Media, supports cspan as a public service, along with these other television serce providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. A discussion about creating a new set of galen to promote trust and objectivity in journalism with former Washington Post executive editor leonard and former cbs news president andrew heyward. They focus on workforce diversity, social media policies and investigative reporting. With good afternoon and welcome to our audience gathered here and welcome to everyone who is watching us live on cspan. We are here for an important discussion here today on a topic called beyond objectivity producing trustworthy news in todays newsrooms. I am from the Walter Cronkite school of journalism. I am pleased to be joined today by two distinctive individuals, glenn downey, who is the former executive editor of the Washington Post, who now serves as a professor at the Cronkite School. And andrew hayward, to my far left, who is the former president of cbs news, who is now a Research Professor amongst other things at the Cronkite School. Today, we will engage in a discussion about the report that mr. Hayward and mr. Downey worked on about beyond objectivity, examining what that means from a contemporary point of view in todays newsrooms. Just a little bit of background about this report and how we got here, we work presented with an opportunity to explore issues that would be of importance as it relates to helping to build trust in media and trust in journalism. We were given some support by the foundation and looking at what would be an important topic for us to explore. Fortunately enough, we were able to turn it over to these two gentlemen, who produced the ideas to explore what objectivity means now and how that has evolved, and where that is taking us, and where we can go from here. This report has generated a great deal of attention. It has been covered in lots of different places, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, to bloomberg, to all sorts of National Media outlets and people who are associated with covering the media. Some have pandered. [laughter] some have said that it is an excellent report. As dean, i have been asked, what is my stance on it . First, i will say that this is an example of research and i am very pleased with the research that mr. Downey and mr. Hayward conducted here. They conducted some 75 interviews with people to get to the heart of the matter. We support academic freedom. I support the work that they have done and i am very pleased with the outcome in the sense that it, first and foremost, has sparked a conversation, an important conversation. We hope to continue this conversation here today. We look forward to your involvement in this ongoing discussion, this can forth, and where we go from here. With no further ado, i want to turn it over to the esteemed panelists so they can give opening comments. Then, we want to again engage in the discussion. We will start with mr. Downey. Glenn thank you very much. As the dean said, we interviewed 75 news leaders and journalists route the company thereof the country at newspapers, television stations, and networks that own the stations. We discovered they are already involved in a dialogue that we wanted to capture. That is to say that a number of people we talked to, people who run News Organizations, say that the definition of journalistic objectivity is no longer what they believe in or practice. That is because they regard it as a white male, very narrow definition of what is news and how to cover news for white males, traditionally. That is with newspaper and journalistic teams becoming diverse. They are looking to go beyond objectivity to produce news that is accurate, fair, aggressive, and enterprising. And again, getting into communities that have not been covered before, getting into subjects that have not been well covered before, and getting away from both sidesism, or you tried to balance out Climate Change for example, many voted scientists about the problems and then doubters to balance it. That is not the case anymore and should not be. Theyre trying to engage the diversity of theirs newsrooms and communities in ways that have not been number four, including by allowing people into under covered communities to share stories they have not been covering in the past. As a result, all of the interviews see in the report, whats going on out there, we came up with a playbook for newsrooms that want to work on this change. It has six general categories striving for accuracy and the pursuit of truth. Unlocking the diversity of newsrooms and the identity of their reporters. We talk about that later, if you want to. Creating a clear and consistent policy to guide your political activity, which is a hot subject, as you know. What should journalists be doing outside of social media and the newsroom . Investigative accountability reporting. This is not something you find reliably on the internet unless it is coming from a good News Organization. Show your work, so the public is no longer wondering where all of this came from and has ideas about what we might be thinking about. Instead, show your work. Say in stories where things came from. Say what you dont know. Put it on the internet if you have internet access, as most News Organizations have, the documents and data used, and so on. Finally, determine your newsrooms core values. There are a number of special interest startups covering things like climate, race, so on. They declare their values. They declare what it is they are doing, why they are doing what theyre doing. To what extent should other newsrooms that are serving everybody be doing the same thing . Explore what your goals are and discuss it within the newsroom itself. Should you also tell the public what you are up to . Battinto thank you andrew thank you. My interest is toward Television News. Local Television News has held up relatively well in the declining trust the American Public has for the news. It often comes up at the top of surveys as the most trusted. I think for a couple of pretty obvious reasons. One is that local news cannot dismiss because you can check it out for yourself. You know the light on elm street has not been fixed or that the warehouse that burned down has not been boarded up properly. Also, the reporters often live in the can unity and you actually know them. It is a place where people inherently have common ground. A lot of the toxicity of public conversation now reflects divisions among people who dont know each other or experience one another. But even in that context, local Television News had it too easy for too many years. It was a comfortable monopoly of stations. It is striking that most small and mid town cities, or you could get a sunburn if he held the newspaper up to the light, there are still three or four competing Television Newsrooms. But that allows stations to get away with not really serving their communities deeply. One of the roots of this report was the idea that we are dealing with a more complex world, a world where journalistic competitors are going to meet in the digital arena in the distance between them is going to blur. Television news stations are going to have to become more responsive, and a lot of them are. We were pleasantly surprised. We have been doing work with tv newsrooms. They are actually not only undergoing cultural change, which we can talk about if youre interested, but really reaching out to the communities and trying to reflect the diversity, even though it is broadcasting. The challenge now is to combine broadcasting, that onesizefitsall monolithic view with narrowcasting, which is reflect above the interest of communities and the people who work in the newsroom. What we are really trying to i will say preach, because that sounds too us, but what we are trying to encourage as a cultural shift, flipping the script from a bottomup reflection of the true interests of the people you are serving. I think that reflects the complexity of the world we live in today. I see im not the only grayhaired one. Remember what Walter Cronkites tagline was at the end of every evening broadcast. Thats the way it is. Andrew thats the way it is. Thats right. If any anchor person said it that way today, we would laugh. It sounds like an Impossible Task to summarize the whole world in 20 minutes. Back then, it was plausible and he was the most trusted man in america. Thats not a knock on walter. Our school is named after him. [laughter] if any anchor person were on us today, she would say, that is how we did our best to find out whats going on today. [laughter] dont hold your breath for that. I think we are encouraging a more complex world. There is one more thing about diversity. I want to get to your questions. But when i started at cbs news, some of my friends from there are here, in the 1980s, there was already a commitment to diversity as a statistical and moral imperative. That is kind of where it ended. There was tremendous pressure to confirm conform to the existing culture when people enter. Black people could not pretend to be black, but they were basically sanded down to act as white as can be. Women had to conform to certain stereotypes that were definitely developed by men in order to get in. If you were gay, you werent gay. You were in the closet years, let alone tapping into peoples Life Experience to enrich anything. There was pressure to conform, rather than inform coverage with the diversity of the newsroom. That is changing now, i think belatedly. We hope to encourage that with this report as well. Leonard i just want to emphasize two other quick things. We are not advocating advocacy i any means. Critics of the report shows that, saying that andrew we are the woke control. Patrol. [laughter] Andrew Leonard you didnt know pterodactyls could speak, did you . [laughter] andrew changes going on out there and you need to prepare your students for this new world. One thing we emphasize is dialogue within newsrooms. We are not advocating advocacy. We are not saying the diverse backgrounds of newsrooms means putting opinion into stories based on your views. However, you need to discuss your backgrounds, views, thoughts about coverage within the newsroom. There needs to be a safe place for that. We discovered a lot of newsrooms doing exactly that, that have different ways of having discussions amongst the staff, even different caucuses or different diverse groups of the staff. As andrew says, the newsroom is a safe place where you can discuss all of these things freely, then decide what is the best journalism that should come out of this. Battinto that is a fantastic introduction from you both. You all have had a long career long careers in journalism and education. It would be shocking if anything surprises you at this point. But i have to ask you, what surprised you as part of this process, this research you conducted in the outcome and response . Leonard two things. One, we thought we would be introducing this topic to news leaders. In fact, everyone we talked to said this is a really important thing that we are already starting to discuss. This is bubbling up organically in newsrooms. One surprise was not so much that we were preaching to the choir, but that we were all trying to learn new songs at the same time. That was the main one for me. I guess the second one is the complexity that people are wrestling with, people and educators in the room, making the case which may sound oxymoronic for nonbiased journalism that grows out of multiple perspectives. That is a challenge that we all face. And the fact that newsrooms are wrestling with in multiple ways was also a surprise to me. Leonard i was surprised when we conducted these workshops, which we did at local television stations and newspapers around the country. How already engaged they are in many of the things we were talking about it how interested they were in our thoughts and advice to continue going in those directions. We are talking about newsrooms that are strapped. Where talking about the Arizona Republic that is fighting hard to maintain a certain staff size. It is experimenting in these areas. They have hired a hispanic woman to go out into the hispanic community, which is very large in the phoenix area, and discover more about whats really going on and whats important to them. And then coming back and creating new beats and hybrid beats, in some cases, because the staff is so small that semi has to cover housing, education, all these things at the same time. But to be informed by the things they learned out in the community. We also discovered that some of the television stations around the country are now putting people, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, into the community. Go live in this part of the new york area and do your reporting from there. That becomes your feet and that is going help us better understand how to cover this area. Battinto we want to open it up to questions from the audience. Another question that i would have is, do youll feel that this pursuit of objectivity has somehow contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation . Leonard thats hard to say, because much of the sources does not come from factfinding news media. It comes from opinionated news media, from other sources on the internet, and not the factfinding newsrooms we are talking about that make up most of america. I dont see that as a larger problem, as the reaction of the people who believe that sort of thing to the factfinding news. They were criticizing the media because it does not agree with what they want, as opposed to presenting the facts. Andrew i would say it has contributed to misleading information. Thats because of a lack of context insomuch reporting. Amy and i both have yellow lanyards. We are wearing yellow lanyards. Are they standoffish . No, we were too late to get the green ones. [laughter] thats my example of reporters digging a little bit deeper. [laughter] we have talked a lot about in one of our workshops with a tv station, one of the morning anchors said that there is often a crime that happened overnight and i dont have access to the kind of context youre talking about because all i have is the police report. For many years, we too courageously accepted the Police Spokesman as the authority for what happened. We learned that while those are also often valuable, important inputs, those are often the wrong story, a selfserving story. What we said is that this number five in our workbook, show your work, you can say that we havent had the chance to go out and do that, but we will do it at noon, 5 00, 6 00. There is an encouraging develop it of stripping away the magic of journalism. Instead admitting it is a work in progress almost all the time. Battinto yes . Please introduce yourself. My name is richard. [indiscernible] what has come up, as far as what universities might do . [indiscernible] i just wonder if the whole university has been thought about. Leonard i want to read the question. He leads a very interesting center that focuses on student led reporting around the country. The question is, what is next for educators . Since i got to repeat the question, i will let andrew answer it. [laughter] first of all, this is my project of news. I want to be talking to you about what you know about all this universityproduced news. It is rapidly increasing. Students who are at the conch right school, they have the conch right news program on television and on the internet covering arizona. The only Washington Bureau for arizona is conch right news. Many nori many News Organizations around arizona take these students and in print. Many universities are doing that now. Much more than before. Cronkite was one of the early ones. Some other universities are putting their students to work in Community Newspapers to save those newspapers, just a few around the country so far as an example of that. We are working on the ownership. There are universities they are very interested in. I think some have already started having the owners of failing newspapers donate it to the university and have the University Run them. That means that it goes beyond the journalism school. That means you can have different parts of the university providing other parts of the services to that newspaper without having to pay for an Advertising Department and Something Else like that. I see a big role, a growing role, for universities in the future of local news. Battinto yes . [indiscernible] leonard come up to the microphone. It seems that the line between social media and Mainstream Media [indiscernible] if so, how did these news leaders and Mainstream Media plan to find that . Andrew i think social media has certainly contributed to a severe deterioration in the quality of the conversation in the public sphere. Because of the incentives that social Media Companies have, they are all wrong. They are to exacerbate conflict and emphasize emotion over information, and to actually get people to get mad or sad, as opposed to being informed. I think that is where misinformation and disinformation have flourished there is an epidemic of sharing indiscriminately that has made matters worse. Theres really two issues. One is, what is mainstream journalism for upstart journalism do about that . The answer is, just hope that at a certain point, facts, accuracy, context, all things we talk about, fairness, will engage in and win the fight for peoples minds, especially if you are willing to call out misinformation and disinformation aggressively, which is increasingly happening. We take a conservative stance on social media policies and News Organizations. There is a school of thought that your social media personality is separate from something of your own. You can be an advocate on social media as to go back to the newsroom and be a trust a reporter. We dont thin