its own surface, far as i said, i'm going, i'm gonna see the way that you tell the story is what can make a difference. 11 days that ended holden, 16 young blind to the land and flattened efferson, the powerful testimony of palestinian families. in garza, as i remember, the children killed joe with the as of may 2021. i remember him every minutes and a team of him coming back to me 11 days in may on al, just the hello, i'm nick. log into all the top stories here on al jazeera took a appears to be heading for its 1st presidential election rental. we've counting

from sundays, but it's in its final stages for the rest of the top right away and remain short of the 50 percent needed to win. not right. he says he will respect any decision to hold 2nd row. oh wow, good to on the well goes, we have seen that the margin with the closest opponent is more than 2000000 volts. and with the final result, we will see a wider margin. we don't know if we will have a run off, but if this is the result of the 1st round, results of the run off will be the same for a nation. has decided to go to a 2nd round with respect to the decision to more about, well, the main opposition, constant commode custodian is training. i'd run in what's being placed before the election. he says he's ready to face the president in any run off. it was said to me, it's just due to the despite his smear campaign against us, ad one hasn't gotten the results he wanted. we have to wait for the final results. if the 1st round wasn't enough to received the mandate, we are going to get it in the runoff election, but your vision, but the fed presidential candidate to see no, no,

none has secured more than 5 percent. right, so far it says run of his endorsement could be crucial so far he's refusing to back other one or click don't count or to say to him that he can just sort of colors. yes, it seems they like sense with go to 2nd round and focus. national nathan gonzales will be the determinant of that on off the offense. they'll be another difficult 15 days ahead of us. and during this time, the elections are completed with a got into something good in the 2nd volume vba to do all the best to make this process a good one for our nation and our country. at this time, we are not saying that we were supposed one fact the or the other to talents progressive move it forward. policy has claimed victory and sundays general election of devices rejected the tree back policies which have governed the kingdom for nearly a decade. it campaigned on impressions, plans to reform the countries institutions. let's read it says he will build a coalition with 5 of the opposition policies. thing for the purpose type policy led by the daughter of the former crime. this is type,

since you know the people of thailand have already spoken their wish and i am ready to be the prime minister for all whether you agree with me or you disagree with me. i have congratulated, couldn't pass on time from good time for her, had for campaign and have invited her to join the coalition. as soon as it goes, hit me, martin, se in bangladesh, lead me, trailer destruction, streets of beans of motion, major transport, roots control, power and telecoms. adults across me, most rescue services say these 2 people have died. it is the most powerful. so i think they have been going in 10 years, bringing wins of 9200 kilometers. i know tons of challenges more from bangladesh. my mother's husband said the main raft of the 5 low cost, by the time it made landfall here somewhere around $745.00 gmc terrain gmc, the wind speed was barely a 120 kilometers power. and you can still sit

a wind is still on it's a pretty. 2 red and a heavy rain. it is a modern island. some damage of one person were filled up by falling trees. and confirm reported by our project problem. generally saying that there's been some damage on top or they've nearby. as for the running a temp, we know there's been no major damage of our projects. they still pop flood damage. they already repaired and good. there was no lamplight on slot, so down, so i've been sped from this last of this side, thrown francis promos, dozens more light tanks and armored vehicles for ukraine. and it's 5 days russian forces. the announcement was made during a surprise for the 2 friends by the crating president, florida minutes of lensky. immense is french counts, bought the men will not crow in paris. basically, it is cold for most sanctions against russia. police and can you have recovered at least 200 bodies as they dig up shallow graves connected to

a religious cult. members of the good news, international church rep uh to stop themselves to death. so they could go to have groups leader as being the rest. right. or up to date with headlines here, ronald 0. you got more news coming up right off to the bottom line. now 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 organizations 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. that 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 2010. 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 in 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 fail to take, hold up. but you do 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 or 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 and 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 went abroad. 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 really right 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 no comment and you were there watching all of this come together. in fact, you weeks for the, i don't to call you, the forrest gump of it were hired by one of them. but you knew 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 is, i 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 they 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 a 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 walk a foreign policy pieces that 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 those that are blogs which were basically be early social media. we're a place where outside or is kind of throw spit balls 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 unread 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. and 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 in 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 anger there was and for which social media was a vessel. but then also there were specific technical things,

the platforms did to amplify tibbetts 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 went to 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. 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, the 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 had 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 hell. 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 ec standards that we were, you know, i mean it's a, 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 the fees and state we shouldn't, we're not going to try to bring it 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 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 still 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. i mean, these technological platforms have 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 the media did was it was the 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 at austin by the way, way did that by revealing what these things were really doing. 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 in late nineties. we're 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 what we talked about semaphores, minute 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 the, a lot of people are not about to go back to trusting, faceless institutions. they want to know who they're hearing from. they want a level of transparency about who you are, where you're coming from. what are the facts, what are your, what is your opinion, which is what we try to do, really schematically and sound 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, that contrast know in that trade off between views and the quality. yeah. if some of 4, would it become big? do you think it would be falling into, into the trap of, of views. you know, i mean it's a, it is a tricky thing in journalism because you obviously want people to reach you. and i think good journals have a sort of a 6 sense for what are people interested in. they want to write that story and pick it that scab. and yet you also know that often the thing that will be most widely, rather this isn't new on the internet. the new york sun, the great 1st kind of break out new newspaper in the united states. it's big moment was when it published a 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 have to resistance and what happened when, when traffic came around, when all of 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 of saying 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 that, and that's just 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 conflicts and those transitions as a springboard 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, who, if office 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 at op ed pages at the major journals or bracket the washington. yeah. your ties wall street journal. and while a lot of them were saying yes to me and to my colleagues at the think tank, we were still getting told, knowing it, and it bothered me that we're being told now. and i wanted to 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 main stream price 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 hybrid. so these different it's, yeah, but i think the times and it's a trick you know the times is because 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 of the you'll raise one of the winners. leasing one of the huge winters of this era. i do think they for veteran, for worse taking 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, and i think it is, and you know, in both of us have a similar arc of thinking that the establishment media media is basically being outside there's 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, 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 huh, like, we've got to find ways to build trusted institutions and rebuild them. i think for of another new moment where people are looking for direct connections, particularly individual voices or yeah, i'm thinking 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 goc or montrose of sexual pictures and you know, innuendo. and so, you know, basically, scandal monitoring was peter feel is a rich billionaire and basically to 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? we're most this don't matter at all, were just victims or winners 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, i totally agree with these and these immensely powerful figures. eli moss being the main ones, right. i've kind of gotten interested in news as

a hobby and what 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 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. well, 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 intact and had actually incentives, legitimate grievances with the coverage and thought, well, i'll just like, throw a few pennies this way to destroy my enemies. i'm having some degree at the feature of this is massive inequality and well, right now let me ask you a more serious question here we have. um, where are your anniversary out of now is, is there a journalist being killed in palestine? sure. mean, i walk with and it's made me think about how journalists are treated all over the world. we haven't endorse 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 we sort of looked 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 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 as a 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. currently, 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 itself for an author of traffic genius rivalry and delusion in the $1000000000.00 race to go viral. we really appreciate you being with us. thank you so much. thank you. is this. so what's the bottom line? i gotta 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 the 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 freed 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 across the aisle and even reach an

understanding with everyone else. the way the media works nowadays is a real problem when divisions within a 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 a meeting of minds you need to compose. friend, architecture becomes in a reno in assembly, where you can place all these evidence together and start seeing things architect to be outside and photographer trim apartment, part one. another thing that i really want out of art, which is not simply things that are trying to see the world,

but things that give you a glimpse of how the world could be different. judy, it'd be unscripted on, i'll just say around the head on the clock and how the top stories here on al jazeera and check it appears to be headed for its 1st election run off with the accounts again, its final stage.