, and those are different skill sets.

Brian Lehrer: Well, both presidential campaigns are obviously trying to reach voters on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. As an example of the Democrats, the DNC credentialed 200 content creators, many of whom are not news influencers or hadn't featured political content before they were in other areas. You interviewed Makena Kelly, a reporter at The Verge, about this strategy. Here's a one-minute clip.

Makena Kelly: I talked to this guy named Jeremy Jacobowitz, and he is a part of this group called the Brunch Boys. For most of his content, it's him going to a restaurant, trying the food, and reviewing it on TikTok.

Jeremy Jacobowitz: This might be the most underrated pizza spot in New York City, let me tell you why.

Makena Kelly: But he also received an invitation to the DNC. There's a lot of nurses who I've spoken to have been invited to White House events who are also really big on TikTok and Instagram, and they dedicate a lot of their work online to reproductive rights. I think it shows a real understanding of the Internet moment that we're in right now, where Micah, my For You Page is probably a lot different from yours. Like, we're not seeing the same stuff for sure.

There are a wide array of creators who focus on a whole host of different things that are going to show up at the DNC, interact with a directly political environment, and then deliver that to hundreds of thousands, millions of people online who maybe wouldn't have been trying to seek out political content in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting clip. We'll talk about it after this break that we have to take.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's "America, Are We Ready?", our Wednesday night election series. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC in New York. Tonight, I'm with Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger, hosts of On the Media. Micah, we just played this clip of somebody you interviewed at the Democratic Convention who's an influencer, if that's the right word, but not in the political realm usually, and yet she was at the DNC, so put that in context for us.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. What we saw at the DNC, and I think part of the strategy that Democrats have taken for reaching voters on social media is let's partner up with influencers who are popular for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily politics, and the idea is that, our For You Pages, what the algorithm delivers to us after studying our tastes, Brian, is vastly different, depending on what kind of content you engage with. If you're a campaign and you want to reach people, there is no one way to do it. You have to try a bunch of different things, and that's what the DNC has done.

Actually, I saw this fantastic piece in the Washington Post last month about the team that Kamala Harris had assembled to reach voters on TikTok. Just to put it in perspective, how much things have changed, the article reads, "In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris's TikTok videos are conceived, created, and posted in about half an hour" and oftentimes by somebody who's under the age of 25 and has maybe never worked a real job before this.

The news environment is so fast, it's so memey, it's so ironic, it's so jokey. You have to be basically studying these platforms like a hawk in order to talk to people in their own language.

Brian Lehrer: You study these platforms for a living as part of your job at On the Media. How would you contrast what you just described coming from the Harris campaign with what's coming on social from the Trump campaign?

Micah Loewinger: I think the Trump campaign has focused very closely on trying to reach male voters. If you look at the TikTok videos on Trump's page, you can see him goofing off with Logan Paul, who's a YouTuber and MMA fighter. You could see him goofing off with Dana White, who is, I believe, the head of UFC. You could see him on the Nelk Boys podcast. This is a group of dirty prankster YouTubers who have become sort of conservative influencers in recent years. They're known for going to frat parties and getting really drunk with college students.

You could see him on Theo Von's podcast. This is the charmingly plain-spoken comedian who has a variety of guests, including Bernie Sanders, and of course, you could see Donald Trump this week on Joe Rogan's show, which is the biggest podcast out there and a huge podcast for male listeners in the United States and beyond.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Listeners, our call-in question in this hour is, "What platforms, other than major news organizations, are you getting election information from and why, and how are you deciding whose information you can trust when they're not with professional media companies?" Sarah in Minneapolis, you're on "America, Are We Ready?" Hello, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi. How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Sarah: What I was saying is that I kind of drive to drive to work and home from work and listen to NPR News. At night, I kind of, at home, dig into X. I've historically been a follower of Elon Musk, having lived in San Francisco in the past, and so it's quite a contrast because most of NPR flows left, and then my ex has really turned to flow right since Elon took a position along with Donald Trump. One of the ways that I decipher the media is I kind of like check the, when something's like a clip of a sentence, I kind of look on the other one to see what was fully said.

On X, you get like a clip of what Harris said, and then you can go to mainstream media and see what did Harris say, or you can see, "Hey, Donald Trump said this," and then you can go on X and then you can hear the full conversation. It's very interesting how easy it is to clip things and pull them out of context. It's been a very difficult situation for me to make a decision. I'm a libertarian and I fall pretty center, and there's a lot of misleading information on both sides.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. I mean, the problem with Musk is that he has taken a position. He is now, I think, the third biggest donor to the Trump campaign. When you go to X and you see the For You part, as opposed to your regular feed, you are seeing a lot of Elon Musk's falsehoods, his just stream of conspiracy and lies unchecked flowing into your box whether you want it or not. He has taken such a position with so much power that basically, if you follow him, you are deeply entrenched in the MAGA world, and if you go to the stuff that he curates for you, you're not going to get a lot of true information.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's interesting about the For You category, and I wonder if that's consistent with your experience, Sarah. Of course, I don't know who you follow on X, but theoretically, maybe, Brooke, this is a better question for you, but you can both weigh in.

Theoretically, if somebody is a liberal or progressive politically and follows people like them politically, the algorithm we would think would give them a For You feed of more people in their echo chamber, but I think, Brooke, you're telling me that Musk, as the owner of the platform, is putting his thumb on the scale so much that the usual algorithm rules or the old algorithm rules no longer apply?

Brooke Gladstone: I would say so. I mean, what you're describing is basically what Facebook does. You may want to subscribe to a whole bunch of people, but they're just going to deliver to your door the people that you mostly read, and so your efforts to go broad won't necessarily be rewarded by the Facebook algorithm. In the case of X, you're going to get Musk, Musk unvarnished, unedited, unchecked, and so on.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, do you have any experience along these lines as an X user?

Sarah: Well, I think to a degree what is being said is correct. However, I was always following Elon Musk prior to him taking over X, and I was also following many, many things that are progressive and liberal. However, as was mentioned, the For You section especially, probably because I do follow Musk, has flown very right, but I would say that often you can take what you hear there and you can check it against NPR.

I think maybe one of the places where-- and then you can also like let's say read the New York Times and they put out a headline that's very highly clipped from what the whole context of the sentence was and check that as well, but I do think if you're following something, especially on X, it has definitely moved more right, and it's quite a head game to listen to one side and then listen to the other, especially when you're interested in kind of what is the truth behind something, and it is a little difficult because the majority of the media does go completely left and follows a tagline. Then there's X, is the only, right now, checkpoint against it, and as was mentioned, it's not always factual.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, thank you very much for your call. We really appreciate it. Micah, whether one agrees with her take about X or the professional media news organizations, there is an individual who's going the extra mile and trying to check independently and look into claims or analysis that she's hearing. That's a lot of work for the average news consumer, and most people don't do it.

Micah Loewinger: That's probably right. I would say that she sounds like a pretty savvy media consumer in that when she has the opportunity to look at the primary source if it's available or to compare news outlets, she's going the extra mile. I think that if you're critical of the perspective of legacy outlets but you think that they do good reporting, I think that's a really healthy habit.

Brian Lehrer: Let's stay in the Upper Midwest and go next to Ryan in Michigan. Ryan, you're on "America, Are We Ready?" Hi there.

Ryan: Hey. Thank you for taking my call tonight. I particularly don't trust news from social media such as TikTok. I'm a former high school teacher, but I've had these discussions with my students for 10 plus years, and a majority of them do get their news or what they call news from social media. I grew up listening to Tom Brokaw at 6:30 every night, and I asked them, "Why do you get your news from TikTok?" They said, "Because it's entertaining, it's enjoyable."

I tried having conversations with them about how dangerous it is for your primary criteria to be, "Well, it has to be interesting and entertaining first, and then I'll listen to the information," but that seemed to go over their heads, and we seem to be existing in a world right now of infotainment where it's not easy to separate the factual, objective information from the subjective opinions and lies. I can't help but look at what has gone on with the Trump phenomenon and perhaps think that maybe people can't tell the difference between an opinion and a fact, or news and entertainment, and perhaps, I mean, this has been going on since the '70s.

People like to be entertained, and it seems that the media has become more about entertaining people, to get them to keep coming back as opposed to just presenting the information, sort of like Walter Cronkite. Not that it was ever that objective. I'm 43 years old, I absolutely do not trust social media in terms of the news, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority with that respect. The younger people that I've worked with for 10 plus years, overwhelmingly, they want to be entertained first and then they'll listen. That just reminds me of Benito Mussolini in Italy who prioritized entertaining the crowd, bread and circuses, and then feeding them lies. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan, thank you so much. Brooke, I'm thinking a couple of things. One is, if people are looking for news only if it's entertaining, I tend to think those are the people who are not personally affected very much by the issues that are being covered. They have the luxury, the privilege of trolling for entertainment or scrolling for entertainment rather than information because they feel something is at stake. The other thing, though, is it's a challenge to professional journalists, right? Because you don't want to do infotainment, as the caller called it, but then if you're not being interesting while you're presenting the news, you're not doing your job.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, entertainment and news aren't newly merged. I mean, a lot of people, we heard, when The Daily Show came on, was finding that a primary news source. A lot of people find John Oliver and the conversation that Seth Meyers does at the beginning of the show, the Closer Look, these are actually, in terms of Oliver and certainly Seth Meyers, there's a lot of good information in that stuff, and it is funny. I think that I can't speak to his students.

They're getting it from different places, but I do know that entertainment has been part of the news since the beginning of journalism as we know it, going back to the Acta Diurna in Julius Caesar's day, but I think I'm going to leave what it is that he is referring to, to Micah to answer, because he knows a lot more about it.

Micah Loewinger: Well, I like where you took it, Brooke, because I agree that it's-- it can-- I didn't hear our caller making this suggestion, so I'm not trying to create some straw man here, but I do think it's easy to compare today's very fast moving, very memey, TikTok, Instagram news world to some kind of perfect past where we didn't have infotainment. Again, he said that we do. For what it's worth, I think a lot of cable news is effectively infotainment. It's people shouting at each other, reducing complex issues to overly simple shorthands, and sparring with each other, producing conflict. That is entertainment.

That is very, very subjective, and so I do think a lot of older news consumers have become accustomed to consuming something that's not so unlike what young people are consuming. I will say, though, that I do think it is the job and the challenge of journalists to remain relevant and to not to camp out in the corner and present themselves as some kind of pure foil to kids these days.

I think we've seen some great innovation that could show younger journalists a direction forward. I'm thinking of the NPR TikTok guy. He's this young man who explains complicated financial topics with really, really wacky, idiosyncratic skits where he's often talking to himself and editing himself with crazy colors, and it's smart. There's also the Washington Post TikTok guy. I know I'm zeroing in on the legacy media people, but these people are doing it right. Dave Jorgenson and his team, they turn a news story every day into a skit, and it's funny and it's factual, and it gets the job done, so I don't think it's an either-or. I think there's definitely room for innovation.

Brian Lehrer: Scott in Oberlin, Ohio. You're on "America, Are We Ready?" Hi, Scott.

Scott: Hey, and I just wanted to say I'm a new listener, and man, you guys got a great show.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks, man.

Scott: [unintelligible 01:15:56] are so intelligent. I mean, I'm imagining listening to you folks, and you sound like you're sitting in a couch in a room, in the studio, or around a table with microphones, but anyhow, I was going to [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: We're going to make a commercial out of this call for our future shows. Anyway-- Scott, I'm kidding. Go ahead.

Scott: [crosstalk] Oh my gosh. This is-- But anyhow, in the eternal words of President Reagan, he said, "Trust but verify," and he was talking-- I believe he was at a press conference, and he was talking to the Soviet premier about working out a nuclear treaty. Because I grew up during the Cold War, so this is like from the early '80s when he was president and everything.

One of the things I would suggest to anyone that's consuming the news or trying to figure out what's going on in the world is track down sources of information cited from online content and producers as well as traditional media and then just anything else you might hear, and go check with multiple news sources from as many points of view as possible from multiple continents. You can't just [crosstalk] from the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Do you do it? And How do you do it?

Scott: Oh, yes, yes, yes. It's like-- I mean, normally if I'm trying to do research, I go to Wikipedia first off, and then I even go to the references that they cite in their articles and go do that, but I love doing research. Then I also read the Washington Post, I catch WION, W-I-O-N from India, that's a great show. Then Telemundo, South China Morning Post, and I can't remember the South American sites or African. There's a great outfit out of Kenya that does some good stuff as well. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: You may be the most broadly informed person in the United States.

Scott: No, no, no.

Brian Lehrer: But Scott, I got to go. Thank you for a wonderful call, we appreciate it, and the nice words. For the final segment of this two-hour special with Brooke and Micah, we will help you bring media literacy along with your popcorn and anti-anxiety meds to election night. It's "America, Are We Ready to be Informed Media Consumers on Election Night?" Brooke, it took until Saturday in 2020, lest people forget, for the network projection desks to call a winner, Joe Biden. Could something like that happen again? What is election night if we're not necessarily going to find out the results that night anyway?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, I think that the news outlets are going to be bracing for chaos. We should expect something similar this year. Election night has become more like election week. Delays are now part of the process because of a lot of Republican-backed voting and election laws about--, which ended up delaying the counting of absentee in mail-in ballots. It's likely to lead to delays.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and this might lead to another so-called Blue Shift or Red Mirage, and hopefully some cable news organizations that are covering the election prime viewers for this potential. When I say Blue Shift or Red Mirage, I'm speaking about this phenomenon where states in which historically Republicans do better with in- person voting, states where Democrats are more likely to do mail-in voting, we might see earlier in the night, for instance, Pennsylvania, Nevada, or Arizona with a lead for Republicans, and then as mail-in ballots are counted later, because in these states there are laws basically ensuring that the mail-in ballots can be or have to be counted later, we might actually see some of these states shift to blue.

In 2020, this was kind of part of Donald Trump's apparent strategy to undermine trust in the election, was saying, "Well, I was ahead early in the night and then look what happened." It seems fishy if you don't know what's going on, but it really isn't fishy.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, Micah, here's a text message that we just got to our call-in number. Yes, we can take texts there too. On the point that an earlier caller was making about why so many younger people, he used to be a high school teacher, that caller, are using social media rather than professional media. Listener writes, "I would like to point out that many mainstream news platforms require a paid subscription. Younger people get more news from free platforms because we don't have expendable income to pay for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and cable television. Micah, a fair point, right?

Micah Loewinger: Fair point. I understand that people may not want to spend their hard-earned dollars on information when we're used to getting so much free information all the time, but good journalism costs money. It does have value. I do wish news organizations had an option to like pay a dollar to read an article. I think microtransactions could be a good thing because sometimes I want to read an article, but I don't want to subscribe for a month to an outlet. I just want to dig into a set of stories, and so I do wish some news organization were more flexible.

Brian Lehrer: Henry in Ithaca, New York, you're on "America, Are We Ready?" Hi, Henry.

Henry: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got for us?

Henry: You guys hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, hear you just fine.

Henry: All right. I want to talk about-- I'm a young reporter. This summer I interned at my-- I was the audience engagement intern at my local nonprofit paper, the Connecticut Mirror. I think that where people should look on election night, particularly young people, I think you should look at your local nonprofit newspaper. There's one in every state. In my opinion, nonprofit news is the future, right? It's free. It's reader and sort of donor funded. I can only speak for my newsroom, but they really, really, really loved that. All of the interns are Gen Z.

I created a lot of videos for them and really tried to reach out to young people to sort of explain complicated topics. I really think that the future of news is nonprofit, and young people or just people, if you check into your nonprofit newsroom on election night, because a lot of them have great election guides and they're doing great coverage. I think that those are the newsrooms that are modernizing the quickest because they have a lot of innovators and they're willing to take risks. That's what I got to say.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Brooke, at the risk of being self-serving, because public radio is listener-supported, not-for-profit journalism, is this the future to some degree? It seems like being donor-supported is a certain kind of insulation against the crash in the advertising market that has put so many local newspapers out of business, local broadcast stations underwater.

Brooke Gladstone: It sounds like a good model. Whether it's the future, I don't know because as Micah mentioned, as we mention all the time during our public radio pledge drives, doing it deeply and thoroughly does cost money. It demands people, it demands research, it demands resources, but yes, he is right, you can-- The point is to find people you trust to do that legwork to the extent that they can afford to do it, and more power to them. I'm not sure what the future holds, and I think prediction is a bit of a mug's game.

Brian Lehrer: Joe in Collin County, Texas, you're on "America, Are We Ready?" Hi, Joe.

Joe: Hi. Good evening. As I was saying, I'm a registered Republican, but I didn't vote for Trump before and I didn't vote again this time. I feel bad for newspapers to go away so fast. My question is-- I have a question, and maybe have a comment, if you allow me to.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Joe: Why so many Republicans believe in this nonsense that is continuously repeating?

Brian Lehrer: Did you have a comment as well? You could do that too, and then we'll take both.

Joe: Well, the comment is that look at what he did before he became president. I'm originally from Chicago, and when he came to Chicago to build his Trump Tower there, and from what I learned, he ripped off everybody including [crosstalk]--

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, he's well known for wage theft. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Joe almost answers his own question, right? When he says it gets repeated so often.

Brooke Gladstone: Mm-hmm.

Brian Lehrer: It kind of brings us back to social media, at least to some degree, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I think it's tribal. You don't really-- Social media gives it wings and enables people to find each other. There was a time when, say, white supremacists would be sitting at the end of the bar nursing a beer all by themselves. Now they have huge communities just as social media unites all communities of common interest, for good and for illness. I think the eternal question of why are people willing to wink at such manipulation?

I mean, I think a lot of people who support Trump believe what he says, and I think some people believe that he's sort of winking with them, you know, "I'm your guy." "I may not be the best guy, but I'm your guy." There's that sense of community that comes from that. Everybody who's been to a rally says that they are raucous affairs that are full of people who are delighted to be there.

Brian Lehrer: Brooke, getting back to election night, talk about Cable News. Election night is like the Super Bowl for Cable News speaking in ratings terms. How are they prepping? Is this year any different, as far as you can tell?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I think that they're trying really hard to head off accusations of election fraud. CNN is lining up legal experts so they can weigh in on examples where counties are being contested by either Harris or Trump. AP is hiring additional journalists to explain their calls. CNN has hired a bunch of people to fact-check and counter misinformation.

NBC News, The New York Times, they're both dispatching correspondence to contested counties to see how fast the vote is coming in, how much is still outstanding, the stuff that we're used to getting from Steve Kornacki, but now they're putting boots on the ground, and the AP, which is a bellwether for the whole US Industry, they seem to acknowledge that they needed to do more and they have to do more to communicate the information that they have and what it means than they did last time around.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call from Neil in Minnesota. You're on "America, Are We Ready?" Hi, Neil.

Neil: Hello.

Brooke Gladstone: Hi.

Neil: Hello. What I was telling the screener was that, my concern is the-- We keep bumping against this confirmation bias. For me, my background is in psychology and sociology and counseling. My question is, why would people want to believe that? I think it says more about the people who believe these things than it does about who is saying it. That's my concern, is that there used to be certain standards of behavior and rational thought, think through what you're doing. I mean, just normal common sense, and it's turned into just, "Whoever says something that I agree with, I'm just going to double down on it."

Brian Lehrer: Confirmation bias, interesting thing to bring up from somebody with a psychology background. Neil, thank you very much. Confirmation bias runs rampant in our country right now.

Brooke Gladstone: Can I just say that I saw a chart the other day, I should have seen this a long time ago, which showed how various groups are doing in the country. To be honest, it was shocking to me that white rural men are doing the worst. They're doing worse than any other ethnic group. Their sense of loss has got to be palpable, and the sense of being overlooked has to be like a kick in the solar plexus. Where do you go from there? I'm not going to do any psychologizing. I don't have a degree. All I know is that sense of loss finds expression in anger in all of us as human beings and in looking for scapegoats, you can't just say this is my fault. That's what's [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Here's-- Go ahead. Finish you thought.

Brooke Gladstone: No, I think that I pretty much finished it.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Greg in Petoskey, Michigan with an election night question. Hi, Greg.

Greg: Hi. Yes, I'm in Petoskey, Michigan. One thing I've noticed is that Trump seems to overperform, based on the results of the poll aggregates every year that he has actually been around. He actually overperformed more in 2020 than in 2016, and so what I'm wondering is, are the poll aggregators, I mean, we're looking at 538, we're looking at Nate Cole, New York Times, and even the CNN, MSNBC. They've all tried to adjust for this, I'm sure.

If they haven't, then it's going to be obvious that Trump is going to overperform again this year. How much did they adjust and how did they get their information to be able to adjust? That's what I'm going to be wondering, is how we're going to be able to predict what's going on election night and how we're going to be able to trust the information.

Brian Lehrer: Greg, thank you very much. Of course, Micah, on election night, they're taking the only poll that counts.

Micah Loewinger: That's true, but to the caller's point about what polling missed in 2016 and 2020. It is true that pollsters have been pretty bad at reaching Trump supporters, or said another way, Trump is pretty good at getting people to turn out who don't typically turn out and are therefore a little bit harder to predict. I spoke to the director of research and innovation at the Pew Research Center, which is one of our best polling institutions, about this very topic. You should check out the episode of On the Media.

It was addressing this very question, "What can we learn from those past two elections?" What news organizations have done, high-quality pollsters like the New York Times and Reuters and Gallup, is they have upped the number of variables that they use for waiting to attempt to make up the difference for not capturing Trump supporters. The fact of the matter is we really don't know for sure whether these methods will work better.

From what I understand, the polls leading up to the midterms were fairly accurate. Of course, Donald Trump was not in the race, though he tried to convince us that he was. For me, it's kind of an unknown. We can look to these models from 538 and the like, but the fact of the matter is they're not drawing on any special information. They're drawing on the very polls that we're all getting, so garbage in, garbage out, potentially. We'll just have to see on Tuesday.

Brian Lehrer: We have one minute left for one more quick call and quick response. Samantha in the Finger Lakes region of New York has a great question. Samantha, can you do it real quick?

Samantha: Yes. I want to know why the news media feels it's absolutely necessary to make calls before all the counts are voted. I think they interfere with turnout, and I don't think it's fair, and all the people who have sent in ballots from overseas and mail-ins from local elections, why do they do that? Why [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Brooke, 20 seconds. Why do they make projections at all rather than wait till the votes are counted?

Brooke Gladstone: Because we're all desperate, Brian, that's why. Because we want to know even what is unknowable.

Brian Lehrer: All right, everybody, thanks for listening to the fourth episode of our Wednesday night call-in series "America, Are We Ready?" Thanks to all our callers for your stories, good questions, and suggestions on the phones tonight, and thanks, of course, to our guests, really my co-hosts this week, my colleagues at WNYC, and the hosts of On the Media, Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks, Brian.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks for having us.

Brian Lehrer: Listen to On the Media — weekly on many public radio stations or follow them on social media or subscribe to their podcast. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC. If you want to follow my other election-related work, check out my podcast called Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast. We've got one show left to go in this Wednesday night series, and yes, it'll be next week, the night after election night, to see where things actually stand. Talk to you then.

 

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.