hello, i'm amy driscoll. i'm the deputy opinion editor for the miami herald. i'm really happy to be here today. welcome to the miami book fair 2022 taking place online and in downtown miami on the wolfson campus of the miami dade college. i've been coming to the book fair myself for years, but as a second generation journalist, i am especially thrilled to introduce these next two

journalists and authors. tony dokoupil is a co-host of cbs mornings. he also anchors the uplift on the cbs news streaming network. previously, he was a cbs news correspond tonight and a cbs news sunday morning contributor as a correspondent for cbs news, he has written about marijuana legalization, digital privacy and the second amendment. from 2011 to 2013, he was a senior writer at newsweek and the daily beast. dokoupil koppel is also the author of the last pirate a father, his son and the golden age of marijuana, a memoir in which he documented his father's exploits smuggling marijuana during the 1970s and eighties. katy tur is the anchor of msnbc's katy tur reports. the author of the new york new york times bestseller, unbelievable. my front row seat to the craziest campaign in american history. wonder what she's talking about. and the recipient of a 2017 walter cronkite award for excellence in journalism. in rough draft, a memoir, she

writes about her eccentric and volatile california childhood punctuated by forest fires, earthquakes and police chases, all seen from a thousand feet in the air. her parents pioneered what became known as helicopter journalism and became famous for their aerial coverage of events such as the reginald denny beating the 1992 l.a. riots and o.j. simpson's notorious run in the white bronco. talk to her talks about her complicated relationship with her father, and she charts her own path from local reporter to globe trotting foreign correspondent, running from her past. she also opens up about her struggles with burnout and imposter syndrome. her stumbles in the anchor chair and her relationship with her husband, rough draft explores the gift and curse of family legacy. examines the roles and responses, villages of the news, and asks the question, to what extent do we each get to write our own story? i'm sure the dinner conversations are fascinating. katy tur and tony dokoupil.

thank you very much. thank you very much, amy, as well. and get this microphone to work. so i appreciate all your being here. people who suspect there might be bias in journalism. i can tell you that it is 100% accurate in at least one respect. this is my wife. i think she is one of the most naturally gifted broadcasters on television. i think she is a graceful and stylish writer. i think she has one of the best ears and eyes for language and i'm so happy that you make me cry. and i'm so happy she's written a second memoir under the age of

40, which some would say is self indulgent. because it brings me back to florida and to miami and to this book fair and this is where i'm from. i was here till the age of ten. love miami, tiger bay. and we have great memories here as a as a couple. last time we were here, we just got married. let's say we were sitting here. sitting here on the stage with we just been married and and there were stories, believe it or not, even up to i do that we had not shared with one another. and they were primarily stories about our own childhoods. and it was all in a book i had written. and she had yet to write this book. and i got the stories along with all of you when she wrote this. oh, by the way, i might have come with some baggage i didn't tell you about. and so, katie, i'll hand it over to you to introduce the book as you see fit. okay, so this book, you probably

know me from at least that first from unbelievable. and the book i wrote about the craziest campaign, which was my time covering lyndon johnson. no. covering donald trump in 2015 and in 2016. and one of the big questions i got after that was put politics aside. how did you deal with that? how did you survive the campaign trail with all of the vitriol and the anger and, you know, he would go after me and why didn't you leave? you know, why didn't you go back to london where you were living? why did you stay on and choose to keep covering it? and one of the answers is it's an incredible news story. and how could you ever give up covering, watching history unfold before your eyes? but the other one is that there was something deeply familiar about about donald trump. and it was something that i didn't really know how to put into words, let alone give that an answer. and so when i was looking at writing the second book and and what i was going to write about,

i it was the middle of the pandemic. and that question was kind of lingering in my head. why, you know, why did i stay on there and the pandemic hit and i thought, well, what am i doing and why am i a journalist? so i, i really want to be a journalist. am i, i working cable news? am i making things worse or am i making things better? and if i'm making things worse, don't i have a duty to get out of this? and all these thoughts were spinning in my head, and it was a very dark place as we all were in the middle of the pandemic, wondering what we were going to do with our lives and i you know, i'm talking to my husband. my mom sends this giant box in the mail. and inside the box, it's like the size of a microwave. and inside the box was a hard drive, like a giant hard drive. and it was so giant because it was filled with all of the videotape my parents shot in their 20 plus years in the news business, every news story they ever shot. i mean, they shot some real doozies, like the madonna's wedding to sean penn, where she

gives the bird to the helicopter, the reginald denny beating in the riots, the o.j. simpson chase, all of the aftermath of the 92 northridge quake. every police pursuit you can imagine. and then also all of my childhood videos. so they use the news camera like it was a camcorder and every piece of my childhood id was documented. and there's also some questionable parenting that was on the hard drive. so we it arrived. i think it was christmas time. and we, we sat down after the kids went to bed and we were we were looking at the tapes and they all out of order. and there was one where a horse had fallen into a ravine. and so there was a kind of an aerial rescue. and katie and her brother are in the back of the helicopter for a while. and then there's a cut. and then suddenly her mom and dad are on the ground and the kids are nowhere to be found. and we called their mother and we were like, what happened there? they were the kids were in the helicopter and then they weren't. and she said, oh, we left you with one of the neighbors. we just put you on the hill. we came back. you loved it.

they gave you ice cream. they knocked on a random person's door on a cliff and said, can you watch our kids for a few minutes? we've got to hike down this ravine. so, yes, we went through i was showing tony and it was alternately, you know, me laughing and saying, look at this wild and crazy thing. and then you'd click on another video and it would be something very dark and ugly and so i kind of seized up and i broke down and i thought the only way to get out of this, to explain to myself why i did 2016 and whether i should keep doing journalism, was to figure out where it came from and to confront the things i didn't want to confront. so it's, you know, it's hard, it's messy, it's complicated. it's also beautiful and joyous and going through it, it made me realize how much i love journalism and the job that i'm doing and how important i think it is for all of us to continue to have hard hitting journalists out there who are willing to to keep doing the job in the face of all of the ugliness that we

are currently experiencing. do you want to read an excerpt from the book? because the book has layers. folks, i would say if you're interested in stories of journalism, journalism history, and then also journalism of the moment, there's that there's also a lot of tough family stuff at the beginning, in particular, the first third of the book is a very cinematic, if you like, miami. let's introduce you to los angeles in the nineties, in the nineties and the her mother and father built out of nothing. a full fledged video and helicopter journal journalism operation and just this sort of like american entrepreneurial ship. and it's incredible as a story. but at one point, my dad walked into a helicopter company. he's 25 years old. he still has pimples. he's he's beside my mother, who

is pregnant with my brother. and there's me. and he says, i want to i want to lease a helicopter. and the guy was like, what are you talking about? and he said, can i lisa helicopter. and he's like, well, do you have any cash? and my dad said, no, but i have this business plan and it presented the business plan and said this. you know, she's she's the camera woman pointing to my pregnant mother. and they were like, get the -- out of here. what are you doing? and he went into another helicopter company and did it again and managed to get them to hand over $1,000,000 helicopter to him. he had no pilot's license, but he was he had so much chutzpah at the time that he went out. he convinced somebody at the los angeles fire department to teach him how to fly. and he used that license, along with my mom, to to cover news in los angeles in a way that nobody had done before. there had been a helicopter. it was called a helicopter. ktla had a local station in l.a., but they used it very seldomly. and it was kind of a it was a bit of a gimmick. and they said the city is giants. whenever we get to a news event,

it's over a fire. the blaze is out and you really want to get the flames. a car crash. everyone has been airlifted or ambulance out of there. how do we get there? faster so we can see this happening in real time. we got to do it from the air and so they built this business called los angeles news service and they changed journalism as we know it. and this is, you know, at first it was for good. you could see these things happening in real time. i mean, they captured some videotape that held authorities accountable in a way that they had not been held to account before. i mean, there was the chp beating the living daylights out of a group of migrants who had crossed the border. this was just a few miles north of san diego, just beating them just terribly. and that would have never been seen had my parents not been above it with the helicopter and training their camera on it. it didn't make them any friends. i mean, they could capture they

could hold authorities accountable in a way that they hadn't been held before. but also, i mean, this is reality tv is news now. so we were they covered the first live police pursuit. if it's not the first, it's the second. and from top to bottom, a guy was a carjacking and a murder and they took this guy took the los angeles police department on a high speed pursuit through all of l.a. up freeways, down freeways, side street walks, curbs, just this wild video of this red cabriolet. what was a license plate? cruel fate. cruel fate. that's where you fate. this is. this is the car you stole a crawfish. and so they captured the whole thing in real time. and the news director says 91 or 92. the news director had a decision to make, do i cut into a rerun of matlock, the station director, which did good numbers or and show this police pursuit or do i keep or i keep matlock on and and at the time he made the decision to cut into matlock which was a big deal. and it was a gamble. and the next day the l.a.

times was covering it, and they said it was a marriage of a tragic technology and technology and because they called the voyeurs voyeurism and it you know, it was the beginning of the era when you could carry events live. and it wasn't just an evening network broadcast where there'd be a 15 second live shot, but there was ongoing rolling live coverage of an event where you don't know at the time you didn't know who was in the cabriolet. you didn't know what they had done, what their motives were. they're a good guy, a bad guy, and you're just a voyeur. you're just observing it. it's context. it's it's it's without context. and of course, you know, you could argue, okay, it's obviously a criminal. it's a bad guy. the cops are on the side of good here. but the principle of taking the coverage without any of the information is the same principle that goes into taking any kind of live political event without any surrounding kind of stealing the thunder of my point that i was going to please.

i am a man and i like to explain. our pillow conversations are a real joy. anyway. so i mean, it was it was reality tv. the ratings came in the next day. it slaughtered matlock. it did so well. people couldn't get enough of these live pursuits. and so they started covering them more and more and news became sort of entertainment. reality tv version of what's going on around you. and you can draw a straight line to that. let's just air it without context because we can't take our eyes off of it too. the way that we cover political reality rallies with the way that we covered them in 2015 and 2016, where this is important. yes, but it's also it needs context. yes, sure. but we can't take our eyes off of it. so let's just air it. we'll figure it out later. and that's what we suffered from in that time. and it's it's part of how we are

dealing with the aftermath of what happened in 2016 and the and the the way that it ate away at trust in journalists and journalism. and we're trying to now figure out how to how to work back toward that trust. i mean, it's very easy to lose trust, and it's very, very difficult to earn it back. if i may interject. yes, please. i you're 1% right about that big national story, but there's also a really good personal story about you and your rise and your relationship with your father. and so the gifts he gave you, that's actually a very moving. so i remember mickey mantle supposedly had a father who threw baseballs at him in the crib until mickey, a little baby mickey learned to put a hand up. and that's how you read a baseball prodigy. when i say she's one of the greatest and most naturally gifted television broadcasters, her father essentially did that to her when she was a little tyke. he would turn on the camera, turn on the microphone, and he

would make her recount in live report or form. what happened during the day? there's a video. i have it on my instagram. you can go find it of me when i was four years old. maybe even last. maybe. yeah, it was for and my dad is the camera on me and i'm standing on the sidewalk with my brother and he says, give me a news report. and i look at him and he said, you know, like the lady on the news. and i look at him sideways again. he says, you know, like the lady on the radio, like knx. and it dawned on me and i said, oh, yeah, there was a fire in san diego. oh, a fire broke out. and all my friends were there. and we went to a party at mcdonald's. but it was the beginning of of being forced to to do these live reports on demand. i mean, we would we would be in the car and he would say, give me a live report about what's happening on our drive to get pizza. and for a long time, it was very fun. and then it as i got to be a teenager, it got to be very annoying.

but looking back, it was the best i mean, the best training for the job that i do now because i can i found myself in situations, in local news where you'd get to a story 2 minutes before the broadcast. i mean, because local news is run, run, run. and they and they have been decimated financially. they just don't have the resources they used to. please watch local news. it's good for everybody, but we would get to and read local papers. miami herald. we get to story in 2 minutes. before they would they would come to you and say, what's going on? i'd have to look around and be like, well, let me tell you about what's going on. and it was just, you know, it's observation and all. and a lot of journalism is observational and painting a picture, telling a story and building a narrative for where you are. so there's a lot of that in this book. there's also a lot of humor. should i read the part about the vice president?

yeah. yes, please. please read this part. so much of her identity is tied to being a journalist. she's raised in a family of journalists. she's a fantastic journalist. and then, you know, when you become a mother, you become a parent, you become a wife. all these other identities come in and, compete. those identities collided in this is so i just given birth to my first son, teddy and it was as anybody's gone through birth, a traumatic experience, which you're not really prepared for and you don't really understand what's happening and mine ended in an emergency c-section and the aftermath of that was a lot. and so i'm i've just gotten home. this is five four days after five days after just gone back. and i'm in the bathroom and i'm working up the courage to look down at what has happened to me. and i have my phone in my hand and here i'll start reading. this is chapter 16.

it's kamala, right after we arrived home from the hospital, my phone rang. i was in the bathroom trying to get a moment alone, sitting on the toilet lid, breathing deeply and working up the courage to look down at the mesh hospital briefs. i had just pulled around my knees. i knew it was going to be ugly. i wasn't sure i wanted to know how ugly. i didn't even know my phone was in my hand until it started to flash and buzz. i don't know why i looked at it, except for the distraction. and i was looking for any reason on earth not to look down. so even though it was a415 number, san francisco area code, a city where i know nobody, i picked up. hello? i said, katie, the voice on the other side of the call sounded excited for me. like i was about to be presented with checks every week for the rest of my life. yes, i said the voice was iconic even then. midway through the 2020 campaign for president, it was the voice

of democratic candidate for the white house and senator from my home state of california, the voice of the current vice president of the united states, the voice of kamala harris. but it wasn't really her or was i still hallucinating? i also hallucinated that the hospital was really fun to have the whole psych ward show up and say, are you okay? that's in here. it took me a second to register what might be happening. i was groggy, half drugged, self-pity, eating, and the voice sang out the name like the announcer on a daytime talk show. i imagined oprah arm stretched out, head tilted back. is this a joke? this has to be a joke. someone is pranking me. hi. i said i heard you had the baby. i just wanted to call and say congratulations. her voice was alive. it jumped out of the phone and dance around me like a technicolor rainbow. oh, my god. it's really her.

oh, yeah, i said, still unable to do more match the energy of a sulking 12 year old. i did. how is the baby? how are you? i looked down. inside the briefs was a mat of gauze folded up like an origami diaper. a catch all for what was still falling out of my uterus. ladies, you know, you think that when you push a baby out, you push everything out or you think if you have a c-section, like i did, they just mop it up before they set you back up. not so different from a dentist. they remove a tooth, but no, your body spent ten months building a home for another life and it takes weeks for that home to dislodge in pieces and flood down a swollen mississippi of bodily fluid. six weeks, at least, i'm sorry, gentlemen. i'm so sorry. but most of you are married and

you get. i. this is in there, actually. i'm sorry. i recommended. they do tell you this at a doctor's visit or you read about it in some book with a contented goddess on the cover, but nothing quite you for what actually comes out. they say it's like a really heavy period and that is being cute about it. what comes out is not cute. there will be blood, there will be tissue, there will be clots. golf ball sized are normal, baseball sized are not. i thought about telling vice president harris the truth making a joke of it all, telling her what i happened to be in the middle of doing. and maybe that would have been the right move. but my professional filter kicked in. it suddenly occurred to me that this was a work call i'd been covering this person one way or another. i would be covering this person one way or another. once i got back to work. so i decided maybe i don't tell her about the carrie movie in my

pants. maybe i keep it upbeat. build a bridge, make a connection be human. the kind of human to agree to sit down to an interview with during the campaign, or if it gets to that point, the white house be nice, but be a reporter and i'm good. i said, trying to find a spare barrel of excitement today is good. we just got back from the hospital. i felt like harris had opened the door by calling me, but instead of walking through it, i banged my head against the doorframe was so flat, so lifeless. was morse code to her technicolor rainbow. she must have noticed it too, because she begged off the call pretty okay, she said. well, i just wanted to say congratulations. good luck. talk soon. and have you ever interviewed kamala harris as vice president? no. i wonder why. no, i got to send her the book and say, excuse me, can we talk about what really was going on?

and then let's talk about paid parental leave while we're at it. so. i immediately realized that i had failed a test. my mother would have passed. she would have realized that while you might be taking some time off from the news business, the news business is never taking some time off from you. i was also failing on a frontier. my father would have somehow conquered my father had always been looking for the next thing in news, never stopping and defying rules and regulations, risking life and limb. i wasn't going to be taking teddy up in a helicopter any time soon, but perhaps i should have been shooting video for social media above the neck anyway. anything to keep this new me connect did to the me that existed out in the world as a journalist. but i was out of ideas and out of energy. i simply hung up and then sat there for a while longer, forcing myself to look down.

the other part of this book that i that i found useful to to write down and also i think is worthwhile of a deeper conversation, is the way that we cover big events. and that's not just the rallies, but the way that we cover important news events and what we can do better as journalists. i know you guys have a lot of opinions on this. i'm sure you do. at least i'd love to hear them in the in the book. i talk about right before i go on maternity leave, it is the end of the mueller investigation. the first special counsel. now that we have a second special counsel investigating donald trump and so i had covered trump since the beginning and this felt like the the end of something very big. and i wanted to be around, too, to know the outcome. and i'm ten months pregnant. i'm huge. and we get an announcement that bill barr is going to release a

summary over the weekend and, you know, just prepare for it. it's going to be a summary of the results of the mueller investigation. and i will barge into my boss's office and i say, you got to put me on the air on the weekends. give me any time slot. we don't know when it's going to come out saturday or sunday at some point, but they gave me a few hours in the afternoon on each day and it just so happened that on sunday the the summary came out, we got a warning about it, a 30 minute heads up. and so we tap dance up to up to the news and then we get the summary itself, which is a four page statement out with one half direct quote. the actual report. and as you know, the statement was deeply misleading. it was a political statement, but that's all we had to go on. and so this is me on live television reading the statement without context, again, without any of the underlying the context, obviously, of the investigation that we've been covering, but without the context of the underlying report or the evidence in the

underlying report. and all we had and me and every other news organization was this political statement from a political appointee summarizing what an investigation said. we didn't know it was misleading. and so three weeks later, when the actual report came out. and so the question is we gave this document, the runaway go to paint a picture about and investigate action. that was not true to give the white house this win that they didn't earn and it was bad for the public. it was bad for the country. but what do you do in that situation? we've caught ourselves in this 24 hour news cycle, both on cable news, but also on social media and in newspapers. these live blogs get you up to speed on. what's happening minute by minute? what do we do? and this is a conversation you and i have a lot because in the

moment there was no other choice but to go with it, live because everybody else was going with it live. we could all decide to say we're not going to cover something until we know more about it, but then fox news or breitbart or whatever, gateway pundit, whatever, we'll say that they're not covering this because it's it's good for the president. and so you're caught in this in this rock and a hard place. use a bad cliche with not being good for the public discourse, but also not having a choice to do it any differently. and so we're in this moment right now where we need the public's buy in and the public's critical thinking and critical eye in order to navigate this very complicated, informed nation atmosphere where we live in with social media and with 24 hour news and with the politics our politicians ability to to

circumvent us. it's just very difficult. and we're all trying to figure out how to do it better and so my question to you guys is, do you know a better way to do this? the floor is open for questions. and if you have one, i would love to hear. it took that out of your hands. very good. wise choice. so i know if i have any answer. maybe just to add to the complication is, you know, the new york post put down at the bottom of the front page after the announcement. florida man makes an announcement. page 26. and if i read of that article, which was just one little column on the left of page 26, and it talked about his we don't know

about his cholesterol, you know, and they describe him as a man who plays golf a lot. and that was basically yeah, it was a it's a very short blurb. little short blurb. so, you know, comparing that to what the press gave trump, all that billions of dollars of free airtime so that so the question is, where do you feel you need to reside? and, you know, in that full spectrum. so i think that listen it's it's news that the former president is running again 100%. it's that is something that needs to be covered. but it needs to be covered in context. and the way that we didn't weren't able to do in 2016 is we didn't have the foresight that we weren't able to do with the bar. some. we didn't have the foresight we can now say donald trump twice impeached former president who is currently under investigation and by the fbi and the doj is

running for president again. and then we have we can say that we can talk about what's the news value that comes or the news the news out of his speech, not necessarily everything he says. even fox news got away. and then we talk about the field of republicans who are either in or out and what lawmakers are doing, the way that they're reacting to it, what the donors are doing, the way they're reacting to it, what the friendly press is doing about it, the way that they're reacting to it. new york post is something that's worthwhile, but also talking about what it means for congress and how the republican party and the democratic party legislate together going forward. what sort of hearings are there? how does kevin mccarthy navigate it? there are all these newsy questions that affect every one of us because they are are there people in charge of legislation and and then the the money that we that we get as a country and then the laws that are made. but we don't go and just cover it wall to wall for the sake of having it on the screen.

all right. good. thank you. hi. my name is roberta velez. first of all, i want to say that you guys are definitely a couple's goal. so. so as someone who works in corporate media, how do you view the rise of popularity in independent and online media, not just from the right wing? they have newsmax, one right wing, right side broadcasting, one america news, but also from the left wing. so you have like the young turks majority or bored secular talk. do you people that work in corporate media view them a threat? do you view them as welcoming? hey, the more media, the better. do you view anybody as a threat? i think corporate media has a certain, certain, uh, implication. i i don't consider myself working for a big corporation in the sense that it's directing anything i say or any, any story that i cover. and i think that's kind of a it's misleading.

people think that like comcast is coming in and saying, katie, we want you to cover this and not cover that. that's not the case. but i think that independent news outlets do a wonderful job and i like propublica. does incredible journalism, and the more the merrier in that respect. and anybody who can interest the public in current events, i think, is doing god's work. so whether you're coming from the left or the right, if that's an entry point in for any member of the public to become interested in who's being elected and what they're trying to do, more power to them. and one thing i would say about all media is it's good and independent, corporate, whatever. make sure that you understand how they do their journalism, how they how they source, what are their rules for, sourcing information, what is their rules for fact checking, how they how they're accountable? the other thing that's important about about smaller, more opinion driven news outlets on the left and the right is they

are only able to exist because of larger sometimes denigrated as corporate media outlets are funding actual reporting in actual difficult places on campaigns, war zones, in disaster zones, finding things out that then are fodder for conversation. and that includes in a huge way, newspapers and print media, the associated press, reuters, the miami herald, all the other big papers. so it's i wouldn't if i had to choose a world where of them went away, the big guys, the little guys, i would choose the little guys. but i like living in a world where both exist because i think they feed one another symbiotic. thank you. oh, one of the thing about orbit, it is like the point of corporate media. yes, it's a enterprise, but the because it's a moneymaking enterprise, its mission, its goal at a place like cbs or abc or nbc is the broadest possible audience. and i think there's virtue in america in having a news source that is attempting, you know, succeeding or failing on some

days or others attempting to reach this spectrum, as opposed to this spectrum or this spectrum. the best thing about the last two years is that we haven't had to listen to unfiltered trump go on and on, on national news and then last night i stumbled upon nbc and they had trump on from a conservative in mar a lago where they gave him like 10 minutes to thank all the people, you know, all the people that he supported who supported him. and then they cut away and they said, well, we'll come back because we only are interested in hearing what he has to say about the special prosecutor. so then they cut back in and he did talk about them appointing the special prosecutor and went on and on about how persecuted he has been and how he's given

11,000 pages of documentation and they have everything on him. what did they keep asking for? and i finally had to turn it off because it was going on for too long, unfiltered. so i think we're back. yeah. and that's upsetting. hi, my name is barry. i assume that there was a question. all right, my name. so i can't. i'm all for a community meeting style, so any statements or questions is fine. no, i guess i'll ask the question. i won't make a statement. my name is barry. butin is is not meant to be a gotcha question. but i think the most important thing i've been listening to is keith olbermann on his podcast. i'm not saying it because of you situation. what do you think it is? podcast. do you think it's integrated? i think it is. i haven't listened to it. i have not listen to it either. but there's a keith olbermann anecdote in the book as yet. no, i it please listen to it. it just won an episode. it's great. i wish everybody would thank.

pardon me. my name is paul johnson and actually, i was in the media about 25 years ago. i was the senior producer for moneyline with lou dobbs. and i got out of that business. and now i'm a u.s. attorney, not the u.s. attorney, but you asked like, how do we how do you solve or what are some suggestions for, i guess, moving forward? i don't know. there is no not a defeatist, but like how do you compete with social media? that is it's not there to inform. it's there to get you back, you know, like the old batman, you know, same back channels saying that time just come back. and i don't really know how you do it. it can't be. macneil lehrer oh one on this side and one on this side. no one's going to watch. i mean, i think part of it is, first of all, let's all pour one out for twitter while we're here yet right now, i think part of it and i've had this these conversations recently, but is just the where we think the

other person that we're talking to is coming from. if they say something that we don't agree with or we find offensive or isn't, isn't, you know, in line with what is acceptable today or if you want to say accurate, assuming that the person i think there's a knee jerk reaction to assume that the person is a bad actor or as you know, angry or mean or trying to do something nefarious is and i'm not talking about politicians. i'm talking about every day your neighbors, your friends, your relatives. i think it would be good for all of us to assume that the person that you're speaking to or the if you're speaking to them on social media is not a bad person, is maybe just somebody you need to have a more calm conversation to understand where they're coming from and then you can tell them where you're coming from and. just have a dialog that we haven't been able to have because everybody believes that the person they're speaking with is the devil and we're not.

we're all americans and we're trying to make the country as good as it possibly can be. and we are all dealing with a lot of everyday junk in our lives. and we all are getting information from from now different sources. some of it we're liable and some of it not reliable, but it's worthwhile trying to find common ground and trying to find a way to speak to each other again and i think it's great that twitter is falling apart. i mean, twitter has been good for a lot of things. it's done a lot of good in the world. that's enabled a lot of people to come together and to and to push back against violent regimes. it's done. it's it's opened the world up a dialog. but it's also more recently been very angry and mean and divisive. and so my advice to everybody would be to log off if you haven't already log off facebook.

maybe if you go on instagram, just like pictures of dogs and cats, baby photos. and then instead, if you're getting into a conversation with somebody, try not to assume that they're a bad person. try to talk to them. and if somebody were to deliver a news program that is substantive but maybe a little boring, dry, maybe it's good for you. i don't know. in the uk, the bbc is actually quite boring and they have a culture of the news is vegetables there and we don't have a culture of the news is vegetables. we have a culture of the news is bright and shiny and happening now. and if you look away, you're going to miss the most amazing thing. it's going to be bloody, it's going to be funny, is going to be exciting. and i, i wish as a person who worked in journalism that it was a little bit more, less entertainment and more kind of, you know, miami dade. like it's an education, but

they. well, thank you all that was a wonderful conversation. another round of applause for our authors for. that concludes the session and the next session will