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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. These are challenging times for journalism, as many of you know, which translates to challenging times for democracy at home and abroad. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 363 journalists in prison last year worldwide. That's a record, shattering the old record set just the year before, 2021, by 20%. We know about at least one added in 2023, Evan Gershkovich, from The Wall Street Journal, now behind bars in Russia.

Other headlines from just the last few days show how journalism is under assault on multiple fronts. Elon Musk at Twitter, in his now customary erratic style, changed how he labels NPR three times in the last few weeks. The latest version removes his misleading label of it being government-funded, but also removes that label from actual state-affiliated sites like RT from Russia, and Xinhua from China. Fox News just paid a lot of money to settle the lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, as you know, but retained its right to lie.

There are the financial challenges. Buzzfeed just announced last week that it's shutting down its newsroom entirely, and so many newspapers and other local for-profit news organizations have been going out of business in recent years. It's why strengthening our nonprofit local newsroom is such a core mission here at WNYC. All these things and more are also why The Columbia Journalism Review and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism are launching a new project called Faultlines: Democracy, and kicking it off with a conference later this week.

We are honored now to have three all-stars who will be organizing or attending the conference joining us, Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, as well as an author and staff writer at The New Yorker, Jodie Ginsberg, president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard University historian, and author of books including The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and On Juneteenth. Jelani Cobb and Annette Gordon-Reed, welcome back. Jodie Ginsberg, welcome to WNYC.

Annette Gordon-Reed: Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Jelani, this is your conference, so you want to start with what it is and why you want the general public to know about it?

Jelani Cobb: Sure. Thank you for having us on, Brian. I've been the dean of the journalism school for about eight months now. When I was thinking about this job, and what was important in this position, one of the first things that came to mind was the threats that confront us in terms of democracy, and the way in which those threats correlate with the threats that confront journalism, as you said, in your introduction. I started thinking that what we needed was a convening.

Dean [unintelligible 00:03:11] made a point when he visited the campus, maybe about a year ago, is that in the midst of doing the work of journalism, that this is such a grind from one deadline to the next deadline, to the next thing, that it's very hard to think of what you're doing collectively. I thought that that applied, actually. I said we need a moment to think about where journalism is collectively, so we can at least think of some best practices as it relates to moments of democratic crisis.

The last part of this, I think, is that all the fundamental ethical rules, and the marching orders of journalism, have come about in moments of crisis. They came from the McCarthy era, which most people don't know, but the Freedom of Information Act was a direct response to Joseph McCarthy, that the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, all these moments of profound societal turbulence, and yes, democratic crisis, shaped our outlook in journalism.

I think that we need to take a moment to look at what we can learn from the current moment, for what we've seen in the last 5, 7, 10 years, and how that applies to what journalists should be thinking about right now.

Brian Lehrer: Jodie Ginsberg, would you remind listeners of what the Committee to Protect Journalists is, when and why it was founded, and the nature of your work today? I cited that stat from your group, that-- A record, 363 journalists were behind bars worldwide, last year.

Jodie Ginsberg: Thanks, Brian. The Committee to Protect Journalists is a nonprofit based in New York. It was founded 40 years ago, to do exactly what it says on the tin, to protect journalists, to defend them, to document attacks on journalists, including imprisonment, including killings, and to advocate, not just for journalists individually, but for press freedom, also. What's interesting, I think, about the current moment, why this is important, this conference, and this thinking is important, is--

For a long time, I think, many people thought that press freedom and the repression of journalists was something that only happened in authoritarian regimes, or that journalists would only really be threatened in conflict zones. When I became a reporter 20 years ago, the only people I really ever knew that received hostile environments training, the training that journalists are given when they go into a difficult environment, was to go into war zones.

Nowadays, we are seeing increasing numbers of journalists receive some kind of safety training for covering political protests in democracies, even here in the United States, and that's the big shift. Jelani describes this democratic crisis. We're seeing a decline in democracy worldwide, and as a result, an increasing number of threats against journalists, attacks on journalists, harassment of journalists.

That's why I think it's really important that we use this moment to look at the things we have learned from defending journalists, and the kinds of scenarios that you might expect to see in authoritarian regimes, to think about what we might learn from that, to deal with this current moment.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Gordon-Reed, you're not a journalist, you're a historian best known for your books on Juneteenth, and multiple ones about the families of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. What brings you to a conference about the state of journalism?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, because I'm interested in the state of American democracy, and from the very beginning, the press was thought of as essential to the workings of a republic, as a society that is supposed to be run by the people. The people have to be informed, and journalists were supposed to do that. I've always been interested in this. I thought of becoming a journalist at some point when I was a teenager.

Enthralled to Woodward and Bernstein, the role that they played in Watergate, and the notion of journalists being watchdogs for government, not just at the national level, but at the local level as well. We see the end of local journalism, and some of the problems dealing with the new dispensation, the new normal that we have now, with politicians and journalists not seeming to know how to deal with that situation, interests me a great deal.

It's a concerning thing, to think that journalism is not able to play the role that they played in American society over the years.

Brian Lehrer: Would it be fair to say a historian is a journalist who writes long-context articles?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes, exactly. Yes, we like to think that. The second draft of history, the final draft of history. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Jelani?

Jelani Cobb: There's a very different deadline structure between these two professions.

Brian Lehrer: That's for sure. Listeners, who has a thought or a question about the state of journalism today, the relationship of that to democracy, as all three of our guests have been drawing that connection, or the new project from Columbia Journalism Review, Columbia J. School, and partners, called Faultlines: Democracy, with a conference coming up this week, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If any journalists, historians, or anyone else, third draft of history, fourth draft of history, want to chime in, 212-433-9692.

Jelani, I see the organizing statement around the conference includes challenges that are narrowly speaking not about journalism, the white supremacist rally and violence in Charlottesville in 2016 is mentioned, and the January 6th Insurrection and big lie themselves, as opposed to saying the coverage of them. Where do those fit into things directly related to the news business that you're trying to address with this project?

Jelani Cobb: Oh, Brian, I think those things are directly related. The reason I say that is that both of those things, when we look at the revanchist, white supremacist movements-- Very mindful that the trial for the assailant who is accused of killing 11 people in the Tree of Life synagogue is about to come up, and we are also coming up on the one year anniversary of the white supremacist murder of 10 African Americans in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo.

Both of those things have thrived in a particular disinformation ecosystem, and the same very much is the case for January 6th. There's a mutually reinforcing cycle here, in that the weakness of local news, the weakness of credible news outlets, and trust in media has allowed these alternative systems, rife with conspiracy theories, to take the place where actual information should be, and in turn, those things then create the moments that we've seen, that exacerbate the crisis on their own.

When we think about what's happening in this environment, and the volatility that we've seen so much of recently, I think that the issues confronting journalism are really right there, at the center of all of them.

Brian Lehrer: Jodie Ginsberg, from Committee to Protect Journalists. I saw the New York Times article on you last year, as you were starting at Committee to Protect Journalists. It quoted you saying, "In 2018, I was in a press freedom mission in the States, and I remember clearly, these two White House correspondents talking about how they got death threats on a daily basis, as if it was normal. I was horrified. It turned me from a journalist by profession to a journalist advocate."

Can you tell us more about that moment of conversion, if that's the right word?

Jodie Ginsberg: Yes. It was a moment where I realized that the profession I had always wanted to be in had profoundly and radically changed. In other words, this idea that journalists were a trusted source of information and had a degree of protection because of that trust, had essentially gone, and into that gap, a huge amount of anger, mistrust, had poured, that had essentially made journalists very vulnerable. I thought two things became very important in that moment.

One is that I think we need to do a better job explaining what it is that we do, and why it's important. There's this notion, increasingly, that journalists are some elite remote entity, whereas in actual fact, the vast majority of journalists are local reporters, community reporters. Certainly, the journalists that we are documenting, who have been jailed or killed, are in the vast majority, local community journalists providing information about what's important to your local community, what the school board is doing.

Which roads are closed, what your local authority is doing with your tax dollars. Those are essential things for us all, in order to be able to hold the powerful to account. If you create a situation in which people feel that they can't trust anyone, and that, in fact, journalists are somehow to blame for that, you create a scenario in which journalists are extremely vulnerable. We need to rebuild that sense of why journalism matters, but also go out very strongly, calling out those instances in which journalists are publicly threatened.

That includes calling out our leaders when they smear journalists as enemies of the people, because it's that kind of smearing that creates the environment in which people feel that journalists are fair game for much more dangerous attacks.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Gordon-Reed, for you, as a historian, of course, the teaching of history is also under attack right now. We talked a little bit in our last segment about restrictions on the teaching of African American history, and other kinds of history, in Florida, in particular, but this is going on in other places as well. Do you see the attacks on history as related to the attacks on journalism?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, absolutely. All bases of knowledge that get people to think about the world, and perhaps think about the world in different ways, seem to be under attack at the moment. It's geared towards rolling back some of the gains or some of the changes that have taken place in the United States in the last 50 years. Civil Rights Activism, Act Rights for women, and so forth. I think journalists and historians are constructed as enemies of the people.

Certainly, universities now are seen as enemies of a particular view, a way of viewing the world, and they're very definitely related. That's another reason a conference like this is really important, to be able to talk about these things.

Jelani Cobb: Bruce, in Somerset, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bruce.

Bruce: How are you? I think the conference in which you're talking about is very important, especially-- You just mentioned about the attack on African American studies program taught at Rutgers, and taught abroad, and you can see the attack on the departments. I even also say the attack on intellectualism, and making reference to-- I lived in Moscow and I lived in Ukraine. Now, there, they jail journalists and people who protest, and you disappear.

Then in Ukraine, what's going on, when you're seeing a lot of the journalists are trying to basically-- And historians, keep the actual record that has been going on during the war, because now, Russians are basically destroying books, and then at certain regions that they're getting in, putting their own journalists and news stations in, to basically propaganda and trick the people again.

Brian Lehrer: Bruce, thank you for that. Jodie Ginsberg, from the Committee to Protect Journalists, do you want to reflect on that at all? Bruce is obviously drawing international comparisons.

Jodie Ginsberg: Well, I think the point, particularly on Ukraine and Russia is really at, it is vital that we have journalists in these places, who are able to bear witness. The first casualty of war, as many have said, is the truth. The more witnesses we have to that, who are able to document and record what is happening during a conflict, the better. That's why what's happening currently in Russia, especially, is extremely disturbing.

Over the past few years, Vladimir Putin has effectively all but wiped-out independent media in Russia. Certainly, the last death now really was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, in which talking about the war, just referring to it as war could land you in jail for up to 15 years. However, some international journalists were able to operate in Russia, but now that we've had the arrest of the Wall Street Journal report, Evan Gershkovich, as you mentioned, that looks extremely precarious.

Brian Lehrer: A few minutes left with three participants in a conference called Faultlines: Democracy, that kicks off a project called Faultlines: Democracy, being organized at the Columbia University Journalism School and the Columbia Journalism Review. Our guests, Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, as well as an author and staff writer at the New Yorker.

Jodie Ginsberg, who was just speaking, president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard University historian and author of books, including The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and On Juneteenth. Let's take another phone call, Susan, in New Hyde Park, you're on WNYC. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Yes, hello, Brian. I am a child of the 60s, always very left-leaning, and active at time, but I am now totally disheartened, especially with television news, because I feel both sides are really what my son called an echo chamber, saying their sides, but not being objective. I look for objective news and I don't find it. It's very disheartening. One of my fantasies would be to get all the Fox News Watchers to hear the other side. I'm saying the same for the CNN and MSNBC News people, too.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, thank you. Let's go around the room on this one. Then, Jelani, as we run out of time, I'll invite you to just tell people a little more about the conference, if you're inviting the general public to attend. One of the things that you bring up, Jelani, we'll go to you first, in the statement announcing the conference, is diminished public trust. I think, as the caller points out, that diminished trust runs across political lines.

Each of you, briefly, how would you each describe the state of, or reasons for declining trust in news organizations, and what do you think would turn that around? Jelani, you want to start?

Jelani Cobb: Well, sure. First, the conference is open to the public, and you can register on the Columbia's website, at the journalism school. We look forward to you attending. The second is that the decline in trust is across partisan lines, but it's not symmetrical. The decline in trust is driven almost entirely-- Well, not almost entirely, but by and large, driven by people on the right, where there has been a precipitous decline in trust in media institutions.

That is connected, in part, to the thing that we talked about earlier, which is the decline of local news, other institutions that people distrust, like Congress-- People distrust Congress in the abstract, but they're more likely to trust their own representative. Even if they didn't vote for them, they'll trust that person at a higher level than they trust the general, generic category of Congress.

What's happened with the decline of local news is that the institutions that people did have the most trust in are precisely the ones that have declined the most. If you're looking for national news, there's always going to be an element of distrust there. To be succinct, Americans have always distrusted large, powerful institutions. In the time that the journalism school was founded, Joseph Pulitzer railed about the railroad trusts.

People distrusted the railroads. In the time of Grapes of Wrath, people distrusted the banks, which they thought was faceless conglomerates. The equivalent of that now is that people distrust large media organizations, but when we learn how to revitalize local news, which is one of the things we're talking about at this conference, we will address at least some of that question around trust.

Brian Lehrer: I don't think I gave the exact date of this two-day conference, I said later this week, but it's tomorrow and Wednesday. Jelani, you want to give that website again, where people can find out more if they want to attend? Then I know you got to jump.

Jelani Cobb: Yes. If you just Google the Faultlines: Democracy Conference, all the information for this will come up.

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you. If you've got to run to your next thing, go ahead. I'll just get one last answer from Professor Gordon-Reed and from Jodie Ginsberg, on that same question about the reasons for trust declining in news organizations, how to restore it, and with whom. Jodie Ginsberg, you want to go there?

Jodie Ginsberg: Yes, Jelani is right. Trust has been declining in institutions generally, not just in journalism. One of the interesting things I think, though, about the fact that people tend to address their local media outlets more, is also that people, in many countries, also trust the public media. Trust in the BBC, in the UK, for example, remains relatively high, and that's why, when you see Musk labeling public media or state-affiliated media, it's so problematic.

It blurs in people's minds the difference between, essentially, a mouthpiece of the government and a public-funded media operation, like an NPR or PBS, and that's really, really important that you have these facilities, that are able to serve a wide population. The second thing I would say is, I think, trust has declined, in part, because people do not see themselves represented in the media. The media is often increasingly, especially at national level, drawn from small groups of people.

I think people were turned off by media, because it did not represent them, and we're seeing some really interesting initiatives, certainly in the United States and globally, to address that. Then, finally, of course, social media and the Internet has exacerbated those echo chambers that your caller talks about, and that's problematic. Outrage gets engagement, and I think that's what, in some cases, encourages some news outlets to, frankly, pander to their audiences.

Brian Lehrer: Because history always gets the last word, our historian will get the last word on trust and news organizations. Professor Gordon-Reed?

Annette Gordon-Reed: I think it's both of the things that were just mentioned, particularly social media, that made everybody their own journalist, in a way, potentially their own journalist. It's really, really exciting to be able to do that, but on the other hand, you lose gatekeepers, and lots of things get into the public discussion, that are not necessarily true. I think Fox News has been a big part of this.

We can see with the Dominion trial, the problem you have, when you have an institution like that, that sometimes is not committed to the idea of truth. All of those things are there, but particularly this loss of local journalism, I think, has been devastating to people's understanding of trust, because you can see directly how that affects you, when people are talking about things that impact people's daily lives in their homes.

Brian Lehrer: Annette Gordon-Reed, Jodie Ginsberg, Jelani Cobb, thank you all so much for joining us, and good luck with the project you're launching with this conference tomorrow, Faultlines: Democracy.

Annette Gordon-Reed: Thank you.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you.

Jodie Ginsberg: Thank you.

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