freedom. but political leaders, rather than ushering a new birth of freedom, guaranteed by the civil rights act, ushered in a new birth of government, instead. this served and is currently serving neither low income americans nor america at large. the real distinguished scholar which have contributed to the state of black progress, some of whom we've heard from today. they've looked at major areas of american policy, housing, health care, education and, retirement savings. they have become tools for more government. with the alleged goal of advancing opportunity and social justice, that's we're gathered here. that's why care exists. the state of black progress will be out in a month. please get yours preordered. thank you for having us. and we look forward to stick it around, answer any questions may have as well. thank you. and i will note it is 230 on the

i'm nicole carroll with, the walter cronkite school of journalism and mass communication at arizona state university. each of these writes about recent times, politics and journalism and too is in a newsroom right along them. for the past five years, i was editor in chief of usa today and before that, editor of the arizona republic. so, first of all, i want to thank all three of you for writing these. it is so detailed and so thought provoking and it's so important to preserve the history that we all just lived through. so thank you so much. and i really hope you all read the books. so i'm going to introduce each of and to give them just a quick synopsis of the book. the point of your book, you wrote the book maybe two or

three or 4 minutes, and then we're going to jump right into questions. so we're going to start with marty baron. marty became editor of the washington post 2013, where he oversaw the post, print and digital news operations. a staff of about a thousand journalist, he retired 2021. his book of power, trump, bezos and the washington post, published in october 23 by macmillan, details. these years before the post, marty was a top editor at both the boston globe and the miami herald. he also held a key jobs at the new york times and the life angeles times newsrooms. his leadership have won 18 pulitzer prizes, including 11 at the washington post. and this is the fact that i love you started your career like so many more as a as a local journalism reporter at the miami herald, covering both the state and business. so, marty, tell us about your book. sure. well, thank you all for coming. it's really great. as someone who refuses to stand

on the line, i admire all of everybody here and in new york, wherever little apartment, people always stand in line a line. good. i'll go there, stand a rare event. when i tell people that i've written a book and they and they are not familiar with, they say, well, what is it? i say well, the title is collision of power. trump, bezos and the washington post. and then some people say, well, what's it about. so i've done my best to explain it as concisely as i can. and the title. but let me talk a little bit about why i wrote this book. so i wrote this book. i was living through an incredible period in history, incredible period for. the washington post for the press overall and for the country and i felt that, you know, here was a legendary that had helped bring down a previous richard nixon, of course. and i was working there and and then six months, six months or

so after i got there, it was that it would be sold to one of the richest people in the world. and then in 2000 and i started at the beginning of 2013 and bezos, jeff bezos acquired it in october, the acquisition through in october of 2013. and, and then, you know, donald trump arrived on the political scene, a presidential candidate unlike any would ever seen before president, unlike any we'd ever seen before. and and i and bezos trying to engineer this transformation to digital era. and we were confronting donald trump. and he was definitely confronting us. and i somebody should tell that story from within the paper how it was dealing one of the richest people in the world as our as our owner and dealing with donald trump as a president. from the perspective of an editor of, a newspaper like the washington post was number one. number two was that i feel that the public really suffers from

misconceptions and stereotypes about how we go about making within news organizations. and i wanted people live through in a vivid and, accurate way the kinds of decisions and really decisions that that editors of news organizations to make. and so i run those decisions, those very difficult decisions, and asked essentially asked readers to come along with me and and see how decisions were made. they can agree or disagree with the judgments that i made, but i think that people should have an understanding of of how judgments were made. and then the final reason was that particularly during my final my last few years there and i retired in february of 2021, there were many issues that arose within field of journalism that had me greatly concerned about the direction of our field. a lot of that focused on people's what i would view as advocacy or activism within within the field expressions on on social media.

i felt that, look, there's a long history of advocacy journalism in this country, and that's fine. but that's who we at the washington post intended to be. and so i thought that it having a corrosive influence effect, an impact on our on our news organization and on a reputation that had been built up over decades. and i wanted to discuss those issues and i did not want to discuss them twitter. so i thought maybe there could be a more comprehensive and, nuanced way of discussing them and out my point of view and provoke a lively discussion, which i assume we'll get into here about, those issues and why i think they are so important. so that's my synopsis of the book. excellent. thanks so much. okay, franklin. franklin four has been a staff writer and national correspond and at the atlantic since 2016. previously he was editor of the new republic, a former new america. he has also written for slate in new york.

so frank is here to discuss the politician inside the biden white house and the struggle for america's future. published in 2023 by penguin random. it covers the first two years of biden's presidency, and i asked you going to do the next two? and you said, no. yep, no. okay. so then his previous book, the world without mind the existential threat of big tech, was named one of the best books of 2017 by the new york times and the los angeles times. frank, please tell us about your book so for a time it was thought only political books were bankrolling the publishing industry because people couldn't read enough donald trump even the stories were the same stories over and over about a guy acting like a lunatic. and i decided my publisher had the idea that we should zig while everybody else zagged. joe biden is somebody who i think most of the world has come

to regard as boring he's been around for so long he becomes a piece of furniture and you start to forget about him and all the ways in which he is a unique character and an interesting and i actually had never really cottoned to biden when i was 24 years old, as a cub reporter, i had him on the phone and i thought, oh boy, this is exciting. i get to talk. joe biden, senator joe biden in 5 minutes into the phone call, i was like, oh, my god, i'm never getting this guy off the phone. and my book, i got to spend two years sitting almost like a fly on the wall in the white house, which was something that didn't happen instantly. it happened over time because. i just kept showing up. i kept asking. i tried to earnestly try to understand. i wanted write a book about government writing, about the biden administration, for me was a kind of a tonic after trump years, i wanted to write about

people who well-meaning, earnest people were going to make a lot of mistakes, who were dealing with incredibly complicated problems like a once in a generation pandemic, an economy hanging off of a cliff, withdrawing from afghanistan, russia invading ukraine. and i was chronically doing all of these things from the inside. and so i was in a way, this was my to try to pivot myself from all the ways in which trump had unnerved me and kind of to go back reporting about the things that i think actually truly matter. so i would say just a couple meta things that i up uncovering in the course of doing this book. the first is that over time my opinion of joe biden actually changed, even though i couldn't, i still don't connect with him as a character. i found him incredibly interesting in ways that i never expected, that he's a guy who's

been around so, so long, and yet he still thinks of himself as an outsider in washington. he likes to talk all the time. how he's the one guy who attended a state university that he's working a working class who considers his values blue, who just doesn't connect. barack obama used to turn joe biden into the punchline of in the white house. he would roll his eyes. biden would start to tell the and that just kind of played on biden sense of insecurity. but what i saw over time was that there was this different kind of wisdom he possessed that i didn't fully appreciate coming in, which is that that there's he respects being a politician is just so fundamental to who is that in the politician is kind of cultural punchline for a lot of the first joke i learned when

i was a kid was a guy walks into a used shop and the most expensive belongs to a politician. and he says, why is that? and he said, well, because it was hardly ever used. and we think of the politician as this kind of artificial theatrical character, who's always trying to pull one over on us and what i saw with joe biden was he was trying to save democracy by proving that politics by deal making, horse trading, persuasion in was still the best way to get things done. sorry, i just got on a roll. i know i'm aways brian. we'll keep going. we'll keep going. well, keep going. yeah. yeah, yeah, it did. he's exactly all right. so, brian stelter, brian is the author of network of lies the epic saga of fox news, donald trump and the battle for american democracy, published in november 2023 by simon and schuster his book explores how the conspiracy theories and lies

grew around the 2020 election and the role fox news in spreading them. brian had a front row seat to politics and media politics and media as the host of cnn's reliable sources for eight years before that he was a media reporter for the new york times. and so this is for all the college students out there. he planted the seeds of his career as a freshman at townsend university in maryland when he created tvnewser blog about covering television news six months after its launch, he sold the site to media bistro and to run it until may 2007. the other thing i love brian is he's over here on his phone right? don't know what he's doing, but he he is so he can do three things at once. like nobody ever met before. i've been his show before and in between takes, you see him being all professional. he's over there typing and probably getting the scoop. so super to have you here. brian, tell us about your book. i was taking notes because these presentations were so great. i wanted to deliver the third and final introduction. so here's what i wrote down. i think it's vital to have a vibrant about the media about

institutions that inform us. and sometimes misinform us about the world around us. so at cnn, in my years at cnn, it clear to me that the biggest story on my beat, the biggest story on the media beat was that fox was having this corrosive impact on the country. the fox news beating heart of the gop was stoking fear, misinforming millions of people and propping up donald trump. i felt like it wasn't being fully appreciated. it wasn't being fully documented, wasn't being sufficiently covered. fox was the dominant force on the right wing media and helping trump and fox fans deserved better. they deserved a reliable source, wink, wink. so in 2020, i wrote a book called hoax, which was full of anonymously sourced quotes from hosts and producers and anchors executives all throughout fox, who all said things like, quote, we don't believe this stuff. we just the viewers to believe it. i had all of these sources, hundreds of them inside, basically fessing up to what the machine really was and machine

to elect republican ads. i thought i was done in 2020. right. i released book in august of 2020, but then launched the big lie, told donald trump that he had won election he had lost, filled him with false hope, filled up millions people with false hope, some of whom bought plane tickets and flew to dc and attacked our capitol. so the most important thing in, my timeline here comes two months after the attack when dominion voting machines sues fox news, when dominion voting system sues fox after smartmatic sued fox suddenly through the legal system, lawyers were able to obtain. i was never able to obtain as a reporter on the record documentation. it was this fascinating experience year as the public record became clear from this lawsuit. you know, as you all probably know, dominion settled with fox for almost $100 million. but before settling, it was important to the dominion lawyers that they be able to release a lot of these on the record emails and texts. so they have all of this on the

record confirmation of what my anonymous sources had said. three years ago. i called up editor. i said, i've got to write another book about fox and trump. so so that's why? i wrote network of lies. i wrote it. there were these quotes from, for example, ceo of fox news media, suzanne scott saying fact checking trump is bad for business. obviously, that should be good business. it's only because of the broken nature of the party and of the court like following of trump that it would be bad for business. you have these quotes from executives saying we need to you know, it's doing a disservice to the to the audience by insulting the viewers with the truth. those those quotes. and i know a few of them public and they were national news for a few. but there were thousands of these texts and emails. and so that's why i decided to write the book, to put them all in one place. what fox, when it thinks it's serving the audience is actually a disservice. when they say it's bad for business. no, it's actually bad for democracy to cover up the truth from viewers to pretend like something is true when it's not. but it's important to recognize

how effective it is, how influential these these right wing media machines are. we're going to talk about president biden and he's been covered. well, the idea of a crime family that was planted by sean hannity before biden, even took office. right. the idea that biden's dictator but also has dementia which is okay, that was planted the minds of the viewing population ago. so when we hear stories, we have this ongoing discussion age and about his capabilities. and i always just try to point out that that conversation might be relatively new, most americans, but that conversation been screaming about it on the far for years. and so that's why i find to document what's happening places like fox. and that's why i wrote the book book. okay, brian, we're going to stay with you because in tucson, i want us to have any more notes when we you know, you got this. you've got this. i was so interested in your book

that, you know, it ends with fox paying dominion about $800 million to settle the defamation lawsuit. but you chronicle. how so much of what happened started here in arizona with the 2020 election result. and i didn't know that connection. can you talk about that isn't that isn't that the fascinating and scary thing about the 2020 attempt to the 2022 to excuse me the 22 i coupla the fascinating thing is that much of it is happening in plain view. but we didn't know how to put all the pieces together at the time. so only years later have we learned about the all the different elements of this plot. in fact, just a week or two ago, new text messages out from one of these trump aligned lawyers saying, here's our plan. our plan is to create a cloud of confusion. that's my new favorite phrase, a cloud of confusion because that's what trump's doing again in 2024. and not just trump other politicians are guilty of this as well. it's not about true or false, right or wrong for them. it's about just creating enough confusion, chaos that they can get away with whatever trying to get away with. and and these messages are still just coming out now. and that's with fox as well. smartmatic is still its case

against fox. they've deposed rupert murdoch and other witnesses. they've even more messages that dominion didn't. so there will likely be even more disclosures on that fox side in terms of what was being broadcast. and it's true as well through the january six federal case, the case in georgia, we're still learning more about this attempt to overthrow, but it is critical. look at, you know, what happened in states like this where you had these seemingly random individuals who were able to get the ear. the president. right. and look at the ear of the trump family. that is what i find so interesting about the weekend that trump the election in november 2020. remember major cities saturday morning. you know, there are streets celebrating guns. you know, it was all declared saturday morning and then by sunday morning, literally 24 hours later, maria bartiromo on the air reading this conspiracy theory laden email from some random woman who admits she's whack a doodle, who's claiming that dominion actually stole the election. then nancy pelosi it all. so the idea that there's always to be the alternative reality that conspiracy theory that people are going to be able to to absorb and live in instead.

i think that's still a clear and present danger today. so in particular in particular, you talked about how that fox called arizona for biden early in the night rightly so and it set off just complete chaos at fox news and that somewhat led to them trying to regain that trust of that audience. that's right. by by tamping down the truth. by whispering the truth and shouting the lie. and that to me is the technique i see at play a lot of times with misinformation in campaigns. they might still mention what true, but then they're shouting the lie. rest of the times that you forget what the truth was. and that's what happened during election week in 2020. fox accurately called arizona for biden first before the other networks, using a different data set that only fox and the ap had access to. and because of the fox audiences outrage about accurate call. they then of course, tried to cover up what was true and focus on the lie. i also think it's important to look back at that moment in arizona ultimately, when fox when fox actually reports the

news, they should be, you know, that's a it's a low bar, right? that's the bar that should be set but should be noted. and, you know, they have professionals there who are trying to call balls and strikes and tell the truth aren't in michigan who the decision desk in 2020 at fox who made the call that arizona was going blue he will be back in 2024. he has a contractor again back at fox this year. so there are people there who are reality based and i think it's important to recognize things. brian in fact, when you read his book, you'll see that throughout the book. they keep we don't want another arizona even even though they were right on arizona, even though they were even though they're in arizona. okay. yeah thought on that fox often by trying to appease audience does a disservice by fox. viewers were being told in 2020 trump's going to win trump is going to win trump's going to win. so all of a sudden when that smack happens and actually arizona is going blue, the viewers don't know what to believe. they're confused about it. right. and i think ultimately fox gives viewers false hope. the red wave, 2022, that never happened. think about that right when

you're listening to a source every day that's cheering for the home team, you're actually going to get deluded about what's going to happen in the election. great all right, frank, your book details first, two years of biden's presidency and how he was pinging from crisis to crisis. and talk about one in particular that spun out of control. and that's the withdrawal from afghanistan which ended with the taliban taking over of people crashing at the airport in the suicide bombing that killed u.s. service members and more than 150 afghans. yet in your book you said that biden was upset with the press from your newspaper and the new york times. so how did that withdrawal go so wrong? and how how could he the press for the bad coverage. so joe biden first went to afghanistan right after the attacks as soon as we'd invaded and he would go to he go to kabul and he would stay in the embassy, he would bring a sleeping bag with he would stand in line for the showers with marines, with the around his waist and he would start to talk to afghan warlord.

and he kept coming back. obama sent him back in 2008, right before he vice president. and he met with afghan president hamid karzai. and he had a couple of dinners that went off the rails. and joe biden has what i call a scranton code of morality that if you expressed in gratitude sometimes it really -- him. and so the afghans would make these and joe biden's response is, well, we've sent all of these troops here. how can you not be grateful to what we're doing, which then caused him as he would get upset about this, he had, i think, greater clarity than people in the political elite about the limits of nation building in afghanis. stan. and so when he becomes president, his main goal is to do what obama wanted to do and trump wanted to do, but failed to do, which was to get out and the way that he wanted to get out was he wanted to avoid the mistakes that obama had made, obama said.

well, according to biden would come come up to obama in meetings. he was vice president and he would say the military trying to jam you. and so when he became president, he designed a process to prevent the military from him that he wanted to he was coming into office he wanted to kind of rush this decision through. and when he thought about afghanistan and the thing that he thought about most was, his son, beau biden, who had served iraq, and he said his all of his he didn't want to send another american soldier into afghanistan. the but the thing that he didn't have was he wasn't thinking about the afghan people and. so i think just at the most macro, the planning for, the afghan withdrawal didn't a president who was saying we need to prepare for the eventuality, the taliban's collapse meet, we need to prepare for the evacuation of all of these people? who do we promises to who'd worked with us over and i think

that is the essential backdrop. the other thing should be said was that our intelligence community failed to anticipate the moment when the taliban would withdraw would would collapse the afghan government. and so we didn't prepare things on that time level timetable. the other thing that should said is i tried to tell the story of what happened in afghanistan and without moralizing about it. and so i tried to tell it from the perspective of people on ground who were and people in this room and, it's not like they were venal or incompetent. it just events happened in such a way that essentially overwhelmed them and they didn't move as fast as they should have. and clearly moved in retrospect and when things started go bad at the airport. biden in the situation said, all right, we're not going to have c-17s leave kabul airport without them being filled to the

brim. and so suddenly us military had to improvise a massive humanitarian evacuation that we weren't planning on doing a week before. and over the of two weeks at the end of august 20, 21, we were able to evacuate. 225,000 afghans, which required having an improvised plan to resettle these afghans because, we hadn't vetted them before they were getting on planes for the most part. so we didn't know who they were. we were just sending them to qatar. and so you have to hold these two truths in your head simultaneously that there was this catastrophic failure and that there was also this remarkable improvization probably only the us could have performed to get all of these people out. interesting. and because we're at a media panel, just to note that many media companies had our reporters and freelancers and fixers and interpreters over there, and we were all caught up in the same thing to get people out safely, which was, i think, heightened the media's

awareness, the situation. well, one of the i tried to hillary clinton had kind her own parallel evacuation effort that she was running simultaneously what the u.s. government was doing and i, i think i was the first person to tell the story in full where she she saw what was happening advance because she had this deep connection. afghan women through her time as first lady and secretary of state and had a network of ngos who set up safe houses in kabul and hired military contractors. and then she ultimately was able to get a thousand women to albania of all places and it was again it was an interesting she was working a lot with media to try to get out but were people who who saw what was happening. media had this deep connection to afghanistan as. exactly. exactly. okay, marty you spend quite a bit of time defending the idea of objectivity as a journalist. and when talking about trump, you have the famous quote and i understand is now on the wall of the washington.

we're not at war with the we're at work. we're our jobs. and yet, as you detail there, many younger journalists who feel that objectivity obsolete, that neutrality is on this white man's values and. some journalists want the freedom to express their opinions about issues the news. so i'd love to hear you talk about why you stand by objectivity and do you see that standard changing as the younger generation assumes newsroom leadership? right. well, think it's really important to really through what objectivity actually and what its origins were because think it's been widely mischaracterized. it's been mischaracterized as false equivalence, been mischaracterized as false balance. both sides ism on the one hand. on the other hand and even neutrality is not a phrase that i use. i like the phrase objectivity. so, you know, this is a phrase that was widely popular, popularized more than 100 years ago by notable journalist and thinker walter lippmann. and the idea was, i mean, he had

been actually a propagandist in the woodrow wilson administration, and he saw that as a disaster, came to regret that, saw that world war one had led to a slaughter and absolute slaughter. and he felt that the press was complicit in that. and so objectivity was designed to counter propaganda efforts, not to promote propaganda efforts to counter them. and the idea was that we need to all of us have our own opinions. we have our preconceptions, our preexisting points of view. and when we're doing reporting that we should we need to overcome those. we need to be open minded. we need to talk to all people. we need to look at all the evidence we need to a rigorous job, a comprehensive job, a thorough job. and in the same way that a scientist the idea was to try to replicate as best we could, what a scientist does in a laboratory where you have an hypothesis. hypothesis about what you're experiment will show. but let the evidence lead you to the conclusion you don't ignore

the evidence and you don't manipulate the evidence. you let the evidence tell you what's happening. and so but when you actually do the whole object, the idea of objectivity was to get at the truth to tell the truth. okay? and it's a it doesn't say that each of us is an objective person, it says we then need we're not. the assumption was we are not objective. we need to then need an objective to get beyond that and to really get at the truth. and and so that when we discover the truth when we've done our research, when we've done when we've done comprehensive and rigorous and open minded and looked at all the evidence and talked to all the right people, then we tell people the truth and what we've found. and so that is the idea. i think it's been dismissed as a concept for a couple of reasons. one is that people do equated with false equivalence and balance. balance and both sides, islam and all that sort of stuff. and and that's not what it is

it's not how i define it. it's not how was defined originally. the is that i think that people feel that the old our old ways of doing business were inadequate to the historic the moment the historic moment we were living in certainly inadequate to dealing with dealing with donald trump and and and i actually don't think they're inadequate the work that we did at the washington i thought was very powerful work we did hold trump accountable we and and another stories that i've been involved in so investigation of the catholic church in i mean you know what we started with was balance when i got there we had a column that said and stories previously that had said well, you know, the the survivors of abuse alleged of people who allege that they were survivors of abuse said the cardinal himself was of this abuse and yet reassigned this priest from parish to parish, allowing him to abuse again and again.

the church said that was absolutely not true. and so that's what we had had balance. and the question i asked of first meeting on my first day at the boston globe was, can't we get beyond one side saying one thing and one side saying something else? can't we get it? the truth? and so without any preconception as to what the result was going to be, i mean, if the evidence showed that in fact the cardinal wasn't aware of it, that's what we would have published. but the fact is that the showed that he was aware of it not in the case of that priest, but of a lot of other priests as well. and fact, that was the policy and practice of the catholic church in the united states and around the world. and so we got to the truth through an objective. objective. but i think a lot of, particularly a rising generation of journalists, been concerned that that our old methods were inadequate. the moment of donald trump. and so that we needed to that we needed to speak the truth and tell people what you know, what our opinions were that we couldn't be one person at home and another person at work, that

we, you know, those those kinds of things that we were that objectivity was somehow hiding the truth from the public. and i don't feel that that is in fact the case. i do worry about journalism that goes with an assumption that that you already know the answer before you even ask questions. and because it you down some really dangerous paths and it doesn't to the truth, it leads to merely exercise it results in merely exercise in confirmation bias you. talk to the sources who are going to tell you what you want to do. you look at the evidence that is supportive. your your initial thesis. you ignore the evidence that that contradicts it and it can take you into some very dangerous places. and we shouldn't fall it. we be falling into that trap. so that's why i've been a vigorous defender of the of objectivity as originally defined and, and and tried to make clear that it is not balance, not false equivalence, not both sides ism. none of that, and that we have an absolute obligation to tell the truth when we when we've

done our research done it well and because my view of, for example, fairness, a concept that i very much believe in, we want to be fair to the people we cover but we also need to be fair to the public. and being fair to the public means telling what we actually found, not hiding, not disguising it, not pretending that we didn't the work, not. and so telling people what we've actually found to be true. so, brian, you talk about what happens in the extreme when opinion is presented as news on fox and to be fair, their opinion programs on, cnn and msnbc. but fox opinion content led to this $800 million defamation statement or settlement. so i know this is going to vary but and you get asked this a lot, but do the hosts who are passionately defending claims of election fraud, do they actually believe what they are saying or are they doing it for ratings. all right. you know, and that's such a it's a great question.

it's a great contrast to what murray just said, because marty is describing instruments of journalism. the instruments of a newsroom, a functioning newsroom that goes out and tries to find new and put it out into the world and i think it's really important we draw a giant red line between that and then the entertainers. i'm about talk about, you know, the entertainers who who spew all all of the stuff you all know about, let's say tucker carlson, for example. kyra carlson is not an editor. he have a newsroom. he doesn't purport to, although i would argue he sometimes pretends to use the language of journalism in pursuit of his political agenda. tucker carlson is the kind of figure who does believe what he says now, but it wasn't always this way. i've known tucker 20 years. tucker on earth one with all of us and he at some point in the trump years off to earth, too. and i believe the way that happens, i believe, can talk yourself into it. i believe he's the kind figure who talked himself into the rants he delivered on air.

by his own admission, he's been radicalized he uses the word radicalized and. i think the rest of us should use that word openly as well. that's what's happened to some of our neighbors thankfully a minority, only a minority, our neighbors. but, you know, i think the other thing i reflect on when i hear what marie saying about objectivity, it gets to this this energy we hear oftentimes from the left, from the right, from everybody wanting the media to do to be different, to be better, to be stronger. it is i think we have to reckon the limits of the media's power as well, even though it's a little disappointing, maybe to say in a polluted information ecosystem, the media's power is really limited. you know, you can tell the truth as clearly as as large a font as possible. and, you know, as we know, there are some people who have opted out of that media universe altogether. they prefer to live. elon musk and steve bannon and greg gutfeld. world of memes and jokes and slogans and nonsense and hate and those are folks that are on earth, too. it's a far right minority and people of good faith left, right

and center want to counteract this phenomenon. they want the press help counteract this phenomenon. and there's only so much that journalism can do. i do think journalists and media outlets should sort of figure out ways to be louder than liars. and, you know, different outlets are going to figure out different ways to do that. that can mean different things that different people in different institutions. but i think, you know, to stand on the side of people that want to know what is real and be louder than the liars is a part of the answer. but look at yesterday, nicolle. donald trump invites viktor to mar a lago. some rant some eastern european or some small landlocked european country leader. but because orban is a strongman with authority and tendencies, with a big christian conservative, you know, values set who has stamped out independent media. trump is celebrating orban. right? so this is the best leader. there's no better, smarter or better leader than orban. quote, he says, this is the way it's going to be and that's the of it. right? he's the boss. he's a great. what the is journalism supposed to do in this situation?

right. journalism predicated on a free and fair democracy. we are able to report freely and guide people and let them know what their options are when a candidate like donald trump is celebrating these autocrats and no, that's actually the great system this the better system. i think that poses a challenge for journalism. that's even even even fiercer the more we went through in 2016, 2017, in 2018, because marty. right. we were never at war. we were we are always just at work. but trump is at. so i'm so glad you brought this up because i want to talk about that, marty i'll address this to you because the threats the you faced as editor of the post so president trump has mentioned retribution in a second term and in the past has said that he wants to shrink the libel laws to after journalist so if he's reelected are you concerned about retribution against journalists or weakening our first amendment? oh, yeah i'd say so. i mean, i think obviously he was

us regularly throughout the campaign and in 2015 and 2016. i did it throughout his presidency and it's done it ever since. continues to do it and do it now. in fact, now he talks about, you know, leak investigations and putting journalists into prison where he celebrates the idea that as he puts, they will meet their broad meaning they would be subjected to sexual assault. i mean, it's appalling. i mean, it's not as charming as he thinks it is. and so, yeah, i think it'll be i think it'll be substantially worse. i wouldn't be surprised to see a national prosecutions under the espionage act of 1917 for disclosures of, national security information. i mean have i mean over the years, the amount of information that's been classified in this government just expanded widely. and and so i wouldn't be surprised that he would use any opportunity. the first opportunity to prosecute journalists for disclosure of what is deemed to be classified. and i wouldn't be surprised to

see him actually begin to classify like everything. i mean, keep in mind, i mean, his first administration right at the beginning, he tried to get all of the people in the white house to sign ndas nondisclosure agreements about happened in the white house. those are completely not enforceable. but that's what he endeavored to do, the idea that he would threaten to sue them if they ever disclosed anything that happened that happened there. and so i would, i would expect that i would expect that he will he will threaten the licenses of some of the some of the networks broadcasting networks that he will endeavor to damage the he will there will be a lot of libel suits. there have been already lots threats of libel suits, an actual libel suit for the purpose of of saddling media organizations with enormous of defending against that kind of litigation and. a lot of his allies were constantly threatening us and other media outlets throughout, his throughout his administration and would expect

that we would see a lot more of that. it's possible that he doesn't really control the libel laws, but it's possible that in other states, such as florida, where ron desantis has talked ronda sanders on the florida legislature have talked about making the libel laws more unfavorable to the to the press, for example, saying that any anonymous source, you should assume that that source doesn't exist and that you could see that being replicated across the that legislation actually was the greatest resistance legislation in florida, which didn't pass in the previous legislature was from conservative media because they were concerned about being sued themselves, because their own business model is defamation of other people. so so they were like really worried about this. i mean people like us and, you know, mainstream media would have great opportunity to sue them. and i actually recommended my book that we do so and so i think that we should get over

this idea that we don't find phi phi a libel suit. so i think that if we're going to be slandered and defamed constantly in serious cases should we should bring some significant cases along the lines of what dominion voting systems did and what smartmatic did. we probably won't collect quite as much money, but whatever we collect be nice. but i think those kinds of things. so i would say that legislation in florida is still alive and i expect we'd see it. i would expect we would see that replicated at trump's urging across a variety of states. so i think there are a whole range of things that he he can do and he intends to do right from the start. that's a nightmare tonight. yeah, i think you're on the list. bryan. there you go. i'm pretty sure you're on the list. you know, i think the other thing to keep in, though, too, is that people listen to him and they take it to heart when was at some of the rallies in arizona, 2016, there was t-shirts they were selling that said rope tree journalist and so

very serious it goes beyond rhetoric. very serious. so we're going to some of your questions in just about 5 minutes. so think about your questions. please come to the mikes to give them. but i want to ask one question. all three of you will do it. speed round ish so we can get to audience. but marty, you recount your book that trump told lesley stahl that he was purposeful in bashing media to train the public not to believe journalist. he said quote, you know why i do it? i do it to discredit all of you and demean all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you. and we've seen this play out over and over that something will go wild in the media and we try to fact check it or bring rigorous professional and people are conditioned to just not believe us. so for each one of you can this damage be reversed? well, i think look, i mean, trump counts as the damage to the credibility journalism as one of his greatest triumphs. he's been asked that and he lost that very quickly as the damage that he's done to the media is a great success of his and.

to be honest, he's been successful. it's not that we that the trust in media wasn't declining, donald trump. it was, but it accelerated during his administration. it's very difficult. i mean, i think that it's a long proposition to turn that around. so i think that we there a variety of things that we can do. we certainly have to cover all people in all of our community fairly. setting aside politics, covered people's lives, the struggles that they have, their expectations their aspirations, their their worries, things like that and reflect all people. secondly, i think we have to be just we have to show more than just tell, have to show people the evidence that we're relying. if there's a court document we're referring to, have that court document, you know, annotate it, but give the entire court document the entire audio, the entire video, if we're pulling a clip, show people the dataset that we're using show people, all of that. i think, really important that we essentially heavily footnote our stories with links and things like that. and i and the key point that i want to make is that look we're not going to convince everybody

there's a long line of conspiracy thinking and this is this country and you know, richard hofstadter, the book the paranoid style in american politics, you can practically draw straight line from worries about fluoridation of water supply to today's thinking that vaccines implant you know going to make you magnetic. and so i mean those kinds of things have been around for a long time generally 25 to 35% of the american public when any one time believe some crazy conspiracy theory where it's about the holocaust of 911 the election of 2020. we need to work on getting another 5% to trust us. another 5% can make a huge difference in this country if that worry about getting everybody that's not going to be possible. get another 5%. and if we get another 5%, let's start working on another 5%. we've probably that point. we've probably done everything we can so i think that's but we should really work on getting

another 5% because the future of the country is decided and decided in increments that size and and that's something that we can achieve confident that we can achieve that. i think it's it's instructive brian the viktor orban's visit talk with and i've been to i don't think it's a coincidence because i think trump looks at the model of what orban's done in hungary and is now self-consciously setting out to replicate it. so in terms of the way in which the bureaucracy is about to be purged to the trump is plans developed by heritage and other places. you're to have a whole layer of the civil service potentially in a trump administration with with loyalist hacks, which is exactly what orban did in hungary. and it ends up creating what

sociologists in hungary have described as a mafia state, where you have corruption runs rampant because you don't have experts or you don't have lifelong people committed to the common good, existing this layer of the bureaucracy. you have people who've sworn their allegiance to to the leader. i think in terms of what orban was able to do to media he wasn't it wasn't so much that he censored or sent journalists to jail. it was that he was able to force, put pressure on organizations so that owners felt compelled to sell their outlets to people who were loyal to viktor orban. and the problem all of this is that we could look at the next four years and say, well, maybe it will be like the last time trump was in office, which something that we were able to essentially survive with our institutions more or less intact this around, it's clear that trump has has a plan altering institutions in a way that they're not going to elastically

snap back to what they were before the status quo so america will end up on the other side a transformed nation. and my fear right now is that we're somewhat sleepwalk into this situation. and i look at the questions about joe biden's age, which are fair and legitimate you know i mean i for am not totally comfortable with having an 86 year old president. but the ways in which the questions are framed, you see, sometimes that there is a false equivalence that ends up getting the media ends up reverting to sometimes it's framed as a question of mental acuity and it's just this continuum that. trump, i think, is in part managed to create that fox news is created where, oh, joe biden has a mental acuity problem. donald trump may have a mental acuity problem. it's all it's all apples and apples but they're not apples and apples being unable to

occasionally a name or getting lost a story is not the same thing as being an absolute lunatic with authoritarian ambitions. keep. we're definitely going to get an education about fascism this year. but most americans don't want to live under an autocracy. like most americans want to ban books. they want to celebrate books most. i mean that it's we should recognize what the majority is. you know, most people want to think freely. they don't want to swallow propaganda. most people want a brighter future for their kids, not some terrible autocratic state. most people should recognize, like most conservatives have more in common with liberals than they. most liberals have more in common with conservative than they think. it's just that on these screens, these screens that made to divide us, it can seem a much scarier we're out there than it actually is. so i think the answer for journalists to reverse decline in trust is to be as human and open and accessible as possible.

when i talk to my have a lot of trump voter friends now, i don't know if they'll vote for trump this year, but they voted for in 2016 and some in 2020. because of where i live, my town and none of those folks, you know, who play with you know, my kids play with their kids. none of them at me. as an evil former cnn worker. right. they look at me as a stay at home dad because we've we've we've forged that connection. and i think the answer is similar for journalism. the more that people know who's and producing and anchoring this work, the more human they know we are i think the better off the media industry is going to be. so i guess we just have to get off screens and go to the library. right. and for the bar, yeah. and maybe come to events like this, the exactly. the idea of a festival for books is the happiest phrase i've ever heard festival of books. right i've been. all right, your turn on up to the microphone. i have someone over here. we're going to have. yeah. you guys okay? just for for the record, i think you're going to the author to after this. so if you don't get to ask your

question, you can go look for them in the author tent. but let's start over here. i have a question for brian. you think there's any chance that fox news will lose its influence and go down? i think around the edges, these lawsuits do matter. you know, you're not going to hear them defame dominion again. but in general, fox still the beating heart of the gop, as dominant as ever, as a 100 fox wannabes out like newsmax, but none of them have the power. fox so, you know, i think lachlan murdoch deserves all the scrutiny he gets and a whole lot more. and here's my message public. pressure does matter. peer pressure matters, media pressure matters. coverage of these figures matters. they all get google alerts for their names. they actually do care. people think of them. so, you know i do think that the attention matters. all right. thanks. we're going to kind of go a speed round just as we try to get to many of your questions. go ahead. over here. yes. i want to thank everybody. it was just lovely and i want to ask brian, i got to be in watching from reliable sources

were it was amazing who you brought and how you did it. thank you. and what i didn't understand was its sudden stopping and i don't know whether your liberty to say it was just like you know somebody with the cane and just. pulled you right off and they didn't even replace that whole right. do you want to hear 32nd answer? i'll tell you, the mother of the gods us over a beer answer that i would give. i don't know what happened. i don't know why the show was canceled. is it possible was canceled? a new owners took over and now a trump supporting billionaire is on the board. didn't like my show. maybe. i don't know. a conspiracy theory, some conspiracy theories are true. so maybe that is it. or or let me just have a little fun with this. maybe it's that i went out to breakfast with the boss of cnn, and i said the wrong thing at breakfast six months before he took over. i you know, i don't know. and i actually find i take pleasure not knowing what happened. was it a crazed conspiracy or did i just say the wrong thing at breakfast there's sort of a joy to life, to not knowing

answer sometimes. so that's my takeaway. i come here, go ahead, over here. but i'll come and say hi after i asking you to speculate, why so many true journalists, true reliable sources refer to it as fox. and i noticed you didn't do it? thank you. when half the site news and half the side is opinion entertainment. and don't we all to get away from calling it fox news because that gives them more credit then what do you do? frankly. i mean, the interesting question is the problem in the in the service of, i think, object tivity in covering i call it fox news. i mean and i'm not i'm not saying that what your assessment is wrong, but proper nouns are proper nouns. i don't call donald trump donald maniac. well, that's like, well, true social is another example, right? yeah. trump so network full of lies is true. social. yeah, but it is called true. all right, we're going to keep going.

thank you. over here. okay. first we. i'm sure all of us here applaud you for wonderful work and god bless free press where you are wonderful. but i have question for morning while we all want you to consent continue to pursue the truth, the truth of the matter is that your are really tied. you don't have the subpoena power you can't you have great difficulty getting to those emails to those text message where the truth really lies. unless someone is willing to come forward and tell you the truth, we have a congress also has their hands tied their backs because. those people ignore congressional subpoenas, they hide information. and it's very difficult for the the courts deal with this. i'm wondering what your would be about legislate action which would enable press to sue the

truth. could you file a lawsuit that says we want to know what really happened? we want access to those emails? we want access to those memos. we want to know what really happened. and i think that's the only way we're going to find out what happened. well, think we need some legislation and through congress, probably through some state legislatures for i mean, that would be really nice. we can certainly file a lawsuit, but we're not going to win just by filing a lawsuit. i mean, you haven't been injured. you haven't. and that's why those of in the look can't come in reality is that i mean the reality is that we frequently we can get a lot i mean, certainly during the trump administration were many people who were very concerned about what happening. and that's why i was the luckiest in history. on top of that on top of that, you know, the congress can do a lot more than it actually does if it's really interested in the truth. i mean, you may remember what it did during the nixon.

you didn't see the same effort during the trump administration. and that's that's unfortunate. so congress certainly has the power do that. i mean, richard nixon would never have resigned. it wasn't just the post. i wish i could just say it was just washington post. it was congress. did their job. and if hadn't done its job, then nixon probably would not have resigned. so we need it's not it would be great. i favor such legislation just to and say give the truth that would be fantastic would make our job much easier. but that's just not going to happen. all right. so much right over here, marty, you said that the public was not trusting the media before donald trump. why? well, i think well, i mean, i think that they're variety. this is a complicated subject. i mean, i think that variety of reasons. one is that we've become increasingly partizan. i think the internet has accelerated that where people can pretty much find any anything that reinforces their

point of view. you have a conspiracy theory guaranteed you can find it online. i mean, as soon as antonin scalia died, i said i telling somebody, i bet i can find a conspiracy theory like right now that moment i saw conspiracy theory on the internet about what happened to antonin scalia. and so, you know, so that's done it. and then and then look it's a business model polarization. a business model. it's a business model. politicians today there, they're not doing a lot of legislating, but they are a lot of performing in front of the cameras. and that's a lot of what they do with that when they're actually in congress. and there's and polarization is a business model for some of the some of the media as and and so that aggravates and so all of that and then some of our own behavior which i think which i talked about earlier is that i really think that we need to we can't be combatants. we to be reporters, we have to be journalists. we have to behave. i don't think that our work is going to be respected the way

that it to be. if we're going to run around with our hair fire constantly, let's just do the work and let the work speak for itself and make sure, that work is as solid as it as possibly can be and that it really stands up under. and so we need to look at ourselves as well. yep. okay. i was going to have one last question, and i'm so sorry for. those of you who are waiting, because we're going to get the cane. but i can tell you that there is book sales area and author will be in the sales and signing area, the uea bookstore tent on the mall. so let's take our last question right here. hi. my name is ray ring and made most of my career in journalism. i subscribe the post and the times have for many years to watch all kinds of news. sorry your show was canceled. brian. i don't. i think fox is clear for many. fox news is the single most force on the planet. whether you're talking climate change or, domestic politics, international politics or,

inequality, anything like that. and i don't see much between the daytime and the nighttime. and on fox, i know that's conventional wisdom, but daytime they practice crime by omission. they don't report anything good that democrats do or any of their enemies do. and so if we could just get your question. i'm sorry to lose the room there. i think the thing and i tried to contact you, marty, but your assistant wanted me to explain the question why doesn't the washington post have a team investigating fox. 24 seven? and why did cnn cancel show? i don't know why they cancel brian's show. i have no idea. we have great reporting on fox. we've done a lot. we post not a report. it's not an entire team. there are a lot of other things to cover by the way climate change happens to be one of them. so there's just a lot to cover and they have a media team and