Saint endowment, the James H. Olay Family Endowment, and the Sidney and Helen S Friedman Endowment, and from viewers like you.

Thank you.

From the doctor, Keiko Miwa Ross.

PSU Production studio.

This is Conversations Live.

Good evening.

I'm Anne Danahy.

In the current media landscape, the role of trustworthy news sources may be more vital than ever.

At the same time, news outlets across the country, including public media, are facing unprecedented challenges.

Joining us to talk about that and the role of journalism in democracy and answer your questions are two media experts, and we'll talk with WPSUs general manager.

Later in the show, let's meet our guests.

Matt Jordan is a professor and critical media scholar.

He's head of the Department of film production and media Studies at Penn State.

Christopher Beam is managing director of the Mccourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State.

He's also a research professor of political science.

You, too, can join tonight's conversation.

Our toll free number is one 800 543 8252.

Our email address is connect at W Matt Jordan and Christopher Beam.

Thank you both so much for coming in to talk with us tonight.

My pleasure.

Happy to be here.

Same here.

I wanted to start with something that is hitting really close to home PSU and its future.

As you know, Penn State's Board of Trustees decided just earlier this week to transfer PSU and all of its assets to be in Philadelphia.

And this will hopefully allow for PSU to continue bringing news and radio and other media to central Pennsylvania.

This had come after the announcement that Penn State was getting ready to shut down PSU.

So it's a change in course.

And Matt, I just wanted to get your reaction to that.

Well, my my initial response is that I'm happy for this because it provides a pathway forward.

But it's symptomatic of a larger problem in the media ecosystem.

Right.

Where public media is under attack and has been defunded.

And so a station like PSU, which relies so much on fundraising now in in the absence of federal funding, just doesn't have the ability to do this.

So it's a it's a creative response to a bad situation that has a, I think, a positive path forward.

And Chris, what about you?

Your reaction to the news that PSU will be able to continue, hopefully bringing public broadcasting across Pennsylvania?

But also what does it mean for that kind of that larger question that Matt raised?

Well, I mean, to my mind, the question is that this is Penn State, and it was one of the I think it was the first PBS, NPR affiliate to say that as a result of the as a result of the of Congress taking back some of its money, it was going to have to close.

And, you know, I've watched a lot of PSU programing and it always says a public service of Penn State.

And that struck me as as right, as appropriate.

This is a land grant university.

We we have in our very core the idea of public service.

And it makes me sad that the trustees thought that that was no longer that this institution was no longer worthy of our support.

It also really irritated me that that that decision being as being so close to the core of our mission didn't merit an explanation.

It just said, no, we're not going to do this anymore.

And so if there's another way to do it, great.

You know, I mean, there are there's a public out there that depends on this.

And to make sure that continues to happen.

Good.

But it's it's sad to me that it's no longer going to be a PSU sponsored institution.

I'll be the devil's advocate here and say, well, you know, the university is facing a lot of financial headwinds.

I think that was the phrase that was used.

A lot of financial headwinds.

And other universities are also having to take a look at their public broadcasting and whether they can continue to support it.

So it was just a way of being realistic to serve the needs of their students and that, you know, this was a positive outcome for, I guess.

Thoughts on that?

Well, as I recall, the early option was not even kind of considered when they got rid of the funding.

And yeah, it's always a question of what are you, you know, in a, in a serious, difficult funding environment, it's always a question of what is going to continue and what isn't.

What are you going to cut back and what are you going to just eliminate.

But again, it is hard for me to justify the idea that that something that hits so closely to what Penn State was brought into being to do is no longer seen as important or worthy.

And, Chris, what about the broader question?

I'm sorry, Matt, about the broader question of the role of public media in this changing landscape.

Do you see that impacting other stations in Pennsylvania, not just PSU?

I think so.

I mean, aside from the big metropolitan areas, which have a much bigger and more wealthy sponsorship basis, you know, they can get more people with money to contribute locally.

But in rural stations like ours can't do it.

And rural stations like, you know, places that are like Erie or Scranton are going to have some trouble too.

And around Harrisburg, they have a different model that we could try here as well.

But again, I think it's a challenge not only because of what Penn State is deciding to do, but also because of the the change in the media landscape in general, which has moved increasingly toward concentration of ownership away, away from a more diverse landscape where you have different types of stations with different types of things.

It's everything's becoming kind of a chain now, and the bigs are gobbling up the littles.

So in that environment, I think it's really important to have public media, because that is a way of ensuring that at least some alternative voices get out there into the media.

Otherwise, it's whatever the owners want.

And the owners are increasingly a smaller and smaller group of people, and public media outlets are facing these financial challenges.

As you both referenced, there was this federal funding cut from Congress.

They rolled back $1.1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting over the course of two years.

That money was supposed to come through, and it didn't.

And this was I mean, this was a the first time, I think, that this happened, that they rolled back that federal funding.

There's been a lot of talk before about ending funding for public broadcasting.

What do you think, Matt, that changed this time?

Why did Congress decide this time that they were going to pull the plug on it?

Because I don't think Congress is very responsive to what the public wants anymore.

They're responsive to what donors want, and donors want to control the media landscape with their money, and they want their money to equal power.

This has been in 1994, Newt Gingrich threatened to zero out public media.

And this has been something that even since the beginning of the of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, they've been talking about because they can't be controlled and can't be disciplined with money.

It's a different model.

Public media is a public service model.

And this emerged actually in relation to what Chris was saying before as universities, it was actually universities who were the people behind that in the 20s and 30s.

It was the National Association for Educational Broadcasters kind of were starting to do the first things that would become eventually PBS, because they saw it as filling a different need.

They were trying to do their version of distance education at the time, and they saw the radio as a way to do that.

They immediately hit pushback from commercial broadcasters.

Right.

And so the first attempts to regulate it, to ensure something like public media could offer something that wasn't disciplined by the market, that wasn't worried about advertising and wasn't worried about ratings.

Were these stations that, you know, out in Iowa that were doing stuff that would help farmers learn stuff or doing stuff that would help people learn culture as opposed to whatever is titillating gets ratings.

So those those were that initial relationship between universities and public media always had that notion of that.

There has to be some media, some part of the spectrum has to be preserved for educational broadcasting, for culture broadcasting, because that's not what you get in regular media.

And that's I think what the big threat is now is that everything is going to be pie in the face, you know, sensationalism in the commercial broadcasting world, everything is moving toward clickbait.

Everything's moving toward very much sensationalism.

And it's really public broadcasting that preserves the space for something like educational media.

Chris, do you have any thoughts on that, on what's changed?

Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, in political science, I mean, so I'm saying the reason what's changed is that now, as opposed to other, other occasions, they can do it right.

They control both.

Republicans control both houses and the presidency.

They control in the FCC.

All of this creates an opportunity for for achieving something that, as Matt said, has been a a goal for a long time.

You know, so I do think there is as much as there is an economic argument or an economic incentive.

There's also this, this idea that that PBS or NPR are not reflecting politics and Partizan issues in a way that we want it to be reflected.

And so therefore it needs to be done away with.

Right.

It's not a matter of saying, you know, I got this example and this example and this example.

It's like, no, we don't we this is a counternarrative and we don't like counter narratives.

And this is our opportunity to take take it, take it out.

So we're going to what do you make of the fact that support for public broadcasting falls along party lines too?

There was polling done when Congress was looking at pulling back that funding, and it found that Democrats largely supported keeping public funding for public media, and Republicans either didn't support it or weren't sure.

So there was much less support.

So it's it's dividing along political lines.

Well, I would say that political lines divide along media stratification lines.

Right.

So it tends to be that there's a certain kind of strata of media that it's very commercial.

Right.

You know, this like Fox News or whatnot that Republicans align with.

And they're constantly you hear, you know, they're they're lambasting other other competitors, basically.

And that's what it is.

It's a competitor situation.

They see it as a threat to their broadcasting.

So they you know, it's like if Coke would denigrate Pepsi, it's kind of a similar thing.

So I think it breaks along the lines of what people are cued to think on these media platforms.

And you don't see that as much that kind of denigrating other sources as much as you see traditionally with places like Fox News.

Chris, do you have any thoughts on that?

Why?

It falls along party lines so sharply.

I mean, I could again be the devil's advocate and say, well, if it's doing a fair job of public media, is doing a fair job, it should get support across across the spectrum.

Well, look, you can, I think, make a fair demographic case that most media elites are urban, educated, wealthy, probably don't go to church.

Right.

All those things are probably true.

And so it's not like this kind of animosity falls out of the sky.

It's it's part of a broader kind of separation of rural and urban.

But you we cannot discount the, the.

Desire for retribution on the part of the president if there is perceived to be an enemy out there, it doesn't matter.

Is it higher education?

Is it law firms?

Is it former people in the administration?

Is it political enemies, or is it media that if there's an opportunity to to undermine that person, event, institution, whatever, that he's going to take it?

And I think that is unusual that I don't see in, in our history.

Yeah.

We're going to come back and talk a little bit more later about some of the other challenges that other media, non public media is facing.

But I want to go now to an interview I had with Isabel Reinhardt, general Manager.

We spoke earlier this week just after the Penn State Board of Trustees voted on PSU.

So we're going to hear what she has to say about that, and then we'll come back and discuss.

Isabel Reinhardt, thank you so much for coming in to talk with me about this.

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this week's Conversations Live.

So Penn State's Board of Trustees decided to transfer PSU and all of its assets to be based in Philadelphia.

Can you tell us what this will mean for listeners and viewers across PSU's area?

Certainly at this point, we really think this is our best opportunity to continue to serve the region with rich public media, both radio and television, across the region as we're leaving the university by June 30th, as was stated in the previous vote, I believe that will continue.

And with Hawaii coming in, I think it's a really rich opportunity for us to continue to provide really great service across our region.

So across the board at PSU, digital, TV, radio, educational, none of that will be part of Penn State anymore.

Is that correct?

Is that correct as of June 30th?

And are there more hoops to jump through to make sure that this is finalized?

Oh, certainly.

This is really just a first step.

So this is a non-binding agreement of just an idea of a 30 day exclusivity period, as was stated yesterday.

And from that, if the conditions are met of this agreement, then we would move on to the next step, which would be a binding agreement that would involve due diligence, making sure that our year end results were as anticipated for them to continue.

So until the transaction would be closed, which right now I believe the term sheet from yesterday said at the latest, June 30th, there are going to be a lot of steps that we need to take in that process, and a part of that is raising a lot of money.

Right?

More than $8 million.

Yes.

And that is on we.

So the term sheet said that they were comfortable with raising $8.3 million by, I guess, November 10th, because it's 30 days from yesterday.

Is there still a possibility of all of that doesn't fall together as it's planned, that PSU could be shut down, which was the original plan from Penn State?

Yes.

That is that remains a possibility until we would have a binding agreement that would be signed or really even into the closing date of that binding agreement.

That would be an acquisition agreement for me to acquire all of the assets of PSU.

Do you feel confident at this point, though, that things will fall together and PSU will be able to continue with we?

I am guardedly optimistic.

Yes, I'm very hopeful.

Yesterday's vote was a big step in the right direction.

There's no guarantee.

But I do think that this that he has every intent to see this through.

I think they're a great organization, a very strong organization that will be able to help us maintain public media coverage across our region.

Do you know yet what type of impact this might have on PSU programing, whether it's national TV, radio or local?

All the conversations that I've had thus far really were intent on keeping the local element across our region.

So we would continue to have local reporting, local storytelling and the national programing, of course, from NPR, PBS and other affiliated programing distributors.

So I think that the impact will be that we can continue to have those over the air services across our region.

Of course, there's a lot going on with public media and just general media news outlets across the country and in Pennsylvania.

How does what's happening here with PSU, y'aII fit in to that landscape there?

We have seen, especially since the loss of federal funding, that there are a lot of changes.

There are a lot of mergers.

There are some divestitures.

We we were we were reported by USA today as the first university licensee to be divested.

And I think that we'll continue to see mergers and acquisitions in order to really capture economies of scale and efficiencies, because without the federal funding, that is a large gap that needs to be filled in some way.

And I think that we will see, you know, fundraising that we've seen in many ways, but we will also see that there will be changes in the landscape here in Pennsylvania.

We are the first.

We are the only university licensee.

So when we have six other stations across the region, each of them is uniquely situated based on what they are providing to their communities, how much of a reserve account they may have had, and just the the services that they provide across their region.

So I think we will see some changes for sure.

And this is, as you mentioned too, also challenging in other places as well.

I'm thinking of new Jersey and in Harrisburg too.

So other outlets in a similar situation.

Yes.

It was recently announced that WNET will no longer be supporting new Jersey PBS, and that was an affiliate of theirs that they supported operationally.

So I know that the coverage area was duplicated by Wwyy and Wnet, so the coverage over the air will continue the challenge.

There will be local services, local reporting, local storytelling, and I believe that they are committed to having a presence there.

I just don't know what that's going to look like right now in Harrisburg.

We just found out that their CEO is stepping down.

A couple years ago, they had inherited or been really inherited online Lancaster News.

So they have spent the last couple years integrating the news reporting operations into WITF operations.

And there's there's just a lot going on there.

So I think we will continue to see some really big changes across the industry.

And there are still a lot of moving parts with the PSU Penn State Wyhy agreement.

But what are you hoping to see come out of it in the end?

Well, I really feel like like I've said, that Wwyy is a very strong organization and they can help us to really continue to serve our mission to our communities to spark discovery, enrich learning and strengthen communities through vibrant public media.

They will help provide us with the resources, the shared back office support, and other things that we need in order to continue to serve.

And I wondered, too, if you could respond to the argument that public media is no longer necessary.

Maybe there was a time when it was needed.

Mr.

Rogers, we all have memories of that, but that now there's enough media outlets nationally and locally that can fill in where that used to take up the space.

Well, I would argue that we will always remain relevant as long as we stay focused on our local presence.

We really need to be the purveyors of fact based local reporting, local storytelling and engaging our community in all the ways that enrich the communities in which we live.

So I think that we will, of course, also have to look at other media outlets, media platforms to make sure that we are meeting our our media consumers where they want to be consuming media.

Recently, we've undertaken a lot of efforts in the digital world, and I think that there will always be evolution in those areas in order to meet our consumers where they want to be consuming.

Isabel Reinhardt, Executive Director and General Manager of PSU.

Thank you for talking with us.

Thank you, Ann, very nice to be here.

If you're just joining us, I'm Anne Danahy and this is sous conversations, live media and democracy.

We're talking with two Penn State media experts.

And we'd love to take your call and hear your questions or comments.

Our toll free number is one 800 543 8242.

Or you can email us at.

Matt Jordan and Chris Beem, thank you both so much for coming in to talk with us.

Sure.

So I want to talk and shift gears a little bit and talk about the impact on newspapers and local news sources.

So they have been really hit hard over the past 20 years or so.

I saw one report that said I think it was more than 3000 newspapers have closed down over the past 20 years.

There's lots of variables going into that.

At the end of, as Chris was talking about Craigslist and of classified ads and all sorts of things.

Matt, can you talk about the impact that that's having on community and if there's any chance that that could, I don't know, somehow start to turn around?

Well, I mean, it put some context on it.

This is a trend that started at first at Gannett.

Right, which is that they presented Wall Street with a business plan that said, we can consolidate, make efficiencies of scale and replace local people with syndicated programing, and it has returned amazing amounts 20% a year, profits.

Any business that gives you 20% a year profits is going to take off.

That has become the model for newspaper chains in general.

And now newspaper chains have been replaced by venture capital firms that are even more vicious than they do things called liquid liquidation, leveraged buyouts.

And they essentially buy one, and they use the leverage from that to buy another, strip it of its assets and put that in the investor's pockets.

And what you lose are all the reporters on the ground, all the people covering local sports, all the things that we need from local newspapers, local newspapers are a vital resource for civic engagement because they give people information about where they are.

They bring stories about national structural changes to a local level so people can understand them.

We know from research that the more robust your local newspaper is, the more civic engagement is, the better democracy function, all of those things.

So as these newspaper chains have wiped out local reporting, it's also liquidated the brand of the newspapers.

People say, why am I getting this when I can get everything online, right?

So that's the conundrum.

If you don't have investment in local reporting, if you don't have storytelling about things that matter to people, people look at the thing and they say, why am I going to pay for that?

So that's the conundrum with it.

And it's it's something that we haven't figured out yet because it's very profitable to buy these things and strip them for parts.

Right.

And so it really requires communities to invest in newspapers.

We see nonprofits emerging in this space of news deserts now kind of moving in or community owned stuff or public broadcasting in our, in our region.

And that's a really a vital move in a direction that could repair some of the damage that's been done by kind of voracious investors who have wanted to kind of whittle out that whole part of the sector.

Yeah, that is really so troubling, because if you start decreasing the staffing levels, decreasing the coverage areas, increasing the cost, I mean, you can't it's hard to blame it on the consumer for saying, why do I keep seeing my bill go up when the content is going down and perhaps I can get it free elsewhere, or I'm just going to rely on Facebook or other other means.

Maybe it's just not that important anyway, right?

I'm not reading what I'm getting.

Chris, do you have any thoughts on that, on where what the future holds the you know, I mean, Matt knows this much better than I, but as from a politics point of view, the one thing that I think doesn't get mentioned enough is coverage of state politics, right?

I mean, in some states, in some states, like, you know, Boston is the capital, Atlanta is the capital.

That's not a problem.

But Tallahassee, Springfield, Albany, these are just kind of outside the major media markets.

And having someone there all the time, or 2 or 3 to cover state politics is expensive.

So when you're looking for things to cut, that's one of the first things to go.

That's despite the fact that, you know, despite the fact that most people focus on national politics, and that's where their attention is, the what happens at the state level is almost certainly going to affect them more.

And if they don't know what's happening, they can't be party to that conversation.

They can't input in that conversation.

The other thing that happens is, yeah, David Broder wrote a book a million years ago called about about State politics, and he was on the tour and around, around the country.

And he said that every state he went to, somebody would say, yeah, but you don't know our state, meaning our state is particularly corrupt, right?

Our state politics is really dirty.

And there's a there's that perception didn't fall out of the sky either.

Right?

There's a reason for that.

And if you are not covering state politics, the opportunity for corruption just goes up.

So you have people disconnected from decisions that affect them, and you have people more likely to engage in, you know, corrupt politics.

And and that is a direct result of these decline of local newspapers.

Yeah.

I wonder if that same idea can be applied to local politics and local going on as well.

If there's nobody covering it in, big decisions are being made, then people don't find out about the big decisions until it's too late to do anything about it.

And then that kind of contributes to that disconnected feeling.

Yeah.

I mean, the example would be out in Dubois, right?

They didn't have they had a local manager who was robbing the cash.

Right.

He was taking money out of it and there was no local newspaper to they didn't find it for a while.

Right.

And that's the that's the thing.

And one of the things we've started at the, in the Bellisario College is something we're calling the excuse me, the Documenters program.

And it's because of this local crater cratering of local coverage.

What we're doing is we're giving people either at the college or out in the communities, training on how to be reporters so they at least can go to the school board meeting and say, here's what actually happened.

And that level of just that basic level of accountability makes people act better.

Right?

And so functioning democracy comes from accountability comes from people seeing what other people are doing, people paying attention to their issues, knowing where these issues are.

I was I was having a conversation with one of the people from WITF, and they were talking about their trust building initiative, and they were going down into these towns in the southern tier of Pennsylvania.

And they were talking to them, and they were saying things like, our mayor candidate here is talking about the border.

What does that have to do with local?

But that's a symptom of that.

Politics and political reporting is now so national.

And the more national it gets, the more it focuses on partizan cues, the less embedded in people's lives it is.

So again, local reporting is just absolutely fundamental for a functioning democracy.

And that's the public radio station in Harrisburg too.

So another public radio station that's dealing with its own challenges.

So so I want to get to the idea of of everything is national.

But at the same time, everybody is in their own silo when it comes to national news.

So depending on where you get your national news, you have one vision of what's happening, one idea of what's happening.

Chris, that seems to have really calcified, that there are separate news sources for different groups of people.

Do you see that changing at all, or do you think there's any way of identifying it?

I don't think it's going to change.

I think the, you know, the the expansion of technology, right.

You know, from three networks.

We went to cable, then we went to the internet and then we went to podcasts.

And so it is it is very difficult to make a successful business model that doesn't to some degree rely on a niche, a some segment of the population.

It can be whatever, you know, whatever works for you.

But the idea that we're going to go back to some news organization that is able to bring together the community in any kind of genuine sense, I mean, you know, like this, right?

Is is much more unlikely, just harder to, to sustain financially, you know, what do you think of that?

I mean, I think it's, it's it's complicated.

Right.

The on the one hand we have nationalization of media and we have the perception of a lot of variety in news.

And yet it's pretty homogeneous.

Right.

And that's that's what's changed.

And that's really a factor of of markets.

People who study media markets often use the expression that when, when a market, whether it's, you know, rice or gasoline or whatnot, doesn't produce what, what the community or consumers need, you call that a market failure.

And if you think about the need of democracy for informative reporting, that helps us deliberate with one another, that introduces people to voices they might not have heard.

There is a complete failure of our commercial system to provide that, and what we see as a result of that is higher polarization.

People gravitating toward niche environments just to have their biases confirmed, which because that's what it's about now, and that's what algorithms help with.

They figure out exactly what it is that you're trying to hear, and they will provide that to you.

It'll feed you that on your platform.

Right.

So it actually becomes pretty homogeneous in terms of what people are doing.

And we're not doing what makes democracy thrive, which is to be able to pool the resources of vast experiences out there, bring them into conversation and solve shared problems.

Media isn't doing that.

It's providing people with a lot of things that just confirm what they already know.

And again, that's really one of the reasons why public media is absolutely fundamental to what it is that we want to do as a democracy.

And we're going to take just a moment here to let people know what they're watching and listening to.

And then we're going to come back to that subject.

If you're just joining us, I'm Anne Danahy, and this is sous conversations, live media and Democracy.

We're talking with two Penn State media experts, and we'd love to hear from you.

Our toll free number is one 800 543 8242.

Or you can email us at connect at.

So Chris, another thing that one of you mentioned also is that we're also seeing more podcasts, more commentators.

It's a different type of media.

So we've got the decline in actual news reporting at the local and state levels.

You have this increase upswing in people who are commenting on what's happening.

And I just wondered what your thoughts are on that.

I mean, on one hand it could be it could be good that people are getting more involved in listening and getting those viewpoints, but it seems a different than getting just the facts, as they say.

Well, you know, again, it's a niche, right?

I mean, the first time Democracy Works won an award, one of the the podcasts we were up against was a podcast about Bigfoot.

So that's pretty niche, right?

And I don't think, like I say, I don't think that's going to change, but I do feel like it is essential that we recognize that public media has a different incentive structure.

Right?

If you are in social media, if you're in podcasts, you are looking for hits, you're looking for face time, you're looking for how long you're going to stay on the site.

And so and that's how you monetize it.

And if you are on cable TV or talk radio, you are looking for outrage, you're you're monetizing that.

You're because by doing that, you are keeping listeners, you're growing your audience.

Public media is does not have that same commercial demand on its on its editorial decisions.

So it is by definition, more concerned about the public.

And, you know, could it do that better?

Sure.

But the idea that we don't need that focus, that we can let the market settle all this out, that's an extremely undemocratic notion.

Do you think public media will be able to find new ways to deliver information, so they aren't going to fill that same niche that you're talking about, but they might be able to I mean, they already are exploring obviously, podcasts and social media, but continue to grow in that way, I think.

I mean, public media should public media should continue to reinvent itself to deal with what consumers are wanting.

I think one of the reasons people like, I have a theory about why people like podcasts so much is that a lot of media is quick hit stuff, right?

Little 22nd videos, and with a podcast, it's kind of a throwback to the days of radio, when people would sit with people and feel like they had an intimate relationship with the person they're speaking.

You always hear about, you know, this was the podcast election where the bro podcasters like kind of carried the day, they say.

And one of the things people just like to do is they talk about vibing with the host of the podcast.

Right?

So it's about kind of connecting with a voice that sounds authentic, has nothing to do with content.

It's more about spending time with somebody.

And that, to me, tells me that people are thirsty for connection in some way that they're not getting from it.

And so people gravitate toward media that fill that need.

So public media could do that very well, I think, and be educational in doing that and involve that public service model and not just be about, you know, whatever it is that the podcasters are talking about.

Right.

And another bright spot that you had mentioned earlier too, is this creation of online news outlets.

Sometimes they're community outlets or we have lots of newsletters.

That's like a really big thing right now to have newsletters.

Do you think that that Chris can help fill that void?

Well, I mean, look, I mean, nobody knows exactly where things are going and, and outside of these operative business models, nobody really knows what's going to work.

So you try it, right?

And and you try to integrate it into your programing in a way that, you know, makes both better.

But there's no guarantee.

Right.

And when there's money involved, there's a lot more incentive to try things and fail.

Fail quickly.

Right.

So it's not it's not a given that this is going to work, but it's absolutely essential that public media, probably even more so than other, you know, for profit media, works to try these things and see what does work.

I want to zoom out to the national level now and talk a little bit about what's happening at the Pentagon in particular.

So Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he said that media outlets have to sign these new rules to acknowledge these new rules.

They say it's just an acknowledgment.

Many media outlets are saying, no, we're not going to sign it.

And this is crossing political lines.

New York Times, Fox News, Associated Press, etc.

I wonder what your thoughts are on what this means.

So okay, the media outlets are not signing it, but the fact that it was asked for and there's no sign that they're rescinding it, that they're pulling that back.

Is this just one moment in time or is it signify something larger?

Is it a bigger?

I think we're seeing unprecedented moves against freedom of the press in ways that I mean, if you read project 2025, a lot of this was just described what they were going to do.

And it's, again, bringing every piece of leverage they have to I mean, JD Vance called it, we have to be ruthless with our power.

Right.

And this is being ruthless with your power.

You're cutting off access to people who don't play ball.

And we've seen the same thing.

They didn't try to sign the pledge to get access to the Pentagon.

But you saw the same thing in commercial broadcasting, right?

This use of SLAPP suits, which are kind of nuisance suits.

President Trump suing CBS, suing ABC, suing the New York Times.

You bring economic leverage to bear, to make people acquiesce to to your demands, to bring them in line with your view of what the story should be.

This is unprecedented in the American experience.

Well, maybe not.

McCarthy had it a little bit of a little bit of this taste of this, but it's what Viktor Orban did in Hungary.

It's it's what a lot of what we called flawed or illiberal democracies are doing in across the world right now.

And again, I think people who value freedom of the press have to push back on this as much as possible.

Well it's impressive that the, you know, these media outlets that don't agree on much and see each other as competitors decide we're going to all stand up and walk out at 4:00, which is when the deadline.

So, I mean, that's a good sign.

It seems to me that that this group, this profession is saying we are not here to be your mouthpiece.

And that's precisely what was being demanded of them.

You are going to tell the American public no more and no less than what we say.

It's okay for you to tell them.

And that's not a journalism.

That's not a journalist and that's not journalism.

There has to be, you know, the opportunity to question to, you know, to find things out and to find things out that people don't necessarily want you to know.

And if you and if you are content to, to stop that.

Well, yeah, that is a, that is a, an assault on democracy.

I mean, I don't know how else to see that.

I mean, you know, Hegseth said that, you know, there's no right to be in the Pentagon.

And, you know, maybe that's true.

I don't know.

But irrespective of that question, there is a right to the freedom of the press.

And and the Fourth Estate has a job in our democracy.

And these new standards make that job impossible.

Fundamentally, irrefutably impossible.

And, Matt, one of the things that you've looked at, too, is how we're comparing what's happening in the United States is comparing with what's happening internationally at other countries.

And how do you see that?

How do you see what we're seeing here?

With the lack of support for public media, also, combined with what's going on at the Pentagon and these SLAPP suits that you were referring to compared with other countries?

Well, I think if you look at I mean, it's a it's almost a direct correlation.

If you look at strength of democracy and there are all these indexes that that would the press freedom index.

There's also the economist runs democracy Index strength thing.

And the direct correlation between strength of democracy and investment in public broadcasting per capita is reflected in things like trust in democracy, trust in media.

And the more robust the support, the more trust there is, right.

And we're an outlier in those things.

In most European countries, they spend between 50 and $100 per capita per year.

In America we used to spend about two.

Now we spend nothing $2, $2, right, a dramatically less.

And so it's no surprise that a lot of what public media does, which is to ensure equity, equity of access to people, to ensure a pluralistic voice, you know, distribution of voices that aren't just what's good for, you know, advertisers.

Without that, democracy starts to wither.

A theorist I like to think with a lot is a guy named John Dewey, and he argued that when people feel left out in terms of their voices and democracy, they say, what does this have to do with me?

Right?

So when you're in a state of and they feel like they're in a state of coercion, right?

So when the powers are left to just the very few to decide things, people tune out.

And so, again, strength of democracy also reflected in our voting tendencies.

People don't vote very much, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't feel like their voices are being heard.

Right.

And that, I think, is a feature of our of the poverty of our media landscape.

Chris, do you have any thoughts on that?

That's really good.

I thought that one.

I don't have much to add to that.

That's fine.

I will throw the next question to you.

So the Sunday morning news show Face the Nation on CBS got into a legal battle with the Trump administration about one of their new segments, and it was a prerecorded interview.

So not a live interview.

It was prerecorded interview with the secretary, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, and they edited it.

They edited, I think it was about four minutes down.

And then it turned into a disagreement about whether that was fair or not.

And now they're saying, we're not going to pre-edit our interviews, we're going to air them in whole.

And I guess for just your average viewer or listener who doesn't pay a lot of attention to that, why does that matter?

How do you see that?

Well, you know, I, I think it is important with especially with respect to ABC and CBS, that their behavior is driven by a new media agreement that they needed to get past the FCC.

So they had a strong financial incentive to acquiesce to what the president and the FCC wanted.

Sorry.

Wait, no, no, just what was your question?

Just what does it mean for somebody who isn't following it closely and says, okay, well, that sounds reasonable.

They have to air the whole interview and they can't edit it.

That's right.

Edit it ahead of time.

Why does that matter?

Here's here's what really is disturbing about this from a democracy point of view.

The, the the implication is that if you're editing, you're not doing it for brevity, you're not doing it for clarity.

You're doing it with a hidden agenda.

Your objective is to make this person look better.

That's what the case with Kamala Harris and CBS, to make them look better than they really are, make them look more intelligent or fair minded, or to make them look worse.

So the implication, the absolutely inescapable implication, is that journalists are not on the level that they are not they're not honest brokers.

They're not pursuing this in a, in a sense of of goodwill, of doing their jobs.

And the more that impression is driven into the American body politic, the the more difficult it will be for democracy to sustain itself.

It is it is imperative, not that we not just that we trust institutions, but that we trust each other to do our jobs and to do them fairly.

You know, we're all human.

We're all going to fail, right?

Nobody's perfect.

But the idea that this is none of this is on the level that we all have an agenda is is poison for democracy.

So further undermining that trust in the media.

Do you have any thoughts on that, on the idea that well, okay.

So they have to air it unedited.

That sounds reasonable.

Well, what they edited out were things that weren't factually correct.

Actually.

They were doing them a favor to keep.

But but that also makes you wonder why did they want that platform in order to be able to spew things that they knew weren't correct, right.

They knew weren't weren't true.

And and that's a little bit that's what's chilling about that to me is that essentially what they say is they want to we want a platform and an open mic to say whatever is want, you know, and we don't want to be fact checked, but fact checking for accuracy is what journalism is supposed to do, right?

Because you want the public to trust you as a media source.

And I think that journalists need to explain better why it is that they edit things and not, you know, and get that get get that narrative out.

You know, Chris is right, that one of the features of either a liberal democracies or authoritarian governments is to constantly attack the press, to undermine trust in the press, to make everybody be cynical.

And when people are cynical, they don't trust one another and they don't trust the functioning of a democracy.

Yeah.

Because also, I'm thinking about it as a reporter, whether it was print of an olden times or online or radio or TV.

A lot of times you want to get a lot of information across, but you don't have all the time in the world to do it.

So you're forced to choose what what goes on out there.

So it can kind of tie your hand behind your back as a, as a reporter trying to figure out how to do that.

So this goes to raises the question about standards of journalism.

And there are definitely standards of journalism that journalists are supposed to subscribe to about, you know, correct information, getting different viewpoints.

Do you see that also being undermined, this idea that here are the standards of journalism that they're supposed to follow.

But now you see people under the guise of being reporters who don't necessarily subscribe to those same ideas.

I think very few institutions subscribe to those ideas, because true journalistic outlets are increasingly under attack, either through ownership constraints.

Right.

The Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

You know, these big people come in and buy these things, and they start to make them hew to the line and, and kind of move away from standards and practices of journalism.

But the majority of people now get their news on social media, right.

And it's citizen journalism which has none of that professional ethos of fact checking, of being accurate.

It's about whatever is going to attract eyeballs, whatever's going to gather engagement.

That's how you build your audience.

That's how it's monetized.

Right.

So there's no and that does not require any standards.

But if it looks like news, if people are on a look like they're in front of a desk, they say, hey, look, this is the news.

And and so again, I think it's really important for people to realize there's a difference between news that is journalism and media content in general, and to, if they want information, gravitate toward people who follow those practices and move away from whatever some guy did on TikTok as a way to get your news.

Chris, do you have any thoughts on that?

The idea that also that leaves us with different versions of reality, which we were talking about a little bit, you know, I mean, I do think there is a market, you know, still in this, in this nation for journalism, for people who hold themselves to standards of truth and evidence and public service.

I don't know how big it is.

And, you know, my fear is that it's getting smaller by the moment, but it's still there.

And so and there are still people who are practicing it.

And here's one little factoid there was trusting news is an organization that looks at this, and they did a survey and found people who were very distrustful of the news.

And they brought these folks into an editorial meeting.

And after that, their distrust went down dramatically because they saw that these people were not, you know, on the make.

They were serious about their craft.

They were serious about the questions that they had to ask.

They were serious about how they used the limited resources they had to serve the public.

And once they saw that.

So I think, you know, one thing journalists need to do is to make that effort more explicit, to show people, no, we're not.

I mean, we may fail.

We're humans, too, but we are trying our best to serve the public and to do it in accord with standards of evidence, ethics and facts.

So having that community outreach be part of it, too.

Absolutely.

And that's something we had talked about before the show.

I think there was a quote you were looking at from the Pope, and he was saying that the role of the community in seeking out the truth.

Well, the community seeking out the truth.

And then the Pope last week did a talk about how clickbait is the is the is the real problem, right.

And that news organizations, he challenged news organizations and people who are curators of the truth to be more serious about what they do and not just chase after engagement and chase after money.

Right?

That this is a crucial thing.

And if you don't have that, then you just have just cross chatter and you don't have a community that can share a reality.

Right?

So much of our if you think about 20 or 30 years ago, the whatever, 20 million people watched ABC news every night, right?

It was just that was the shared reality as the disaggregation and splintering of news into niches.

And further, you just don't have that shared reality anymore.

And without that, it's really hard for people to talk about what's important to them.

We can't even identify the problems we share in order to solve them.

And that's what democracy depends on, is locating the things that we do and we want to do, and then saying, here's how.

Here's some potential solutions.

And I wonder how both of you deal with this with your students, just the where they're getting their information, either whether it be young future journalists or just students who are interested in the news.

Chris, how do you encourage them to to get reliable?

Well, it's a little depressing in some ways.

You know, you get the the too long, didn't read response about just about everything.

And and there is this gravitation to TikTok and Instagram and those are not measured careful, thoughtful, rigorous effort.

Now it's not the it's not true that there are absent there.

I mean, Mccourtney Institute brought in Spahr, who is a journalist for on TikTok platform and they are very responsible.

So it's not impossible, but it's harder to find the weed for the chaff, right?

Because again, the incentives line up differently there.

And what do you tell your students or how do you encourage them to get reliable information?

Well, in a way, I encourage them to be like, what a functioning democracy, which is to to search out different sources for to check the same thing.

Right?

So if they have a question, don't just go to some AI garbage, right.

To get the answer.

Look at look at trustworthy sources.

Look at Wikipedia, which is another public media model that is a huge success, to go to things where you know that they're not just chasing clickbait stuff, but you're going to get it and to, you know, cross-reference things to read across the spectrum to, to get better perspectives on it.

The only one, just one thing.

If what you're hearing is exactly what you want to hear, that's a red flag, right?

That is, there's an it's not an accident that that's happened.

It's not an accident that that's shown up in your feed, because there's very sophisticated algorithms that are pushing you in that direction.

But if if all you're doing is getting your biases confirmed, that's not news.

That's entertainment, that's dopamine hits.

And one thing they did used to be entertainment, though, was the news.

I mean, there were times when we only have a minute for this, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on this.

Matt.

The idea of this journalism, this headline journalism that especially back in the 19th century.

So the standards that we have now, this idea of being fair and equitable, it isn't something that necessarily has remained the same.

Things have shifted over time, I guess.

What are your thoughts on that, that history?

And also does that mean that we can kind of shift back in a new direction?

Well, I mean, there's cycles of these things, right?

So at the end of the 19th century, what emerged as the New Journalism was a lot of competition in many ways, like our diverse landscape today with a lot of different sources.

And the only way to get your stuff out there was to go bigger, bolder headlines, sensational content.

Right.

And so that's where yellow journalism came from.

The circulation wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst to see who could get the biggest splash.

Right.

And so a lot of our ideas of objectivity that can emerge as a professional were in response to that.

So we're we tend to forget things as a culture.

And I think we're we're emerging.

We're we're entering a period now that looks a lot like the end of the 19th century, right?

Gilded era of oligarchs owning everything.

And I think we'll we'll relearn some of those same lessons from back from back in the day.

And we have just a couple of minutes left.

I wanted to end by just getting information about where both of you get your news.

So aside from maybe the mainstream media, but that's true.

If there's some, are there any unusual favorites or specific places that you get your news?

Matt, you know, since a lot of newspaper reporters have been fired, they've gone on to things like Substack.

And so it tends to be people that I, that I trust that I go.

But then I also read The New York Times and I read The Wall Street Journal, and I read places that actually still do kind of follow a journalistic ethic, but I read broadly and you encourage your students to do that to to try Substack and try other outlets as well.

Yeah.

Chris, how about you?

The one that comes to mind is a site called tangle where this this one guy, Isaac Saul, takes an issue and he says, here's the issue, here's what the right says, here's what the left says, and here's my take.

And I think he's very scrupulous about representing the points of view fairly.

And and then he says, you know, what do you think?

Right?

I mean, I think lots of people are struggling to try to find a viable way of being a journalist in, you know, at this moment in time.

I just think that's interesting.

And I and I just like the way he writes, too.

And something interesting to read, as you said as well.

Matt Jordan and Chris Beam, thank you both so much for coming in to talk with us on News Conversations Live.

I'm happy to be here.

Same here.

Im Anne Danahy, thank you for joining us.

And please join us next month for a special conversation on November 13th at 8 p.m.

where we'll be talking about the American Revolution.

Rewatch this and previous episodes of Conversations Live and more of your favorite WPSU programs on the PBS app.