grand prize goes to nate coleman and jonah roth line, 10th graders in connecticut their compelling documentary innocence held hostage never getting past and future conflicts with iran. >> it is evident in the next 20 years the united states must make more policy that places heavy restriction on all americans traveling to iran because not only will we see a less -- the united states will have to participate in such negotiations with iran. >> congratulations to our winners and domiciled. the top 21 main documentaries air on c-span every morning at 6:50 a.m. eastern and throughout the day on april 1 you can watch each of the award-winning studentcam films anytime at studentcam's.org. >> next, a discussion with editors and writers on bias in media, decreased trust in

institutions and how social media and local news have impacted journalism. this is one hour and 20 minutes. >> good evening. i am the director of domestic policy studies at the american enterprise institute. it is my pleasure to welcome you to our discussion tonight of the new liberalism, the american medium in the future of mocker c. one of the major problems we face in american life is the decline of trust and institutions. this trend is evident in american views of established media outlets. most of the cause is fairly clear. major media institutions have learned distinction between news and opinion subsidy the ideas

and attitudes of a small percentage of population for objective reporting and fair-minded analysis. the rise of the internet and social media has made the problem worse. journalism is given by tribal affiliation and insatiable demand for clicks. in such a polarized climate, journalist have come to see themselves not as information gatherers but advocates for the latest induration of social justice. last december james bennett, the economist lexington columnist published a groundbreaking essay casting these trends in new light. bennett had been the editorial page editor of the new york times from 2016 until june 2020 when he was forced to resign at the height of what kelly be described as a cultural revolution in american life. at the time, americans had been consumed by rights and protest over the death of george floyd pit the times had promised -- and published a range of up

heads. their internal reaction to another op-ed written by tom cardin would be a with a call for supporters of free and open debate. they claimed publishing the op-ed threatened their safety, the outrage group. less than three days later, james bennett was forced to resign. in his economist piece of the new york times lost its way, he explores how the episode is another example of the drift of media away from the values of

pluralism, political neutrality and ideological balance. examines how the times became defined by an intellectual culture intolerant of dissent and afraid to trust its readers with alternative perspectives. he writes in his essay journalism like democracy works better when people refuse to surrender to fear. we are here this evening not simply to describe how american journalism or parts of it have succumbed to a liberalism but to analyze the growth of a liberalism throughout americans opinion forming institutions more broadly including higher education in the wake of the october 7 attack on israel. leading the discussion tonight will be that a stick wished journalist charles lane, deputy opinion editor and columnist at the washington post the author of three books on american history and legal affairs. we'll be joined by aei non- resident fellow thomas williams,

a staff writer at the atlantic whose next book will reflect on the events of 20/20 and explore their meaning for america's future. you're happy to welcome to the stage the editor in chief of the washington free beacon and cohost of the ink stained wretches podcast picked we hope to have time at the end of the discussion for audience q and a and if you are watching online submit any questions you may have to guide denton at aei.org or send a question via twitter using #newilliberalism. i'm happy to turn things over to charles lane of the washington post. charles: thank you very much tiered i'm excited to be here with this stick wished panel in front of such a pretty good-sized crowd for an event of this nature.

i wanted to make a couple quick remarks about the framing of this event which is the new il liberalism. 20 years ago at a forum about the new york times they would have been complaining about the old liberalism. i think that is interesting comment about our situation. we are not talking about a newspaper accused of being pro-liberal shared we are not talking about a newspaper that is nonliberal or anti-liberal. we are talking about the notion of illiberalism which is a different animal and that is going to be what we circle around as we discussed things. matt alluded to this sensational james produced for the economist. it is one of the most provocative eloquent things i have read in a long time. whether you agree or disagree, you have to admire the fact

you're reading the words of somebody who is saying at long last what he really thinks and that is always an admirable thing. that makes this particularly a special occasion at least for me and the idea we are going to talk about it with two colleagues who have a lot to say on the same subject is also gratifying. what i'm going to do is start off by asking you a question. i went back and reread the piece and took a lot of quotes from it. there is a lot of quotable material but i wanted to start, kick us off not so much talking about the incident involving the, -- the tom cotton op-ed at most frequently quoted line in your article quote the reality is the times meaning the new york times is becoming the publication through which america's progressive elite talks to itself about an america that does not really exist. ".

-- closed quote. tell us what you meant about that and have that experience with the constant op-ed prompted you to formulate that thought. >> thank you, chuck. thank you for the kind introduction. thank you for convening us. it is an honor to be here with you guys on this panel. i arrived at that conclusion from being back at the new york times tiered i was there as a reporter for 15 years, gone for 10 and veteran of the atlantic and i went back for four years as the opinion editor and discovered in my view the times had changed radically an culturally in the intervening 10 years. these are changes we have seen -- both through journalism more

broadly throughout american journalism and what i saw was what i believe i saw was trends exacerbated as so much has been by the election of donald trump in 2016. reporters retreating to the same kind of filter bubbles readers are so easily able to cocoon themselves in now. becoming as susceptible to peer pressure exerted in social media by their chosen tribes as anybody else. the old rewards and at the risk of sounding like an old crank or an old guy -- yeah. the old rewards for being contrarian, challenging conventional wisdom, i believe have replaced and again, my

story and my experience was about the new york times. this is a much bigger problem. much broader than that. those had been replaced by a compulsion and again, for very understandable reasons. not reasons of bad faith, not reasons of people on anybody's part but the incentives created by the media ecosystem in which we now live have been replaced by a desire to conform and to say what other people were saying and to ratify the view of the tribe. we can go into -- so much of this is related to the rise of the internet reporting in the virtual world as opposed to the reporting out of the virtual world and encountering other americans in all their complexity and reckoning with decency and intelligence of your

fellow americans by reporting out in the field. there are fewer and fewer journalists partly because the economics of the business who can do that kind of work. so the journalists who are supposed to be the best listeners in this society i think are instead not hearing either on the right or the left what people who don't see the world the way they do are saying . a bit of a rambling answer to your question. charles: let me just follow up. if this is the progressive elite talking to itself about an america that does not really exist, described that america they are talking about. you say it does not really exist but what is this fiction they are discussing? james: there is no way to do this without simplifying.

oversimplifying. but it is an america in which every republican is a maga republican who is cheering on every most kind of unsettling or transgressive element of donald trump's movement. that is a very simple kind of statement about it but it is also an america -- again, there is the old problem of liberalism than your times has trouble with for ages and i come from that. i consider myself of the left although not with a capital l. come from the background now overlaid with a new problem. i think of illiberalism.

it is a coastal reality. it is a reality not terribly interested in what is going on in the middle of the country. it is one interested in what is happening in the internet. i don't think we realize how much coverage of the internet and a sense of what is real is happening on the internet has replaced coverage in the real world. that has been something that has been easy for politicians to exploit, manipulate. charles: i'm going to ask you for a quick reaction to what you just heard. thomas: i could not agree more with james assessment and when he published the piece, i at the same time -- by chance we met each other the day before your piece came out and i got a chance to read it after we had lunch and talked.

i had been thinking about what happened at the new york times quite a lot. i was a contributive writer at the magazine at that same time. it was not only what happened at the op-ed but that was a major impetus for other writers and myself to start talking to each other and drafting this letter on free expression and open debate, an open letter signed by other voters trying to make the basic case that there really is both informal and formal culture that was constricting people's ability to think and disagree in good faith freely within the institutions not just in the media but prominently in the media. what happened to james ith think

in retrospect as i have been writing my book about this era is emblematic of a much, larger cultural shift. you were scapegoated in a way i think is a lens through understanding so much of what is plaguing our institutions. charles: as a conservative, this must be great. total vindication. this is what i have always thought about the media or is it? do you find yourself contemplating this -- these thoughts of james? not to lead the question too much. eliana: a little bit of both. it is bad for the country so i can't be too happy about it. i have less compunction about describing the world james

alluded to in his piece and i think it is one that we see playing out on college campuses. where broadly speaking and it is broadly speaking but where words are violent and actual violence is justified as resistance. where disagreements on one side are slapped with the label of conspiracy theories. the terms racist and bigoted are thrown around casually. and attached to those with whom one disagrees. i think the result of that has been and i think of covid. this comes to mind where the times ran pieces and comes back to senator tom cotton labeling the view this may have come from

a lab as a conspiracy theory. what i have seen as a result of this is it has increased distrust for a lot of the country in elite institutions. that may be good. it may be bad. i tend to think it is bad because it is increasing increasing the distance between americans under the middle of the country and americans on the coast and now they can rightfully say these people are lying to us. they have no idea what they are talking about and the term misinformation and disinformation is thrown around casually as a substitute for real argument. from my vantage point as a conservative who has worked to the mainstream and done real reporting is i have seen institutions like the times, the

post, the journal seed huge -- the journal cede huge ground. they are not covering the biggest stories happening in the country. the times has picked up a little bit on stories involving transgender medicine and treatment of transgender young people but what is happening on college campuses in many cases conservative media or independent media has led the charge on that. that has to be one of the biggest stories in the country and in most cases the mainstream media has followed rather than let on that. these are places whose resources were hours -- doors -- these resources dwarf ours. they are leaving huge white spaces uncovered. there are places to pick them up but on the whole it has to be bed that there are enormous -- has to be bad there are enormous stories that are not being

covered the way they should be. charles: without going too far into academia, i want to come back to journalism and some of the things james raised in his piece. i thought one of the points you emphasized i thought was very astute was the ethos young people are bringing to careers in journalism when they start out now. i became a journalist because i could not face law school. i am a little bit of an outlier. if you ask me why i went off and became a journalist, i would say it is probably more to see the world than to change the world. those are kind of the two reasons people become journalists. but part of what i was brought up in and i think you were too is the idea it was a little bit of a priesthood. the trade-off you got for all that access to exciting

personalities, information and experiences was that he stood apart from the conflict. you refer to that as renouncing the taking of sides. telus us a little bit about why you think that ethos disappeared and what if anything can be done to rebuild it. james: let me slip in the caveat quickly that -- because it needs to be recognized. there lots of people at the new york times doing really great work. a lot of people and at the post and lots of people taking physical risks in places like ukraine to report stories. . i wrote this piece in an effort to support that. and also what i think is some efforts underway at a counterrevolution. efforts i don't think are as bold or as -- are as bold as they ought to be but there

are some sides of that. it was the same for me as a journalist. my experience was so often to be fortunate to be dropped in the beat where i was starting over and learning and having a happily experience of coming to grips constantly with how much i did not know about the world. the great privilege of part of the privilege of being a journalist is the world is your school. you kind of never stop learning. you never stop having the license to ask people about anything. it can get on their nerves. that was the glory of it. the other thing was you never had to pretend the world was less complicated than it actually is.

obviously the work of journalism is the work of simplification and explication. you do not have to take a position. you never had to tell a lie. you did your best to represent the world as it is. that to me was the trade-off. you did not have the satisfaction of being an activist and being able to be on the front lines fighting for change. but if you were somebody like me who was not all that confident in your own opinions to begin with, and endlessly fascinated by what other people thought and how they came to those conclusions about the world and you liked being able to write letters home which is how i always thought about my stories about what you were learning. it was just a wonderful profession. i think it changed. very much grounded as a result

and when i thought of as fundamental tenets of liberalism should it changed as -- of liberalism. it changed as the internet not the economic foundations from under the business as people could afford to do less reporting in the real world. as they spent more time reporting on the internet as local journals disappeared. as people retreated to their cocoons. like somebody else as liberalism failed to live up to its unstated principles in journalism as it failed elsewhere in the world. when i got to the new york times opinion section, there were 11 columnists. one of them was a person of color. two out of 11 were women. two out of 11 were conservatives. i'm now trying to make the case for a diversity of views that for me included the more

conservative to the new york times. people could look at me and say you are a hypocrite because for years what were you guys doing? you care about it now? what about when we were not being heard? that is a fair complaint. there were other fair -- i'm trying to give some sense -- these views did not come from nowhere. we have to reckon with our own responsibility for the period in which we were not necessarily fully delivering on our own ambitions or aspirations for what a truly broad diversity of opinion should look like. charles: me ask you, -- let me ask you the question this way. if you wanted to create a news organization or magazine or institution that was devoted to what james and i are idealizing

is the right way to do journalism, do you think you could find people interested in doing that? where would you go to get them? thomas: yes i do. there are so many people already within the organizations who -- at that moment in time i was thinking as james was talking so many people at the times specifically did not agree with what was happening. there was a sense that you could not publicly voice what you actually think. the first thing that you would do if you wanted to cultivate the type of environment would be to make people feel that they had the ability to speak honestly and disagree with each other without fear of compromising their livelihoods. that would be a cultural change that would find diversity of viewpoints within institutions already. there would also have to be a kind of commitment to a

different understanding of what diversity is. we often get far too hung up on what looks superficially like diversity but actually is just mono thought packaged in slightly different cases. having a bunch of people from the same three schools of the same socioeconomic class but some of them are of slightly different ethnic and gender and sexual orientation background is not what i would consider actually diversity. actual diversity. there would have to be efforts to reimagine how you locate different types of writers and how you empower them to speak on behalf of communities. the other thing is there is an understanding -- i know for a fact just as somebody of african dissent in this country there is quite a lot of diversity within black thought but there is a

kind of narrow idea of who speaks on behalf of the group. to come back to what james was talking about, when you are commenting on the commentary, you have this idea there is one sense of moral clarity to the black community but it is a narrow slice of the black committee that has conversations like abolishing the police for example. if you actually had a different understanding of who can speak on behalf of the group, you would be surprised by what kind of ideas you would get in response to a proposition like getting rid of police forces in communities where people are confronted with high levels of crime and violence. there is much more conversation going on then we have a sense of when we cover the commentary itself. charles: we have already branded you and accepted the label of the conservative editor on the

panel. do you feel any obligation to have liberals writing for you? is that not part of the deal or is what the free can isabel is kind of just being -- embracing the idea newspapers or websites just have an ideological orientation and they should go with that? one reason i ask that is i think both in our own history in the 19th century and in other cultures -- for example, britain, media culture is sort of more open about the political leanings of the media organization. or do you think the free begin ought to have a few progressives in there -- putting you on the spot. i'm sort of thinking like my son who is kind of progressive could use a job. [laughter] that is a joke. eliana: for your son, we could make an exception. that is a great question and i

do think we are moving toward an era in part led by places like the times that are embracing becoming ideologically liberal places. where there is room for lots of different ideological outlets. i don't feel we have an obligation to have conservatives and liberals but unlike the times and that host we do not -- and the post we do not hold ourselves out as representative of all views and mainstream views. we say we come from a center-right perspective. our goal is to present people with new information they would not find elsewhere. that is a difference between the beacon and what we see from this times and the post. when i look at these other outlets, i think i know what you guys are doing because we do it at the beacon.

we just don't brand ourselves as democracy dies in darkness or this is the center of american opinion and we are doing things right down the middle here. that is what i think grinds the cares of conservatives. to be told that this is neutral. when in reality it is a mix of opinion and reporting. i will say increasingly one of -- we have a beacon reporter in the audience here. who when i interviewed him said i'm not actually a conservative. increasingly there are kids who come to the beacon and in most cases that is fine. they want to write the -- they want to write the stories we are interested in written. there are principles we are clear about.

i would say we are strident zionists. but apart from that, pretty open. james: that is an inside joke. eliana: it is quite interesting. i would say more and more kids will come and say i'm not necessarily -- i don't quite know what i am. but i do think that monoculture at mainstream outlets is pushing people who do not quite know where they are, but who are intellectually curious people, into outlets that might brand themselves as conservative, but are just more tolerant of dissenting views. i see this when i speak to college students. i spoke to a group of yale college students, a conservative student group. i went around the table and asked them, how did you come to be part of this group? most kids at the table said i'm not actually a conservative, i

just reject the monoculture of campus. think more and more, what i am saying is, people are talking to themselves and excluding large segments of the public, and say, i don't quite know what i am, but i don't want to be part of that. james: i'm going to try a different version of a similar question on you. you go to great lengths in your argument, and the sincerity of it is almost overwhelming, pleading for sort of a return to the right way to do things. which you believe "the new york times" once embraced and others once embraced and have drifted away from. is a second-best solution for media as a whole to have this kind of -- you have got the free beacon over here. you have the times over here.

they will be pretty openly ideological, pretend they are not ideological, or whatever. the new challenge for the reader will be not what you posit, which is to look at this objectively and figure out what you think for yourself, but in fact to referee these competing visions of reality. matthew: the journal's role would be to referee? charles: the reader. james: i think that asks a lot of the reader. i think that is the world we are moving toward and living with. i think you look at the 19th century version of what the media environment was like. it may be that 100 year or so period. maybe that is the anomalous one, where we had the rise of the idea in american journalism of

the ambition to separate news and opinion, and to create a kind of foundation of shared facts. like so much of the media, our reality and our definition of news is driven by changes in technology and changes in the business model, right? we went from kind of a niche industry, serving everybody who could afford a printing press, and reached a certain number of people and became a mass industry. the basis for that industry was advertising. you did not want to alienate a large swath of the audience. the business model supported the idea of objectivity, and the reporter core that would be conservatives, be liberals, but would try to set ideology aside and deliver the news fairly to have a robust opinion section that was walled off, where many

viewpoints were represented. that was the model "the new york times" was built on for a century. it failed in many ways. there were all sorts of problems. but at least it created a foundation for a shared basis of fact in this country. and i don't know how diversity in this country can be a source of strength and weakness if we don't have some agreement on the basis fact -- the basic facts of reality. at the beginning, i did a bad job of explaining my concerns. if people believe they are getting truth, but in fact they are being served news reports increasingly influenced by ideology and a range of debate where the richness of debate is in this country, they don't really understand what is happening out there.

charles: can i say one quick thing? i can back on about this for too long. this is one of the dangers of the subscriber world we have moved into. so much stuff i got wrong -- i was so excited at the beginning as we move him an advertiser model where everybody is pursuing scale on the internet -- what better bulwark for the quality of your product can there be than having an individual pay you for it? the danger, obviously, is that the best way to retain the loyalty of your subscriber is to reassure them that you see the world exactly as they do, and you don't want to upset them. you don't want to confront them with confounding news they don't want to hear, like that -- well, we could go into a list of things they would be upset about , or opinions they would find objectionable.

the newspaper would just be a slower moving tiktok, right? the algorithm of tiktok is instant in steering you done your rabbit hole, but newspapers move slower. so thomas, i would like to get your reaction to this idea that may the second-best solution is just let the liberal and conservative media slug it out. or is there something sort of illiberal about that? i mean, our democracy was, i think by today's standards in the 19th century, was an illiberal democracy. there was a lot of restriction on the franchise, obviously. there was a narrow range of permitted opinion. there was a lot more political repression around the country. it in our current situation, with this left/right open slugfest be ok with you? thomas: i think james is right. that is the way the media landscape is now, to an extent.

but i think there is something healthy and kind of new media landscape -- like we have members of new media here in the audience. the free press and new organizations and sub stack are doing some kind of, i think, healthy critiques of the larger institutions. and if you are tuned in to a variety of sources, you can kind of triangulate good, healthy viewpoints on a variety of topics that you don't get from being served by one specific place. i really agree with what james is saying, that that is quite a lot to ask. i work in the industry and it is a lot for me to keep up with reading. if i am not involved in media, it seems like quite a lot to ask of the part of -- to ask of the reader. that is one of the main dangers. i do like the idea that you have much more -- the activists have a point that you have more space

than you have ever had in the past. things were quite restricted in the past when we lived in this kind of -- this period that we now look back on with nostalgia. i think there is a lot of opportunity for having a much better and more vibrant discourse. we really do need institutions, and we really need our institutions to be trusted. you can have a lot of value added by smaller independent sub stacks, and people questioning the institutions. but if you don't have that basic trust in the mainstream, that is a problem. one of the points james made that was so -- it articulated something that i understood, but it was really eye-opening how you phrased it. you said that the new york times can't work like the free beacon. it cannot be an openly partisan newspaper. 10 million people subscribe to it, who lean liberal mostly. they pay for that because they

believe that it is objective and neutral. they would not want to pay for it if it were openly partisan. right? the whole thing is functioning on selling itself as this ideal. charles: do your subscribers not think they -- that you are neutral? do conservative papers depend on -- have a subscriber base that does not feel that way about the information, the way the times subscribers feel about theirs? i am asking that in part because i also want to know, from your point of view, if you had advice to the new york times -- and i mean sincere, not snarky advice, to the new york times about how to fix the trust problem, from the vantage point where you stand -- what would you give them? eliana: two separate questions. the first is that i don't think

conservatives, readers of news, have that same -- the same self regard that they need to think what they are reading is neutral. i think they want to know that it is true, and they read "the new york times," and they see bias everywhere. i think when they are reading the beacon, they find that a more reliable version of truth. and the sort of -- what grinds our gears is the bias in the reporting that never swings in the other direction. and the presentation -- the self seriousness of the reporters, the idea that they think they are neutral -- it just happened with nbc and ronna romney, with wallace going on the air and talking about their sacred airwaves. i can assure you nobody on the

free beacon staff is talking about our sacred space and our honor, and we are not going to bestow it on anybody else. we are not saving lives here. it is not brain surgery. that kind of self regard is so tiresome to us. i think the idea is there are stories of enormous interest to conservatives that the mainstream is not covering. the ones that come to mind are the claudine gay plagiarism story that the beacon did, and the reception to it at the times. the journal did pick that up. watch the coverage on cable news. it was not like, that was bad. it was like, they only covered that because they don't like black women and they have a problem with black women in power. you can't really challenge the facts. first it was like, everybody does this. there is an argument over

whether this should have been reported or not. charles: it sounds like they were copying each other's coverage of the plagiarism. so what is your advice to the mainstream media? don't be so full of yourselves? eliana: that is part of it, but i'm not sure that is fixable. that is hiring a different set of people. i think hiring a different set of people who have some sense, from talking to people, about like what are the real stories in american life that people are interested in, ok? something is happening on college campuses. i can tell you from talking to people, people are deeply interested in this story, ok? it has been happening for a long time. it is one of the biggest stories in the country. get on to campuses. talk to students. it is important. that is one. what is happening with enormous private foundations?

the rockefeller foundation, the ford foundation. i have searched in the wall street journal and the times. all you find is glowing profiles of the heads of these foundations. they are very powerful. i could come up with a list of 10 things that don't get covered that are of interest to conservatives, and i don't think there is a sense at these mainstream outlets that there is much interest for people in the country, including the biden administration, other than trump and criminal problems. charles: james, this picks up a little on what eliana was just talking about. it has long been the case that journalists were self-important, pompous people. that is not really new, unfortunately. but just to give you an anecdote, i was in a meeting at the post maybe five or six years ago, and we were talking about our social media presences.

i recommended to the group that everyone quit twitter, and i based that on my personal experience, which was that it was -- my mental health ebbs and flows. but a very good moment for my mental health was when i quit twitter. suddenly, i had more time on my hands. i was more relaxed. i was not worried about the thing pinging all the time. and i was not coming the waste of time away from real journalism. i made that position to the group. the intern spoke up and said, but chuck, you already have a brand, which i didn't know. but i thought to myself, a brand? she said, yes. we younger journalists are still establishing our brands, and that's why we need twitter. so talk to me about the part of your analysis that has to do with the sense young journalists have that this is a personal branding exercise for them. james: this is why i say -- i

was thinking about eliana's list and thinking my first step would be get of social media, but exactly that same conversation that you just described. it's not bad faith. it is just the incentives that exist. to succeed in journalism, people feel like this is the kind of thing that in the old new york times -- you used the word brand, and the head copy editor would circle it in your copy and say this is the language of advertising. we do not use this language. that is what an old crank i am. it still shocks me that we talk about ourselves this way in journalism, but we do. and i think it is terribly corrupting. i don't think it is malicious. i don't think they are wrong. they are right to be worried about it. they need to build their presence on social media because they have seen other people get rewarded for building big followings on social media.

and because they see that their bosses are scared of those people and they are not willing to stand up to them. and it is terribly destructive, and i think you kind of have to start over, rebuilding your culture from the ground up. it is hard. it is hard work. but it is not impossible work. it is going to take some leadership. but you have to make people feel that they can succeed without having a million followers on twitter, that they can be rewarded for doing work that challenges people's view of reality, rather than simply reinforces it, and that they have an opportunity to grow within your institution over the long haul. and that is hard, but i think it is doable. charles: i saw you nodding in vigorous agreement. what was going through your mind? thomas: all of us engaged in a kind of mass global

psychological experiment over the past decade and change, with social media platforms, inside and outside of the media. we allowed ourselves to be experimented on. we now know much more than we knew several years ago. but we know that certain journalists who are supposed to be actually reporting on and covering the news -- it was a real mistake for them to become extraordinarily followed on twitter and other platforms, to the point where they are more followed than the publications they write for. they are passionately followed. so you had some people that were too big to keep in line with the goals and the objectives of the institution, when they veered apart from their own personal ambitions or biases. so we know that is a mistake now. it is hard to put that back in the tube. if i were giving advice, i would

get rid of things like slack. that seems to be more trouble than it is worth. i would also -- maybe this has already happened at the times. i have a policy that you can never make a decision based on something that happened -- a blowup that happens online on social media for fewer than 48 hours. usually, if you actually don't react immediately, these things are not substantial and they go away. but, you know, the girl that said that to you was correct. i think five years ago, zadie smith told me "get off twitter. why are you on twitter?" if i was as famous as you are, i would not be on twitter either. you do have these incentives to have to make sure that you can survive if you are laid off at an institution, because jobs are so precarious at a lot of these places now that you have to be able to take your work elsewhere. oftentimes, i do have a large

following on twitter or elsewhere. that insulates you from some job insecurity. one of the things that i think would make the culture healthier is if it were economically more viable for people to have jobs they can pounce on, and they can invest in the institution without believing it is just their name and they live and die by that. charles: on a slightly different note, the big story of the last few days, obvious to me, was the collapse of the bridge in baltimore. terrible thing. in a funny way, a real counterpoint to everything we are talking about. it was immediately clear what had happened, right? the american public got immediately and accurately informed, almost in real time, that this major bridge had just collapsed because a boat ran into it, unfortunately. and i wonder if part of our

problem is that events like that are now so effortlessly communicated accurately. that used to be a big production for a newspaper reporter to get out to the river and find a payphone, and call that back to the news desk, and convince people it is really happening. the amount of time and energy we have to devote to just telling people what is going on is so small that we are filling it up with the elaboration and the commentary. eliana: i will say one thing about twitter and social media really quick. i have to admit i don't totally understand it. i have never been a big social media person. and i don't quite understand the brand thing and how you separate somebody's brand from just they

are really good and they do amazing work. my guidance to reporters has always been, like, you want a brand? it is in breaking news and doing amazing work, and that would be your brand. to the extent that people have a brand that is separate from that , i can think of a few, where people do very little work but have high online presence, big online presence. those are not brands that i would pay a salary for. so i don't totally understand that. like the distinction between just do your work and keep your head down, and your brand will develop. and also, i thought that in reporting it was really not supposed to be about us, and really that should be the guidance to people. over 40 years, maybe it will become -- maybe you will become

known for shedding light on what is happening out there in the world. but i do feel like this has just been toxic and distorting, because twitter wars feed snark opinion, and that is not -- it is feed to be snarky and opinionated. like, this stuff takes time and is expensive. it is not what twitter rewards. by the way, the feedback you get on there is from a distorted world that is not at all reflective of the real world. i do think it is poisonous. and often i feel wrong and the reporters at the beacon do not listen to me about this. but i still think i am right. i still think i am right. charles: so, the bridge? eliana: i don't want to eat up too much time, but it is totally true about the bridge. however, i think for a lot of other stories that would take a lot of time and effort to get to the bottom of, they are not

being covered. i can think of a lot of stories about the biden white house, that is opaque in many ways, particularly about how the president is managed. i still do not think that story has been told. it requires a lot of -- a lot of international stories. some of those are communicated much more easily. i think there is a lot of in-depth reporting that we do not often see being done. charles: i'm going to use the privilege of the chair to tell a quick anecdote before we get to questions. one of my earliest jobs when i was in my early 20's -- i went to peru to work as a freelance journalist, and i got a job for the english language newspaper in lima, peru, which was appended to an english-language publication for the business

community which covered politics , business news, in english, in lima, peru. they charged a lot of money for it and they got a lot of money for it. and the lesson that taught me was -- the rest of the press in peru is very flawed. the political scene at the time was totally partisan, bought off , drunk, everything else. eliana: my mom is from lima and her cousin wound up behind bars. charles: the point being that they needed foreigners to tell them what was actually going on, literally in another language. and people who really needed accurate, objective information would pay a high premium for it, to get it from these outsiders. these people who, if push came to shove, could move to chile, which in the end they had to do.

i sort of feel like if we are going to -- we might find ourselves needing something like that here in america, right? there might be this niche of the men and women from outside the maelstrom, speaking hopefully in english, but maybe not. maybe they can use another language -- german. with that, i think we will open it up to questions. i think we are at about 6:11. who is the boss of this? are we ok on time? do we have until about 6:30? ok. so you will be in control of the microphone. ok. your other associate. what is your name? ok. why don't you go first to the woman in the back? >> i think i might be perfect for an outsider perspective. i am a college student doing my

semester abroad here. i am at georgetown university. i want to say about colleges that there is nuance, and i wish that media outlets would try to facilitate and involve students more into those debates. i think you will find a lot of nuance there. so as an outsider, to me, it seems that liberals and conservatives start from very, very different premises that have almost nothing to do with what i hear in college and what i hear here are completely opposite. once you get into a discussion, people have a lot to say, and it is very similar, very sound judgment. and i think i wish people would find that on a broader scale. my question is, where is the overlap between the two sides? and how can it be uncovered more?

charles: thank you. who wants to take that on? eliana? the overlap in terms of ideology, in terms of policy -- eliana: in terms -- >> in terms of ideology. what are some of the things you can agree on which may be could be the start of a bigger agreement? maybe in terms of ideology. charles: i risk sounding again like sentimental. i think in many respects, the media exaggerates the differences and the kind of fun house mirror ideological

splintered kind of publications we present reflects back to americans a lot of the time an image of themselves that does not comport with -- nuance is the word you used -- of their own lives. basically, decent people want the best for the country. i would start there, looking for overlap. and also, if you asked me, of course i want a diversity of views. of course i want to hear what the other side has to say. when you are confronted with that, feel differently. it is hard work. it is a very counterintuitive idea, that you should hear of you find obnoxious -- here a view you find of noxious. in some ways, it is a more immediately recognizable point of view that that idea is dangerous and i should not have to hear it. i think that is actually a much more dangerous point of view in

the long haul. once you talk people through it, they are generally supportive of the principal. i guess my view in general is that there actually is a lot of overlap. charles: a question over there. >> thank you. my name is jacob. i am from sweden, a guest here in your country. agile you describe, james, about media, the times being a voice for their own readership of progressive values, very much describes some of the leading newspapers in my own country of sweden, and also the rest of europe. for example, years ago, when your former president talked about last night in sweden as a horrible example of criminality on the rise, plenty of newspapers wanted to go to school with him on how sweden is on how sweet and a safe, but at

the same time, we have lots of criminality, new forms of clan violence, tension, and that kind of speaks to what is talked about vis-a-vis kind of the new priesthood, teaching people the right kind of values. i was wonder if you could speak more to the international trend. this is not just "the new york times" or here in the states but also in europe in a broader sense. >> my sense is it has been ever thus, actually. the american journalistic tradition is a little bit odd on the emphasis that has been placed in mainstream institutions on this idea of

objectivity with all its flaws. every generation discovers objectivity is a myth one way or the other. in some ways, the european model has been more openly ideological. i don't know if i have that wrong. you would know more about that. quickly former president became well-known for his criticism of the media, particularly with the phrase "failing new york times." did that have any impact on the reporting or the culture of the media?

>> i was covering the white house at the time. within the white house press corps, my sense was the president's overt attacks on the press, white house correspondence, people in the briefing room felt that gave license to take an opinion and take a stand because they felt under attack and wanted to push back, and it was mutually beneficial. for trump, you know, the right loves to hate the media. it was a wonderful political talking point for him, for the press, and for these guys in the briefing room, acosta and everybody else, they got enormously famous, more famous than they had been going in, standing up, talking about the

threat they were under. how many books did we see come out after that? my sense was there was this mutually beneficial back and forth that was politically beneficial to trump and financially and personally beneficial to the reporters and gave them license to depart from the sort of objective stance that they may have come in with. >> i would like to take a second to ask james about that because i think a sort of rubicon was caused -- was crossed. when people would say so-and-so lied, very often trump lied, but now we are pretty free about that. i seem to recall a front page story at "the times," but i'm going to forget his name. the news stories are announced that we had to play by different

rules under trump. >> i think covering trump is a real challenge. it's hard, you know? it is hard when somebody is such an unconventional politician. obviously, all politicians been the truth, but how unmoored he was from fact presented journalists with a real conundrum to simply report what he was saying. as a reporter, you are not a stenographer. you always make clear when someone is not telling the truth , but it became more of a cause to be able to say he lied. use that very direct language.

i know "the times" really struggled with the language. i think they actually pulled back from that, as i recall, partly because that language is so loaded. it short-circuits the reader's ability to really think about it and reach their own conclusion. i think that is a case where "the times" rightly retreated from making such a clear political statement about the president. >> according to legend at "the washington post," carl bernstein always wanted to be able to say in news stories nixon was guilty, like that phrase, and was restrained from doing that on the theory of we will let the jury decide that. assuming that legend is true, and i think there is some truth

to it, it shows how times have changed. >> i think it comes down to the role of journalists to tell the reader what to think or to help the reader think for themselves. obviously, i am in the latter camp. i think that is what people want to do. they don't want to be led, but this is an old struggle that we overcame in the 1920's, i think, but now we are back to again a 19th century model where we need to tell them what they think and trust them to be able to arrive at the right conclusions. >> do we have a question over here? >> it has been very interesting. my question is, you raise the issue of the business model. it seems likely business model has increasingly favored the balkanization of the media, and

that is really what we are looking at today, a landscape in which media outlets have slotted into one point on the ideological spectrum. is there a business model that you think can restore some kind of centrist position, that can be more diverse of opinions, that can be more objective, or is that idea shot? >> "the economist" is doing it, right? >> yes, the -- though it takes trump's position on things. i think it is a superhard problem. i don't think it is an easy answer. i think the cable industry in a lot of ways led the way into this new media reality that we are living with because you can build a pretty big business and a reliable business appealing to

a certain segment of the american public. you don't need 100 million people or 150 million people, and that is the safe play, is to occupy an ideological niche. i think it is possible -- i mean, i think there are publications out there that are successful, journalistic and business enterprises that have some integrity. i think "the wall street journal" is a good example right now in its news report. i think politico is another example that does a good job of covering the political -- i don't know if you are with me on this. i know you worked there -- does a good job covering the political landscape and is succeeding as a business. not at a massive scale, but is succeeding. i think it is doable, but it's

not the safe way. i think the biggest problem would have tonight is just the wipeout of local journalism, which has deprived americans accountability journalism in their community, but also journalism they can see and touch and believe in because they know -- they can see in their own community if it is doing a good job representing them. >> thank you so much. i'm a journalist and also thomas' friend and neighbor. i'm not in legacy media, but i'm in journalism. i find so many of my colleagues

in legacy media are so incredibly conformist. i don't know why, but you got into journalism because you like to travel or whatever. i got into journalism because i hate authority and i'm here to cause trouble. a lot of people don't have the same troublemaking instinct that i have that was intrinsic to journalism of that cranky generation years ago saying this is journalism, not advertising. i really liked making problems for politicians, and they don't. and i don't know why. it is it's easy to have a sort of contempt for their lack of contempt for the political class. i always wonder, why don't they just join the political party? why don't they become activists for the democratic party instead of pretending they are journalists? i don't understand. i'm new here.

>> part of what ails journalism is because it has become a very respectable profession, and it did not used to be. it used to be vaguely disreputable. to be a newspaper reporter was a cut above -- i don't know, numbers runner. i blame woodward and bernstein for that, for making everybody a movie star. bernstein was more old-school in that way, but woodward was from yale. anyway, i will take that as more of a comment then a question. we have time for a couple more. >> it seems institutions interested in the pursuit of truth seem to be nonprofits. should newspapers be nonprofits?

>> we are, but not intentionally. [laughter] that's a good question. anybody want to take that? >> i thought about how these things could potentially work better. audience capture was already discussed. maybe there does have to be some type of government intervention and make it a nonprofit. pbs is no longer trusted by a lot of the country because it is considered to be associated one party in the binary, so i find it hard to believe that if the government wants to be invested in the paper of record that that would ease tensions. i work at "the atlantic," so maybe i am biased, but it seems

you need benevolent oligarchs to hopefully have the public's interest at heart and really feel the need to cater to an audience that captures your ability to objectively report on issues that might anger them. >> one more question. yes, over here. >> thanks, everybody. i'm an academic so i will leave my name out of it for now. there seems to be a consensus that things aren't good among all the panelists. i wonder if it is good that things have gotten so bad, and might it be bad -- might it be better if things got even worse. for example, thinking about what went down at "the times." i regarded that with very mixed

feelings at the time and after the fact as well, but overall, i was pleased. sorry, adam. i know adam is here. that's because i see the problem we have been discussing, which i think charles put very nicely, that young people in particular are more concerned with changing the world than understanding that. it seems to me at the root of the problem lies higher education. it is it's very hard to package what goes on in the classroom, what goes on in faculty meetings, what goes on in search committees, in academic journals in such a way that it can be consumed by the general public, so it remains largely under the surface or has for a very long time, but when "the new york times" sets a mask to its

credibility in public, this is visibility to everybody. i think james at some point mentioned at a counter revolution might be coming, but that can only come once the revolution is visible and invisible enough to provoke a reaction. my question for, i guess, everyone or anyone who wants to take it up is -- is this a good thing that things have gotten so bad and might we hope that they get worse? >> this sounds like a question linen -- lenin might have. i bet eliana would have a good answer to that. >> i'm happy to offer an answer to this question and the one that preceded it because i think they are related. business model is a problem, i agree, but i don't believe if newspapers became nonprofits that would solve the problem because i don't believe universities are engaged in the pursuit of truth right now, and

that is part of the problem. my sense is the problem starts in k-12 schools and is exacerbated in colleges. what is really the problem is that the training grounds of the country's elite are deeply deformed and as a result -- because it's not just happening in journalism. yes, it's happening in journalism but it's also playing out in academia. his it's playing out in the country's major corporations. blackrock and some of the nation's biggest corporations, headphones, -- hedge funds, whatever across the country. we are seeing this everywhere. i do think, seeing the testimony of three college presidents to be able to see, these people are actually intellectually impoverished, and these are people running some of the most

elite institutions that people bribe to get their children into. that is eye-opening and i do think we'll have salutary benefits. certainly for me, i grew up -- without getting too personal, but in a household where it was highly valued to go to an ivy league school, and i had no desire to funnel my kid into such an institution because i don't think there's a lot of valuable things going on. the training grounds for our elites, what we teach our elites, what we teach young people to value needs to change. before that changes, people we are going to hire into "the new york times," "the post," "the journal" will not change. >> i'm going to once again exercise the privilege of the chair to conclude on the following note. i go back to my early years in peru.

the guy who ran the operation was from britain. he was a fleet street or -- fleet streeter of the old school, and he gave me my first assignment which was to write about how the impact of crime and terrorism was affecting the business community around lima. it was a big issue at the time. he sat me down, and i admit i was newly minted, from harvard, i had been an intern at "the new republic," and i was very full of myself. he said, how would you approach this story? i proceeded to give them just the sort of bloviating answer he was expecting from a person like that. i went on for a good 15 minutes. he looked at me and said no, no, no. people want to know what's going on. that has stayed with me throughout my entire career. that's what people want to know. people want to know what's going

on, and they want to be able to rely on the person who is communicating to them what is going on. they don't want to know my deep feelings about this stuff. i sort of feel like more journalism needs to take that approach, which is a roundabout way of saying i think we all found out what's going on from this panel, which i certainly learned a lot from. i think it has just been a very illuminating afternoon, so let's give them a big hand. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2024] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [indiscernible chatter]

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