The News We Deserve: Media, Power & the Politics of Engagement

Susan Bordson, talks about how broadcast news and information sources shape public governance — not just through what’s reported, but through how we engage with it --"How We Reward Quality Journalism."  From headlines to policy, perception to power, the media we consume — and how we respond — directly impacts what we’re given next.

We dig into the moral responsibility of the news industry, the feedback loop between media and public behavior, and why media literacy isn’t optional — it’s essential for democracy.

Because the way we watch, click, and share doesn’t just reflect the news — it helps write it.

Status newsletter by Oliver Darcy (media and news industry)

Platformer newsletter by Casey Newton (tech)

Substack: Margaret Sullivan (news & journalism standards)

Reliable Sources from Brian Stelter

Lucas Shaw’s newsletter from Bloomberg

Podcasts:

By Puck News: The Powers That Be (features media news every Monday)

The Grill Room hosted by Dylan Byers

Hardfork – covers tech & AI featuring Casey Newton & Kevin Roose

Uncanny Valley by Wired Magazine

Powerlines by Oliver Darcy

Pivot with Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to Connections and Conversations, an Advocacy Arena podcast, working to increase civic engagement and strengthen our communities. Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Connections and Conversations. I'm so glad to have with me today, Susan Bortzen, who is someone that has been a part of our community for quite some time. And we lean on her for a lot of information around media and journalism. And that's why I've asked her here today. I'm so glad that she could join and talk to us a little bit about it. So welcome, Susan. say hello and give people just a little bit of background about yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

Well, Heidi, thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this. I'm really excited to have this conversation today because it's something that I think is very critical right now in our world and especially in our country. And I'm just really honored that you invited me to be part of the conversation. So I started out my career in news promotion for the local CBS affiliate here many years ago. And I worked in the Twin Cities market, which is a relatively large market, but it was also known for producing a lot of excellent award-winning investigative journalism. We kind of became the minor leagues farm team that sent a lot of journalists to major networks and markets and had a great reputation. And at that time, news production was seen as a critical, vital resource in the community, something to be valued. And I went into that with this idealistic mindset that we were providing a great public service in covering important things happening in our local region. After I left working in TV news promotion production, I went to a company that worked on communications project for large corporations that were involved in employee improving their performances. So communications for national sales meetings, annual meetings, that sort of thing. And there I learned working with Fortune 500 and 100 companies that working in the broadcast industry did not really teach me anything about the rest of the corporate world and basic best practices and things about marketing that at that time broadcasting was an industry sector that was very, very different from most other corporate sectors. So that was kind of an awakening for me and a big learning curve. And then after that, I worked for Thank you so much. is something that's very close to my heart and something that I'm highly concerned about, how it's impacting things about our public governance at this time.

SPEAKER_01: 3:23

Absolutely, which is why I invited you here, because I think it is important that we as citizens have media literacy. I think citizens in the U.S. are not that savvy as a whole, and I think it's important that we become more media literate. It's So I wanted to talk to you a little bit today. And first, we want to kind of start off with an overview of where we are right now as far as journalism and media as it pertains to the sources that we have traditionally kind of relied on to go to places for news. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00: 4:07

There are so many trends, big trends happening now, just like many other sectors, we're seeing change at a rate that is faster and almost harder to audit and examine as it's evolving. And a lot of that has to do with the convergence of different sectors as tech has evolved and has crossed over into these big Venn diagrams of media and news production and how it's distributed, gets involved with the tech aspect of it. It has created this churn of change in The rate this past decade has far surpassed the rate of change, let's say, from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. That's one of the biggest things is the rate of change. And that has influenced audience choices and behaviors. And our audience choices and behaviors then turn around and impact content that we see. And so overall, the biggest thing I'm concerned with is that We have sort of a cultural crisis. And I say cultural because it's not communication is a two way street. So there's the people that create the content and the information and the news we consume. And then we have, you know, there's supply and demand and the audience creates the demand side of it. And so we have a cultural crisis with the devaluation of accurate information and news. And a Accuracy is not winning the day in the overall attention economy. Accuracy is not what has been driving clicks and engagement metrics, but clicks and engagement metrics are what determine profitability. The people that produce any kind of content, any kind of information, and the news industry is a subsector in the attention economy, they are not incentivized to give us accuracy. That's not the top priority. The top priority is just making it compelling somehow. And overall, it's a problem.

SPEAKER_01: 6:23

Right. And as you said, I know one of the conversations we used to dig into a little bit when you would join us in our good trouble chat was how we respond to certain things and how that drives what they give us, as you said, supply and demand, and that it is not necessarily as profitable for companies to center. Newsmaking is just not a profitable industry any longer. So do you want to talk a little bit about that and our role in that?

SPEAKER_00: 6:58

Sure, I would. When we get frustrated with headlines that we don't think are quite accurate or are misleading, even from newsrooms that would like to view themselves or hope that they're viewed as less partisan, Because we know there are very partisan outlets. The thing to understand is there are very many layers of ownership, layers of management, layers of ownership above the people writing those headlines. And so it can feel like when we might have a valid point about a misleading headline and that sort of thing. The big picture is that like Paramount that owns CBS News, for example, has been losing billions of dollars. Warner Brothers Discovery that owns CNN has also been losing huge amounts of money and that rate of loss has been increasing. Comcast that owns NBC Universal, which owns NBC News, they are profitable, but not because of the news production. The parts that make Comcast profitable as far as their hardware, corporate, other things that they do, or Disney's theme parks, that sort of thing, they are subsidizing the news production. And so from shareholders and corporate owners point of view, producing quality news is a chore, something that they actually maybe want to cut out of. That's why they're moving more towards trying to find content that's profitable. So you see them moving into entertainment and sports. So we recently have just announced David Ellison, new owner of Paramount, has put$7.7 billion into the UFC fighting content, right, in order to get profitable content. While we also are expecting huge, huge cuts are coming in the CBS News division. And Amazon and Netflix are also trying to get deals for that UFC fighting content. So as we go from less linear watching and seeing stuff via cable and satellite with all these third parties in between getting the content to us, it's moving to streaming. That's where the growth is. That's direct to consumer way of distribution. And so to be profitable, you are going to give whatever the consumers are clicking on and wanting. And then as we see technology and devices change, now when you put on your smart TV If you have a smart TV, you see all these tiles up there that are algorithmically based, trying to push you to content that that TV is learning you like to click on and watch. And so more and more, we're getting fed into a system that reinforces our split second spontaneous reactions to what we want to see, pushing us, nudging us in subtle ways, what to watch. watch and then we get reinforced for whatever we watch and our tendency is to watch things that entertain us help us escape that's fine but usually the stuff the content that is examining and auditing public governance what our government officials are doing locally state federal level auditing how those actions are impacting outcomes and what those outcomes mean to us is not as compelling content for a lot of people. And so we've lost any sort of public service mission to do that. And entities like public broadcasting that do do it for the public interest and because of a public service mission, we see the Trump administration has been doing everything in their power to shut that down, to defund it, to discredit it, etc., So there's a big toxic soup of things happening with lots of different things going into the pot to make this a very dysfunctional news and information system. And it's not all of one thing. There's a lot of things impacting it, including us, the public, as audiences, our choices and our behaviors and how we interact with the content and what we reward with our viewing.

SPEAKER_01: 11:43

Right. And that is so important. And I appreciate you sharing that. And that is a reminder that you used to bring to our conversation quite often, encouraging us to help amplify and let the people who were providing that good, important, deep dive content that we appreciated it so that they would give us more of that. So we are part of this content equation, this news equation. So I think it's important that we understand the role that we play and And how we can help to improve it, improve our interaction a little bit. But also, because all of these things, they are, I feel like, very fluid right now, especially with this new administration. Things are changing and they will be continuing to change, I feel. It's important in such a state that we be well informed and we know those good sources to go to that we can rely on to provide us some good information. I'd like for you to talk a little bit about that. And we're going to, of course, in our show notes, provide some lengthier links and resources for people.

SPEAKER_00: 12:55

Well, there are some bright spots on the horizon that give me a little bit of hope that it won't always be this way. There has started to be a recognition by lots of important people that are as concerned about this as us. And we see more nonprofits emerging that are focused on sustaining local and regional news, trying to get people to go into the field, trying to figure out new business models for it. Some of them are larger and national. A lot of them are regional. We have more nonprofit newsrooms popping up that some are at the local level that are, there's some in Detroit, there's the Baltimore Banner, there's the Mississippi Free. In Minnesota, we have something called MinPost, high quality journalism that is run as a nonprofit to avoid corporate interests in influencing the content in any way. So if this is something of great concern to them, we can provide the list of these various nonprofits, like you said, in the show notes. And some are focused on the reporters. Some are focused on rural news so that we can try to address some of the news and information deserts we have around the country. We don't all get the same quality of content in terms of covering public governance specifically. Then there's like the News Literacy Project, which is a great nonprofit that's been growing and they focus on news and media literacy education in the schools and programs for community programs, school programs. So there's a lot of different nonprofits that people can seek out if they want to and try to support. And then the other thing that I would say is try to take special note. There are some smaller newsrooms. To give one example, Wired is a tech publication. That's their history. The editor-in-chief is Katie Drummond. She has been a courageous champion that has stood out because when Doge became a big story and you're trying to use tech to cut fraud in the Trump administration and all of that, and they brought in Silicon Valley types to do it, Wired was ready to go because the tech industry was their specialty and their area of expertise. And they went in and produced some of the best, clearest, courageous reporting on what Doge was actually doing and that it was actually not doing what it was claiming it was doing. So things we can do is when you do notice publications that are doing quality audits on the effectiveness and outcomes of public governance is to give a subscription to a smaller newsroom and give it clicks and that sort of thing. Go seek it out because I feel like that will do more good. At least you'll feel better about it because you'll be rewarding the people who are trying to do the good work and noble work versus just being mad at the corporate newsrooms that are not performing like we would like them to as far as being a check on governmental power at this time.

SPEAKER_01: 16:05

Right. Absolutely. And we know, as you said, things are changing. It's a very fluid situation. And one of the things that is having an effect in all of this change and playing a very big role is AI. Can you talk to us a little bit about that, perhaps?

SPEAKER_00: 16:23

Oh, wow. Well, it's just going to turbocharge everything, including impacting our news and information ecosystems. It's important to remember that any AI model is only going to produce accurate content depending on where it's getting its data from. from, where it's scraping data from. And so it's too early in the process to really have good audits on is AI really going to get smarter in terms of being more and more accurate? Or will there be ways that bad actors or inadvertently inaccurate data gets scraped into it? And now we're creating this churn where we've got tech-powered inaccuracy getting fueled out in some way, shape or form. It's so early. So people just have to really understand that if they're using cloud or chat GPT or any other AI tool for your own resourcing is the standard rules apply in that take all of it, but cross-reference, go to the links it supplies, audit the links that your AI tool is supplying and that sort of thing. Yes, it's going to be an incredibly helpful tool, but like any power tool, sometimes it's really great at causing some damages as well. So that's the important thing to understand. AI, it's only as good as the data it takes in and uses. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 17:55

Garbage in, garbage out.

SPEAKER_00: 17:58

And I just heard on one of the podcasts that I listened to is that it has, ChatGPT has now offered the government a big discount if they'll choose that AI tool. And right now, AI is so expensive. It's not a problem. But the investors and owners of these AI platforms believe so much in its future critical nature of it that they're still just pouring millions and millions of dollars into it, tons of resource into it, thinking about the future. Well, ChatGPT wants to get the government locked into using ChatGPT as its AI source, even if it creates even more loss for ChatGPT OpenAI at this point, because they want that AI. huge scale long term. So it's really hard to try to fathom ahead ramifications and outcomes and auditing whether there's going to be more positive or negative for us, the public, you know, at public's

SPEAKER_01: 19:01

interest. always check but verify and as we close out here I'm so glad that we had an opportunity to share this information with the audience because I do think that it is very important that we all really increase our media literacy and help to share that with others because we're in an information war and having access to good factual truthful information is very important I would like for you to kind of share with the audience some closing thoughts, insights, tips that you might want us to remember.

SPEAKER_00: 19:50

One main tip is just be very mindful of your own behaviors and what content you're rewarding with your engagement. And if you're a parent or a teacher or influencing others or your friends, remind them as well that their behaviors contribute to what we are going to see more of. The other thing I would say, if people are more interested in understanding the business side of it, the supply and demand market forces that are influencing this, I think it's important to understand that even if it frustrates us and makes us upset and it's not stuff we really want to know, we wish that there were corporate owners that wanted to produce journalism that audits and examines and covers and analyzes our government officials and their actions and the outcomes of all of that. just because they know it's good for the public to know these things so that we can be smarter voters and smarter consumers and all of that. But it's not going to happen. But I do think it's good to understand what's going on because that's a big part of what makes us smarter about being consumers. Right now, the commodity isn't the content. You have to think about our attention is the commodity.

SPEAKER_01: 21:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 21:09

The economy is our attention. And so if all we reward is entertainment and sports content, that is what we will see more of. And we haven't been rewarding quality journalism and it's not profitable. Long term, I think the smart people are realizing we can't rely on corporate for-profit newsrooms to do this work because their mission to make a profit is totally different. We do need nonprofits that have the mission of serving the public It's a completely different mission other than making a profit. One of the ways to keep up on the business is there are some free things that I recommend. Margaret Sullivan, who has an excellent substack, she had been the public editor at both the Washington Post and New York Times, and now she's independent. And she does an excellent job on covering how the journalism sector and its relationship directly to public governance and how they're often failing in how us sustain more effective public governance. Check her out. Then there are some for the media business side of it. If you want to pay for one newsletter subscription, the person I would recommend is subscribing to Status Newsletter by Oliver Darcy, because he covers the media industry and he's the one who most includes also morals and principles behind the work. And so that's important to him. And that differentiates him for example Sarah Fisher of Axios also covers the media industry but she's not as interested in morals values principles side of it that's going to be strictly what's business Brian Stelter there's still a free newsletter Brian Stelter from CNN it's called Reliable Sources at this point CNN's trying to move to a subscription model at this point that newsletter is still free and a lot of times quality newsrooms like Bloomberg Lucas Shaw who covers the media industry there He offers a newsletter himself. So if you can find media reporters who work in large newsrooms, it's become more common now that they do their own individual newsletter. And a lot of times, if you don't want to subscribe to the newspaper or news publication, you can still get newsletters from people who cover that industry. And that resource is free. There's also a number of podcasts to follow for tech. I recommend a subscription newsletter by Casey Newton is called Platformer, but he also does a free podcast once a week called Hard Fork with the New York Times Media Reporter. So Hard Fork, if you like to listen to content, is excellent about covering media and tech, and they absolutely do cover morals and values involved in that industry. So that's why I like them. The Powers That Be is a podcast from Puck News, and every Monday they focus on media. So again, that one won't cover media. morals and values and principles as much, you'll get strictly the business of what's going on in media. And then Puck also has Dylan Byers, who's their journalism media reporter. He has a podcast called The Grill Room. So once you start finding some of these, you can realize that you can still get access to reporters' work that cover these sectors through newsletters and podcasts, even if you don't want to have a whole bunch of paid subscriptions to the larger publication they work for.

SPEAKER_01: 24:41

Excellent. So thank you so much. As always, excellent insights and tips and resources. And we will be providing a more lengthy list in the show notes. And again, I just want to thank you for taking a little bit of time out of your day, making us more media literate. Thanks so much, Susan.

SPEAKER_00: 25:04

Thank you, Dee. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 25:07

Thank you. What are you doing? Thank you.