you
how’s everybody doing tonight good good
I can’t see any of you they tell us that
these lights are bright but they they
really are they’re really bright but
thanks for being here my name is Connor
I’m the head of production at newsy a
digital national digital video news
outlet that’s headquartered here in
Columbia and I’ve spent much of the last
year on the road reporting on the
presidential election and in meeting
politicians and journalists and citizens
all over the country it’s become
abundantly clear to me that America in
2016 and now America in 2017 is living
in two self-contained never overlapping
worlds where facts are not absolute and
vary widely depending on who you’re
talking to and where you are people are
putting themselves in echo chambers
closed-off comfortable corners of their
world where they don’t have to interact
with or see people who don’t share the
same political ideologies as they do and
we in the news media and some of you in
this room are a part of that we and our
distribution platforms we’re doing
things to keep them there and push them
further in their holes regardless of how
you feel about the outcome of this
presidential election and what your
politics are we are all today faced with
a sobering reality that today in America
political discourse is broken we don’t
know and understand each other as
neighbors and the politicians we elect
are a reflection of that and that’s not
just sad
it’s scary this election has shined a
light shone shined something like that
this erection has revealed a lot of
problems some of them have been brewing
for many years some of them are a result
of new and changing technology but all
of them are complicated and layered and
nuanced and overlapping and frankly
they’re important to talk about and try
to understand so tonight we’re going to
look at some of these problems as I’ve
seen them unfold on the campaign trail
and in the news room and online and
hopefully share some perspective on what
I think our role is in solving those as
citizens so for the purpose of our
conversation tonight I meant to put that
up sooner for the purpose of a
conversation tonight I’m going to group
these problems in
two major categories and the first is
that the divide between news makers and
news consumers is growing we can see
that first at the local level local
newspapers that were once synonymous
with reporting and news now find
themselves struggling to turn a profit
between 2004 and 2014 digital ad revenue
for newspapers across the country did
grow by two billion dollars and that’s
definitely a lot of money but in that
same period of time print ad revenue
dropped by thirty billion dollars and
that’s a problem especially for a
society that is becoming more and more
familiar and accustomed to not having to
pay for their news because it’s
subsidized by ads sooner or later we’re
either going to have to pay for
journalism or we’re all going to pay for
it newspapers as a result of this drop
in revenue are shrinking staff they’re
scaling back their publications some are
selling to larger media companies and
some are closing their doors altogether
meanwhile on the national level
reporters are flocking to the coast
reporting jobs are moving to the coast
in the last 10 years reporting jobs in
DC have doubled in LA they’ve grown by
20 percent in New York they’ve basically
stayed level and the rest in the rest of
the world one in four reporting jobs
have vanished in that period of time
we’re talking about 12,000 jobs and this
this push to the coast has left a void
in middle America and now folks in the
Midwest and smaller communities they now
see the media as something for the
coastal elites they don’t see themselves
and their stories being told on TV and
online and frankly they’re not wrong and
all of this is contributing to a drop in
trust in mass media this figure from
Gallup in 2015 shows that Americans
trust in the mass media dropped a 32% in
2015 and when broken out by party it’s
even more alarming Republicans down to
14% and I got to think that in the last
year and change those numbers have
gotten even smaller and as someone who
works in news and is from a part of the
country that largely identifies as
Republican that’s concerning and this
means that our job is hard today and it
will continue to be hard in the years to
come and fake news isn’t making things
any easier when my cousin’s Facebook
timelines make no meaningful distinction
between fact-checked magazine stories
and flat-out rise from an ad
scammer or a FoxNews propagandist the
means by which meaningful public
discourse can happen isn’t only damaged
it’s broken this is one of the most
popular fake news articles from this
election season obviously Pope Francis
didn’t endorse Donald Trump for
president but this still racked up eight
hundred and seventy thousand shares on
Facebook
meanwhile the Snopes article noting that
it’s fake got thirty thousand shares on
Facebook despite what I think was a
pretty snappy headline and according the
Pew Research Center about one in four US
adults self-report to having shared fake
news with friends and others online in
this election season that’s crazy
some of them said that they later found
out the news was fake some of them said
they knew at the time that it was fake
and I don’t really understand that but
all of this amounts to you know all of
these shares and these people sharing
fake news on their social media feeds
this is effectively breaking the
algorithms that democratize the internet
Facebook makes money when we spend time
on their platform and in order to do
that they serve us content that they
think we want and so when a fake news
article gets shared not only does it
trick the system into thinking it’s
legitimate but it tells the system that
that’s what we want and it gives us more
of that and it pushes people further
into a web of fake news that’s a problem
but on Facebook’s part admittedly
identifying the truths complicated and
as Zuckerberg put it some stories get
the basic idea right but some details
are wrong or omitted an even greater
volume of stories express an opinion
that many will disagree with and flag as
incorrect even when factual and he’s
right and Zuckerberg has said that
Facebook he doesn’t want Facebook to be
an arbiter of truth and frankly I’m not
sure if I want him to be that either
but despite the even considering the
issue of fake news we also have to
grapple with the fact that many
Americans don’t have an appetite for
real news a lot of people have low
tolerance for serious articles published
in respectable publications
you know we’re once upon a time we gave
newspapers the power to determine what
news we need it and what news we wanted
but today we are faced with so many
options and people are distracted in so
many ways that we’ve taken that power
back and so what the news operations do
when people tell them they want puppies
instead of Syria it’s a problem the
other category of problems is that the
divide between red and blue America is
growing these election maps from the New
York Times are showing landslide
victories by county in presidential
election years and in 2016 this map is
really colorful and all of these blue
and red counties show us a county that
was won for their party by a victory of
20 points or more this map just came out
this week from the cook Political Report
and it further breaks down those margins
of victory this showed up on my Twitter
timeline when CNN posted it along with
the headline this map shows that we
really do live in two different Americas
or something like that
don’t quote me but they’re right and
these maps do a really good job to show
us that not only do we believe much more
strongly in what we believed 10 or 15
years ago but so do our neighbors and
we’ve grouped ourselves geographically
around people who feel the same way that
we do what these maps don’t do a good
job of illustrating is the polarization
that exists digitally on Facebook many
people say that this election wasn’t won
on the ground in these red and blue
counties but it was won online on
Facebook where we only connect with
like-minded people and unfriend anyone
whose viewpoints we don’t agree with
creating insular worlds I don’t know
about you guys but it was pretty common
for me to see on my Facebook feed this
election season somebody that I knew or
was friends with say all Hillary
supporters or all Trump supporters
unfriend me I don’t want to see what you
have to say shutting it out completely
and well I can understand the temptation
to shut out some of the crazier things
being shared around and some of the hate
nobody wants that when we get rid of
different viewpoints we whitewash our
digital lives and this can be a big
problem especially when we the maps we
just saw not only are we not living near
people who are challenging our
perspectives but now we’re erasing these
viewpoints from our Facebook feeds and
so not only can we not challenge our
political perspectives but now we don’t
even have a window into the mind and the
heart of our political opponents how can
we have meaningful dialogue and move
forward when we don’t even know what
each other thinks and believes and why
so it’s a problem all of this is
contributing to us pushing ourselves
further into echo chambers where we can
sit comfortably in our own ideas and not
have to worry about any others
it’s tribalism it’s ego it’s groupthink
it’s confirmation bias and there are all
kinds of studies you know that point to
psychological and physiological effects
some studies even say that all of this
is contributing to a world where we tell
ourselves that what we think is the best
and we are prone to attack anything that
says otherwise
it feels good to stick to our guns even
if we’re wrong and that’s a problem so
what do we do about all this these are
big big problems so first let’s talk
about news I work in the news but I
don’t pretend to speak from any position
of authority on what the news media
should do I’ll leave that to other
people but I can speak from the
perspective of a news consumer and one
who is from Middle America and who has
family and friends and neighbors who no
longer feel like the news is for them
they are increasingly turning to a diet
of highly partisan news or even fake
news and conspiracy theorists and we now
live in a world where Breitbart and info
wars and the like have captive dedicated
audiences in the millions and that’s a
problem but I really see it as an
opportunity for the news media I don’t
know how they solve that I don’t know if
it’s opening up bureaus in major markets
in Middle America some national news
brands are starting to do that I don’t
know if it’s permanently assigning
journalists to underrepresented
communities and underreported
demographics that could be a part of it
as well but what I do think is that if
the news media starts to tell honest
stories about folks in Middle America
that they can see and relate to and
share and feel good about then maybe we
can begin to mend that broken
relationship but what about you and me
as citizens what can we do about this
when you never run into anyone who you
respect but who disagrees with you on
something and you never watch anything
that challenges your beliefs you become
convinced that what you think is a what
everyone should think and be totally 100
right I think this quote is a good job
to illustrate not only the problem that
we face today but also the solution when
Sean Spicer
when Kelly when Kelly and Conway
defended Sean Spicer his claims of crowd
size she used the phrase alternative
facts and Twitter had a heyday with it
and it sounds kind of crazy right but I
think that phrase that she engineered
actually does a good job of illustrating
the partisan divide in America you see
we’re not coming to different
conclusions based on perspective and
nuance and opinion we live in two
different worlds with different facts
and that’s alarming and that’s
concerning because we like to think of
fact and truth as being absolute that
the Sun will rise in the morning and it
will set at night and that’s true we all
accept that but in the last year on the
road in traveling the country and
meeting people and seeing where they
work and where they live and what their
life is like and asking them questions
and listening my perspective on truth
was broadened you see what’s true for me
and my life isn’t true for you in your
life and that informs the way we see the
world and the way we see policy and
politics and so I would contend that as
citizens of our communities and of our
nation and of our world that we play a
big role in that I don’t have a lot of
faith in our leaders to solve these
problems I don’t have a lot of faith in
Facebook and Google to fix fake news or
CNN and Fox News and MSNBC to move the
media narrative in a direction that will
move us forward but as citizens you and
me can play and should play a big part
in this it’s our responsibility to go
through our days with a steadfast and
diligent and constant focus on meeting
people who are different than us and
that might mean changing our routines
and changing our schedule and going
places we wouldn’t otherwise go but I
would ask all of you today as citizens
to go about your life trying to learn
the stories of your neighbors and see
what’s true for them and their life only
then can we begin to chip away at the
partisan America that we live in so go
meet somebody
you
you
how’s everybody doing tonight good good
I can’t see any of you they tell us that
these lights are bright but they they
really are they’re really bright but
thanks for being here my name is Connor
I’m the head of production at newsy a
digital national digital video news
outlet that’s headquartered here in
Columbia and I’ve spent much of the last
year on the road reporting on the
presidential election and in meeting
politicians and journalists and citizens
all over the country it’s become
abundantly clear to me that America in
2016 and now America in 2017 is living
in two self-contained never overlapping
worlds where facts are not absolute and
vary widely depending on who you’re
talking to and where you are people are
putting themselves in echo chambers
closed-off comfortable corners of their
world where they don’t have to interact
with or see people who don’t share the
same political ideologies as they do and
we in the news media and some of you in
this room are a part of that we and our
distribution platforms we’re doing
things to keep them there and push them
further in their holes regardless of how
you feel about the outcome of this
presidential election and what your
politics are we are all today faced with
a sobering reality that today in America
political discourse is broken we don’t
know and understand each other as
neighbors and the politicians we elect
are a reflection of that and that’s not
just sad
it’s scary this election has shined a
light shone shined something like that
this erection has revealed a lot of
problems some of them have been brewing
for many years some of them are a result
of new and changing technology but all
of them are complicated and layered and
nuanced and overlapping and frankly
they’re important to talk about and try
to understand so tonight we’re going to
look at some of these problems as I’ve
seen them unfold on the campaign trail
and in the news room and online and
hopefully share some perspective on what
I think our role is in solving those as
citizens so for the purpose of our
conversation tonight I meant to put that
up sooner for the purpose of a
conversation tonight I’m going to group
these problems in
two major categories and the first is
that the divide between news makers and
news consumers is growing we can see
that first at the local level local
newspapers that were once synonymous
with reporting and news now find
themselves struggling to turn a profit
between 2004 and 2014 digital ad revenue
for newspapers across the country did
grow by two billion dollars and that’s
definitely a lot of money but in that
same period of time print ad revenue
dropped by thirty billion dollars and
that’s a problem especially for a
society that is becoming more and more
familiar and accustomed to not having to
pay for their news because it’s
subsidized by ads sooner or later we’re
either going to have to pay for
journalism or we’re all going to pay for
it newspapers as a result of this drop
in revenue are shrinking staff they’re
scaling back their publications some are
selling to larger media companies and
some are closing their doors altogether
meanwhile on the national level
reporters are flocking to the coast
reporting jobs are moving to the coast
in the last 10 years reporting jobs in
DC have doubled in LA they’ve grown by
20 percent in New York they’ve basically
stayed level and the rest in the rest of
the world one in four reporting jobs
have vanished in that period of time
we’re talking about 12,000 jobs and this
this push to the coast has left a void
in middle America and now folks in the
Midwest and smaller communities they now
see the media as something for the
coastal elites they don’t see themselves
and their stories being told on TV and
online and frankly they’re not wrong and
all of this is contributing to a drop in
trust in mass media this figure from
Gallup in 2015 shows that Americans
trust in the mass media dropped a 32% in
2015 and when broken out by party it’s
even more alarming Republicans down to
14% and I got to think that in the last
year and change those numbers have
gotten even smaller and as someone who
works in news and is from a part of the
country that largely identifies as
Republican that’s concerning and this
means that our job is hard today and it
will continue to be hard in the years to
come and fake news isn’t making things
any easier when my cousin’s Facebook
timelines make no meaningful distinction
between fact-checked magazine stories
and flat-out rise from an ad
scammer or a FoxNews propagandist the
means by which meaningful public
discourse can happen isn’t only damaged
it’s broken this is one of the most
popular fake news articles from this
election season obviously Pope Francis
didn’t endorse Donald Trump for
president but this still racked up eight
hundred and seventy thousand shares on
meanwhile the Snopes article noting that
it’s fake got thirty thousand shares on
Facebook despite what I think was a
pretty snappy headline and according the
Pew Research Center about one in four US
adults self-report to having shared fake
news with friends and others online in
this election season that’s crazy
some of them said that they later found
out the news was fake some of them said
they knew at the time that it was fake
and I don’t really understand that but
all of this amounts to you know all of
these shares and these people sharing
fake news on their social media feeds
this is effectively breaking the
algorithms that democratize the internet
Facebook makes money when we spend time
on their platform and in order to do
that they serve us content that they
think we want and so when a fake news
article gets shared not only does it
trick the system into thinking it’s
legitimate but it tells the system that
that’s what we want and it gives us more
of that and it pushes people further
into a web of fake news that’s a problem
but on Facebook’s part admittedly
identifying the truths complicated and
as Zuckerberg put it some stories get
the basic idea right but some details
are wrong or omitted an even greater
volume of stories express an opinion
that many will disagree with and flag as
incorrect even when factual and he’s
right and Zuckerberg has said that
Facebook he doesn’t want Facebook to be
an arbiter of truth and frankly I’m not
sure if I want him to be that either
but despite the even considering the
issue of fake news we also have to
grapple with the fact that many
Americans don’t have an appetite for
real news a lot of people have low
tolerance for serious articles published
in respectable publications
you know we’re once upon a time we gave
newspapers the power to determine what
news we need it and what news we wanted
but today we are faced with so many
options and people are distracted in so
many ways that we’ve taken that power
back and so what the news operations do
when people tell them they want puppies
instead of Syria it’s a problem the
other category of problems is that the
divide between red and blue America is
growing these election maps from the New
York Times are showing landslide
victories by county in presidential
election years and in 2016 this map is
really colorful and all of these blue
and red counties show us a county that
was won for their party by a victory of
20 points or more this map just came out
this week from the cook Political Report
and it further breaks down those margins
of victory this showed up on my Twitter
timeline when CNN posted it along with
the headline this map shows that we
really do live in two different Americas
or something like that
don’t quote me but they’re right and
these maps do a really good job to show
us that not only do we believe much more
strongly in what we believed 10 or 15
years ago but so do our neighbors and
we’ve grouped ourselves geographically
around people who feel the same way that
we do what these maps don’t do a good
job of illustrating is the polarization
that exists digitally on Facebook many
people say that this election wasn’t won
on the ground in these red and blue
counties but it was won online on
Facebook where we only connect with
like-minded people and unfriend anyone
whose viewpoints we don’t agree with
creating insular worlds I don’t know
about you guys but it was pretty common
for me to see on my Facebook feed this
election season somebody that I knew or
was friends with say all Hillary
supporters or all Trump supporters
unfriend me I don’t want to see what you
have to say shutting it out completely
and well I can understand the temptation
to shut out some of the crazier things
being shared around and some of the hate
nobody wants that when we get rid of
different viewpoints we whitewash our
digital lives and this can be a big
problem especially when we the maps we
just saw not only are we not living near
people who are challenging our
perspectives but now we’re erasing these
viewpoints from our Facebook feeds and
so not only can we not challenge our
political perspectives but now we don’t
even have a window into the mind and the
heart of our political opponents how can
we have meaningful dialogue and move
forward when we don’t even know what
each other thinks and believes and why
so it’s a problem all of this is
contributing to us pushing ourselves
further into echo chambers where we can
sit comfortably in our own ideas and not
have to worry about any others
it’s tribalism it’s ego it’s groupthink
it’s confirmation bias and there are all
kinds of studies you know that point to
psychological and physiological effects
some studies even say that all of this
is contributing to a world where we tell
ourselves that what we think is the best
and we are prone to attack anything that
says otherwise
it feels good to stick to our guns even
if we’re wrong and that’s a problem so
what do we do about all this these are
big big problems so first let’s talk
about news I work in the news but I
don’t pretend to speak from any position
of authority on what the news media
should do I’ll leave that to other
people but I can speak from the
perspective of a news consumer and one
who is from Middle America and who has
family and friends and neighbors who no
longer feel like the news is for them
they are increasingly turning to a diet
of highly partisan news or even fake
news and conspiracy theorists and we now
live in a world where Breitbart and info
wars and the like have captive dedicated
audiences in the millions and that’s a
problem but I really see it as an
opportunity for the news media I don’t
know how they solve that I don’t know if
it’s opening up bureaus in major markets
in Middle America some national news
brands are starting to do that I don’t
know if it’s permanently assigning
journalists to underrepresented
communities and underreported
demographics that could be a part of it
as well but what I do think is that if
the news media starts to tell honest
stories about folks in Middle America
that they can see and relate to and
share and feel good about then maybe we
can begin to mend that broken
relationship but what about you and me
as citizens what can we do about this
when you never run into anyone who you
respect but who disagrees with you on
something and you never watch anything
that challenges your beliefs you become
convinced that what you think is a what
everyone should think and be totally 100
right I think this quote is a good job
to illustrate not only the problem that
we face today but also the solution when
Sean Spicer
when Kelly when Kelly and Conway
defended Sean Spicer his claims of crowd
size she used the phrase alternative
facts and Twitter had a heyday with it
and it sounds kind of crazy right but I
think that phrase that she engineered
actually does a good job of illustrating
the partisan divide in America you see
we’re not coming to different
conclusions based on perspective and
nuance and opinion we live in two
different worlds with different facts
and that’s alarming and that’s
concerning because we like to think of
fact and truth as being absolute that
the Sun will rise in the morning and it
will set at night and that’s true we all
accept that but in the last year on the
road in traveling the country and
meeting people and seeing where they
work and where they live and what their
life is like and asking them questions
and listening my perspective on truth
was broadened you see what’s true for me
and my life isn’t true for you in your
life and that informs the way we see the
world and the way we see policy and
politics and so I would contend that as
citizens of our communities and of our
nation and of our world that we play a
big role in that I don’t have a lot of
faith in our leaders to solve these
problems I don’t have a lot of faith in
Facebook and Google to fix fake news or
CNN and Fox News and MSNBC to move the
media narrative in a direction that will
move us forward but as citizens you and
me can play and should play a big part
in this it’s our responsibility to go
through our days with a steadfast and
diligent and constant focus on meeting
people who are different than us and
that might mean changing our routines
and changing our schedule and going
places we wouldn’t otherwise go but I
would ask all of you today as citizens
to go about your life trying to learn
the stories of your neighbors and see
what’s true for them and their life only
then can we begin to chip away at the
partisan America that we live in so go
meet somebody
you
you
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