The last election and threatening, planning to spend 400 million in the next election in the midterms, that is a huge footprint and theres a lot more going on behind it. The second piece of that is bringing home the longterm effort of the Republican Party to put business friendly judges in the courts so that the courts are increasingly hostile to regular folks, and increasingly interested in protecting corporations. Watch afterwards sunday night at 9 00 eastern on cspan2s booktv. A panel examines the spread of populism in certain regions of the world including the us, europe and latin america including van smith and the origins of populism and contributing factors in the 2016 president ial election. This is about 90 minutes. We will start. Is everyone prepared . I want to thank everyone for coming, this kicks off our afternoon session. I will explain what we did in the morning and afternoon session which is a public discussion, debate about populism, entitled the rise of populism, a global approach. I will be the moderator. I like to talk about it but i will hold back, we have a distant west panel which i will introduce in a bit as we organize in a certain way. We came from and all morning session with experts in the private sector, the Public Sector talking about populism, the objective was to do some conceptual gardening of what is populism, what are we seeing in the world, is what we are seeing similar or different and what are the implications in outcomes more generally . This afternoon we will debate the same things with a reduced crew. Before we do that, what we are going to do is have been smith who i will introduce in a second, give a quick keynote, then he will sit down as one of the panelists and i will throw a couple softballs at him, we will kind of have a back and forth and open it up to a discussion, a general discussion, the dynamics of the discussion back and forth, hopefully this afternoon as well so my name is cliff young. I have two hats, i where two hats right now. I am an adjunct professor, i teach a course in its fifth year on Public Opinion for decisionmakers. Im a professional pollster, president of public affairs, the thirdlargest Employment Research firm in the world with boots on the ground in 90 countries and polling everywhere. I will be the moderator. For our keynote talk, the editor in chief of buzz feed has a long bio but i like a quick note, he is, quote, one of the most talented and admired school mongers in the game. [applause] thank you and i dont know, you didnt give me a heads up on this last time but thanks for having me and they initially asked if i wanted to talk about population and i thought that was a dangerous task. We know what theyre talking about in that regard and im just a reporter and thus know a little bit about a lot but the things that i do have spent a lot of time thinking about is how you do reporting in this moment and actually, the thing that prompted this, my thoughts on this is we were recently, i was recently accused by the Washington Post of practicing journalistic populism which, it came out after we published a dossier of unverified claims about donald trump and russia which was presented as unverified with some clear errors and what we do about the source. And a column in the posttook us to task for this and described it as journalistic populism, the notion that the cocktail set to keep information away from the american people. Which i think goes some of the antielitism that people are serving and populism globally, the sense that the people versus this shadowy elite. But it is also what we certainly believe and that in this moment when people, when theres this crisis of trust in the media, i think our theory is which i think is not the same as a lot of others is the way you get that trustback is to think about how you get closer to your audience. How you can accurately persuade your audience that theyre on your on their side. And it sort of standing above them as gatekeepers. And the simplest level, that means we do know a lot more about their audience and what theyre interested in and what they want than we ever did. You are probably tired of hearing about but we also think thats rather transparency is crucial to that. To winning back that trust and the promise that were not keeping secrets from you, that we dont pretend to be part of a journalistic heresy. And that we dont really fundamentally see our role as gatekeepers and we think the audience should be straight with us for fighting for them to tell stories and have an effect on their lives and i want to talk for a couple minutes on what we in the populist moment see as journalistic populism and what it is. I will go on for too long. I feel like this panel will get off. So i think obviously the media is facing the same crisis of institutional confidence thatyouve all talked about at length. The numbers in gallup are at an alltime low in trust in the media and the question of what the media is as confusing, resident obama and trump certainly trump published a lot directly themselves. On video, on twitter and audiences have segregated themselves where they read what they want to read, what fees their biases. I think the reaction to this for a lot of the legacy media has been to kind of retreat and look backwards, to say, to look back to an era when they were the gatekeepers, to say we have these trusted brands,trust us, after these brands were going to put our slogan on our brand. And trust us because you trust our brands and i think theres an argument to that to the extent that i think in this chaos for readers and viewers to turn the things that are familiar and they trust which are largely behind pay walls. But i think thats broadly great for journalism, the revival of the washington century, obviously the great story of the last few years in media is something everybody is excited about and israel, energy of the times that cnn is broadly exciting. And i dont take it really fully addresses the vast majority of the country who are watching cable news and subscribing to publications behind pay walls and meanwhile we have obviously dont have the luxury of saying trust our ageold brand, read the Buzzfeed News that your parents and grandparents read and so we feel like the path toward winning Peoples Trust in this chaotic environment is a polluted environment. It comes from transparency and from fighting for our audience on issues they care about and the first thing is transparency has been a disaster for media in many ways. I think in the old days when there was a crime or a break in the story, if you were in the newspaper newsroom it would be a total mess. Youd be sending reporters to the wrong house, have the wrong guys name, all the details of the crime wrong but by the time you went to publication a few hours later would have straightened it out. All now all that happens in public and the public says these people are a bunch of idiots and we were always idiots, its now that is more evident. But that, seeing that message realtime has made it a lot harder to maintain this idea that journalists are just this class with these specialized set of skills that allow them to detect the truth through means that you dont have. And so i think a lot of News Organizations are wrestling with what do you do in that situation . Do you try to help navigate and engage this chaotic, messy information coming out of the new story or do you stay silent and wait until you got nailed down. I think different organizations take different approaches to that but for us, we know our audiences living in this social media face where theres, when as soon as the thing explodes theres things we know that are true, things we know that are false, there are stories that have gotten out of the way and the thing that we find useful is to do our best to help them navigate back. We know this thing is false, we know this thing is true. This is a widely reputed claim, we are not sure but heres what we know. And we will guide you through this place. I think thats true on nonbreaking stories too, anybody who spending time in the last year on twitter and facebook has an enormous amount of garbage and full stories and in 2016 it was a lot about Hillary Clinton. Now im sure a lot of you are seeing nonsense donald and russia are in your feeds. Along with reported true stories and i think weve always, we thought way to again engage with the best of our readers is to is to help them navigate the stuff that, not to keep our hands clean and ive raised like this group of macedonian teenagers whoare filling the internet with false stories about Hillary Clinton last year , its a crazy story. And i do think again that when you think about what is journalistic populism, it is about that you havent had a special knowledge. From your audience . And then the other thing, when we think about again what kind of populist journalism , i think it will not ultimately largely be about politics like it is more poisoned criticism space and thats where we feel like we have the deepest connection with our audience, things like a big investigation of a Mental Hospital chain thats touching people and when they next with those stories, when they see some of these pros that touch of their lives feel real, and just this social media screaming match that that again is where we sometimes find trust. I think that there are two other things that the populism isnt although i think that also in this moment when journalism is changing as much is politics, as much as these other businesses and one is telling people what they want to hear regardless of the truth and its obviously a huge opportunity and a kind of sugar high. We are hopeful that by holding back from those and often debunking the things that people want to be true that you win a longterm credibility that people feel you are serving them. And then the other is really, abandoning the idea of professionalism entirely and i think the critic criticism of us in publishing the rest of that russian dossier that we publish any tips, any pieces of information that came to an backend in our view that was influencing decisionmakers at the highest level of power and the subject of a real debate. And just we found one final note, i was on a panel a couple weeks ago and an editor i admired who runs a local News Organization said that he expects his journalist to extend their citizenship, to be journalists and they need to sort of pull back to whatever country they happen to be from in order to follow up an abstract set of journalistic practices and i feel like particularly in this moment, probably always it was sort of the fact and that american journalism has always been very patriotic business and we think, the audience expects that. Expects reporting as a fax or improving in an imperfect country and reporters should not be afraid to say that. Thanks for letting me share those thoughts, i look forward to having them debunked. And by the way, this is being live streamed by skype and we are being taped by cspan. And so we will take some of those strands later on, were going to donate a bit. The role of the media in todays world, the low levels of trust and the global poll this morning, on average in 25 countries, 27 percent local Citizens Trust the media. Thats even lower right now than donald trump, he has a Higher Credibility rating than the media doesnt ultimately, can we think of institutions in this case journalism or media as having a populist strategy to retract readers and users and thats something we can obviously talk about. We talked about that a lot this morning so let me introduce the panel and i will ask the first couple questions and weregoing to risk from that. Ben is introduced , the next sitting next to ben is francisco gonzales, he is the riordan senior associate professor of latin american studies at Johns Hopkins. He is an expert on latin america and will bring that sort of perspective. We have once again people from the private sector, from academia, different regions of the world so we can mix it up to have a good and interesting reflection and perspective on the issue of populism. Sitting next to francisco is sheri berman, sherry is the professor of Political Science at barnardo College Columbia university, her expertise is europe. Shes written a lot on issues of populism and politics there. She will bring us that sort of perspective. All of them had wonderful comments this morning and hopefully we will glean that out this afternoon and finally our last panelist is christopher garman, christopher is a managing director at the Eurasia Group. Hes in the Country Office of emerging markets and lead analyst on brazil. He worked with private sector clients, hes a practitioner as hes been and he will be bringing an interesting sort of emerging market as well as practitioner practices and it comes to the issues of populism so let me do the following. Let me initially throw out, i dont know if the softball but just throw out some general questions and we will go from there. Listen, we were surprised by the professional pollster, we thought there was a probability of trump winning but it surprised us. And in the question is is what we are seeing in the us and europe in braxton perhaps with france, is this new . Is this Something Different . Are we entering a new era of politics and the drivers of politics or is this more of the same . Is more of an empirical question, i pollster, and i want them to comment on that. The length of that obviously, we think its something new. It walks like a duck, a. It is a duck and maybe its Something Different. The concept of populism, the term populism has been thrown allowed a lot by journalists. Especially with whats going on and once again that is a duck, we think its a duck and it walks like a duck, talks like a duck but were not sure what it is so iswhat were seeing if were seeing Something Different , a new emerging driver in terms of politics today. Is that populism and more specifically, what is populism western art because its a dive used term and id like to try at least this afternoon to pull down those two points, conceptual, what is populism on the one hand and more empirical, is what we are seeing new and different. I want to work backwards. And will startwith chris and then , let everyone talked first and then we will go from there. So chris . First of all, i want to thank the opportunity to be on this panel. Is a great debate, such a precious one and highly relevant the discussion given around the world. Listen, as cliff highlighted i worked in the Eurasia Group for Political Risk advisory firm. And if we live in the interface between speaking with policymakers on the one hand and business elites and Fund Managers on the other. And ive been at Eurasia Group now for 12 years. Kind of navigating the field. And ill just say, that i have never in my 12 years at the firm had a sense in which a political establishment are so uneasy on the terrain in which they are stepping on. And this, we see this on multiple levels. I think obviously we had a one moment, we had a favorable Global Economic environment, feeding of the Global Financial crisis in 2018 and then we had an acute crisis of confidence in the markets, tremendous uncertainty over the sanctity of the euro zone project and the record of adjustments, none of our clients were asking us and we were on the hook to candidates whether or not we were headed for the breakup. In the euro zone and argue was that political markets were underappreciated the commitments towards the project and elites were running the game and the end result was a stable outcome but what we are seeing here today is something entirely different, i would say that to answer your softball question cliff, are we seeing something new, Something Different in terms of underlying voter sentiment. I think the answer is unequivocably yes. We have very good Public Opinion data on affairs and its got fantastic data. On the, we didnt coordinate that before the event but you look at the Global Survey indicators and the levels of discontent towards the political establishment, distrust of Political Institutions. Distrust with International Institutions be it the European Union or the iron map or these multilateral frameworks. Distrust of bigbusiness. Has never been running as high as it is today. You look at some of this, the Global Surveys that each of the time and quit already highlighted some of the data points on the media, on the 21st percent of those surveyed its Something Like 45 countries. Thatthey actually trust the media but you range from issues , do you believe that the additional parties and politicians dont care about people like me . 64 percent agree with that statement. That the economy is written to the advantage of rich people, 68 percent agree with that statement, that we need a strong leader to take it back from the rich and powerful, 64 percent so the demand and distrust with established institutions demand for antiestablishment candidates, is running inordinately high. And this is creating the father for political trump in reverse to tap in to that discontent. So i think that what we at the Greater Group spent a lot of time is to think what are the repercussions of this . And the repercussions are profound. We can talk, theres a debate in the beltway over whether the Trump Administration will represent such a radical shift with traditional republican parties and what are the constraints that you can have to keep the legislation in congress and there are large constraints but the other one is withdraw from multilateral commitments in international architecture. Were seeing a breakdown of the