Falmouth Flexible's MA Journalism Course Co-Leader, Kate de Pury, chats with Tom Kent about how he sees prospects for sustainable quality journalism, particularly since COVID-19. Tom is former Associated Press Standards Editor, and now Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in the US.
Falmouth Flexible's MA Journalism Course Co-Leader, Kate de Pury, chats with Tom Kent about how he sees prospects for sustainable quality journalism, particularly since COVID-19. Tom is former Associated Press Standards Editor, and now Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in the US.
Kate [00:00:00] I caught up with Tom Kent, former Associated Press Standards Editor and now a journalism lecturer at Columbia University in the US, to talk about how he sees prospects for sustainable quality journalism, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Tom, thank you very much for joining me for this podcast. It's great to have you with us at Falmouth Journalism. You have recently been working on a book about disinformation, Russian disinformation specifically. But I would like to ask you more generally, if we look at the challenges facing young journalists today, it seems that disinformation is one of the issues that they're really going to have to get their head around. And that would be disinformation at scale. So how do you think that new generation journalists can prepare themselves for this? And what skills can they build?
Tom [00:01:08] I think that there are a couple things to begin with. Journalists have to be good at identifying information, identifying disinformation as soon as it appears. This is a very fast moving area. So disinformation appears in an hour. If it's not countered within an hour or two, it just becomes common wisdom. So the first thing that journalists need to do is to be able to identify information as soon as it appears and move to counter it right away. The idea of publishing a fact check two or three days after some piece of disinformation becomes current is you know, it's interesting from a historical standpoint, you're not really countering it. It has to be an immediate process. And then after you have identified disinformation, you're prepared to counter it, you have to counter it in an interesting way, in an effective way. Just publishing a column saying there's a version that says this but the fact is that - question is, who's going to read that column? You have to think about how are we going to get the word out in an attractive way, in a sharable way, in a viral way. So now you're talking about means, you're talking about chat bots, you're talking about all sorts of new news technology that needs to be used to this end.
Kate [00:02:30] That's really interesting. So the kind of fact check in text that we see from the more traditional outlets, probably the AP amongst them, you don't think is actually doing the job?
Tom [00:02:48] Well, it's a good thing to have, but you have to wonder to what degree you are preaching to the converted. If you look at actual network mapping that's been done, you look at the mapping of how disinformation travels across the Internet, and then you look at how the mapping of fact checks looks - it actually pretty much looks the same. The disinformation sits in its silo and the fact checks sit in their silo and there's not much crossover. So if you're trying to get to the people who actually believe this information, we've got to be more creative than we are now.
Kate [00:03:26] So who have you seen doing that in a creative and effective way?
Tom [00:03:31] Well, it depends. There are certainly efforts in lots of countries. We see very, very aggressive efforts going on, probably 80 countries that now have different fact checking organisations. There's an experiment that was done in Brazil that I liked, that was a bot that went around on the Internet, on Twitter, and looked for people who were posting false narratives - narratives that this fact-checking organisation had identified as not true. And then the bot would actually tweet at them, "What you just posted is not true and here's a link to the fact check." So there's a pretty interesting, aggressive way to go at it. The International Fact Checking Network has also come up now just in the past few days with a chat bot and you can interact with this bot. It works on WhatsApp, which is a place where there's a lot of disinformation. You can interact with this chat bot, ask it questions, you know, say, "What about bleach? Does bleach protect you from coronavirus?" And it will give you links to various fact checks that have been done on that subject and it's being set up to be connected to fact checks from multiple countries and multiple languages.
Kate [00:04:49] That's very interesting. So you need to push the fact check to the channel, the same channel the disinformation is occupying?
Tom [00:05:00] Absolutely. You've got to try to penetrate the world with disinformation lives. And let's also remember that to a lot of people, sharing something on Facebook, even something that they think is probably wrong, but it's fun, they're not sentimental about it, it's a way to pass the time. And people are not aware when they share something that's false, that it really could have far-reaching implications. So you have to build in people two things: one, a sense that there is a lot of false information out there and they have to be aware of that. But also that it's really not a good thing to spread things that are totally false. I think the the second part is actually harder because we would like to think that just because people know something is false, they won't share it. But people share things just for amusement. And, you know, there's another side to that, too. Maybe we're in some ways overly alarmist that we think that just because someone shares something ridiculous that they don't know it's ridiculous. People are sometimes not as stupid as journalists believe. We say, oh, my God, this piece of disinformation was shared five million times. But maybe everyone who got it rolled their eyes and said, how stupid. But it was just something to do, some way to spend some time on the Internet.
Kate [00:06:27] Well, one has to hope that the great deal of disinformation that we have seen around COVID has had only sensible shares, but somehow I doubt it. Have you been surprised that a story that has such life or death implications has actually seen such a big amount of disinformation?
Tom [00:06:53] Not really, because people will use whatever is in the news to advance their political position. Countries do it, individuals do it. And as I say, people are not sentimental about information to a lot of countries, to a lot of people. It's just a weapon, it's just a device to advance their point of view. So, you know, we journalists tend to think that, you know, we live in this cathedral of information and that everyone should respect it and walk around with hushed voices. This is information, this is sacred. But most people don't look at it that way. It's just one more thing.
Kate [00:07:32] Well, that certainly puts it into perspective. Tom, do you think that anything positive has come out of the fact that mainstream news has had to counter misinformation about the benefits of various outlandish cures for coronavirus? And in the U.K., the idea that it was caused by the 5G network - has anything positive come out of the fact that mainstream news has had to engage with those narratives of misinformation?
Tom [00:08:08] Well, the results are always very preliminary. But what we see at the moment in the United States and in parts of Europe, I don't know about the U.K. itself, but there actually are people who tend to look at legitimate professional media a little more than they did before. We see more clicks on legitimate media than we had previously. I think a lot of people, they love going to their conspiracy sites and reading crazy stuff on social networks because it's amusing. And if you want to get mad, if you want to be mad and think that coronavirus was created in an American lab or it's a plot by the Illuminati or something, you know, it's fun. It's fun to go to conspiracy sites and read that. But if you want to know how many people are dying in my city today, and when will we be able to go to a restaurant again in my city. Then I think people tend to go to more legitimate news media and maybe over time there will be some return to media that actually is telling you things the way they are.
Kate [00:09:20] That's very interesting because you kind of eluded that, the fact that we know that people are going to the mainstream news media to get information about coronavirus. But you are suggesting, and it's probably very sensible, that that is not only the national and international media, but it's local media. And I'm just wondering whether this is true in the States and whether this is going to benefit local news, which is in such a state of economic crisis already?
Tom [00:09:57] Yes, I certainly hope so. There is a great crisis in local news in the United States. I think one reason is that local news has been transitioning very slowly from actual paper newspapers, which don't make money anymore to various kinds of web enterprises. And this economic crisis, compounded by the COVID crisis, has caught the news media at the point where they were still trying to sort of keep the paper going - the "paper paper" going - and hadn't really moved into full digital mode. And also where advertising for digital has has not been polling the kind of dollars that advertising for paper did. So this will hurry along the transition. Digital media has helped greatly, obviously, by the fact that it's it's much less expensive to produce than paper newspapers. So it has a huge advantage there. But it could be a while 'til this all settles down. And maybe COVID actually can help in a way, because people are looking for authoritative local news in our local town. We don't really have much in terms of high-quality online news sources, but people are going to community bulletin boards and exchanging information with each other. And there they're learning the importance of putting up true information, because if someone says, "There's no meat in the store," somebody comes right back and says, "I was there yesterday morning, and there was plenty of meat." So people are starting to understand the importance of true information. And I hope that that will eventually transform itself into solid online sources, but it's very dicey and particularly the revenue model; where's the money for all this supposed to come from? Maybe, you know, things like public libraries, local universities will wind up subsidising local news.
Kate [00:11:54] Or indeed local people in the community that may be building around these noticeboards.
Tom [00:12:03] Certainly possible that they will decide that it's worth a few pennies to do that.
Kate [00:12:09] Yeah, well, let's hope. Let's broaden out the conversation a little bit. I wondered whether you could let me know, generally, what do you see as the main challenges for the new generation of journalists? Maybe give me your top three and let's talk about them.
Tom [00:12:26] Sure. Well, I think the one challenge I would mention, which has been coming for a long time, it's not all about COVID, is the gap between journalists and ordinary readers. I think that even the term "ordinary readers" is a little condescending because it suggests that we're not ordinary. I remember, you know, in my journalism training in the United States, we were always told, you know, "You have to write for the Kansas City milk man." Well, you know what does that mean? I mean, it means make things, you know, explain things so anyone can understand it, I understand that. But this idea that we are not the Kansas City milk man, that that's some kind of, you know, brain dead person who we need to attract was actually a bad idea to think in those terms. And now it's gotten much more dangerous with a lot of journalists thinking that "ordinary people", so to speak, are some kind of political Neanderthals. And so we have to learn to relate to "ordinary people", so to speak, with respect, not in a patronising way, to understand that their concerns are real concerns and that we need to pay attention. Not everybody, you know, has a job, you know, typing in an air-conditioned newsroom. Lots of people have, you know, hard jobs, they have hard problems. And we have to be much more in touch with them. I think we have to learn to be a little bit optimistic. The "ordinary people" are optimistic, or they try to be. But when you read news, news you know, talk about all the time, uses pessimistic, uses bad news, I mean good things happen. I mean, suppose they were published once every hundred years. What would the headlines be? You know, there would be things like world learns to read if people are literate. Famine ends. There's basically very little famine in the world these days that doesn't relate somehow to some kind of war time situation. A headline might say, cancer no longer a death sentence. I mean, big things happen but, you know, to read the news media every day, we don't project that. People pick up the newspaper, go to a website and they wind up depressed. This is not something people are going to pay money for or spend a lot of time, you know, "I'm feeling happier, I better read the news so I get depressed." But this is sort of the product that we're offering.
Kate [00:15:13] Yes. Tom, just to ask you there, who do you think has begun to do that well? I know there is the movement towards solutions journalism. You know, maybe positing a problem and then offering some kind of solution to it. Who's doing that well?
Tom [00:15:34] Well, certainly The Associated Press has a rubric every day now of something positive. And it's smart for them to do it because there have been a lot of news sites that have sprung up now that are sort of good news sites. And, you know, some of them can be just so focussed on good news that, you know, practically making stuff up and it's not really vetted, it's not really very rigorous. So I think what should happen is legitimate news organisations start looking for good news and highlighting it, making it easier to find this, you know, being a professional and reporting good news should not be antithetical. But I think that a lot of journalists, the way we train people is that if there's no conflict, there's no story. You know, why go out and cover a happy event? You know, no we've got to find someone who thinks it costs too much or someone who, you know, was offended by something or whatever. I mean, we've got to start understanding that positive events can be stories and probably ought to be able to win prizes, although you rarely see a Pulitzer prize for a good news story. The system is oriented toward bad stuff and the expose of that.
Kate [00:16:57] Well, there's a challenge, a Pulitzer prize for a good news story.
Tom [00:17:02] Yes!
Kate [00:17:04] Okay. So let's go back to your top three, then. That was number one, right?
Tom [00:17:11] Right. Right. And then I think the next thing that we have to think about, what we have to get our heads around is modesty. Journalists need to be modest about what they know and what they can predict. We're often told, you know, journalists need to write authoritatively. You know, you're the expert. People are paying for your for your information or for your opinion, for your analysis. If something's likely to happen, just say so and so forth. Yes. Some things you can write authoritatively about. But let's remember that most events in life, in our personal lives in the world are surprises. I mean, COVID's a good example, of course. Brexit was a surprise. The election of Trump was a surprise. The invasion of Ukraine was a surprise. You know, we have to always be modest in terms of we don't know what's really coming next. And so the idea that we are so authoritative, the more authoritatively we write, the more we can be hanged from our own petard. So we have to, you know, be careful about what we're saying, what we're predicting, what we're accepting as common wisdom. You could remember a few years ago was a decade ago. Remember peak oil, supposedly the world was running out of oil. And everything, all our thoughts were to be predicated on this. Well, turned out world wasn't running out of oil. We discovered new ways to find oil. And now, you know, 20 years later, we've got this enormous glut of oil. So that didn't turn out to be so true.
Kate [00:19:03] I was just going to say, you know, thinking on from what you're saying about being modest and perhaps not knowing everything, might this then feed into the whole kind of move towards and the need for diversity so that it may not be, you know, the five guys in the newsroom who are going to generate all of the top lines in the story, but it might be a much more varied selection of voices that, you know, from the newsroom, but also from the community and maybe from social media as well?
Tom [00:19:43] Yes, I absolutely agree that the more voices you get in, the more views you get, the more likely someone is to say, wait a minute, you know, you're overstating it, or that's not the case, or not from my standpoint. So you do need this diversity and when I say diversity I mean it in the most diverse sense. So certainly you have racial and ethnic diversity. Certainly you have gender diversity. But what about diversity in terms of, is everybody in the newsroom from the city? You know, who in the newsroom knows if spring wheat is planted, you know, in the spring or it's harvested in the spring? Who in the newsroom has been in the armed forces? Who in the newsroom has worked in blue collar jobs? Who in the newsroom goes to church and believes in God? I mean, these are all forms of diversity that need to be represented.
Kate [00:20:39] That's very interesting. And number three, Tom?
Tom [00:20:43] Number three would be keeping technology in perspective. We have way of going crazy over shiny new objects in the technology area and a good example is VR, virtual reality. So five years ago, whatever, virtual reality was going to be the thing. And this was going to be the end of the way that we told stories and yeah technology was kind of clumsy, that it was going to get better and we would have all these immersive experiences and so forth. Well, it didn't quite work out. Virtual reality turned out to be very hard and all sorts of ethical questions around it. And it just never took off. How much money was spent on that? How much time was spent running down the virtual reality rabbit hole? So, you know, time and people that could have been spent on something else. So you look at data science now. I mean, I think data science is very important, the ability to clean data, analyse data and prove things with it. But we have to be very careful. How is this data collected? Is it really relevant? You know, can data itself be prejudiced, particularly if it's not used in conjunction with some other data that proves, you know, another aspect to that? What about polling? There's a lot of polling and we're getting somewhat better at it, though I have doubts about the whole idea but anyhow, we do a lot of polling about what people think. But are we thinking about the impact of the poll itself? In the United States in 2016 the polls all showed that Hillary Clinton had like a 90 percent chance of winning. So a lot of her supporters said, oh OK, you know, so I don't have to go vote. So then she lost. So we have to think that even when we can scientifically prove something, does the fact that we then report it affect the experiment and does it change the outcome? So, you know, all these things about technology, we just have to be careful about what we devote our time and money to and how we use them for good instead of complicating our lives additionally.
Kate [00:23:05] I mean it does, you know, the advent of data and how you source data and how you interrogate it, because in the end, as the journalist, you're going to interrogate that data. How you programme your AI to write, generate stories and news content. All of it is a bright and huge new horizon that seems to bring an enormous number of ethical concerns as well. I know you've written on this, Tom. Can you share with us some of your own ethical concerns around these very new aspects of what must be a journalist's toolkit?
Tom [00:23:58] Well, certainly automatic news writing has its problems. We use it now for very specific, very limited situations, sports results, financial reports by companies. But as soon as it gets a little more complicated, then the question is, what do you want to use it for? Public relations people are very smart. They know what journalists like. They know at the moment we like structured data that we can turn it into automatic stories. In the United States, incidentally, there are six public relations people to every journalist these days. I don't know what the equivalent is in the U.K., but maybe it's on the same order. So we're always being offered structured data and let's suppose a political party comes to you and says, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna give you structured data on every single appearance by every one of our candidates nationwide. And for each appearance, we're gonna give you the date line where it happened. We're going to give you three key quotes. We're gonna give you the size of the crowd, we're going to give you the slogans that were posted behind the candidates. And with this, you can essentially generate an enormous amount of data. And for every every postal code, you'll be able to report when our candidate was there, what the candidate said. And all these details and all the parties might come to you and say, yes, you know, we'll give you ours and we'll give you ours. And after, I think, gee, this is great. You know, anybody in a given post code can see what candidates came on, what date, what they said. But are these essentially just press releases because you're not interrogating the candidates? You're not saying on the other hand, you're not fact checking them. You're just publishing it. But from a data science standpoint, it's great. And, you know, you can personalise down to the postal code and everything else. So we have to be very clear about how this stuff is being used. And then there are also other questions with with automated news writing, like, should there be a by-line on it? Should there not be a by-line on it? Should you identify that it was written by a machine? Should you not? Who's responsible if there's libel in it? Should the code behind it be something that is just public? You know, so there's no question about the transparency and how you put your stories together. Or is it proprietary? If you put it out as public, people might learn how to game it. You know, if there's a libel suit, you know, do you have to show this code in public and how the whole courtroom go through every every decision that was made by the machine in the formation of it? Are you going to let people contribute to a story automatically? That is to say in Scandinavia, there's some some automatic programmes that write sports results and then the coach for each team is allowed to send in by SMS his or her view of how the game went. And this automatically goes into the story without anybody checking it. You know, at what point is this just getting too cute and undermining some of the basics?
Kate [00:27:25] Yes. Yes. I mean, I think it's it's a it's a huge new area of concern as well as possibility. And you've indicated already that we really need to consider the basic needs, values and whether they are adequate, you know, whether we actually need new news values to cope with this new landscape.
Tom [00:27:52] Right. Absolutely. So our values going forward and principles should be the same values that we should all always subscribe to. But now it's more important because we live and die, not by advertising, but by clicks. And if you're not serving the Kansas City milk man the way he feels he needs to be served, he now has plenty of other options.
Kate [00:28:29] Yes. And you know, you've identified the fact that he's much better informed than you think he is and possibly than he was 30 years ago.
Tom [00:28:46] Yeah, that's absolutely true. And readers are informed not only by other information, but by disinformation. So the reader's mind is full of all sorts of stuff. And you have to recognise that. I know that the journalists you know, we used to say that, you know, when some crazy story was around or some crazy narrative was around, we would say, you know, I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. We're not getting into that, that's all crazy. You know, we're not even mentioning it. Now, I don't think we have that luxury. I think that if something is circulating and enough people believe it and enough people are talking about it, even though it's totally ludicrous, we need to get into it. And there's a danger, of course, that, you know, as you get into it, the more you talk about it, the more you'll give it dignity. But nonetheless, you know, there's an information war coming on here and I don't think that we can fight this war by just hunkering down and hoping that false narratives just collapse of their own weight.
Kate [00:29:58] Wow. That, Tom, sounds like pretty much a call to action for journalists.
Tom [00:30:04] I mean, it is. I mean, you know what are we here for? You know, this is a key moment in the development of democracy and the development of public consciousness. And I think that, you know, we have to understand very clearly what we stand for. And, you know, actually, a lot of journalism organisations never say. I mean, they don't have a mission statement. They may have like an ethical code or something like that, but where is the three-line mission statement? Why does this organisation exist? Or we could say, yeah, we're here to report the news and report the news fairly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's hard hard to disagree with that. But what are you trying to accomplish? What are the issues that you consider important? Do you have particular opinions or not? You know, there is a school of objective journalism saying, no, we don't have any opinions. We just report the news, whatever comes. We report. And that's OK. Well, you know, so be it. But then you have to say to yourself, is that really true? Do you care if, you know, if your country becomes a dictatorship with weapons? Well, yeah, we care about that. Well, OK, where's that in your mission statement? Are you for democracy? If you're for democracy, what does that mean? And if you're for democracy, what are you doing about it? So these are, in a way, uncomfortable questions for journalists, because we like to think that, you know, news sort of comes in all by itself and we treat it in some scientific objective way. But unless, you know what you're trying to accomplish, it's hard even to be an objective news organisation and we're often afraid to say that we believe in anything.
Kate [00:32:00] I think that's really interesting and it's very inspiring, actually. And I think that may be a really good place for us to end, Tom. Although, if I may just sneak in one final question. With your newly engaged and conscious journalist that has their own mission statement, what are the beats that journalists now need to take really seriously? I'm thinking of environment. I'm now thinking of, you know, health, science. What are the themes or the beats that they need to be not expert in, but they need to be serious about?
Tom [00:32:52] Well, let me first sneak in just a comment that none of what I've said about, you know, having a position on things means that I'm in favour of journalists engaging in propaganda. But I do think that people have to have a focus on what's important and talk about issues like democracy, you, freedom of speech and so forth that are so important. As for your question on what fields we need to be focussing on: certainly all those you mentioned, certainly disinformation. I think disinformation is a beat and that any news organisation should have somebody who specialises in disinformation and writes every single day about what are the fake narratives out there, what's the technology that's spreading disinformation and so forth. But outside of that, you know, I would say the big beat and the one that we've had the hardest trouble with is, excuse the expression, "ordinary people". I think that we have to have someone who is thinking all the time about what are the aspects of life out there that we do not write about the problems that people face in daily life, how to make their lives easier. Their, you know, the religious communities they live in, the social communities they live in, how people communicate, how you know, what resentments there are, what kind of polarisation there is, not from a political standpoint, but just from a daily social standpoint. And maybe, you know, maybe one beat is sort of to allude to what we were talking about earlier is, you know, sort of a good news beat, not, you know, just, oh, you know, this is wonderful, they had a bake sale and sold a lot of cookies. [INAUDIBLE] So the thrust is to, I guess, is sort of a mankind to beat, sort of a feeling about, you know, how is mankind coming together? Because, you know, sometimes I think that when we feel that, you know, the way to write a story is to get a person who is extreme on one side and a person is extreme on the other and there we're done. You know, we have to think about what is the story that we could write that focusses on the people in the middle and how the vast majority of people actually our position would be willing to compromise on this issue. It's the people at the extremes that keep them from doing that.
Kate [00:35:40] Tom, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for giving us your time and your insight.
Tom [00:35:46] Pleasure, thank you so much. All my favourite subjects.
Kate [00:35:52] Yes, mine, too. Now let's see if we can slip this question in. There is a U.K. Nigerian novelist called Chimamanda Ngozi, and she calls herself a journalist, even though she writes fiction. And in a podcast that I heard recently, she said there has been a failure of the liberal press because they have chosen not to seek and write about the truth. They have chosen simply to report news. What what do you make of that?
Tom [00:36:32] Well, I think she has something there. I think that news by itself tells you about immediate events. But it doesn't tell you about trends. And we try to pack, you know, a paragraph or two of context or explanation into the news stories. But we don't write enough about trends. And I mean, you know, by trend, I don't mean you take three things that happened in the last week and you write a wrap up at the end of the week. Let's take three things that happened in the last 20 years that that point, the three three phenomenon that are coming together in various ways. Now, this this is not a lot of journalists say, well, gee, I don't do that. I don't do history. You know, that's another department. But, you know, we'd better expand our minds and expand our historical perspective and our social perspective to think big thoughts, because the world demands that these days. And if we just are always just bouncing off what somebody said yesterday, I think we're going to panic ourselves into thinking that, you know, oh, my God, because somebody said this yesterday, you know, the world is over. You know, history's been going on for a long time. I suspect it will continue to go on for a long time. So, you know, everyone thinks that, we're at the fulcrum, this minute of world history. But usually that's not the case. Even with COVID, other stuff is going to happen. So let's try to keep some perspective.
Kate [00:38:13] And would you regard a journalist as a seeker after truth? Is it as simple as that?
Tom [00:38:21] Well, I think of a journalist as somebody who should pay attention to facts, provable facts. But when it comes to truth, in the sense of what is truth? I'm not the first to ask it, but the truth involves a sort of philosophical concept. And people can take the same facts and come up with completely different fact-based narratives [INAUDIBLE]. So this is where it becomes important to understand and to share with your readers. What do you believe? What do you stand for? And how do you choose to arrange facts to a particular end? I think that's why distinguished, honest historians can come up with different interpretations of things in history, all working from facts. And we have to understand that. There's no, you know, there's no machine that puts facts together in some scientific way unless we have some concept of what we're trying to accomplish, some concept of what society should be, then the ability to just get the facts. It's only part of our job.
Kate [00:39:47] Thank you so much. That has been so interesting.
Tom [00:39:50] Great. Well, thank you so much.