the percent of carbon emissions showing the debates. people have already lost that life. people have close to the culture of the people who have your say one abroad in this conversation by bringing more voices into it live on youtube. people commenting. i will check with the record that the visitors on al jazeera, a shop to the head of the silencing of a renowned understanding american journalist, the people pouring that's recent on the nation. and yet no accountability a thorough investigation into the final moments of her life. and it's on time the end of the hands, if it's ready for the kidding, should be in a box on a jersey to the

this is officer. i'm telling you, navigate that with the check on your world headlines. positive range of how you berto on has held a rally and assemble on the final day of campaigning before presidential and parliamentary elections on sundays. the voters being tightly contested and held during an economic crisis, or the one has led turkey or for 2 decades. his main rival is the opposition leader come out because historically sitting comfortable glue has more from a stumble. this has been a very tight race, and actually it says here has been in the sphere of an election for the last 2 years. so i must admit that it's been to solve years for the turkish people who have also suffered high inflation and an earthquake a couple of months ago. and these are, this is the last day of the election campaign at 6 pm local. uh, the restrictions are going to be in place on uh, both the vision and the government side. the 1st visual side at is going to harsh or israel has resumed their strikes on gaza and destroyed homes as the latest

escalation and violence center is a 5th say at least 33 palestinians. ive been killed. rockets were also fired from gaza on saturday morning for the marx has more from south of escalade. that's near the border with garza the last 5 days around a 1000 rockets according to the is rating military this morning where we are just a few kilometers and also the goal of the strip. it is relatively quiet. we're hearing. the occasional is really minute treat drone above our heads. we've not seen or heard any rockets but the warning sirens that indicate the presence of broken. some potential presence of rockets coming into some of the communities, including the city of asked or north of us, they'd be gone at around 5 am. they've sounded every so often, particularly in some of the smaller communities just on the eastern edge of the gaza strip. to palestinians have been killed during raids by is really forces and occupied westbank. the army opened fire in ballasa refugee camp near knob less losing 3 people. other rates to place near it on the left and best for him and,

and have her on that. but he has more from grandma, according to local sources, these really forces of rated the beloved refugee company of novelists and has asked the people in one house to surrender themselves before they started shooting and bumping at the house. now, according to palestinian house ministry to palestinians were killed. and according to these read the army, they say that the read has failed to achieve its targets. which means that the 2 boston is what killed were, not the ones that these really forces came to the cap to arrest or sometimes ends up in killing them. thousands of supporters of pocket stones, former prime minister in mont con, have gathered to celebrate outside his residence and before us, after he was granted to expel on friday by the high court in his lombard, con chase's corruption charges. his arrest led to widespread protests resulting in at least 8. that's the russian and south african presidents have agreed to deepen

ties, including peace initiatives in ukraine and a phone call. let me know if it's in repeated an offer. it's 0 or on my so. so to send russian grade on fertilizer, free of charge, the african countries, the call came off to the us a q, south africa of secretly shipping arms to rush up. the government has denied the accusation, but ro, my folks that has opened an inquiry into the matter or thailand goes to the polls on sunday in a general election that could see a major change in the government's opinion polls. so the group allied to the military could lose this year for the 1st time in nearly a decades. more progressive parties are leading the polls or authorities in bangladesh and me and mar, bracing for psych loan mo, cost that's expected to make landfall on sunday night. and the best is whether department warrants the storm has intensified since the developed in the bay of bengal, nearly a 1000000 ro here, refugees living in camps and cox's bizarre are in the projected part of that storm

. us. so 40 say there has been no surge of people crossing the southern border following the listing of the so called title 40 to law on thursday. the legislation allowed all forties to turn away migrants at the us mexico border during the pandemic and migrants now face strict new measures starting from next week. those are the latest headlines on algebra, or we'll have more news coming up, thoughts after the bottom line. thanks for watching by the hi. i'm steve clements and i have a question. our journalist and the media, undermining our societies. let's get to the bottom line. the with so much may have in the news business these days,

it's hard to keep track of who's in and who's out and where different media outlets stand on the issues in case you didn't catch it. america's biggest news host tucker carlson is out at fox news, but he's now in a twitter, which he says is the last place on earth where you can find free speech. other household names have recently been fired, and major companies like cnn are trying to re brand themselves. and some famous news platforms like by speed, have just pulled the life support plug on themselves despite the disruption and a lot of innovation, confidence, and trust and media. is it a real crisis point? so is the news suppose to enlighten people and broaden their worldview or go narrow and just reinforce people's biases? is this the new normal? today we're talking with a journalist who's had a front row seat to all the changes in modern day journalism. ben smith was in the launch team and political. he worked as the top media writer for the new york times and he created the news department at busby. and recently co founded a brand new news organization center for wearing full disclosure. i also work,

he's just come out with a book, traffic genius, rivalry and delusion in the $1000000000.00 race to go viral. the tells the story of the social media revolutions impact on the news business. ben, it's great to have you on my show. it not only tells the impact of social media on the news business, and also it talks about the social, you know, the impact of social media on society. and i'm really interested just to start with . the big question is, this is what has led to the toxicity of our times. has social media really undermined our democracy? i mean, i guess the way i see it and thanks for having me on steve, is that um, is it social media and facebook in particular were totally bound up with the searches of populism in the 20 tends. i mean, i'm not sure if you can see, i mean that you can't really run the counter example if there hadn't been facebook . but i do think, and the thing that i, you know, found and reporting the book was the extent to which, particularly the trump movement in the united states. you know, took these really deeply understood facebook digital media kind of followed its

energy to the absolute logical sort of end point, which was in some sense, donald trump. so donald trump, who, you know, tweeted and all of this stuff is the winner in the social media environment. but as i look back in history, the one who was the 1st winner was brock obama, and what it brock obama's team see in the social media team that other, you know, progressive democrats failed to take, hold up. but you didn't have to sort of put your head back to this world in the early 2, thousands where you know, where facebook is, where college kids hang out. the internet is a set of blogs that are, you know, and the establishment critical of a mainstream media that has with notable exceptions. gotten the rack for ron isn't really on the internet is a bit lost. and there's all this energy for us to rand howard, dean and then around brock obama, and it's really like it's a place for young people. and so it's almost obvious the brock obama kind of young progressive in united states is going to kind of ride this energy between similar things happen in letting them in columbia actually. but all over the world,

sort of like young people, finding their voices on the internet, which was, which was the presumptive lee there. space. and when i brought, and when obama visits facebook in 2011 after his victory, you know, it's what it goes without saying that this is where democrats hang out. of course it is. you write such an interesting. it's almost like anthropological treatment of the early days of social media. you focus on buzzfeed and joiner pereta. you focused on nick denton who created gawker, arianna huffington, and others around her the founded huff post. i'm just interested in that moment and you were there watching all of this come together in fact, you weeks or the i don't know to call you the forrest gump of it were hired by one of them. but you knew all, all of these characters, what did they get right? what did they get wrong? you know, they were among the 1st just to see this way of coming. and there was, you know, there was a huge, particularly if you on a friday really saw social media was going to be this don't already did both of the founder of us. it was going to become the central distribution platform. nick that

and who founded docker saw the power of the internet to kind of strip away the artifice that it media. but i think also both to some degree of thought they could control these forces and monetize them. and i think that turned out to be a lot harder than i thought. so when you saw this, i mean your early blogger, i wasn't really blue, or i don't really watch it as a note, i wrote it kind of us now i the, i read the book and everything i did in the washington note was exactly the opposite of this, i wrote long walkie foreign policy pieces, but nonetheless, found an audience in that time, folks. so it wasn't all bad, but i wasn't chasing traffic, you know, per se i was chasing people who i thought would be thoughtful about these issues which was a different strategy. but i'm interested when you saw gawker and i was afraid of goc or i never wanted to meet nick denton or any of his people because they were scandal monitors to. yeah, i mean, his philosophy was that, you know, the, the, that the possibility of the internet was to publish the things the journalist said

to each other in bar is not the things they said on the internet. which by the way, i think you do not give yourself enough scandal longer and credit is some of what you do. and you were saying stuff that other people were afraid to say about american foreign policy at a moment of washington consensus. but all the big publications were in one place and it was a place for outside hers. and in those that are blogs which were basically be early social media. we're a place where outside or is kind of throw spit balls the establishment. and i think in early gawker and this side called decibel to be like kind of the iconic thing, they can't tell the folks which is what it was. it was a feminist box still exists, but in its heyday and 2007 launch. the 1st thing they did was put out a $10000.00 bounty for an henri touched photograph of someone in one of these magazines. and they got a picture of paypal with it, where she still has crackles and smile lines which have gotten photo shopped out. and it's kind of a emblematic of that error as mainstream media, which was photo shopping out a lot in the sense that the internet could tell you what was really happening. and i think it was all, it was all in some sense kind of very small scale people learning how these, how,

how human interest and attention worked on the line and watching it through the truth, through traffic until this wave of social media came and, and kind of massively amplified these tactics, these ways of thinking, you know, one of the things that occurred to me when i was reading your book, which i'll tell everyone in the audience it read it, it's, it's a fascinating journey into it into this time. and also what went wrong, but in the days of walter cronkite or the big, you know, national network stations, or national radio stations and or whatever it may be. more people were listening to those in math and, and, and while they were, you know, not designed for small tribes just like you basically were forced to, if you were going to get any news to have a wider aperture to get fed a lot more than you might otherwise want just for yourself. but as media broke apart, people were fed more and more of just what reinforced their views or what they were comfortable with. and you described this beautifully in the book and, and i'm asking myself is that is what one of the main drivers that has led to the

political fragmentation in this country. where people really don't give a damn about someone on the other side of a perspective or a view or a political party it, i mean, i'd love to hear how technology has, has basically disrupted, you know, our knowledge of the world. yeah. i mean, i think, you know, one of the, probably the wrong, the thing we were honest about it, but i see it where i started in 2012 was we had this theory that when people started sharing news publicly in these public spaces like facebook, they would be their best sell, they want their friends to think they were nice people, they would share appeals for earthquake really relief and thoughtful atlantic articles and, and thoughtful bussey, news articles that our slogan for a while was know where it was. i mean, we have a bit made that both feet had 10 pretty yeah. we have, but also definitely like silly means include animals, but certainly not like hateful saudi politics. like what kind of a person would go out in public and act like that. everybody will think you're crazy and obviously we were totally wrong about human nature. and so at some level

there. but now i do think, and i think they were both both the sort of broad moment how much and you're there was an a for which social media was a vessel. but then also there were specific technical things the platforms did to amplify tibbets. and, you know, and they were trying to get donald trump elected or whatever they were trying to move the amount of time you spend on the platform from, you know, 4.7 minutes to 4.9 minutes. and the way they would do that is find what you were most likely to engage. and, and this metric of engagement into the interaction, wound up amplifying things that you awesome things that were incredibly divisive. things were racially divisive. where if you comment, i hate this, it's racist. the machine says, wow, this person is very meaningfully engaged with this content. let's show it to more people. and i think that really, that in particular, that's a 2015 to 2017 period on facebook. there were elements that drove these divisions deeper. that said, you know, a lot of that has passed, right? like and so donald trump hasn't been on social media for

a while. and it's not like things are that much better as well. i, when he get to the trust in media crisis in a moment. but i remember when donald trump ran and after he ran and you know, you were responsible. in part, you write about it. uh, releasing the dossier which fed a lot of the paranoia about russian manipulation of donald trump. it also russian manipulation of the kind of the american political sandbox, if you will. and i guess the question i have is, when i read it, you know, i don't know what the russians did or didn't do in terms of feeding toxicity in america. we were doing it on our own right. there was an awful lot going on just by the algorithms that facebook was releasing, where the other people were doing that had nothing to do with foreign perpetrators . am i right? yeah. and in fact, there was, there was a british government report a couple of years ago that made pretty clear that i think a lot of commentators, i mean the, the, the russians did try to go on facebook and make things worse. but they were massively overwhelmed by our own ability just to make things worse and by facebook

. facebook was amplifying this stuff, but also it was in the politics. it was in the culture down terms on cable news. and a lot of this stuff to it wasn't solely a facebook phenomena. wire democrats, so bad at it. well, i mean, i do think, you know, there was this moment when it seemed like obama liberalism was the thing the internet was good for, you know, sort of huffington post era. and i just think that if you, you know, you follow the sort of passions, you follow the traffic to its logical extreme. it is often telling people what they want to hear. whether it's true or false. lying to provoke a reaction, saying i read just things to provoke or reaction provoke, i guess with the platform to call engagement. actually when i went to meet steve band and i read about it in the book and in trump tower in 2016. and he made a real study of social media hit studies. huffington post, he had run, bright bird had just moved to the trump campaign. and the thing that he was, he was very interested investigated. and he was very puzzled that we hadn't just back to bernie sanders to the help. what, why would you not just follow that traffic?

follow that energy to become to him what right part have been to donald trump. and what was your answer? you know, that we had journalist acc standards that we were, you know, i mean it's, this feels like a very lame answer, honestly. like what we're just trying to do. our jobs, as journalists were, you know, we think that these and still we shouldn't, we're not going to try to bring them down these institutions for fun. when you look at, i mean, you and i have talked about this offline before, but when you look at american attitudes and there's, i think these numbers are reflected globally. frankly, we're talking, yeah, global audience. and a lot of the things i find interesting about your book in the u. s. case. or also true. you're around the world in the port ization is going on. but, but you know, basically more than 5053 percent of, of folks have a very or somewhat and favorable view of the media and, and you've got basically 20 percent very ambivalent that 26 percent are somewhat favorable. this is a lot of people do not trust the news. they do not trust us. they do not trust the media and i'm interested in culpability and liability you. i think this has got to

be the most sympathetic treatment of true monsters that were out there taking advantage and writing this in my view. yeah. but how do we heal ourselves after the buzz feeds huff post doc or? yeah, well i'm, i'm, i'm obviously more sympathetic to the monsters. i think that it is general. i think the media loves to exaggerate the media's own role in these things. and these technological platforms had a lot of influence, the bigger social forces. but if you look at, but it's also obviously across institutions, one of the things that this and media did was another thing that social media and some sense for that to be best. that was breaking down institutions and trusting institutions. whether it is the cdc, whether it is a newspaper, whether it's, you know, banks, i mean, i, or government i often, by the way, way did that by revealing what these things were really do. it mean it's a complicated picture. it's not like it's not like the news organizations that we look back fondly in the early 2, thousands and late nineties were doing such a bang up job covering the a rack or it was just that it wasn't so evident to everybody. and so i think it's,

i think, very hard to put that in the back in the bottle. i mean, obviously, you know, we're partners and a new new thing and we're trying to figure it out. but i don't think there's some gold gold. hardly about 7 for, for me that forget that i work there and you work there, but i mean, how is some of for going to address some of the gaps that you've written about between essentially content and substance and the thrill of chasing traffic? yeah, well i mean, i think one thing for better for worse, i think people are sick of this sort of that sort of stuff going on facebook or twitter and seeing this chaotic kind of confusing but like lively and fun, nothing. everything says fun anymore. but i think actually consumers have moved on and are interested in help navigating this cas at and, but they, i think they are not basically see a lot of people are not about to go back to trusting, faceless institutions. they want to know who they are hearing from. they want a level of transparency about who you are, where you're coming from. what are the facts, what are you, what is your opinion,

which is what we try to do, really schematically at that before and, and i also think that people are there's, we're not all going back to being all in one place, right? i mean everyone, the whole world on facebook and twitter yelling at each other. i think people are looking for smaller spaces, more intimate conversations. they can trust, you know, in that trade off between views and the quality. yeah. if some before, would it become big? do you think it will be falling into, into the trap of, of views. you know, i mean, it's a, it is a tricky thing in journals and because you obviously want people to reach you. and i think good journalists have a sort of a 6th sense for what are people interested in. they want to write that story and pick if that scab. and yet you also know that often the thing that will be most widely, rather mrs. and new on the internet, the new york son, the great 1st kind of break out new newspaper in the united states. it's big moment, wasn't it published the series on how flying mammals have been found on the moon?

a series of scientific reports and sold out for days. i think there's always an impulse in media to tell people what they want to hear. and i think you, you have to resist it. and what happened when, when traffic came around, when all this new flood of data, it's some sense. suddenly we're like flying with instruments. and if you wanted to, it could really take you to indulge your worst instance. you were a twitter upside that i and um are you, did you go through any kind of withdrawal? are you still on twitter all the time? you know, i last to either later to, i mean i last we did 26 minutes ago or something, but it probably was about how twitter is dying. i mean, honestly the thing i just as i'm a news junkie and the thing that strikes me that social media, if it has lost its basic utility for saying, hey, what is happening in the world. and i think people are going elsewhere just to that very basic, like what, what's going on, twitter, if you spend a lot of time on twitter, it is sort of in a perverse way. fascinating to watch it fall apart. it's like some kind of disaster movie, like it is very compelling. but if you can't go there and say, hey,

what's happening to this is not what it's for anymore. you know, donald trump is going to appear on cnn. why do you think he's doing this? i mean, he's, donald trump has always said he, you know, denounce the media, but in a way use that conflict in those positions as a spring board for more attention. and his sort of conflict with the media has always generated attention. and i think, you know, cnn is incredibly, sort of to, to me, shocking degree, unpopular with republicans. it's viewed as sort of the animated the way a lot of democrats, you, fox, us, of us. and i think trump is putting on a show showing his own strength relative to his competitors to run the status. in particular, let me ask you the question and i hope i can get it out correctly. but when i started my own blog, which is around the time that you started yours, i sort of felt like there was a cartel and intellectual cartel of the editors. it op ed pages at the major journals or bracket the washington new york times wall street journal. and while

a lot of them were saying yes to me and to my colleagues at a think tank, we were still getting told no, and it, and it bothered me that we're being told now. and i wanted a place to put these ideas, which is why the washington note became created. but i thought they were lazy, homogenized news organizations that were leaving a lot of interesting stuff on the cutting room floor. and so i saw a market opportunity there to basically cover things that the mainstream press was like john bolton's confirmation was a big issue at that time. but without going, you know, to down that rabbit hole. i guess the question is when you look at the major media today, the new york times has bought a lot of bloggers. they bought a lot of if they've hired a lot of the people, including formerly yourself, who are of the social media world. what are the vulnerabilities today of the new york times of washington post and others that have tried to become hybrids of these different movements? yeah, but i think the times, it's a trick you know, the time to speak to. i did not expect to write a book about the internet that was in part about the new york times,

but certainly the times above all, i think is one. i mean, you'll raise run of the winners. leasing one of the huge winters of this era. i do think they for veteran, for worse took in a lot of the ideas, a lot of the people from the internet. i mean, part of the challenge is a lot of those ideas and people are inimical to the core ideas of the new york times. and if you sometimes look at the new york times say, wow, why are all these people fighting each other? it's because they hired a bunch of lunatics from the internet and everybody disagrees about everything. and a lot of us have, have since left. but i don't know, but i think it is. and you know, in both of us have a similar arc of thinking that the establishment me immediate basically being outside years to it and you know, waging the sort of digital campaign to change it. and then i think to some degree, finding ourselves in this apocalyptic landscape where i like, wow, okay, like very effective challenges to these institutions. they're all sort of in ruins . and, and, and i think at least in my case, thinking hot like we've got to find ways to build trusted institutions and rebuild them. i think for another new moment where people are looking for direct

connections, particularly individual voices. oh, yeah, i'm seeing of, i mean, really strikes me about your book and it bothers me frankly. is that you focus on these key individuals who saw, you know, the matrix edward differently than others. jonah peretti, nick denton, a kenny layer, nick, you know, arianna huffington and others, but that one of the people who was very dissatisfied with sort of the dock or monitor of sexual pictures and you know, in the window. and so, you know, basically, scandal monitoring was peter feel is a rich billionaire, a basic feature. so we're talking about individuals have massive impact on the news . habits of american society or global society, or an individual who gets picked up and has enough power to bring down one of these news organizations. are we living in this world kind of super gladiators where most of us don't matter at all? we're just victims or winters accidentally, but it's all about these individuals who figured out how to a mass,

incredible power and what does that say about american democracy and the economics of news today? i mean, i do it, does the, i totally agree with these in these immensely powerful figures. the line must being the main ones. right. that's kind of gotten interested in news as a hobby, and we would like to crush their enemies and elevate their friends. and like, have some series and yeah, and it's, i mean it's a great, it's, it is a great story. but also, i think a big threat to the industry weren't the souls burgers of the new york times where the grams at the washington post. those same kind of characters, while they were entrepreneurs who were in the news business, i mean for better and for worse, right? as opposed to people who, who made their money, who made billions in tack and had actually lived inside of legitimate grievances with the coverage. and thought, well, just like throw a few pennies this way to destroy my enemies. i'm having some great. the feature of this is massive inequality. and well, right now, let me ask you a more serious question here we have um, where you're anniversary out of a now just or a journalist being killed in palestine. shoot me an outlet. and it's made me think

about how journalists are treated all over the world. we haven't endorsed kavitsky has been taken in and detained in russia, wrongfully we have, i think over 60, that had been killed over this last year. and so when you sort of look at the broad profession of journalism and i, i know a lot of journalists out there and they really admire you. they look up to you as setting a certain standard out there. is there anything we're not doing to remind governments, both of democracies and, and are talk, receives in a way differently about the important role of journalists in journalism, unhealthy societies? i mean, i do think that journalism is a real threat to power that, you know, the internet made a foreign correspondents used to be kind of harmless if you're the russian leader and some american journalist is sending off despatches to appear to print paper in english who cares, now that's visible to your own citizens, social media amplifies that too. i mean, you know,

and autocrats aren't wrong. i think to see this is a threat to them into power, but i, but i do certainly think that the, you know, where, where democratic leaders are attacking the for us project early. trump, you know, helps you know, gives ex extra space for, you know, whether it's moody or put in or, you know, whoever else to crack down on, on the press. well, i'm going to thank you for joining us, ben smith, editor in chief of december, 4th, and author of traffic genius rivalry and delusion in the 1000000000 dollar race to go viral. we really appreciate you being with us. thank you so much. thank you. so what's the bottom line? i got to say we're not much different than lab wrapped in a massive media science lab. we get poked and we get provoked with different algorithms designed to elicit certain responses. and we love it. but despite all of a technical innovation, the rise of citizen journalist and a blogs and platforms like tick tock, instagram, facebook and twitter, you rarely get exposed to a range of different thinking. they feed you what you want to hear. sure,

it's great to be comfortable connecting with others in our identity and political tribes. but it's not great to lose the ability to pop out of our filter bubbles and to have our biases challenged and sometimes cross the aisle and even reach an understanding with everyone else. the way the media works nowadays is a real problem when divisions within the society push up the market value of mega social media companies. and when social cohesion is not good for business, then we know the future is going to be riddled with clashes and with controversy and choking democracies. the lab rats, we've all become need to find a way out and set up new rules. or else we remain really frustrated little lab rats . and that's the bottom line, the, the suitcase holding presidential and general elections in the after mass

over the say thing, years quick. and in the midst of an economic crisis, whose presence are the ones raped on power be challenged? and what are the implications for the country? and the region, say, what's elda? 0 for the latest on the turkish elections? the a, but next week the, [000:00:00;00] the