Panelists explore the shifting landscape of journalism, including the influence of political pressures, and the broader implications for press freedom and democratic values worldwide. STENGEL: OK. I’m going to stand up in the beginning. OK. Good afternoon, everyone. AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Good afternoon. STENGEL: What a fantastic crowd, and what an important discussion today: “Challenges to Global Press Freedom.” And there are a lot of them. Appropriately, the conversation today is on the record. And we have a fantastic panel of people who can represent every point of view about this, and I’ll introduce them first. So Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on the American conservative movement, which she’ll talk about today. Graciela Mochkofsky, who is the head—the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University. She’s a contributing editor at the New Yorker, and I’m proud to be on her board. It’s a fantastic school. You’ll hear a little bit about more of it today. Jacob Weisberg, my old pal, is the co-founder and CEO of Pushkin Industry. He is also the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is relevant for today. And he was the longtime head of Slate and the Slate Group. I’m Richard Stengel. I am the former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in the Obama administration. But more importantly, before that I was the editor of Time magazine for seven years, so that gives me some bona fides to talk about what we’re going to talk about today. So just a quick survey of the challenges to press freedom, which is pretty much familiar to everybody here: authoritarianism around the world, authoritarianism here, intimidation from the government against journalists and news organizations, the problems of the economic model which has caused news deserts around the country, and the—and the diminishment of local news. All of these are gigantic challenges to what we’ve all been involved with most of our lives. And Jacob, as the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, looks at this internationally and domestically. You know, we’ve talked about this. The U.S. is an outlier in terms of press freedom that we have here. Nobody has anything really quite like the First Amendment. But now we are experiencing challenges we may never have in the whole history of the First Amendment. I’d love you to kind of give a little bit of a tour of the waterfront internationally and domestic, and set up this whole discussion. WEISBERG: Sure. Well, thank you so much, Rick. I thought you were going to do that. But—(laughter)—and I should add I’m not the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists; I’m the—I’m the chair— STENGEL: Chair. I’m sorry. WEISBERG: —on the board, where I happily sit with Graciela. And I’m not speaking for the Committee to Protect Journalists, although I’m going to reference a lot of the—a lot of the work we do. First, maybe just to step back for a minute, why do we care about press freedom? I think we should care about it intrinsically because the right to communicate and receive information is a fundamental human right. But it’s also a particular kind of human right; it’s a human right that’s a linchpin for so many other human rights. And I would say even if you think you don’t care about press freedom, you do or you should because it’s so bound up with everything else. When you don’t have independent media, when you don’t have journalism, everything else gets worse. Nothing else is possible. You can’t—you can’t pursue global health solutions. You can’t fight corruption. You can’t—business gets worse. I mean, it’s very interesting, there have really been studies now in authoritarian regimes that are—that show, I think very persuasively, that you get lower growth, you get higher inflation, you get poorer equity returns in markets over time. Without journalism and democracy, everything else collapses. And those two things are so tied up together that you see—when you look around the world, you see journalism and democracy under attack hand in hand in a kind of reflexive way. Is democracy suffering because there’s less journalism, or is journalism suffering because there’s less democracy? Both things are true. And what’s changed? Well, if you look around the world, things have been getting worse. I mean, to cite some of the CPJ numbers, in 2024 there were 124 journalists killed. That was a record since we’ve been keeping track. That number is driven very heavily by Gaza, where I think eighty-five—something like eighty-five journalists were killed in 2024. The number of journalists in prison around the—around the world is in the 300s. If not a record, it’s very—it’s very close to a record. The leading imprisoners of journalists, jailors of journalists, are China, Israel again, Myanmar, Russia, Belarus. You can probably guess who’s high on that list. But what’s changed is the United States. You know, I think for so much of my career the United States was a beacon of press freedom. The First Amendment stands as shorthand for press freedom around the world. And it is—we are now seeing the same phenomena in the United States in terms of the diminishment of press freedom as we are in other regimes that are moving in an authoritarian direction. And just, you know, very briefly, it’s physical threats against journalists—journalists are physically less safe. There have been more attacks and threats here, something that we hadn’t historically seen. There are more lawsuits and interference. And there are more rhetorical attacks. You know, when you have a president—not surprising anyone in this room, but when the press is called the enemy of the people by the head of state, it’s a kind of permissioning for everything else. STENGEL: Yeah. So you laid it out well. And we were talking beforehand when Donald Trump was just a developer in New York he used to threaten to sue people all the time and we laughed at it. But now, as president of the United States, that is a serious, serious threat. And I wanted to ask you, Graciela, how are people reacting to that? I mean, what we’re not seeing, unfortunately, is the sort of Katherine Graham reaction during Watergate—the, you know, damn it, we’re going to just publish this. What are we seeing out there? What are the threats to journalists doing to journalism? MOCHKOFSKY: Right. So thank you for asking that. You know, one—I think one element that is really answering that question that Jacob didn’t mention is that the primary driver of the press freedom crisis here and in the world is the state—is the very weak state of the news media, as well, the lack—that we’ve lost our monopoly, our collective monopoly, on the distribution of information. So nobody—you know, it’s very easy now to influence public opinion without having to go through media. And so it’s not that we don’t have courageous people and women like Katherine Graham today; we do still have a lot of courage in the industry. But the power that the Washington Post had in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, it’s very hard now to have. You know, very few news organizations have the type of power that we had for over a century—that you saw in this country for over a century. And that has to do with, you know, this is described usually as a sustainability crisis. But I think the core and the way to explain the sustainability crisis—meaning there’s very few—more and more outlets are finding it hard to find a sustainable financial model to do the kind of expensive, you know, service—public service that journalism requires—is that there—less people in the world—in this country and in the world trust the information we give them or find us relevant. So it’s the fact that people find—you know, get their information through social media and nonprofessional, non-journalistic sources. And that authoritarians around the world can communicate with them directly, bypassing us, has, you know, really taken away a lot of power. And that power came with safety for the industry and for—you know, I believe for our democracy. So that safety is hard now. We’re less safe because we have less trust and less power. And it’s easier to sue us, and it’s easier—you know, if I—correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that this is the first time that a sitting president has sued a newspaper, a news organization, this was—just happened with the Wall Street Journal. So all the other lawsuits against ABC, CBS, were when Trump was not elected—before he was elected, and that—there’s been an escalation now. A sitting president is suing a major news organization because he’s pissed off with the information that was published about him. And you know, we’ve seen what—how is the press, how is the industry reacting? There’s a lot of fear. There’s—it’s a very uneven and unequal landscape out there. So you have some major news organizations like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal who—that can actually, you know, go meet the president in court, and they can—they have the type—the kind of resources that allows them to actually resist and fight back. You have a diminished and really collapsing local news—commercial local news landscape, where most metro papers and local newspapers and local news organizations have been struggling to—you know, to survive, and a lot of them are going under and are disappearing. You have an ownership model for a lot of the local media—they’re owned by, you know, private equity and hedge funders who are just, you know, milking—you know, just extracting the few dollars that are left and then shutting them down. And so you have a lot of fear because a lot of these outlets can’t even afford the lawsuit. They can’t afford the lawyers and the time that it would take to face such a phenomenal opponent. At the same time—and you have a lot of—you know, you have two major networks, TV networks, that have settled lawsuits that they could not possibly lose. And so—and it was just so obvious that they were—they were going to win it because it was so just preposterous that—you know, why they were being sued, and yet they decided to settle. And that has created—of course, the morale in those newsrooms is very low and it’s very sad. As you know, Stephen Colbert just—I never pronounce that correctly, Colbert. STENGEL: You did. (Laughter.) MOCHKOFSKY: I did? Thank you. He was just—you know, there was this announcement that he won’t be renewed in May, and even though maybe the—you know, after the CBS—the CBS, you know, this new ownership into that network. And of course, everybody is assuming that this is censorship because he’s a very critical voice of the president, and you know, the response from the network is that he’s been extended until May. I mean, he’s still on the air until May; if this were censorship, he would have been taken off the air sooner, which is a very interesting conversation to be hearing in America that this—you know, that this—that this explains that this is not censorship, and no one is really buying it in the—in the media ecosystem. And then you have an emerging—there’s a lot that is actually very exciting in the news media landscape. There’s an—there’s a lot of emergence. There’s an emergence of local nonprofit newsrooms. The nonprofit model has shown to be more, you know, successful than many people thought. There’s a lot of—millions of dollars—hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into local newsrooms in New York and outside of New York in areas that had—that had become news deserts. And that is working. But now the boards and the leaders of those newsrooms are very concerned because this administration have threatened their nonprofit status and their tax-exempt status, and so they are very worried that that can be used against them if they publish information that is critical of the government. So everyone feels a bit fragile and vulnerable. And then, as you know, you know, this government has defunded public media, has just defunded public media. And so at a moment in which there’s new efforts to bring more public funding to reinforce this industry that is really providing a public good that our society can’t do without, that is also under attack. So that creates a new set of challenges for the media. STENGEL: So, yes, and we’ll talk a little bit more about technology. Technology is shaping and reshaping the whole industry, and it’s super important. But Nicole brings a point of view that we don’t always hear in these precincts of the Council on Foreign Relations. I mean, this is an organization that has been a supporter of what we call mainstream media. We’ve all participated in mainstream media. I grew up reading the New York Times. I thought that was the most mainstream of mainstream medias. But, obviously, going back decades now, conservatives felt that they were excluded from mainstream media. And I feel like so many of the things that are characterizing the media environment today—a term that I hate using, “fake news”—all came back from, you know, the ’50s, the ’60s, and this feeling that conservatives were shut out or even censored from mainstream media. I’d love to hear about that. HEMMER: Yeah. I mean, we often think about the current crisis as starting with, like, cries of fake news and lügenpresse in 2016, and then coming through today when the government is actively going after and trying to shut down different news organizations. But for conservatives who look at this, they see that period of the last ten years as a kind of golden age for their ability to shape what’s happening in America today; that they have more influence over what people hear. And that is built on their belief, starting back in the 1940s and 1950s, that they were being censored and shut out of news media in the United States; that there was a conspiracy against the right to keep those voices out. It starts with the America First Committee and the runup to World War II, but really during the Cold War, during this period in which the right is organizing politically in the United States, one of their main complaints is that the mainstream media is liberal and doesn’t have a space for them. And they don’t necessarily put this in First Amendment terms because—(laughs)—they’re not actually on that good of terms with the First Amendment in this period, but they do see it as this is—we are victims of a media industry that does not see our voices as valid and valuable. And in some ways they win that argument pretty early on. By 1969, Spiro Agnew is giving his very famous speech attacking liberal media bias. He turns that into a national conversation about liberal bias in the press, and you see changes happening right away. You see CBS hiring Phyllis Schlafly and other right-wing voices to comment on the news. You see 60 Minutes adding “Point/Counterpoint” with James Kilpatrick, who was a segregationist journalist who becomes then sort of a mainstay of the American news industry after that. And in the years that follow, they’re going to continue to win that argument in a lot of ways because, as that conservative complaint becomes more popularized, outlets look around and they say, yeah, you know, we’ve been treating the news as this thing that we are bringing you that is technocratic and just a reflection of reality, and we’re giving you the voice from nowhere; it turns out, after all, that actually there are all these passions in the country, and the only way for us to sort through that is to give you both sides and let out audiences and readers sort it out. So we’ll have a liberal voice. We’ll have a conservative voice. We’ll have Crossfire. We’ll have The McLaughlin Group. We’ll have all of these different outlets for the left and right to fight, and we’ll take a step back on sort of adjudicating who’s right about this. And so in some ways the story is not, like the conservatives or the right won control of the media environment in the last ten years, but in fact that they have convinced Americans over the past fifty years that the media is biased toward liberalism and there need to be more conservative voices. What’s left out of that is that the voices that were being shut out, that don’t get talked about, are those on the left. You know, conservatives really railed against the Fairness Doctrine, which was a federal regulation of the airwaves in the—from the—in the Cold War era, and they had some legitimate complaints and some illegitimate complaints. But one of the things that when they would write to the FCC, they would get these letters back and they would be like, you know, we can’t go on air and say that America is good because then we have to have an anti-American on. We can’t say that communism is bad because then we have to have a communist on to fight back. We can’t say God is good because then we have to have an atheist on. And the chair of the FCC writes back and he’s like, no, no, no, you don’t have to have communists or atheists on; there is no public controversy about that. Nobody agrees with those views. And so you have this whole set of ideas that are legitimately being blacked out that don’t become part of the conversation about news coverage, and that continues to this day, right? Where are the places that we are seeing voices shut down and silenced at universities, in media? They actually tend to come more from the left. But that doesn’t get folded into the conversation because that idea of liberal bias is so pervasive in the United States. STENGEL: Yes. And in some ways technology has solved for that, right? There’s no barriers to entry anymore. You can start a YouTube channel. You can be on Substack. You can get those voices. In the era that we grew up in, it was literally about real estate. If there’s a liberal point of view, you know, you have to have two columns here that have a conservative point of view, and I always subscribed to that. But I do wonder now, Jacob, about how technology has changed the kind of perception of the press, the protections of the First Amendment. I mean, Slate, which was a kind of a revolutionary thing when it started—you know, we didn’t have to print, you know, words on paper anymore. I remember, you know, Mike Kinsley’s today’s papers that summarized everything in the newspaper. So many people blame technology—i.e., social media—for the destruction of the mainstream press. Do you think that they are a culprit? Or how has that changed perceptions of media? WEISBERG: Well, I think there’s an inevitability about it. I mean, I did start working on the internet in 1996. And Slate, where I went to work at the beginning, is pretty much the sole survivor of that era. And boy, it was a lot of fun to be actually innovating in journalism and inventing things like news aggregation and blogs. You know, that was—we saw those as ways—new ways to communicate effectively, and I don’t think the medium itself is at fault. But you have this confluence of factors. You have the technological change. You have the destruction of economic value around news organizations. And then you layer on top of that what I’d call the political attack. And you—what you have is a badly weakened news media then sort of getting hit from another side.  So I don’t think there’s any one—I mean, you can—you can blame technology if you want. You know, you can—you can—but it’s—I don’t think there was any—there was any other alternative. In a way, I think we would be much better off if the big mainstream news organizations, for want of a better term, had embraced it sooner and had got behind it. You know, the moment I always think about, Slate started at Microsoft and went to the Washington news company—the Washington Post Company, and the Washington Post Company almost became the first investor—big investor in Facebook. And I always think if that had happened in whatever year that was—2006, 2007—the whole story would be different. I mean, if the Washington Post had owned—first of all, it would be an enormously rich company. It would be in a position to do, you know—the company would have never had to sell the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, and they could have continued to do robust international coverage, investigative coverage as long—they could have endowed that until the end of time. And so there were—you know, there were accidents and mistakes along the way that kind of worked out badly for news organizations. But at the core of it is an ethical story, and a story about values and principles. And I think with this CBS case you see it, you know, as in—sort of perfectly and terribly illustrated. I mean, first of all, you know, CBS, for kind of young folks in the room, you know, was the class of TV news. It was—you know, it was the house of Edward R. Murrow. It was the, you know, first place that stood up to McCarthyism. Walter Cronkite, during the Vietnam War, you know, was the person who was trusted to tell the American people the truth. There’s a tremendous, still, sense of tradition and responsibility on the part of journalists there. And now we’ve reached a point where, well, Stephen Colbert came back from his vacation last week on Monday, and he talked about the settlement. He said there is—you know, there’s actually a technical legal term for what CBS is doing with the president; it’s called a big, fat bribe, right? (Laughter.) It is—it is nothing else. There was—that was the most meritless suit that, you know, the worst Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana or Texas I don’t think would have granted discovery in that case, because what CBS was accused of doing—it didn’t do what it was accused of doing, which is editing the interview to make Kamala Harris look better on 60 Minutes. They actually just cut the interview in half and ran part of it on Sunday morning and part of it on 60 Minutes. But even if it had, there’s a First Amendment. It’s not—you don’t have a legal case because you think a news organization made your opponent look bad. And by the way, he won the election anyway. Who sues for $20 billion? And because Paramount, the parent corporation, is being held up to have its sale to Skydance, David Ellison explicitly held up pending a settlement, they say, well, it’s in our interest to pay $16 million. And the business leadership of the company, including the business leadership at CBS, lies about it. They say, oh, no, that’s not why we settled the case. The amount of credibility that CBS loses because of that I think is tremendous. And that’s why, you know, journalists at CBS have their hair on fire. But really, it’s a—it’s a betrayal of journalism. And they did have another choice. They didn’t have to do that. They could have fought that suit. They could have won the suit. Now, you know, Shari Redstone, you know, might not have ended up with as much money as she’ll end up if the merger goes through, but my God, you know, what do you—what do you ultimately care about? STENGEL: Well, and in some ways they want to penalize the actual practice of journalism. I mean, what 60 Minutes did is just—they were committing journalism. That is protected by the First Amendment. You mentioned Walter Cronkite. And Nicole, I want to ask you something about this. I read a book last couple of years, I think it was called Walter Cronkite and the Washington Consensus, about how Walter Cronkite was the face of kind of objective news but he had a real ideological point of view, and that all of those journalists in those days—whether, you know, the Associated Press, CBS, the New York Times—it was a Washington consensus. They wanted people to feel like the U.S. should be involved in world affairs, the U.S. should be leading things, we’re in favor of NATO, and all of these things. And it was a kind of an eye-opener for me. And I’m just curious how the folks on the right saw that, and did they see that at the time? HEMMER: They absolutely saw that. I mean, they talk about this kind of consensus journalism not just as being liberal, but they’re also like, it’s vapid, it’s milquetoast, and it doesn’t—it doesn’t have much substance to it. And part of what they were pointing to was this idea that there were a lot of things that you couldn’t push back against. You couldn’t push back against the sort of agreement about the U.S. being in the United Nations. You couldn’t push back against, you know, the good things that the government does like Social Security. Like, there wasn’t room for that kind of debate, they felt. But again, I think it—that’s how conservatives understood it. They were like, there is this consensus. We are outside of it. We need to destroy that consensus so that we can have a seat at the table. But there was also a consensus on, say, anti-communism. Now, they didn’t think that liberal anti-communism went far enough, but there was a whole swath of ideas that don’t get reflected in the evening news from anywhere sort of, like, to the right of—or, to the left of the Kennedys, right? Like, there’s a—there’s a whole big space that’s not part—that’s shut out of that consensus. Or take something like Black civil rights. There is a movement—you know, in the early 1960s I think there’s more of a consensus among White journalists that this is a good thing that’s happening, that Black civil rights, the time has come. It’s time for White Southerners to give up their old ways. And this is actually—there’s—a lot of the coinage around liberal bias actually comes out about that; that, oh, look at all of these journalists who are standing up for Black civil rights, they’re biased against the White South. So you have those kinds of conversations that are happening as well. But there’s also a consensus among White journalists that it goes too far; that there’s a certain point at which they actually don’t agree with the aims of the broader Black Power movement and some of these other groups. There is this consensus that constrains what news coverage looks like in the midcentury, which is why I’m against golden-ageism. I think that there is a real sense of like, oh, if we could just go back to the Walter Cronkite days. And there were good things about those days, but there were a lot of people who were left out across the political spectrum because of that consensus. STENGEL: That’s really fascinating. And so, Graciela, you take that idea that journalism is necessary to the foundation of a republic—whether it’s Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, they all felt that a republic couldn’t survive, because it depends on the consent of the governed, unless that consent was obtained through journalism. One of the things that we’re seeing now—and we mentioned it at the top—is that there’s the dying out of local newspapers. You know, two-thirds of local news reporters have lost their jobs since the beginning of this century. What is the reason for that? What can you do about it? And to go back to the technology question, I mean, aren’t there ways to communicate and get local news that there weren’t before? So maybe we don’t need newspapers. MOCHKOFSKY: Right. So, you know, what has happened is that—the way I put it for my students is, you know, more than a hundred years ago this society created a consensus or came up with a model for journalism, the American journalism model. That’s not universal. That wasn’t given by God. This was an agreement in this society that was adequate to the societal and technological conditions of the beginning of the twentieth century. And so mass distribution was possible, you know, and, you know, paper was available, you know. There were conditions that made that model very, you know, appealing, and it was a very successful model. And it’s not longer adequate anymore. It hasn’t been for the past twenty, twenty-five years, because society has changed. And the way—and technology has had dramatic changes in the way our society, ourselves, consume news, and look for information, and connect with each other, and so many other things. So my view, and what we’re trying to do at the Newmark J-School, is really to stop thinking—I think there’s a cultural problem in within the media, and I was very much guilty of that too, which is that we are so set in that model, and the idea that it’s society that needs to change for us to really show them how great we are and to continue serving them, because we are so important. And we are, and the service we provide is essential. I truly, deeply believe that. But we can’t wait for our society to come back. There’s this nostalgia and this sense that, you know, more education, or fact checking, or verification, that will bring people back and they will trust us again. Or be having more, you know, credible voices, and using, you know, the influencers—example, you know, there’s these new phenomena that you have individuals who are way more popular than any newsroom, and so newsrooms are trying now to kind of create their own voices so that they will bring these audiences. And all of those things have actually led to great experimentation and successful experimentation. But to me, the problem here at the core is that we need to change. It’s not about us, journalists or the media. We really need to understand what is the model that works for the society we have today and the technology we have today. AI is here. AI is coming. If you’re in the newsroom and you think AI won’t affect you, you are—I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re crazy. It’s going to—if you resist, good luck. You can resist all you want. It’s like resisting the internet. It’s not—because it’s not what you do. It’s what society—how it’s changing our society already. And so I find there’s actually a lot of people, very smart people, very brave people within our newsrooms in this country and abroad, everywhere, who are actually embracing this new technology. And even though, you know, with understanding the dangers and understanding how we can be used by bad actors. But how they—but it’s being used to create, continue to do what we do, which is public service information, serving information needs, and really get to our society where they are. And so to me, you know, as a—as someone who’s constantly, because of her work, thinking about the future, because I train people to be the next generation of reporters and editors and news leaders—we are constantly trying to figure out how do we adapt to our society, and what—and their needs? And how do we defend—while we do that, how do we defend? It’s really hard to do this in general, but it’s much harder to do it when you’re under attack, because the instinct is, of course, to unite in defense of your—of, you know, what you’re doing and the values, and protect PBS, and protect, you know, the local newspapers. But I think we need to do that, and at the same time really explore transformational, radical change that will really help us adapt. Because we are behind. WEISBERG: I just wanted to add to the point both of you made. I mean, when I look at it historically the American contribution is not just the eighteenth idea— eighteenth-century idea of a free press. It’s the early twentieth-century idea of an independent and objective press. And I think we’re much more in danger of losing that than we are of losing the free press. There’s a cacophony of voices. I don’t think we’re facing a situation where people are going to be imprisoned for expressing their opinions. I think we’re facing a situation where there’s no trust, and the idea of what journalists do, the professional obligation of journalists to try to act like scientists, to try to see reality and tell people what reality is, that’s what I think is in jeopardy right now. MOCHKOFSKY: Yeah, but I think, as Nicole was saying, that really served just one population in this country, the objectivity, you know? And I come from Argentina, Latin America. You know, I grew up in a dictatorship. And when I became a reporter in the first generation post-dictatorship in the early ’90s, the American model was just a dream. And I came here to do my masters. And I don’t think other models were better. And, you know, none of us believed in objectivity, but we understood that we need to be fair and hear all. You know, so that model I think we keep. I don’t think we don’t keep that. And it’s very important. But, you know, it’s not—it didn’t serve everyone. We have here thousands of community and ethnic media outlets in this country serving Black people and Latino people and Asian people and immigrant people. They did not have that. They didn’t have access to that journalism. They didn’t have access to that model. Those outlets who were serving mostly white communities in this country did not see them, did not serve them. There was always an exclusion problem with that model. And I think we have now, as you said, an opportunity to fix that. And that is not a small thing. I think that’s a huge thing. And I also want to say there is one journalist who is in prison for all his work, which was Mario Guevara, as you know, CPJ’s. You know, if you are an immigrant journalist, if you are a journalist today in America who don’t have citizenship, you are really, really scared to death. You know, it’s now—you feel they’re coming after you. There’s a lot of journalists who are really afraid to leave this country because when you—even American citizens—when you come back, your, you know, telephone might be taken. And if you have any criticism in your WhatsApp communications with your friends, you might, you know, have a rough time. But, you know, for the first time in a long time in America, there’s a journalist who has been imprisoned for his work. He’s in an ICE facility in Georgia. This guy is a Spanish language, very well-respected reporter in Atlanta, Georgia. And he was—you know, he was arrested during a protest, and then he was handed over to ICE. And ICE is now trying to deport this guy to El Salvador, where he—that’s a country he fled because America was safe twenty years ago. STENGEL: Yeah, no. It’s just extraordinary the courage and bravery of journalists abroad that we’ve looked at for generations, and now we’re beginning to see it here at home. And I think, to Jacob, your point, the First Amendment was an outlier. But even this idea of objective journalism turns out to be an outlier, and may even be just something that was temporary in American journalism. So we’re going to open it up now to questions. And this, by the way, is being recorded, so you can see your question. And I will call on folks. Hou have your hand up right away. OK. Q: I’m James Heimowitz. One of my roles is I’m a senior advisor to the Hong Kong South China Morning Post. And I was previously CEO of Hill+Knowlton in Asia. And I listen with fascination to all of you talk to words like independence, trust, well-respected. The question I get—I also taught in China for—I lived in China thirty-three years—what is a journalist in Western standards and American standards? Most professions, whether you’re teachers you get certified by the state, whether you’re a doctor you get a medical certification from AMA. Problem is, anybody who wants to be a journalist can be a journalist. And is that part of the problem? Question one. And is there any talk about certification, so to speak? And all of the questions—and the second part of the same question is, what do we do about all the problems that you mentioned? (Laughter.) STENGEL: Who wants to start? HEMMER: I can start. I mean, I think that the problem with the idea of accreditation is that I don’t know that it would persuade readers and viewers that they should trust the accrediting organization or institution, and that—I think there’s a broader cultural problem underlying that, which is this lack of trust. I mean, I do think that there is something—this was a big complaint, I think, in the early internet age, was, ugh, now everyone can be a journalist. It was very hot, when MSNBC first started, to have, like, eye reporters come on, they came on CNN. And it was like, oh, everybody gets to be part of the creation of news. That it becomes this cocreation moment. And if you’ll remember at the time, and especially in the early days of social media which had the same kind of dynamic, there was a real kind of techno-optimism about this, right? Because it was the democratization of news. And it went in a very different way. But there was that moment when it felt like—and I think we need to recapture that part of it, which is that there is something freeing about people being able to report and share information. But then there is this question of journalistic standards, because I think that that, that set of practices is what makes somebody a journalist. But how do you convince ordinary Americans that those are worthwhile practices? I think that has become much more challenging. MOCHKOFSKY: Yeah. I think a journalist is anyone who’s practicing—who’s committing the act of journalism. (Laughter.) And I think—I don’t think that’s bad for us. You know, there is countries where journalism have been accredited for a long time. I think Italy, Chile, I don’t know. I don’t think they don’t have these, the same problems that everybody’s having. So I don’t think that will solve it. I would also be careful, you know, who gets to certify. You know, today in this—I would be very scared about, you know, who’s in that—you know, in the room. Hmm? Exactly. And so I don’t really think that will solve anything. That’s my honest answer. I feel like the problems. I mean—I don’t have a problem with everybody having access to social media and saying whatever they want. I think there has to be—people just need to know that there are some where they can find the reliable information they know when—and you see that still happening when there’s—you know, during the fires in L.A. or during the floods, you know, when something—during the pandemic—you see people flocking back to reliable, more traditional news sources. So I don’t know. That’s my answer. WEISBERG: No, I totally agree with Graciela. I don’t lose any sleep over the question of who’s a journalist. If you say you’re a journalist, you’re a journalist. I mean, but it doesn’t mean you’re a good journalist. There are lots of—(laughter)—there are lots of kinds of journalists. And that—in a way, that just only opens up the question of what you’re doing. But I think, to give journalists—you know, kind of register journalists or authorize journalists just opens—you know, it’s—I don’t think it’s permissible under the First Amendment, because I think everyone has that right. And I think it is—you know, it’s a very dangerous direction to go in. STENGEL: But I have a—I disagree a little bit. And I’ve talked about this for years. That journalists need to have a kind of radical transparency about what they do, because people don’t understand what journalists do. You know, we don’t have a fake news problem. We have a media literacy problem. Even when I went into government, I was surprised that people in government didn’t get how journalism works. It’s like, you mean someone’s fact checking that story? You mean a lawyer is reading that story before it’s published? I mean, people—regular people don’t get that, and people in government didn’t get that. OK, yes. Esther. Q: Oh, great. Thank you. Esther Dyson. Former journalist, now writing a book. We’ve talked about corruption and, you know, all the bad things government can do. And there’s a free press that’s free to speak. There’s also a free press that is free, but is sponsored. And one of the other eroders of trust is all these influence—you know, we need also disclosure statements of who paid for you, or did you pay for this article to be published on behalf of something? But that provenance of the money as well as of the government power is really important. I’d love to hear some thoughts on that. WEISBERG: Well, yeah, sure. I mean, I’ll start. And hi, Esther. I think the way media organizations have been set up historically, if you go back to the golden age, whether it was a golden age or not, there were—you know, it was almost like the Federal Reserve the way that walls were erected to try to protect journalists from the financial influence and from the corporate influence. It didn’t always work, of course. But like objectivity, it was a standard and a principle, and good journalists believed in it, and good news organizations worked towards it. And in this kind of midcentury period, we have the extraordinary phenomenon in America of these family businesses who, partly because their monopoly profits made them so successful, were really in a position to support those standards—the Grahams, the Sulzbergers, other families that owned the great kind of metropolitan newspaper franchises. You don’t get the same thing—being a good media owner is as hard or harder than being a good journalist. And when I look around, I see very few of them. The transition from Donald Graham—Katherine Graham and Donald Graham to Jeff Bezos is just—you know, is a is a shame. It’s just a huge step down in terms of standards around owning and controlling a newsroom. And interestingly, I think you see it even at a place like Fox News. When Fox News was started in 1996, yeah, the—it was a mixture of news—real news reporting, high—reasonably high-quality news reporting and, say, propaganda. And you got the—you know, the news till 4:00, and then—or, 5:00 or 6:00, or whatever. And then you got, you know, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. But there were conscientious journalists doing a good job at Fox News. There’s still a few of them, but the balance has shifted so far, driven by the corporate imperative and the company’s politics that, you know, it’s essentially—it’s maybe, like, weaker propaganda during the daytime and, you know, more forthright propaganda in the evening. And so I just think there’s been a degradation that’s kind of cut across the board. HEMMER: I do think this idea of sort of radical transparency applies to funding as well. But I think it’s also happening in an environment where you also have these conglomerates come in, and—like Sinclair, right? And making what are essentially, like, propaganda news reels, that are then distributed through your local news, and then it looks like local news, or your local newspaper went away and then one of these big right-wing conglomerates started printing a paper that looks like local news but, again, is actually propaganda in disguise. And I think that’s a little different than something like Fox News, where you know, like, going in that it’s a conservative-leaning network. And here it’s people just, like, clicking on websites or picking up newspapers, and seeing it as, oh, this looks like my local news, and treating it that way. And not understanding that it’s actually the product of an entirely different kind of political movement. And so that’s something too. I don’t know how you deal with that, other than, like, exposing it as much as possible. But that is another element of that kind of money flowing in and political projects flowing in, that people just aren’t aware of. Q: (Off mic.) HEMMER: Yeah. Which also old newspapers were doing. (Laughs.) STENGEL: But, I mean, advertising has a lot of culpability in terms of how journalism has changed. Because part of the thing when I was head of Time magazine and I had to actually get a lot of advertising, advertisers wanted to look like the content. They wanted to deceive people that this has the same credibility as a news story. So on the websites that you’re on, where those Taboola things are at the bottom that are pretending to be news stories that are advertising, I think a lot of regular people don’t realize that there’s a difference. I do think technology is—there are some new things that I think are terrific. Substack, for example, right? You’re paying a subscription for that content. It’s not intermediated by any advertising. You know, that may be the way of the future. There’s a gentleman way back there who’s been waiting for a long time. Q: (Off mic)—from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Fascinating discussion. Thank you all for it. I did have to check the title of the conversation though, because I think it’s about global press freedoms. And I’m not entirely sure that—maybe we could reflect a little bit on that. I was in Moldova some months ago when the administration had started its pyrotechnics. And when a member of the government calls USAID a criminal organization, then what they’re saying to a local constituency of courageous journalists and investigative reporters struggling in their own environment, it’s labeling them as criminal too. So this has had a really terrible impact on democrats and journalists around the world, not just the cuts in USAID funding, which is very significant, but in the whole attack on journalism itself more broadly. If America is not a leader in this field then, frankly, nobody is. So I wonder if you could just shift the conversation a little bit back, if you didn’t mind, to how this crisis of American journalism, which you’re describing, really impacted the whole rest of the world, which I think it does. WEISBERG: Yeah. I will just—you know, thank you for the question. And there’s something even beyond what you’re talking about, which is the explicit advocacy by the United States government of press freedom in other countries. You know, it has been high on the human rights agenda of the State Department. And there’s been a bipartisan consensus that the United States wants free journalism in other countries. And journalists have been imprisoned and threatened and killed. It’s been the rule not the exception that a secretary of state, or a secretary of state in a bilateral meeting, brings that up. That’s on the agenda. And I fear that’s not happening anymore. And no other country that now imprisons journalists or passes a law restricting press freedom has the same fear that they would have had even a year ago that the United States is going to look unfavorably on that and put pressure on them to not do it. MOCHKOFSKY: You know, another aspect—like another—to answer your question from another perspective, one thing we’ve been doing at the school is really—and in conversations with, you know, boards and journalists here—is to play—to always bring the global perspective to these challenges here, because this is—a lot of this is very new for America, but it’s certainly not new in most of the world. And these are the conditions in which journalism has been practiced around the world for a very, very long time. And this country—and this is the norm in many, many countries. And, you know, a lot of my friends from Central America, you know, they’re all in exile in Costa Rica because they can’t cover Central America from El Salvador, or from Guatemala, from or from Nicaragua, or, you know. So this is—and this is—this is the reality in so many places. So one thing that we’re trying to do all the time—and you just did for us, thank you—is to bring this global perspective always. And you know for us, that means to learn from colleagues around the world on how to assess risk, how to look at risk, how to mitigate risk, how to create networks of support. How do we deal with these and, you know, find ways—we shield ourselves, if we can. We find solidarity. How do we do the work? And we can learn from, you know, journalists in Mexico, and from journalists in Russia, and from journalists in—you know, in Africa, everywhere. You know, it’s like more countries have dealt with this than not. So I think that’s a very important perspective to bring. STENGEL: And we were, as you said, in the democracy promotion business for a long time. And one of the foundations of that a free press. WEISBERG: It used to be Rick. MOCHKOFSKY: Right. It used to be Rick. WEISBERG: Rick used to be the person who did that who did that. STENGEL: Yes. And so, yeah. So we would—they were not easy discussions. If you’re talking to an authoritarian state and you’re pleading for a free press, that’s not something people were really open to. So this gentleman right here in the blue jacket. Q: Thank you. Jonathan Guyer. I’m a journalist and I’m with the Institute for Global Affairs. Jacob, you mentioned Palestinians. I think 200 Palestinians have been killed covering Gaza. Israel is a huge challenge to press freedom. I wonder if you could talk about how American press is meeting the moment, the challenges for Palestinians in Gaza covering this issue. And one of the harder things I think is active voice. We don’t see that a lot in the press when they cover Israel’s alleged war crimes. And why there’s such a scant coverage on the cover. New York Magazine ran a cover on alleged Israeli war crimes. By my count, no other publication has. How is that posing a challenge to global press freedom? WEISBERG: Yeah. And the number I cited, of eight-five, was just in 2024, of journalists killed with Gaza. And one of the things that the Committee to Protect Journalists does, that I’m very proud of, is it looks into every one of these cases. And it tries to determine, to the best of its ability, who was—who was a journalist, using the standards we have. What’s happened in Gaza is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in terms of the scale of the attacks on journalists, certainly relative to the size of the country. A number of journalists have been killed incidentally. But a number of journalists have also been—and I think the evidence is really overwhelming about this—have been targeted by the Israeli military. And there has to date been total impunity for Israeli soldiers or military officials who have been involved in targeting the journalists. And there are other aspects of it too. There’s no—journalists that are not allowed into Gaza from other countries. So there is no—for the global press and the U.S. press—there is no independent description of what’s going on. The information we’re getting is from Gazan journalists who are, despite these horrendous conditions, getting information out to us. And I think it’s all utterly unacceptable. I don’t know what else to say about it. But on top of the—on top of the humanitarian catastrophe and crisis, there is a sub catastrophe which is the journalistic catastrophe. STENGEL: Anyone else want to weigh in on that? Yes, sir, right here. MOCHKOFSKY: Your mic is coming to you. There it is. Q: Bob Scott, Adelphi University. Professor Hemmer, in your studies have you examined radio? And the background to my question is that through a set of circumstances, unusual as they were, in the 1980s in Indianapolis I happened to be together with Beurt SerVaas, Richard DeVos—I mean Beurt SerVaas, Richard DeVos, and the Liberty Foundation, planning to buy up radio stations for talk radio to be conservative across the country. HEMMER: I do study this. So my first book was called Messengers of the Right, and it was a study of conservative media during the Cold War. But the backbone of it was a radio broadcaster named Clarence Manion who had a syndicated radio show that ran from 1954 to 1979, and was sort of the prototype for conservative talk radio. Now, at the time, like, the technology wasn’t what it would be. So that, you know the—if you’re thinking about conservative talk radio and you’re thinking of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, those three-hour call-in shows that are—could be very entertaining, but very provocative, and very influential, these weren’t those. But it was part of this early movement on the right that said, the way that we are going to change politics in the United States is through the media. We have to control the media if we want to change politics. Like that’s a theory of politics that the right has had since the 1940s and ’50s. So what we are seeing now is the fruits of that decades-long movement. And radio was at the heart of it. And that they stuck with radio through these very deep-pocketed donors, because nobody was making any money in it during the Cold War. That they stuck with it. And then you get that second generation, that Rush Limbaugh is sort of the avatar of, who’s benefiting from all of those donors who are buying stations. And then he shows up on the scene in 1988 and becomes just this huge phenomenon. And what he does that’s different is he shows that talk radio on the right can be both very popular and very profitable. And so they’re imagining in the 1980s that talk radio is going to have to be something that’s just supported by sponsors and donors. And it certainly still is, in a lot of ways. What I don’t think that they could imagine was that you could be paying somebody like Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, or Sean Hannity hundreds of millions of dollars per contract, and they’d still be making a profit. And that has a lot to do with changing politics in the 1990s, but, yes, that it was a program, a project that had been underway not just in the 1980s, but in the 1950s and ’60s. STENGEL: And, Nicole, people on the right have been trying to defund public radio for all those years. HEMMER: All those years. STENGEL: That’s happened. Are people rejoicing about that? HEMMER: They love it, yes. They’re very, very happy. They’ve been gunning for Big Bird for a long time and they finally got him. But also, like, yes, and, you know? Bill Buckley’s Firing Line was on PBS for thirty years. Like, it is one of those things where there is this kind of—there’s the bogeyman of PBS and NPR that they’ve been gunning for for a very long time. But when they can make use of it, they do make use of it. It was the same thing for, like, the Fairness Doctrine. There was a big voice on the right—big voices on the right that were opposed to the Fairness Doctrine. But by the 1970s, they were looking around and they were, like, wait, the Fairness Doctrine could be a way for us to get more right wing voices on air. And then they use it. So I think it’s important to understand that these positions might be strongly held, also kind of flexible. STENGEL: But, interesting, I would just add, Nicki, they’ve also won podcasting on very short order. And it’s very interesting. I mean, in the days of Rush Limbaugh, you would often hear the lament, oh, why can’t liberals have populist voices that get huge audiences like Rush Limbaugh? And there were a lot of—I’m sure you have various theories about why they didn’t, but they didn’t. And exactly the same thing has happened even more dramatically around podcasting, which suddenly, you know, in the period running up to the last election and since, the biggest podcasts are all populist conservatives, populist conservative like many of the comedians. Not all, you know, inherently ideological people, but people who are—you know, you would class on the right. And there’s no equivalent on the left. They seem incapable of doing it. HEMMER: So I do have a theory. And that is that it connects to the broader changes that are happening in media. That we had a media system that was built around expertise and authority, and associated with big corporations like CBS, ABC, NBC. And we have moved to an information environment in which people are dependent on influencers and trust in a different way. Like, it’s a different kind of trust. It’s not trusting in the Walter Cronkites. It’s trusting in people because you have a parasocial relationship with them, whether it’s through podcasts or social media. And the right is much better set up for that because they weren’t ever, like, particularly strongly tied to that world of expertise and authority in the same way. They were already in a world in which influence and a person’s sort of political identity was more important than whether they had, you know, verifiability. And so they have thrived in this environment. STENGEL: Which you might call believe the people you like instead of like the people you believe. HEMMER: That’s right.  STENGEL: Yeah. MOCHKOFSKY: I just wanted to also say too, I always remind myself that this is not a unique phenomenon happening with media. That the people—if you look at the data, the people who don’t trust the media, they also don’t trust the government. They also don’t trust, you know, institutions that they feel are elite institutions that haven’t served them well. And that we ourselves—the media by itself cannot change that. And so when we are looking at trust—and, you know, we spend a lot of time at the school and talking to news leaders, thinking about that, and looking at what people are—you know, newsrooms are doing around this—you really need to remember that there are—this is not happening, you know, in a void. There’s a context in which—that is the context that I think explains, you know, these authoritarian—you know, the success of these authoritarian rulers and leaders. And that we are seen as part of institutions that are not serving—that people don’t feel we make an impact—we have an impact on their lives, and that don’t serve them well. And so how do we change? How do we adapt to—and that doesn’t mean—I absolutely reject the fact that that means you need to change your standards or you need to, you know, change your coverage to include the people or ideas that you actually find untruthful and dishonest. It really needs to—you know, we need to do a much bigger effort on really understanding where the roots are of this problem, and how can we rebuild for the society we have an understanding why is it that they don’t trust us and they don’t believe us? STENGEL: Well, that’s a great note to end on. I do believe that the First Amendment was created to protect the press so the press could protect democracy. That’s what—I think we all believe in, that. I want to thank everyone for coming out today. I want to thank Nicole, Graciela, and Jacob. This will be—a transcript of this and the video of this will be on the Council website. Thank you so much for coming and supporting the idea of a free press. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.