cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] macy's been your primary source for campaign 2018 that makes c-span your primary source for campaign 2018. make c-span your primary source for campaign 2018. >> a sort of man has been taken in for sending bombs to president obama, cnn, and other

critics of trump. a high likelihood he will be prosecuted at least in part for the federal district court in manhattan. we will find out more and 15 minutes when the justice department will be briefing on the case. we will have live coverage at 2:30 eastern, or when it gets underway. in the meantime, part of today's washington journal. "washington journal" continues. host: we are back, joining us from new york is steven brill, cofounder and co-ceo of "newsguard," here to talk about how to identify fake news. what is "newsguard/" -- what is "newsguard?" " is a serviceard that takes the view that every once in a while, union intelligence is better than the official kind. we have people who are trained as journalists to serve as analysts, several dozen, and they have been reading, rating, and writing nutrition labels for

the thousands of websites that , information,ws and sometimes misinformation online. icone have a green or red that will appear on your twitter feed, your google search, your andbook feed, you name it, once you hover over the green or red icon, and most are green, you will see the nutrition label that explains based on nine very specific indicators why this site was rated green or red. host: how does one get this, and how do you determine which is truthful journalism and what is fake news? newg: well, if you go to

uardtech.com, you will see how you can download the safari extension for your chrome browser, safari browser, and your firefox browser. you can install it with one icons and the "newsguard" and nutrition labels will begin to appear whenever you do a search or look at a feed. again, the way we determine this is not by having a general conversation about to be like this site? is it too conservative? visit to liberal -- visit too liberal?- is it too but using the nine indicators, do they have the corrections policy, do they publish false news repeatedly, either headlines deceptive? indicators,ecific and we apply those across the board. there is not a conservative or aberal way to have

corrections policy or any of the nine indicators. now that we have come out with the ratings, we have been recognized, i think, for doing this straight down the line and absolutely right across the board. bias is it ok a site has a , either liberal or conservative? guest: sure, it is absolutely ok as long as they disclose it. just to give you an example, the national review, which is a conservative magazine, and its website, has earned a green. and"the nation magazine" its website has earned a green because they disclose their perspective, but they adhere to the nine standards we set, or at least most of them. host: how do you define fake news? guest: well, what i prefer to

characterize it as is misinformation or disinformation. misinformation is just wrong, inaccurate. and this information is deliberately wrong, -- and disinformation is deliberately wrong, it is paid propaganda. like there can be a website that we have identified as paid for by the american petroleum institute that purports to be a website to giving unbiased information about the pros and cons of fracking. now, that is deceptive. host: does the company make money? we don't.l, right now we are a startup, and we are engaged in discussions for licensing the icons in the nutrition labels to the

platforms themselves so that they will appear whenever you do the searches. you will not have to install the plug-in, and microsoft as so far been extremely supportive and now that we have the plug-in, and now that people can see exactly what we are doing, we are in extended discussions with each of the tech companies. host: mark zuckerberg was on capitol hill on april 10 talking about facebook plans to evaluate differences between political speeches, plans to use artificial intelligence for content review. i want to get your reaction to what he told lawmakers. >> from the beginning of the company in 2004, i started in my roommate, weand my

did not have technology that could look at the content people were sharing, so we basically had to enforce our content policies reactively. people could share what they wanted, and then if someone in the community found it to be offensive or against our policy, they would flag it for us and we would get it reactively. increasingly, we are developing ai tools that can identify certain classes of bad activity proactively, and fly get for our team and facebook. by the end of this year, we will have more than 20,000 people working on security and content review across all these things, so when content gets flagged, those people look at it. if it violates our policies, we take it down. some problems lend themselves more easily to ai solutions than others. so, hate speech is one of the hardest. the determining of hate speeches linguistically nuanced. you have to understand, what is a slur, and whether something is

hateful, not just in english, but the majority of people on facebook use it in thing which is different across the world. contrast that, for example, like finding terrorist topic and, which we have been successful at the point ai tools already on. as we sit here, today, 99% of the isis and al qaeda content to take down on this book our flight before any human see it. that is a success in terms of rolling out ai tools that can proactively police and enforce safety across the community. hate speech i am optimistic that over a five-year to 10 year period, we will have ai tools that can get into some of the nuances, linguistic nuances, of different content to be accurate in flagging things for our systems, but today, we are not there. right now, a lot of it is reactive. people flag it to us. we have policies to try and make it not as subjective as

possible, but until we get automated, there is a high error rate that i am happy with. host: you heard the ceo of facebook talk about artificial intelligence doing the job. guest: my reaction is that is interesting testimony, but it has nothing to do with the conversation you and i are having about fake news. ai does not work for fake news. it hasn't worked for fake news. he testified in april, let's look at what is going on this morning lisa the fake -- vis-a -vis fake news. the whole idea of fake news is to look, feel, read, and sound like real news, so the language is not hate speech language. you cannot use ai to tell the difference between the denver which was a phony

newspaper during the 2016 campaign, that made itself look like "the denver post." ai does not work for that. and he also talked about having to be reactive. "he whole purpose of "newsguard is to be proactive, so we rate the general reliability of sites. we do not fact check individual articles. the reason that works is, first of all, that is how you achieve the scale of being able to cover -- right now, we are covering 93% of all the news and information shared online in the u.s., and by the end of the month, we will be closer to 97%. the way you do that is by rating the reliability of sites, and that way, if the site has a red icon from newsguard -- from "newsguard" right now, and let's say it publishes some fake news this afternoon about the bombings, it will publish with

that red icon, and in the facebook feed, you will see the red icon. when you hover over it, it will say you should proceed with caution. we do not block anything. we are not in the business of trying to block content. we are in the business of trying to give readers the information they need to evaluate the reliability of the content that is being said to them -- fed to them. his testimony has nothing to do with what we are doing, and it is just not relevant for fake news. host: we are talking with steven brill, and we want to hear from our viewers on your thoughts on fake news. how do you identify it? what do you think about it? where have you read or heard fake news? we will go to linda in st. louis, missouri. good morning. caller: good morning. good show. i consider fake news, number

one, to the fox news network. that is not a news network, that is an opinion network. cnn and msnbc give more news, and it is not fake news. they are repeating what trump has said. i find trump to be so repulsive and so folder and just about everything -- and so vulgar in every thing he says, and the news stations are repeating what he says. and how people can be so gullible when trump calls them fake news -- i just do not know what these people are listening to other than fox. host: mr. brill, your reaction? guest: i think the caller will be disappointed in what i have to say. we have given fox news, foxnew.com, the website, not their prime time on television, but we have given the website the same green that we gave to msnbc and cnn. now, there are aggregations of

greens based on how many of the nine criteria you meet, but as a general matter, we gave fox and msnbc and cnn a green. if you read our nutrition label, you will see that we did not sit around and say, we think fox's too conservative, or msnbc is too liberal, or cnn is unfair to the president. we unflinchingly applied to nine criteria. i think if the caller looks at the nine criteria, the caller will be convinced we did this in good faith. host: sam is next in los angeles. good morning. caller: good morning. you are the best. something sparked my interest because i am a freelance t.v. producer, and i did a document reality series for rt.

when you see that rt is secretly paid for by the russian government, it peaked my knowsst because everybody it is directly funded -- in light guest: everybody -- guest: everybody knows it who works for them, what people who see the headline on the twitter feed, facebook feed, or google search, do not know that this is paid for and brought to you by vladimir putin. they have no idea of it. caller: well, but that doesn't mean it is secretly paid for by the russians. they make no bones about it. i appreciate -- guest: it is non-transparently paid for. what "newsguard" ties to do is look at what the typical user , and are the producers being transparent with them about who they are, what their motivation is, who is financing them, what other

processes? that is what we try to do, and we do it unflinchingly across the board. host: sam, i think you have a larger point. what is it? caller: i appreciate what you are trying to do. i know there is a full disclosure to when it comes to fake news there is a general umbrella of things that goes along with anyone. , one iswe can all agree left, fox's right. predicate the agreement, is

kind of fake news for me. i wondered how you get good ratings for fox or cnn. equallyt they all be unbiased? analyst take that question. >> i think there's a difference between by a central a stick standards. i think the national review adheres to journalistic standards whether we agree on the perspective or not and same thing for nation magazine. one of the sites gets a 100% green rating is the daily signal, which is the daily newsletter of the heritage foundation, which is quite conservative. they have serious people who wake up every morning and try to do a serious job.

they reveal what the other side is. they are trying to do something serious that may be something you disagree with. there is a difference between that and rt and the difference alleen that and info worse, of which get red ratings from us. >> let's go through the criteria repeatedly, does not publish false content, gathers information responsibly, regularly corrects and clarifies eras, handles difference between news and opinion responsibly. the website discloses ownership and financing, clearly labels advertising. provides information about content creators. there is a criteria to determine what is fake news. next.s

call.ngs for taking my i want to make a quick comment about rt. rt seems to show some nice documentaries, i didn't think it it wasecret that russia, the russian station because i thought that's what it was, russia pv -- russia tv or something like that. my main common is those concerned with cnn and the way they are reporting about these bombs. example the bomb was sent to bill clinton, but when they showed the envelope it says hillary clinton. i fell like that was a bit misleading. i felt like they took it upon clintones to make bill

when itnded person clearly said hillary. >> if your question is about how inh do you have to get right order to be journalists -- is your question how much do outlets have to get right? >> iphone x cnn sometimes puts their own plans. i feel like if a story came on thean it would have said envelope was addressed to hillary clinton. that says this attack was on bill clinton. >> lots of good journalists, me

included, make mistakes. what we are doing is cutting to the core. we assume everyone is green until they fail on enough of the criteria so they sink below and get a read. that sounds like a mistake cnn made, i don't think it was a big conspiracy to say let's deceive everyone end until people was bill clinton. we are not going to solve all the problems in the world. greensf sites will get and they will publish information that is wrong. everybody does. the question is what do they do about it when they make a mistake? do they own up to it? are they accountable? that's one of the major criteria at three what we are really in the business of is telling the people the

difference between the denver guardian, which is a website posing as a newspaper, and the denver post, which is a real newspaper with a real website. we've spotted a whole bunch of that are imposing as local tv stations or local newspapers. which looks like a cbs website in just a bunch of phony news. after what we are going and being affected by. we slap a read on that site after a few hours looking at it and then what it appears in your twitter feed, your facebook feed you will besearch warned.

there will be a three or 400 word detailed explanation why you should proceed with caution. that's the interesting thing. in some cases it's not the russian government or people trying to make political points. it's people who are in it for the money. they can get programmatic advertising, the kind of advertising where advertisers say find me this kind of person, whatever website they happen to be looking at. there are people in macedonia and elsewhere all over this country and every other country who are creating these phony and getting the interviews that earned them advertising revenue. >> let's go to bill in sebastian, florida. you're on the air. >> good morning.

sanchez is now doing the nightly news on rt. ours he doesn't have any -- rt doesn't have any commercials. guest: they don't need to have commercials because the russians are paying for it. caller: he is to work for cnn, but these journalists. tide,you consider a red the coast ofroying florida, which you consider that fake news? would you consider mr. kemp and his attempt to purge voters in georgia, this is the second time he's done this.

would you consider that fake news? >> what are you driving at? guest: one of the message that a misinformation site or in the case of rt a disinformation site uses, they mix real news with false news. the sites i mentioned before, they willine.com, have weather report and baseball scores, but within that they have a phony story about hillary clinton. journalistsspected and i respect them. knowact is people should the news they are getting online from some people -- they changed their name to rt so they can

hide the russia part of it. that doesn't mean it's all wrong, that doesn't mean unnecessarily that it should be censored or suppressed. the people should be on the information so they can assess the reliability of that with more knowledge. trying to stop anything. we're trying to do at the library and have been doing since the invention of libraries, logistics operators understand the source of what they are reading. the's why librarians across country have joined the news guard in installing the news guard on their devices in their libraries. >> rachel in memphis tennessee, a democrat. comment, i've to been doing rt fares.

i am very fond for coverage. a former new york times reporter, he had a show on rt. in america are american issues. rt america are american journalist covering american issues. >> let me explain the difference. boardc has a governing that has transparent rules that make it independent of the government. is it biased toward the left, but there are very specific that areplace carefully enforced that keep the bbc independent of the government.

that is a laughable prospect with rt. >> explain more. >> rt is controlled by the russian government. place, noo process in ground rules in place that would have rt be able to report independently on what's going on in the ukraine. chris hedges would report that, but rt sure did. host: fake news, there's an app it's immensely popular in brazil, is also filled with lies. the national -- a national outlet reported companies purchased millions of dollars in messaging packages to blitz users with propaganda supporting the far right candidate.

they discovered more than half were misleading or false. what are your concerns with an where a business -- where it's a business model based on having encryption and no one can see the messages? guest: my partner and i were in brussels last week and we decided to step up our plan to expand in europe. brazil is another country that the platforms have mentioned to facebookcussions with and google. this is a worldwide problem. the genie is out of the bottle.

>> is there a partnership in the works. >> they are varied depending on the platform. in some cases it's down to how much are you going to charge? it's technologically easy for them to do it. much easier than it may stand. to charge are going to license this are probably less than they are paying their public relations people or lawyers to talk about how hard the problem is to solve. host: in danbury, connecticut, a republican. caller: it seems to me many outlets practice graphic journalism versus journalism. you know, emphasis on emotional words, for example, outreach seems to be a favorite word. there headlines will include conditionals, as if something may happen.

also, if they do stick to the facts, they qualify them highly, the gdp growing 3% will include a headline that includes worries about too hard on the economy. it seems you cannot say they are true or false, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem you could say it is journalism. guest: well, again, we are not getting that granular, and everybody will have a different opinion on whether if you are doing a story on the gross gdp, you ought to put a word of caution there or not. that is a perfectly debatable issue. what we are about are the nine criteria, and whether you apply them. those are really basic.

you either have a corrections policy or you don't. you either repeatedly publish news that turns out to be false and you do not correct it, or you don't. you have deceptive headlines in the sense that the headlines promise much more than the story delivers, or you don't. we are just not that good -- we are pretty good at telling you the difference between "the denver guardian" and "the denver post," and that is the first problem that needs to be solved. host: should there be, has there ever been a line between entertainment and news? guest: well, that is a blurry line. when i teach the seminar that i teach at yale, one of the first things i do on the first day is i talk about the difference between news and entertainment, and i explained to them, to me, c-span is entertaining. it depends on who you are and how you get your entertainment.

but the basic values of newsgathering in journalism are pretty clear, and that is how we came up with the nine indicators that we use. i think every journalist would agree on those, whether they produce journalism that is entertaining, or not. host: robert in new york. independent. caller: good morning to both of you. i applaud you. i'm going to be contacting you in the future. a couple of quick things. when his retraction, you hardly hear anybody retracting anything in a more. back in the 1940's and 1950's, they would govern themselves and then there would be told to retract the story after being transparent. number two, i think our citizens could vote on a branch of the government which could be an advisory board of retired people in the media i could actually examine these things that would report to all the other three

branches or all four branches, and really start to keep things on an even keel. this is what i want your response on. why is it that we are not involving the libel and defamation lawsuits, especially in politics? i believe i have read that political leaders in the past, 20 years or 30 years ago, they said that in politics, campaigning, running against a competitor, opponent, that they are free from being sued liability for defamation. we need to bring them back because then people will not be making up things about their opponent. also, i think we should pass laws that if you are going to run for government position, public office, then you can only concentrate on the things you will do, not what your opponent, negative things about your opponent. if there are things about your opponent that need to be brought up, it could be brought up in that branch of government could

create. thank you. guest: with all due respect, that is a set of laws for a country i would not like to live in. i would not want any government agency to be deciding on which news media is legitimate, and which news media is not legitimate. i prefer what newsguard is doing, and you can see what we are doing if you go to www.newsguardtech.com and download the browser plug-in. what we are doing is giving people more information so they can make their own decisions, not have the government to make decisions for them. as for libel laws, the president has talked about that, too. the libel laws ought to be toughened. i do not agree. if they were toughened, he would be the first person in trouble.

host: we will go to jason in new york. independent. caller: thank you for being here and presenting your organization and what they do. we appreciate that. what is your opinion of the responsibility that reporting agencies, and those who broadcast over large listener areas, have to telling the truth and reporting actual news as opposed to their opinion and swaying the public views just by -- mamma thank you all for being here. over this past week over a dozen suspicious packages have been sent through the united states postal service to a media outlet, a hollywood