118th congress tuesday, at noon eastern live on c-span, and c-span2. also on c-span now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. >> listening to programs on c-span through c-span radio app just got easier. tell your smart speaker play c-span radio, and listen to "washington journal" daily at 7 a.m. easter, important congressional hearings and other public affairs events throughout the day. and weekdays at 5 p.m. in 19 eastern catch washington today for a fast pace report on the stories of the day. listen to c-span any time. just tell your smart speaker, play c-span reader. c-span powered by cable. >> weekends on c-span2 on intellectual feast. every saturday american history

tv documents america stories, and onundays booktv brings you the latest and nonfiction books and authors. fundin for c-span2 come from these television companies and more including cox. >> homework can be hard but squatting in a diner for in network is even harder. that's why we are providing low income students access to affordable internet so homework can just be homework. cox connects t compete. >> cox, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> i'm very pleased to introduce tonight speakers. margaret sullivann is a columnit for the "washington post" and has been a journalist for over four decades. she has served on four surprise juries and was a of the pillaged by four from 2011-2012. she's a faculty member of duke universities stanford school of public policy. she has also taught i journalism in the graduate schools at columbia university and city university of new york.

she was the first woman editor of her hometown paper, the buffalo news and she was also the first woman public editor of the "new york times." [applause] >> her previous book is called ghosting the news, local journalism and the crisis of american democracy. we have one copyleft of the registers. joining market is doctor joan donovan, leading public scholar in disinformation research specializing in media manipulation, political movements, critical internet studies, and online extremism. she iss the research director of the harvard kennedy school shorenstein center on media politics and public policy. and the director of the technology and social change research project. she is co-author of the book the untold story of the online battle ending democracy in america. inch her research can be found n severall academic peer reviewed

journals. she is a columnist at m.i.t. technology review at a regular contributor to the "new york times", thehe guardian, npr tonight there discussing "newsroom confidential: lessons and worries from an ink-stained. life" called a beguiling memoir and journalist katie couric said her perspective are increasingly system is invaluable. by dealing our personal and professional experiences in this wise and engaging memoir she pulls the curtain back to reveal how journalismal really works, d human decisions behind it. please turn in welcoming margaret sullivan and joan donovan. [applause] >> a while back. a good looking crowd. i want to thank the students from my course they came over from the harvard kennedy school. cheers to them. always keeping me on my toes. i came here fresh from a lecture

on this information in the anatomy of media manipulation campaign, so i got aat few thins that are front of mind. >> i will have fusion mic.c. i can't figure out how.us [speaking in native tongue] i think it just slides up. >> thank you. >> wherere together now okay. so sullivan, solely. >> you can call me solely. >> i know that you know why? >> because of it in the book. >> because i'm from boston and it would be it would be a special kind of trauma not to call you by your name. >> you know, i live in your city and when i say like for a reservation whatever i might have to give my name, i will say sullivan and they will say solomon? no. it happens every time. so here in, boston it's a little different. >> you say sullivan, which one? what county? >> what parish. you got it. by way of entering a new conversation with you i wanted to talk a little bit about your

first book, local news in the crisis of democracy, which seems to portend someom of the issues that we found ourselves in with the drying up of local news and the preponderance of internet platforms that make everything global. this is such thing as local news link online. everything becomes a global story when it is posted online. thinking about what you knew then and how you have matured since that book and how your thinking has matured -- >> early 2012. >> i'm not making this argument but, i mean, what do you see is different is essentially the' question? >> it's worse. everything is worse. .. equals newspapers and i want to be clear that.

i know that's the case. there's lots of other ways to get local news. you know, there are digital first sites. work on newspapers are important, the boston globe is really important for ly example. the buffalo news in nwestern new york is important but they still even now in there whether state, come the globe is that whether but it's a lot smaller than it used to be. they still are i would argue the engine of local arrest of the local news ecosystem takes some of its content and a lot of its ontone and direction from the newspaper. so when newspapers which local newspapers which have suffered the sort of the

ruination of their business model because of the depth of print advertising, when they suffer the whole thing suffers. and we see that things happen. people become more tribal. they become less politically engaged. the party lines because they are more tribal corruption can flourish municipal bonds cost more times because the watchdog effect isn't there. giving politicians honest so a lot of bad stuff happens and it's a real worry and the other piece is we talk and understand there's been a huge decline in trust in the media generally but local news has high trust so it's this huge paradox in which people trust local news more but it's falling off a cliff in terms of its sort of

sustainability. >> i recently was talking with someone at the baltimore banner about how hard it is to reintroduce local news given the digital platforms role . and how hard it is to get local news to be discoverable on these platforms . do you think this is my last ti question about the old stuff and we go into the new stuff but do you think that online news media is up to the challenge of meeting this moment in our democracy? >> i think the content can be. i do discoverable is right. it's not the same and what we're never going back to this but i'd say it's not just the same as when the paper landed on your doorstep and pretty much everybody got .t now you have to seek it out or if they're really good miniature it comes to you but it may not . so they could be doing great work but you may never see it. and it's not the kind ofthing

where , the thing i worry about is that we don't have kind of a common basis of reality. that local news even though flawed maybe it was too oriented towards the establishment. but it's still kind of we could argue about the issues but we all kind of shared a set of facts doesn't seem to be the case anymore. >> one of the things we study in our class has a lot to do with the way social media as failed to serve news and knowledge, not just information in ways that we could build back up healthier democracy. and i wanted to ask you by way of asking you about writing a memoir , what was different about the writing for this book that process wise, methodology. obviously it's not research research but there's quite a bit of new information in

their what were the different processes for writing these differentbooks ? >> one of the weird aspects of doing this memoir is that i had i guess what james comay would call contemporaneous notes because i've been keeping a journal since i was 10. so when i was 10 my daddy a date, one of those maybe it's the year to everyone but it was a datebook that had like a white plastic cover. and it had a year on the front i'm not going to say what the year was it wasn't recent, let's put it that way and i guess i could have used it as a datebook like intramural basketball on tuesday or something i started to use it as ajournal . and then i alwayskept a journal . so it was helpful when i was writing because i was able to say, i was actually able to use direct quotes in some

cases because i had them written down, not as if i went down every day but i did have to unlock a lot that was there so that was really helpful and then i also for the past 10 years since i've been either at the new york times or the washington post i've been writing columns, blog posts or columns so i was able to go back to them and say this is what was going on and then sometimes draw from them so that was very helpful. the other thing is this memoir sort of took a turn and became i mean, people have been using this word manifesto which seems a little loaded to me but it has something to say beyond thisis my life . it's about what's happened to to truth. about what's happened to politics and kind of where we are. so it's and it looks at subjects like the kind of fraud issue of objectivity in

midterms. is there such a thing? is it a word thameans what it used to mean . this . >>. >> you may say that but i have a chapter titled objectivity wars. and of the woke newsroom. so there's a whole thing going on in newsrooms as you know that younger people, people of color, women are really not too interested in what they see as an outdated idea of objectivity. but then, i have someone like marty baron whose i think very well known in the boston area who in the book makes a very strong defense of objectivity and says it's not what people, it's not the thing people are objecting to, it's approaching a story with anopen mind . without the decision already made about what the story is and looking at evidence and

being rigorous and allowing that the drive where it's going but i do think the word has become kind of tainted in certain circles so i like to use other wordsthat don't set everybody off like for example accuracy, fairness . evidence. reporting. all those kinds of things because they don't make you cringe. >> i only cringed as a punctuation point because as researchers where often called the task of objectivity and what that might mean in my research especially around online extremism and violent s extremists as well as will say people say what you just interview them and you'llknow the whole story . and we do this deep dive into all these far right communities online cbecause

they game is already out there, wedon't need to hear from what supremacists what they're talking points are . be it for breakfast. how they're just arguingtheir points . so you've been called to task to have to make those decisions as a public editor. you have to think about what is fair and what is objective and what are some of the tougher calls you had to make about objectivity y is you're trying to think about are these stories that we're telling fair? are they balanced? are they capturing the aptruth or are they starting the sissue the cause is hard to talk about? >> i was a public editor only the new york times i didn't have the washington post and i didn't do it at the buffalo news i have four years in which and i'll start quickly say what is. or was because it doesn't exist anymore times but the

public editor job was set up to be one of an internal watchdog the new york times the readers represented it so the idea was and it is a bizarre idea in many ways you , i was employed by the new york times s,in essence to criticize the new york times i sat in the newsroom of the new york times to say critical things about the ti people who were sitting right around me you don't get a lot , you don't get invited to a lot of parties that way and luckily i have friends ie already because i wasn't going to make any new ones. one of the things i write about in newsroom confidential is coverage by the new york times of lori clinton. so you know, i thought it was, i got there in 20 12 which was long before she declared for president and i thought it was very weird that in 2013, all reporter was assigned to cover hillary

full-time. why? she wasn't a candidate and it sort of acted as a way of, i mean, i think it was a bad idea because it puts so much emphasis on her. it was a way to say we already know she's going to be a candidate and we already know she's going to be the president. then there was this kind of coverage that scrutinized her and made i think much bigger deal than it should have been made of the supposed scandal over her email. so the chapter is called but your email. but at the same time what was the level of scrutiny brought to trial and to particularly the connections between the trump campaign and russia. i mean, that was a big topic. >> one of the ways in which

i've tried to think about the email story as on the one hand it's like zombie content. it keeps coming back and back again in the news the cause of what the search at mar-a-lago and why didn't we search the hservers for the email and there's been a lot about her using her personal email forstate department resources . what do people think where the risks and how do they compare to the risks of keeping the kind of documents trump had at mar-a-lago. is this even on the same scale? >> is sort of weird to compare it. the other day i had a book stop at politics and prose which is in washington dc and about two doors down from politics and prose is the pizzeria comet ping-pong ., ping-pong is ground zero for

fake news because it's the place that supposedly hillary was having a sex trafficking game involving children. >> she was harvesting a drina chrome in the basement and she had extorted all of these children in wayfarercabinets to get there . andit was a whole thing . >> this settlement actually walked in with a gun. >> andthere is no basis . which are these punchlines are these conspiracy theories that overtime take on quite a life of their own . and i would love to know from your perspective just inside newsroom particularly from your time at buffalo what was the feeling uncovering stuff that's deemed so outlandish at thetime . and your media columnist so your job is to help us reflect on public reflect on the media. where we too late to q-anon

or was the dismissal of a big problem? where do you fit in when you are trying to think about the political importance of how these conspiracy theory is that then mobilized allover these communities into january 6 . >> sometimes i feel as though , of course i critique the media and i think they could do better. but i don't know that more coverage of q-anon early was going to make such a huge difference. i mean, i think that there's a kind of a curiosity factor. there's like, inside newsroom's there's a lot of desire to write stories that are going to get what we call engagement which you might think of as clicks . and so cis it outrageous, is it crazy, and that sometimes is the tone of the coverage as opposed to really diving

deep into something and trying to explain the underpinnings of it. i think we've all gotten much better about that but i think it probably came a little late. >> it was hard as researchers to even figure out the degree to which these conspiracies are taking root in the public. because of the way in which people, there was such a horseshoe effect where you had just as many people upset about q-anon and dismissive as you have people that believe in it so it was hard to study on line because it looked like it was everywhere. but at the same time, it was partly the outrage about it was everywhere as well. which in some ways is paradoxical because you don't want to spread the conspiracy theory but i virtue of covering it, it does the job. >> i think we run into that and we run into this a lot, the difficulty in writing about lies and conspiracy

theories without magnifying them. how do you cover, trump of course is the main problem. with it. because everything he says is you know, during his campaign during his presidency by virtue of the fact that he was president, what he said was newsworthy and yet by quoting him and by putting what often was false or a lie into a headline, into a treat,into a news alert , you are actually helping. you're doing the thing that works so well inpropaganda which is repetition . so how do you avoid that and actually there are ways to avoid it. >> there's something that is not my thing but it's something i've written about called the truth sandwich which george laycock, a linguist came up with witches instead of putting the lie or the misstatement or the outrage into the top

paragraph for the headline, you actually start with the truth. and you say what is. and then you say and here's what's being said and then you say and here's what's wrong. so it's much more effective than just putting g the outrage out there and then checking it. it's surrounding the lie with truth. it's a little, truth sandwich is a bit of a misnomer because the truth is the bread. >> i call it fact fallacy fact. so i don't sound like i'm teaching a bunch of fifth-graders. because it's hard. it's hard to walk in the newsroom and pay guys, guess what's up. harvard professor and were going to talk about truth h sandwiches. but the fact fallacy fact model has a lot to do with the psychology new. this is the news or and their

very news headlines this i is going to use disaster us with or a lie. is only obvious situation if he is the business model? >> i think all i engagement has changed a little bit in places like washington post and new york times is a more purely for numbers six 30

uses. actually pushes in the direction of more is not just let me or someone on-site is there e. >> a. >> is in. but your last retranscendent stuff is always somewhat saccharine uncle going to six years style of journalism and how this covering positive change in last year's in one basket facebook how you'll never again you are one officer as you'll never access it in our youth will

affect the cost of the house is trying to find a story away. what are your assets and people playing inside in. >> meit has a place. at least it was the reporter. i the school is. in those days you actually must have access. you have to be talking to inside people. but when it comes time to do the investigation, the way is probably is you might know because the order use your answer it and then investigation or in the order roi stalking, they might be,

you investigation as you said you, i know you you need to you today in the job of the area where it's gotten to the te is coverage of the lighthouse in washington where sue journalism palace injury and while it is salacious is to use something that's interesting or is not the most important kind of journalism and this is more in his. >> i feel the same way researchers. some of them that do work inside these days, i was u the day at a hole at the

image and a sense of the world i'm not always sure i met its internal cities is a lot of parallels i research investigated. and also to the heels of all honest say you. >> it makes sense . i was asked of this or that question gis easy. you will find this so is too much but fox or barry. one. i all my. all i. your answer to? what is the easiestwellness list . he. >> what is this? >> i'm getting along. >> the. >> cool or a.

>> always. >> cheney or ross. >> which chain? >> one. heroes or villains. >> some for transoft. >> more. >> is only the usual fast so he threw some issue is you will. the last one was new york times for wapo is there? >> it new york times is bigger and more powerful) say is . they will have a lot of people. you know, i went is doing

what ages coverage, that's probably the times . but i think they did a a lot is the post is engaging as moreinteresting . >> interesting. when it comes to day-to-day you beginning the that was for reconstructing the timeline is your. how did your memoir develop day-to-day? at what point did you realize he's right about this and this issue as you were in the book together what stories youdecide to ? >> is weird because i started off doing things like having a list of things would be interesting to . as ithappened , all was in my building in new york rosa memoir that i she was just

she's in her 80s. she is one award in the circle sore. she also was so she read some early on and said you should just stop jumping in a civil, [eating you really need to have so that started with being a kid and watching the water, particularly watching the wire hearing and being inspired is in because of my brother was sitting here who lives in. because he identified journalism as something that will is easily about making it more or less chronological that seems to be more social than i was to follow that thread all the way through.

>> is fascinating to think about two the story usually is now was that of this and of examples of times in which all the people you know, what do you want to say was that he fand give up on us. >> one of the things that i a lot and it felt a little new york times was these overuse sources. there is a problem in news and one of the reasons there's a problem is that we use the services , these days a disk us.

you know who this is, you're never going to go know the story the size of the problem is in the war which turned out to be very flawed and left skepticism about weapons onof mass distraction. people really. and even though i was at times years later, readers would cost about. so then there were couple of incidents that occurred in which services be either wrong or messed up. so i changed the rules on the use of services is a story on on , that was the main reason is the seam side off on top editor was is deputies so

that really rules although they said it is public and others. he related to is a way. >> you you, he was the year of resources. people were leaking stuff left right from the white house. you this. of your were leaking from all the agencies. and the row dva was an. when you story on source the word i use often is fantasies is what the story is saying. you will like that i think is

you. >>. >> you should because it's so hard. you need anonymity because of the rules of these people who occupy. >> as an on is never say you can't use financial services anythinglike that . >> is the. and be sure that we have time for that. there's only a microphone going around from c-span so is not like those so you will need to speak up. but you will hear. for c-span. so if you want to raise your hand, we have a question so that they can come over you always need some questions . >> will.

>> is a lot recently about your a hole in reality. moving back towards doing more. that the challenge of conservative platforms is just too overwhelming s and mark. >> it is overwhelming and i worry a lot, you can use it to just saying fox news. fox is an active force in our society because it's a way .or people you can say that in some ways the cable news generally. your e place you go get outrage on it is not as you will be really well-informed difference with fox news is often is not really reality.

some people, the people showed up will versus were immersed in you can't call it news but they were in the false information always was being encouraged strongly encouraged on fox. >> .. >> i think it's good. i was very heartened to see that

the washington post start add democracy team and it was a way to see this as a rock and a place that needs coverage of efforts to suppress votes and, you know, all those kinds of issues. the thing that -- and, you know, times has this challenge and doing a good work and touchdown catches not just those two places. the thing i kind of worry about is it in a silo and sort of like sayinger here's where we deal wh democracy and we'll have the rest of coverage from treating politics as a horse race and usingou polls for everything and

unequal as equal and really it should be -- in a way we shouldn't have a democracy team because everything we do in a news organization should be oriented towards the public good and i think it's good to put that kind of attention on it and to bring it to people's attention. i mean it's really interesting that polls are showing now that polls are showing that 70% of americans are concerned about democracy and whether we or what i mean about it and free and fair elections and what is voting access like and is there going to be acceptance of elections done proper and she is there going to be an equal transfer opportunistic power. that's what i mean.t

what some people think i mean about it based on reporting i've seen is there's too much immigration and my children are being taught horrible things in school. i mean, i don't know. i don't think that's what it's about. but people seem to mean different things by it and so when we see these numbers that seem to be like, who he, that's good that people are concerned and we have a problem and i'm not sure it translates into everybody being concerned about the thing that's happening. >> it it possible to come over? he has a short range here. thank you so much. i likep the energy that is comg out. >> i was a freelance journalist for about twoca decades, and i have been h reflecting on the coverage that comes about and i thinkov almost daily as the full

coverage andel largely responsie for his rise to power. i think it's real failure of the media to allow that to happen. he kept throwing out stories and they were fast, easy, they were cheap and all the media outlets kept running with them. >> thank you. i know what you're saying and i don't disagree but certainly when he was the president, it's hard not to cover the president but i think you're talking about the kind of salacious coverage as everything he said being made into a big story and then you'd go on and news sites that everything was about trump and i fault the media for that, yeah. >> i hadai a question about financial sustainability for

local news rooms and the ad revenue and what do you think of the path forward getting local users back on their feet. >> it's harvard, isn't it? well, it's hard. i mean, local news rooms are -- local news is very troubled and it kind of comes down to the thing, the life blood that's supported newspapers for so long was print advertising and print advertising took a huge hit basically when the internet came along and when craigslist came along and all that. you can't put that genie back in the bottle and now we have to re-invent ourselves and find other ways of sustaining the cost of hiring reporters and cost of putting the paper out. it's hard. news rooms is doing it and the globe is doing better than most and it's dis-hartening to see

and -- disheartening to see and that's the measure, one of the biggest measures of success rightt now, how -- how many digital descriptions do you have and there's a de-emphasis on print that doesn't make everybody happy and i mean when i was in buffalo the other day, my hometown, a guy stood up in the question period and told me how much -- he gave me which parter and verse on how much his daily subscription touchdown catches ten, five, years ago and now. the person interviewing me was the current executive editor of the buffalo news and i went and did my best and it's an effort to drive people to digital and it's the present and future and getting a print subscription scription jeff bezos said this and ii can attribute this to hm

and he said at some point when you'll go to visit someone and you'll see a print news on their cupboard or cabinet, it'll be like going to somebody's place and saying, oh, you keep a horse, you know, it's like that unusual and that weird. we're not there yet, but it's philanthropy support, public support, and advertising has to be a bunch of different things and it's notit going that great. the example i like to give about the decline of local news and i'll get off my high horse about this is denver. denver had two big newspapers and rocky mountain news and the post. thisng wasn't that long ago and each had 300 people and

reporting about that and rocky mountain news went out of business and the denver post bought by the worst of the hedge fund chain owners and probably has roughly 50 people in the news room now and gone from 600 to 60. now there's other news organizations that popped up in the area and that's all great. but again i see the newspapers still as kind of engines so thau something. i'm not -- i think it's futile and i think it's tough. >> hi, thank you.s i'm one of the people that beats the horse. i i wanted to go back to the question previously about the threat to democracy and very

different ways that people see what the real threat is and different realities that americans are facing in the world with. i think very much comes from the news they get and finishing news and tough news and special media and some questions in there is going to be done with the bridge and people out of there news bubbles and out of those and other than because you think it's the right thing to do as a citizen, you know, get out of that some similar reality base. >> i think it's come down to education to some extent. >> getting caught in schools and we need to go to teach more civicss in school and news

literacy should be taught inac school and you knowo, when you encounter something thatth looks like a news story, you actually would know how to judge it. you'd hesitate to share it before you'd say this is true. stop long enough to say that's one way to get out of it. >> this has been charged by m many different kinds of reasons and howt do you think how to

regain the trust from audiences? that's the key question. >> my bookor is a memoir and underlying memoir of the whole book and one way that i think news organizations can start to rebuild trust i is by explaining ourselves to the public a little more than we do being more transparent and saying here's how we do the story and the reporting method we use and that's a relatively small thing, but i think it could start to make a difference, and i think education is a big part of it. so, you know, i will say though that while we've seen this huge decrease in trust, it's happened at a time when institutions in general have seen a huge decrease in trust. that's true of government, business, you know, the police, every institution you can think

of. i address this in some detail in the book and i think that shoring up local news is apart of it too and that's a place where people tend to trust more and it has to be kind of a multi-faucetted approach and -- multifaceted approach and it's a difficult process. >> the talk on the research team is adding more talk to the internet and kindly with local knowledge. knowledge being different from information and ends up costing more. i think that local journalism is a big part of that and you're, you know, a local journalist that is y someone in your hometn for so long and saw all of these technological changes and political changes and i think this book is not just pertinent to the moment and call to action at the end of the book where you

want a return to more reality-based accurate journalism and it's long overdue and also such a wonderful read to get to know you and even though you wouldn't play my silly game, i still love you and from my m heart to yours, and don't think i i would have ended up being the scholar that i am without having fierce media there holding people. everybody, let's thank, sully. [ applause ].