Risa Levine:
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon from all around the world. My name is Risa Levine, and I'm a member of Brandeis Class of 1983. I serve as vice president of the Alumni Association Board of Directors. And if anybody is interested, I represent your interests. So, please feel free to get in touch with me any time. You can let me know on the chat if you're interested in my contact information. Before we begin the program, just a quick logistical note. There'll be some time for Q&A at the conclusion of the conversation. Please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen to submit your questions. We'll try to get to as many questions as possible.
Risa Levine:
I'm just going to give you a couple of highlights of each of our speakers tonight. If we went through their complete bio we wouldn't have time for any discussion. Two incredibly special ladies, and I'm excited to hear what they have to say having just had a few minutes to get to know them. First, Eileen McNamara is a professor of the practice of journalism at Brandeis. As a former news editor of The Justice, I wish that we had had a professor like Eileen McNamara when I was there. As a reporter and columnist for the Boston Globe, she won an individual Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and contributed to the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the clergy sex abuse scandal in the arch diocese of Boston. I suspect many of you saw the movie, Spotlight, which featured that story and in which she plays a role. Her most recent book, Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World, was published in 2018.
Risa Levine:
Maura Jane Farrelly is an associate professor in, and chair of the American Studies program at Brandeis. Before joining the Brandeis faculty, she worked as a full time reporter. First for Georgia Public Radio, in Atlanta. And then for The Voice of America in Washington DC and New York. She also freelanced for National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Her current research project is entitled, Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy and the Closing of the American Frontier. It uses the lives of three people in Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century to explore a topic that touches the experiences of many Americans today. The right to be forgotten.
Risa Levine:
We're so thrilled to welcome both Professor McNamara, and Professor Farrelly for this special event. Thank you for your participation. And now ...
Eileen McNamara:
Hello.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Hey.
Eileen McNamara:
Here we are. Okay, so we wanted to begin our evening with you all to say thank you for coming. Thank you for joining us. We know an evening is special time that you don't necessarily want to listen to two professors. So, we're really kind of thrilled that you're here. We wanted to start on a quiet note by excoriating NBC ... I'm sorry, I wanted to begin by excoriating NBC for today offering President Trump time opposite Vice President Biden to have a town hall on NBC's airwaves. In effect, they were affording the president, who had a bit of a tantrum last week and canceled participation in the debate that was supposed to be held tomorrow night, because he didn't want to have to debate virtually.
Eileen McNamara:
So, I think this is an abomination. And I think it's an indefensible decision.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
So, Mac, what would you say if I could just channel NBC here for you? The official line that they are giving is that they did a town hall with Biden back on, I think it was October 5th, and that they are simply giving equal time now to President Trump, with a town hall.
Eileen McNamara:
Yes, well that rationale is absurd, as you know, because after all they're giving it at the exact same moment that the vice president is on a competing channel. So, by all means if you want to give the toddler in chief time, give it to him, but don't give it to him at the same time that ABC is hosting Vice President Biden. It's simply absurd. Our job in journalism is to serve the American people. How is this serving voters? They can't watch both programs at the same time.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I guess I sort of wanted ... By the way, y'all, we don't have a plan here. Eileen and I have both been teaching on Zoom all day, so it's not like we really had much of a chance to talk about what we were going to say here. But I do want to ask you for your thoughts on just the whole notion of the televised presidential debates themselves. I have to say, here Mac always loves this when I point this out. That she's a little bit older than I am.
Eileen McNamara:
Just a little.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
My whole memory has been a period when there have always been vice presidential debates. The very first presidential election I can recall was the election of '76, and we've had televised presidential debates ever since then. But you know, I was looking some stuff up. That very first debate, only about 3% of American voters said that their minds were changed by the debate. And that number has remained pretty consistent for the last 40, 50 years. The debates don't help people make up their minds.
Eileen McNamara:
So, we have this mythology about debates, in my mind. And the mythology is that we have debates for very serious purposes. That we have them so that the American electorate can hear the competing ideas of the two political candidates. That the vast undecided block can use this opportunity to make up its mind having heard the two candidates talk about the issues. That's never what debates were.
Eileen McNamara:
You often hear journalists and historians criticize debates because they aren't as lofty as the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Or as long, thank goodness.
Eileen McNamara:
Or as long. I mean, those lasted for hours and hours, and they weren't that damn lofty truth be told. There was music and there was dancing, and there was destruction. American politics has always been a raucous business. The debates of course first began in 1960 with JFK and Nixon debating. And there were four debates, and people only remember the first one. And they remember it for all the wrong reasons. They remember it for this mythology that grew up about that debate. That John Kennedy was just so handsome and powerful, and he was tanned from having been down in Florida, at his family's estate. Richard Nixon was recovering from an infection because he'd banged his knee on a campaign visit to North Carolina.
Eileen McNamara:
Those things are all true, but Jack Kennedy had a permanent tan because Jack Kennedy had Addison's disease, and one of the characteristics of Addison's disease is it turns your skin darker. He looked like a robust, healthy young man, which he was not because he was taking steroids for Addison's disease. So, in some ways the 1960 debates are perfect because they created this notion that it's all about image. But what you were seeing was not reflective of reality. Yeah, Jack looked better than Nixon, but he wasn't physically healthier. In fact, he was an unhealthy man.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And you know, what I've always wondered about that as somebody ... Again, I'm not really trying to emphasize our age difference here, but I wasn't around-
Eileen McNamara:
But this is the second time you've done it.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Second time. I wasn't around. But, whenever I teach that, I've gone and I've looked at the videos and I know Nixon supposedly looked terrible to people because he was pale and he was sweaty. I don't see it. I have to see, I don't see the way the debate-
Eileen McNamara:
Well, you need new glasses. I mean, you might be a young woman but you definitely need an eye glass upgrade.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Right. I know. But he doesn't look as horrible as you would think he did to read about those debates. And I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is I was looking, of the 11 debates that we've had since 1976, Gallup always polls people immediately after the debates. And the candidate whom the polls indicate won the first debate has actually gone on to win the election only three times. It was Reagan in 1980 and Bill Clinton in '92, and then Obama in 2008.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But the other thing that's interesting is that in the case of Dukakis in '88, people had him winning that very first debate. And then you read the way he was written about in the press. You know, "He's cold." And I went and I looked at that video. His response to the Kitty getting raped thing, that does strike me as a little bit cold. But apparently it didn't strike viewers as cold, but it struck the media as cold.
Eileen McNamara:
It was a ridiculous question. Let's put that on the ...
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But the same thing with Al Gore with all of his sighing in 2000.
Eileen McNamara:
Right.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
The immediate reaction of the people polled by Gallup was that Gore won the first debate. And yet, you look at the way he's written about, the pressed went after him for the way he sighed consistently.
Eileen McNamara:
Well, exactly. Think about the way the press covers debates. We're nothing if not schizophrenic in the media. So, we have this lofty ideal that we tell the American people, "This is what debates are for. They're to talk about public policy, and they're to elevate the conversation, and they're to help you make up your mind about this very important election." I've already said they're not about that. But the other thing we do is we cover the debates and we don't write about the public policy, we write about people's gaffs.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Binders of women.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. Right. So, poor Mitt Romney talked about his binders of women. Really, what did that have to say about Romney? Nothing, except that his elocution was not great that evening. Poor Gerald Ford said that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in his debate with Jimmy Carter.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Multiple times. That's a double banger.
Eileen McNamara:
And well, he doubled down on it. I think he sort of felt under the gun. I think he probably knew that there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Oh, and of course. Here's one that is incredibly unfair. Dan Quail, who in the vice presidential race of 1988, he's up against Senator Lloyd Benson. And he says legitimately, "I'm not this callow young man that you're portraying me as. I've got as much experience in the congress as John F Kennedy had when he ran for the presidency of the United States." And that's true. But that's not what we remember. What we remember is Lloyd Benson saying, "Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, and you Senator, are no Jack Kennedy."
Eileen McNamara:
Well, devastating. Absolutely devastating. But, on the merits, Quail was right. Jack Kennedy was as callow a young man as he was when he ran for the presidency. And this guy was running for vice president. So, I think we love to jump on the dramatic thing, or the mistake. And those mistakes that we jump on are things that are just reinforcing what the public already thinks about somebody. So, George Herbert Walker Bush keeps looking at his watch during his debate with Clinton, who he thinks Bill Clinton is a lightweight. And he really, you know, "Is this thing over yet?" So, we sort of think of him as an entitled aristocratic fellow who doesn't really want to be on stage with this Arkansas yahoo. And that's what the press wrote about.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
You know, I wonder-
Eileen McNamara:
I don't think the election turned on that moment.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
No. But you talk about how the debates end up sort of confirming the ideas of the candidates that people already have. Something I've been thinking a lot about lately in trying to understand what exactly is going on in the United States right now.
Eileen McNamara:
Let me know when you find out.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Yeah. I go for runs, and that's when I think about these things. And today I was just thinking about how it seems that a lot of voters have become very cynical about not just politics and politicians, but they've become cynical about government. That they don't necessarily expect government to do anything good. And that they're ... I wonder to what extent then, that they are tuning into politics for entertainment purposes. And I'm wondering, it's not just the debates that are doing this. I definitely think the pundits ... I think television is a big part of it.
Eileen McNamara:
Right.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
As you know, Mac and I go out and we talk to alum groups a lot and usually before the alum groups, people will come up to us and they'll complain about something in the media. And I always say, "Which media? Which part of the media are you talking about?" Because I think there's a vast degree of difference between newspapers and television, and then even between broadcast television and cable television. And certainly the pundits on cable television are facilitating this idea of politics as entertainment. But do you think that the debates are contributing to that as well? And that's a leading question, I know.
Eileen McNamara:
Sure they are, but I'm not certain that I think that's a bad idea. I mean, when you think about the size and the diversity of this country, television isn't what it was in the 1960s. The fireplace that we gathered around at 6 o'clock to listen to Uncle Walter tell us the news. You don't remember that Maura, because of course, you're much younger than I am. But there was a time when there were three networks, and people did watch the evening news as a family together. It was an important ritual. So, that's gone. Everybody remembers the weekend that President Kennedy was assassinated because they were all in front of their television for three days except for bathroom breaks, to watch that pageantry and tragedy unfold.
Eileen McNamara:
We don't have that now. But every four years Americans watch the debates. Not all of them, because tragically in this country not everybody votes. But the people that vote all get around the same television screens or their phones, and they watch those debates. Are they watching them for the lofty policy discussions? No, probably not. Maybe they're looking for the gaffs, they're looking for the fight, they're looking to see ... But the next day, when they go to work ... Not this year, because nobody goes to work anymore. But the next day they talk about it. "Did you watch the debate? Of course, I watched the debate."
Eileen McNamara:
And that alone has value, because it says we are all part of this common wheel. This United States of America includes me, and it includes you, and we're invested in what happened at that ridiculous debate last night. I don't know. I think that's a value.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I think you're right. I actually looked up the numbers. In 1996, there were 46 million Americans who tuned into the first debate, and in 2016, there were 84 million Americans who tuned into the first debate. This past time, it dropped down to 73.
Eileen McNamara:
Right.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But I get what you're saying. I think I agree with you that there's value in that. The water cooler talk that comes out of it. But it was also value in that for the networks.
Eileen McNamara:
Oh, yes.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
The advertising spots. Obviously they don't advertise during the debates. But the advertising spots for the conversation afterwards. In the first debate in 2016, a typical 30 second network spot for that debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ran anywhere from $170,000, to $200,000 dollars for a 30 second block. In that time period in the Eastern time zone, a typical 30 second commercial costs about $70,000 dollars. So, they were making a lot of money. The four debates together in 2016, counting the VP debate, generated $19.7 million dollars for the networks just in advertising revenue.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. So, obviously the platforms that are carrying it have this incredible incentive, which amazingly Les Moonves, who was the head of CBS in 2016. Now gone to the place where so many obnoxious white men have gone since, in the era of Me Too, into early retirement. But Les Moonves famously said in 2016 about Donald Trump, "Hey, it may be very bad for the country. But it is very good for CBS." Because they were making a bundle on people who were tuning in to watch the show. They were not coming to CBS to see elevated debate about public policy. They were coming to watch the show. And it was in the interest of the networks and cable television to keep it coming. Keep the show running as long as it could. And it is really depressing that by the decision that NBC has made this morning, that that is still what is motivating them. Not their responsibility to the American people during a pandemic.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Right. Right. So, I don't know. Should we turn it over to people? I'm looking and I see like seven or eight things in the chat, but I don't actually know what that means.
Eileen McNamara:
Okay, I don't either. But I think we have a moderator, Sharon, who's going to help us with this. I don't think that we have to look at the chat to get the questions. I think Sharon's going to actually intervene and helps us out with that.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes, it'll be my pleasure. Thank you Maura. Thank you Eileen. Yes, we have about six or seven questions that I can see. And participants please feel free to keep adding questions and we'll get to as many as we can. So, to get us started, our first question. Is the journalism and broadcasting profession culpable in frequently focusing on a candidates' "expectations" prior to each debate? Voters don't discuss or talk about expectations. Seems like the campaigns manipulate the media. What are your thoughts on that?
Eileen McNamara:
You want to take that Maura, or I'll happy to.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
You go ahead, because this is a two part question. So go ahead, let me see.
Eileen McNamara:
Okay. So in short, yeah. Yeah. Of course. Journalists write about the horse race. And so, the horse race is all about expectations. And there's this phenomenon that happens here in Massachusetts every four years. So, somebody is going to win this presidential race, hopefully sometime in November. Maybe December. I don't know. But somebody's going to win. And in January, all the bright and brilliant people in the journalism profession and the politics profession are going to gather at the Kennedy School of Government over in Cambridge. And they're going to have a big round table discussion about what went wrong in the coverage of the campaign. And they're going to say exactly the same things they said four years ago, and eight years ago, and all the years before that, which is why don't you focus on the issues? Why do you focus on the expectations game? Why do you focus on the polls? Because as we all know, polls are a snapshot in time. They tell us something about right now, this minute. They tell us nothing about three weeks from now.
Eileen McNamara:
So, yeah. I mean, all I can tell you is that it's easier. There's a lot of great public policy issue coverage in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, and in the Boston Globe and in the LA Times, and in newspapers all over this country. And on the PBS News Hour and on Frontline. There are ways in which journalism goes deep. But in the day to day campaign coverage, it's all about the horse race. And we know it's wrong, and we keep doing it.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And especially when you have 24 hours of news that you have to fill up. I mean, the horse race, say what you will about it, it fills up time. It takes up space. And as far as the polling is concerned, at this point there is a whole infrastructure that has been built up. Lots and lots of jobs are dependent upon polling in this country. People actually graduate from schools like Brandeis and go and work for polling firms. And you know, they're deeply dependent. It's this reciprocal relationship between the networks and the polls. And you're going to have to change the whole infrastructure to get away from that.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. And you have to change your priorities. I mean, if 2016 taught us nothing, it taught us not to trust the polls, right?
Maura Jane Farrelly:
We're doing it again.
Eileen McNamara:
We're doing it again, right.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Instead we're talking about how the polls are better and why the polls are better.
Eileen McNamara:
Well, yeah. We'll see. We'll see.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Yeah.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. I'm actually going to combine two questions that are very similar here, and they're both about Fox News and Trump. One's, do you think the elimination of the fairness doctrine allowed the rise of Fox News and ultimately Donald Trump? Do you think it should be brought back? And then another question that goes along with that says, should an organization have a license to use the public airways if they are a quasi campaign organization? Specifically referring to Fox News.
Eileen McNamara:
You go first this time Maura.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Well, I don't know that you can draw a direct line between the demise of the fairness doctrine and Fox News. There's a 10 year period there between-
Eileen McNamara:
Right. I mean, the Fairness doctrine was revoked in 1987, so ...
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I mean, what does happen is the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon happens shortly after that. I mean, it's within a year of the fairness doctrine. So, I don't want to suggest that there's no connection whatsoever, but I don't know that it can be put squarely at the feet of the disappearance of that doctrine. And I'm not really sure how much good that doctrine was doing in the first place. But the horse is out of the barn on that one. Would I be in favor of licensing for a station that is really a campaign mouthpiece? Is that what the question was? I'm not sure I quite understand.
Eileen McNamara:
Well, the FCC issues regulations. I mean, they issue licenses, right, for broadcast-
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Everybody is licensed to use the air waves. That's why I don't understand was there a suggestion that there should be an additional license.
Eileen McNamara:
Well that maybe that Fox I think the suggestion is shouldn't qualify for it, since Roger Ailes, who is a Republican strategist, founded it for the express purpose of it being a mouthpiece for the Republican party.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I mean, what is the case is that when the licensing initially started, because the idea behind it is that the stations, whether we're talking about radio or television, that the stations need to use something that does not belong to them in order to deliver their content. They need to use the air waves, and that belongs to all of us, and so it will be regulated by the institution that supposedly represents all of us. And it was the case for a number of years that stations would have to satisfy what were known as Blue book rules. That they would have to have a certain percentage of their content that was devoted to the public interest. And the public interest was defined as information that was about education or politics, or economics, or children's programming. Interestingly, religious information was also considered to be a part of the public interest.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And those were fairly rigorously enforced initially, but they really started to go by the wayside in the 1970s and 80s. And it might be interesting to have a conversation about whether Bluebook rules should be revived, and if so, what would we use as our guiding principles? What expectations would we have for these stations that are technically using a commodity that does not belong to them? But you know then cable is something else entirely.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. That's a whole other kettle of fish.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Right, and so-
Eileen McNamara:
But broadcast, for broadcast you could say, I mean what those rules were was there had to be demonstrated programming in the public interest. So, just take Boston. Every television station in Boston had public programming about public policy every week. Now, was it on Sunday? Yeah, when maybe not everybody's watching it. But channel 7, channel 5, and Channel 4, all had their own round table conversations about politics. They had policy makers on. They were actually really good programming. The woman who was the state house bureau chief at Channel 5 quarterbacked one of those programs on Channel 5, and it was really excellent programming. They're all gone. There isn't a single program like that left in Boston.
Eileen McNamara:
And why? Because there's no mandate anymore to do it because it was part of the fairness doctrine. You'll never get the fairness doctrine back because both parties pose it for different reasons. Everybody says-
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Filibuster.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. You're right. Everybody says-
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Kamala supports the filibuster.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. Everybody says it's about free speech. But, nah, it's not really. Sometimes it's about free speech and unfettered speech. But as Maura says, we're talking about use of the public airways. Why do they get to hijack my airways and do what they want with it without any public responsibility to me. You'd have to rethink it. It has to be refashioned for the digital age, for the 21st century.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And I mean, the other complication with this is the reality that when we talk about television broadly speaking, but also when we talk about television news, we are talking about it's not a public service. It's a for profit endeavor, and it's not just a for profit endeavor. It's a for profit endeavor being done by a publicly traded company.
Eileen McNamara:
Right.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And there's a reason that the networks stopped broadcasting public interest programming as soon as they were no longer being forced to. And that it was this big black hole in their budgets.
Eileen McNamara:
It was a big black hole in their budget, but there was a time. There was a time when CBS understood that CBS News was a loss leader. It wasn't there to make money. It was there to serve the public. It had a documentary unit. So, you would see documentaries on gun control and all kinds of topics. You know, hour long documentaries that were very, very well done. Now you have to go to PBS to Frontline to see that kind of programming. The networks don't do any of that anymore.
Eileen McNamara:
But now they expect their news programs to make money. So, tune in to the evening news, and you'll see first of all, all the advertising is not direct to Maura, because she's a young woman. It's direct to people like me. It's all drugs for constipation, and all kinds of, diabetes. All kinds of stuff. So, it's all drug pharmaceutical advertising. And on the news program, inevitably the second story is a weather story. You know? There's a tornado in Missouri. There's a hurricane somewhere. And these aren't stories that are about Katrina. These are just every week. Oh my God, it's raining in New York. And there's a reason they do those stories. Because they don't have the money anymore. They don't have anybody in Beirut. They don't have anybody even in London. They don't have foreign bureaus anymore. They don't invest in their news operations, because they're unwilling to understand that journalism, which is what CBS News is supposed to be, isn't about making money. It is about a public service.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And that phenomenon ... I have no idea who's listening to us right now. If there are any recent alums who took my advertising in the American news media class will know that that phenomenon that Mac just described really can be traced to a particular year. It was the 1979, 1980 viewing season. And CBS News turned a profit that year, and that wasn't the expectation. Nobody really knew why. Immediately all of the financial uppity ups start asking why is it that the news desk actually turned a profit. And one of the biggest driving forces was the Iranian hostage crisis, which was a very inherently dramatic story. Everybody wanted to tune in each night to see, "Is it going to be over tonight?"
Maura Jane Farrelly:
So, it's very dramatic, but it didn't cost that much money to produce, because you couldn't get in there. You couldn't get into-
Eileen McNamara:
Right. You couldn't cover it.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
So, the formula then is drama with low expenses on the production end.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. So, what was one of the most popular news programs, was Nightline, where Ted Koppel is there at 11:30 at night. People are staying up and they're not watching Johnny Carson. They're watching Ted Koppel talk about day 421 of the hostage crisis. Right. So, news is entertainment.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Yeah. That was what we said in answer to that question.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you. I'm going to combine a couple questions about social media. One is, do you think that social media have replaced the role of journalism as it was, and may well determine winners of primaries and the general election? And then another question about social media saying, in what way would social media and the accessibility of it augment the dangers of misinformation about politics, and increase in anti intellectualism in the American populace? How can proper bread and butter journalism help fix this?
Eileen McNamara:
Oh, I just saw Maura's eyes light up because somebody said, "Anti intellectualism in American life." All right, go Maura.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
This woman knows me. This woman knows me.
Eileen McNamara:
Go.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Well, I mean, is social media going to replace journalism?
Eileen McNamara:
No.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
No, it's not. And this is one of the things that in conversations that I have with people, I'll often stress. They talk about, "Young people nowadays. Young people are not reading newspapers. They're just going to social media." Well, what are they reading on social media? A lot of the time, what they're reading ... Not all the time. But a lot of the time, what they're reading is stuff that was created by journalists working for newspapers. Young people do still read newspapers. They don't read them the way we maybe still read them, or the way we used to read them. And I think there are both benefits and drawbacks to the way they read. They're very, very piece meal. They can be very siloed in terms of the kinds of news stories that they read. I think that's the bad effect that social media can have.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But social media for the most part is not producing news. Or if it is producing news, it's not producing detailed news. It's not producing good news. So, social media is a delivery system. It's a delivery system that is threatening news in that it is making it more difficult for news producers to pay their bills. This is one of the things that ever since the internet got started, newspapers have been struggling with this. The New York Times responds to the internet immediately by putting up a pay wall. That was a bad decision on their part, because it just meant that nobody was reading the New York Times. And so, they get rid of the pay wall, and then they come up with a modified pay wall. There's discussion about whether social media sites like Facebook should be kicking some of their revenue back to the news generators, the institutions that are actually spending the money to generate the news.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But social media is not journalism. I'm not going to say that it never will be. But it's not even close to it now. I'm sorry Sharon. Could you talk about the second part of the question there?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Sure. It was about the misinformation part?
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Sharon Rosenberg:
In what way would social media, and the accessibility of it, augment the dangers of misinformation about politics, and the increase in anti intellectualism in the American populace? How can proper bread and butter journalism help fix this?
Eileen McNamara:
Well, bread and butter journalism can't fix it. Personally I think Facebook and platforms like it need to be regulated like public utilities, because they aren't journalism. And they don't augment misinformation, they broadcast misinformation, and they don't take it down. And I don't care what Zuckerberg says, he is not committed to getting misinformation off that platform. He just wants to expand that platform. And he's undermining democracy. And not just here at home. He's undermining it around the world. Because there are a lot of smart people out there who have figured out how to hijack those algorithms, and how to create bots. To create people that don't exist.
Eileen McNamara:
I mean, how did pizza gate get propagated? I mean, the idea that there is a little pizza shop in Washington DC, and in the basement, John Podesta and Hillary Clinton are like the masterminds of a child exploitation ring. For one thing, there is no basement in that pizza parlor. There's no basement. But somebody believed the nonsense that's on those social media platforms enough to show up at that pizza shop with an AK-47 and to discharge it. It's a miracle nobody got killed. And now we've got QAnon, and we've got even more fantastical conspiracy theories out there. They don't exist without social media. Social media has nothing to do with journalism. I mean, journalism spends all the time knocking down the nonsense that's spread on social media.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
What I would say, and believe me, I'm not trying to defend the misinformation on social media by any stretch of the imagination. But something that I've been really aware of ... I can't believe that I'm going to actually get to talk a little bit about the research project that I'm doing now. But I'm looking at three people who sort of got caught in the media snare in the late 19th century. And left the east coast, they came from prominent east coast families. They left the east coast and went out to Wyoming to try and go west and start over. And you start over by being forgotten. But, oh gosh, it's Wyoming in the 1890s. You're not taking a Conestoga wagon out there. You're taking the train. It doesn't take three months, it takes four days. The telephone goes out there, the telegraph goes out there and so they're not able to be forgotten and start over.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But one of the things that's been challenging to me in looking at the news coverage of them from the late 19th century, and realizing that it was everywhere. It would start in New York, it would start in Boston, and because of the wire services, because of things like the Associated Press, a very well respected wire service now. Absolute lies. I mean, you want to talk about misinformation, just complete lies about these people would be published on the east coast, and then they'd be picked up by papers in Salt Lake City and in Sacramento, and in St Louis. And so, I guess what I'm getting at is the idea of misinformation is not a new phenomenon in American history. The idea of technology, newfangled technology like Western Union facilitating the dissemination of that misinformation is not a new phenomenon either.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
What is new is that the dissemination made possible by social media is so much greater than the dissemination that was made possible by the wire services. But I mean, some of these lies were picked up by newspapers in Australia. I'm able to read newspapers in Victoria state Australia that replicates some of this misinformation about these people. And I don't know. I get like this sometimes as a way of calming myself, I suppose. That whenever I start to feel terribly anxious about what is happening to my country right now, I take a step back, and I try and find a parallel in history, just so that I can be reminded that we are very rarely the first people to be having the fears that we're fearing, or the anxiety that we're feeling. Or anything like that.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But it is ... What we're seeing now is different in terms of the degree of magnitude by a long shot, but I'm not sure that it is a brand new phenomenon.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you. Just to give everyone some context, we have nearly 30 questions in the Q&A box. We will get to as many of them as we can. This one, Maura specifically for you. As a voice of America alum, can you please comment on the impact of the leadership turnover on its ability to perform its mission without partisanship and what this means for its target audience abroad?
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Everybody I know that I used to work with has left. That's what I will say. From what I have heard ... With the people that I worked with, I was only in touch with three people who were still there, and they've all left within the last three months. Morale is extraordinarily bad. From what I've heard, it's never been as bad as it has been at VOA. When I worked for VOA, I was very proud to be working for VOA, I have to say that. I know for Americans who had no idea what it was, or just had a passing understanding of what voice of America was, they would think of it as a propaganda engine. I never would've worked for a propaganda engine. We have had and still have a charter that guarantees editorial independence from the State Department. The Voice of America operates under the State Department, but because of this charter that dates back to the Ford Administration, they are supposed to have complete editorial independence.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
When I was working there, one of our reporters in the Pashtun language service had snagged an interview. It was about a Mullah Omar Muhammad, who was second in command in the Taliban after Osama Bin Laden. And we broadcast about 20 seconds of that interview, of that 10 minute interview, and the State Department had a conniption. Colin Powell was in charge of the State Department at that point in time. And there was a lot of blow-back in the news room, but our news director stuck to his guns. And eventually, the State Department ended up giving our news director some award that supposedly existed in the State Department, except nobody had ever gotten it before Neil got it. And it was the creative dissent award, given out by the State Department.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I have a good friend that I'm still very close to who grew up in the Soviet Union. And he used to tell me about how when Chernobyl happened, he grew up in the Republic of Georgia, well it was the Soviet Union at that point. That they all turned not just to VOA, but to VOA's English language service, because VOA broadcast in Russian, Georgian, and in English. And the notion of broadcast news in Russian was so severely tainted by task, that they didn't trust anything that they heard in the Russian language. But they turned to VOA English to find out what was happening in their own country with regard to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I go back and forth as to how much VOA is still needed in the world. There are pockets of the world where it is still needed. North Korea, it is still needed. You pretty much cannot get any signal into North Korea except for a short wave radio signal. And that's what VOA uses in most of its international programming. It is next to impossible to stop short wave radio, and so they're not able to block that. There are pockets of the world where I think VOA is still needed. I would be hard pressed to say it's absolutely essential today. But, if we're going to have it, if we're going to be funding it, it needs to have editorial independence.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I said the charter is there. So what? That's the thing that is so remarkable about this administration is that we've kind of taken it for granted that because there are traditions and rules, that those traditions and rules are always going to be followed. And that's not the case.
Eileen McNamara:
That would be wrong.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you. Another question. Given that media corporations make so money from campaigns, what are your views on public financing of campaigns? What are your views on profitability versus accuracy of coverage?
Eileen McNamara:
Well, I'll take the first part. Yeah, let's start publicly financing campaigns tomorrow. Oh wait, that's not going to happen. Yeah, of course. We should have publicly financed campaigns and they should be a whole lot shorter. I mean, really, do you want to spend two years thinking about the next president, when the current president is only two years into his term? No you do not. But because of money in politics, you will. You might actually be spending three years watching campaigns unfold. And you know how you fix that? You get Congress to change the law, because citizens United, the decision by the Supreme Court said that money is speech, and you can't restrict it. So, Congress can-
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Constitutional amendment. Good luck with that.
Eileen McNamara:
Yeah. None of that is going to happen. So, of course, the logical solution because we can't have campaign finance reform because money is speech according to the Supreme Court. So, yeah, that's the great idea. But it's not going to happen. So, what do we do short of that? And I was going to throw the second part of that question to you for a reason, and I can't remember what the second part is.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Well, I was just going to back up what you were saying about how publicly financed campaigns is a wonderful idea. Good luck with that. It's coming back to what I was saying earlier about the polling companies, and the relationships between the for profit television news outlets and the polling companies, and how you have this whole infrastructure that has been built up in hundreds and hundreds of jobs that exist because of the way we do things. That is also the case with how campaigning happens. And for that reason, I think we're stuck with really expensive campaigns for quite some time. But it is possible. The existence of the infrastructure makes it difficult for there to be changes. But again, coming back to some of what I've been looking at for this research project I'm doing.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
One of the people I'm researching was a state law maker from New York who was the first person to propose what was known as the Australian ballots, which was this really unbelievably radical idea. That a state should take on the obligation of printing the ballots in every election rather than letting the political parties be the ones that print the ballots, and that the ballots should have the names of every candidate who is running for office. Not just the candidates who are running for office from the party that is printing the ballots.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And South Australia is the first English speaking state in the world to have this kind of ballot, which is why it's called the Australian Ballot. And he pushes for it and it fails. And New York continues to have this situation where political parties would print ballots in newspapers, and they would print them in different colors so that not only could people who are illiterate know whether they were having a Republican ballot, or a Democratic ballot. But also, the poll watchers could tell whether you were plopping the ballot in the box that you had been paid to plop, because you're plopping a red ballot rather than a black ballot. I mean, there's lots and lots of corruption that was associated with the old way of doing things. A whole campaign infrastructure that had been built up hundreds of jobs that people held, they were organized around this old way of voting, where political parties were the ones who made the ballots, not state authorities.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And that did eventually change. And the existence of an infrastructure that was designed to maintain the old way of doing things made it harder for the change to happen. It made it take a lot longer than it probably should have. But change did eventually happen. I'm not going to be holding my breath for public financing of campaigns, though.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. We have a few questions about fact checking by the media, including what role should journalists play in reporting when politicians lie? Is it even possible to play a role given the sheer volume of Trump's lies?
Eileen McNamara:
Okay. So, fact checking is another word for reporting. I mean, I get it that there are things like PolitiFact. And the Washington Post has its thing. And there's all kinds of trackers out there that, that's their job. That's our job. It's your job as a journalist. Is a politician says something, we don't write what people say. We confirm that what they say is factual. If we just wrote what people say, we would be writing a lot of bullshit all the time. And we do, because we don't fact check. And fact check is reporting. Reporting is verification. We live in a culture of assertion right now, where you can say anything. But journalism is not about asserting things. It's about verifying things.
Eileen McNamara:
So, yes of course, of course. The more fact checking the better. And it's not that damn hard. If somebody tells you that it's sunny out and it's night time, it's not sunny out. And of course there are gradations. We can all interpret things differently. But there is such a thing as facts. The problem we have at the current moment politically is we can't agree what is a fact, because politicians have somehow hijacked the very notion of facts.
Eileen McNamara:
And you know, Patrick Monaghan famously said, "Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." Well, today we have a world in which people, what a Kelly Ann Conway called them. Well, we have alternative facts, but there's no such thing as alternative facts. Alternative facts are friction. And it's journalism's job not to be belligerent about it, but to simply point out if somebody has something that is just wrong.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
The alternative facts phenomenon that really is ... I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it's a crisis of authority. Let me use a less pejorative laden term, a crisis of expertise. The reality is that we have journalists in this society. Walter Lippmann was saying this in the 1920s, that we have journalists because I can't go to the Senate judiciary hearings right now, and sit in them on my own. Or I guess I can watch them on television. But closed session meetings, or ... I can't be everywhere doing all of my own research. Right? This is what kills me. Have you done your research?
Maura Jane Farrelly:
No, I've not done my research. I've got a job. I've got other things that I need to do, which is why we have reporters, and I rely upon the New York times, and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to do the research. And then I make a decision to trust them. And it's not a blind decision. It's a decision that is based on their reputations which they have been building over the course of decades. For not always getting it right, but most of the time getting it right, and when they get it wrong, acknowledging that they got it wrong and correcting the mistake. And so, I make a leap of faith, and I choose to trust their reporting.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And what has been happening in this country, and if anybody had any doubt that it was happening, I think this last six or seven months have made it very clear that Americans are being encouraged to trust nobody's expertise. Nobody's reputation. I mean, we are questioning doctors about a virus, and we are trusting things that we read on the internet, instead of what Dr Fauci says. And that D R means absolutely nothing. It doesn't signal to some people that they should trust what it is that he's saying. And again, this is not a terribly new thing. This is what launched the Protestant Reformation. That newfangled technology known as the printing press, made it possible for people to not have to differ to their priests anymore, but rather to read the Bible themselves. Of their own research with the Bible, and come to their own determinations. The result of that is that there are more than 32,000 different denominations of Protestant Christianity in the world today.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
So again, it's not a new phenomenon questioning authority, and I think it is a good thing to question authority. But we don't have any referees it seems left in America right now. And certainly journalists are not being permitted to be referees.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. What did you expect to see in the media's coverage in the period of time between November 3rd, and whenever we know definitively who has won? How do you hope journalists will handle that time.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
I don't know how you feel. She and I haven't actually talked about this. I will say I have been rather impressed with the amount of discussion I have read and heard on the radio among journalists about the importance of recognizing that we're probably going to have to wait. That we're not going to know on November 3rd who the winner is. And to resist the urge to declare a winner. I've been impressed by the news media's recognition of that. Let's see if it happens. I don't know, what are your thoughts?
Eileen McNamara:
Okay, so I think that the most ... One of the most important stories in this election cycle is about the integrity of the electoral process. And I've been impressed by the Washington Post and the Times, doing a massive amount of reporting from the country about what's happening there on mail in ballots. I mean, we have this incredible phenomenon in California where the Republican party in California admits that they have put phony boxes all around the state to mislead people into putting their ballots in there.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
It's not a fringe group. It's the California GOP. Right.
Eileen McNamara:
They not only concede that, "Yeah, yeah. We did that." They're not going to take them down. So, I think to be honest with you, I think we're going to spend some time in court houses, covering what's going on in court houses, because I do think there are going to be challenges around the country about the integrity of the system. And I hope that before ... and I see this happening now. Before November 3rd that we have a lot of stories about voter suppression because I think that's a real phenomenon as well. Reporters have to document it if it's happening. If people are being discouraged from voting. I mean, we've got lines in places like Georgia that was ridiculous what's been happening in Georgia. Five hours yesterday waiting to vote.
Eileen McNamara:
Those stories are really important, and I think it's important to cover the process. To make sure that we are in state capitals, that we are with the election officials, watching how those ballets are processed. To make sure that we can report back to the American people about the integrity of the system. Of course, there'll be stories about the candidates screaming at each other. But that's not the primary function of journalism. It's to see whether the process worked. I mean, was the system undermined or wasn't it?
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And you know you mentioned the WaPo and New York Times. We've been critiquing the media a lot again. Just want to point out the criticisms have been oriented toward television. The reality is these last four years, five years because the run up to the election, there has been some phenomenal journalism produced in this country. I mean, yes the media is severely threatened. Threatened by our elected officials. Threatened by the American public that doesn't trust them. But in some respects this really has been a rather golden age for journalism. Some of the newspaper coverage, it is not easy to produce the coverage that is being produced. The example I will often point out is that even before the election 2016, the Washington Post pulled the tax returns for 420 charities that Donald Trump had claimed publicly to have donated to. And looked at 13 years of tax returns for those 420 charities, so that they could learn that of them he had donated to one of them, one time, and that it was in the range of $5,000 to $9,999 dollars.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
That is work. That takes a lot of work. And it's fantastic journalism. Whether anybody reads it ... There's only so much journalists can do.
Eileen McNamara:
I think that's the frustration journalists have in this era. I mean, the New York Times just did a deep dive into Donald Trump's taxes. I mean, they got them which took years, but they've finally got them. But they didn't just write about, you know he paid $750 dollars in federal income taxes, which is on it's face, outrageous. But that's not all they did. They dug deep into his debt. His debt could be a national security threat. We don't know who he owes that money to. So, I think the work has been extraordinary in journalism.
Eileen McNamara:
You know, we talk about how superficial the campaign coverage is. But that sits right alongside this investigative work. I think Maura has a good point. Do people read it? I think some people read it, and a lot of people hear about it. But because we are living in this moment, the news cycle moves so fast, yesterday's outrage, just it's ephemeral. It's gone.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Whoever thought that a story about a bunch of men who planned to kidnap and kill the governor of a state would not even be above the fold the next morning.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. Right. And no one's talking about it today.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
No.
Eileen McNamara:
Because today we're on to something else. And I mean, you've got to give credit to the Celebrity Apprentice boss who knows ... he knows how news work. He knows how the cycle works, and he knows how to change the subject. And unfortunately for a lot of the time that he has been running or in office, the press has allowed him to be our assignment editor. And he jumps and we scurry. And that's a mistake that we just have not corrected yet. I mean, his Evita moment on the Truman balcony when he left the balcony. Well, it was certainly a photograph, but I really don't know if the cameras had to be trained on him while he took the drive and while we watched the thing, and yet, there it was. Because it's theater. It's all theater.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. So, we are at 9 o'clock here on the east coast. We still have a bunch of questions, and I'm wondering if we can get two more questions in before we call it a night.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Sure.
Sharon Rosenberg:
So, we had a couple questions about the debates, so I'm going to actually combine them here. If the debates are not worthwhile, what would you replace them with to get a helpful contrast of the nominees? And along those same lines about public policy in general. If not through the flashpoint moments of the debates, what is the best way for journalists to get the public engaged with the not particularly flashy topic of public policy?
Eileen McNamara:
Okay. I'm going to be counterintuitive here. It's not my job to get you engaged. It's my job to report the news. Democracy is hard ladies and gentlemen. It's work. And it requires something of the electorate. And if you don't want to take the time, I can't make you take the time. I can write the stories. I can investigate. I can do those things. I can't make you care. I've often said to my students that I think journalism has done a terrible job of explaining how critical we are in the democratic system, because we're so easy to hate. But the electorate is critical. And there is a burden to care. And I'm sorry, but I can't make you care.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
This is, I'm going to use my little analogy that I use in class a lot. It's my favorite little analogy. I talk about oatmeal and Cap'n Crunch, and I usually use my nephew Jack as an example. But given that Jack is going to be 15 at the end of this month, I probably need to find somebody else. But I'll often tell my students that when my little nephew Jack was a little boy, if I offered him oatmeal or Cap'n Crunch to eat in the morning, he would choose Cap'n Crunch. Not because he is Jack Farrelly, but because he is a human being. Every human being in the world is going to choose Cap'n Crunch over oatmeal because it tastes better. That's just the way it is.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But I don't want Jack to eat the Cap'n Crunch, I want him to eat the oatmeal. And so, I can maybe do some things to the oatmeal to make it a little bit more attractive to him. I can add a little bit of brown sugar and cinnamon and maybe some walnuts or something like that. But at the end of the day it's still oatmeal. And Jack is going to choose Cap'n Crunch over oatmeal unless there is an additional educational component to breakfast. Unless I also say, "Come on Jack. Do you want to grow up big and strong? Do you want to get good grades in school? You need oatmeal. It will stick with you. Etc. etc." I think that journalists can maybe doctor the oatmeal up a little bit. It's a delicate balance. You don't want to put too much sugar into it. You don't want to put too much cinnamon in, because then it's not really oatmeal anymore.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But journalists do have an obligation to be accessible and interesting to their audiences. But that is not going to be enough. Americans need to be taught to take the responsibilities of citizenship seriously. And journalists can't do that. Actually teachers are the ones who can do that. And I know that they are trying. I am not bashing teachers. I know that students are learning about this in their civics classes in 8th grade, and 11th grade, but it is a message that needs to be hammered into the American people constantly, because it's really easy to forget that democracy is a responsibility. We talk a lot about rights in this culture, and we don't talk enough about responsibilities.
Eileen McNamara:
And I have to add one thing, because just out of the corner of my eye in the chat, I saw somebody saying, "You know you're talking about these elite newspapers with well educated readers, and not everybody gets to read those." Which is certainly true. And we have an enormous crisis in local journalism. We have state houses where there's no reporters covering them because local news has collapsed. All of that's true, but that's a topic for a whole other seminar with us. But I have to say, I'm the daughter of a postal clerk. So, he went to work at 4 o'clock in the morning. And when he got finished with his postal shift, he worked at a liquor store at night. He had a window of exactly an hour, which was at 4 o'clock, which is a very odd time to have dinner, let me tell you, when you're a little kid.
Eileen McNamara:
But, we had dinner and we weren't allowed to talk at the dinner table because my father was reading the Boston Evening Globe. You think I was trying to get his attention by becoming a reporter? And my father was the most erudite man I knew when it came to talking about politics. He had a high school diploma. He didn't read books, but he paid attention. And he took it as his civil responsibility to know what the hell was going on in the Massachusetts state house, and in Washington, and he did. And when he did talk ... You know, when he finished the paper, and he did talk to us about those things, he talked about how important they were. And I think those conversations are still happening at dinner tables. And I think we make a mistake if we think you have to have a degree from Brandeis to care about what's happening in this country. You don't have to be elite, and you don't have to have a fancy education to care about your country.
Eileen McNamara:
But you have to care about your country. And it takes an investment of time.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
You know, bringing up even just the notion of elite, what we consider to be elite today, what is high brow and what is low brow is always changing. I am going to guess since we are talking to Brandeis alums, that we have a few people listening to us who are from New York. The next time you are in Central Park, you will notice that there is a statue of Shakespeare at one of the ends of the promenade there. And that statue of Shakespeare was erected in the 19th century to memorialize a deadly riot that took place down at Astor Place. I think it was in 1849 when it happened. And the riot was because the theater there that traditionally performed Shakespeare for poor people in New York City had made the decision to hire a very expensive British actor to perform in Hamlet. And in order to pay his salary they had to jack up the price of the ticket, and so poor people couldn't afford to go and watch Shakespeare, and they rioted, and people died.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And the notion that poor people would get upset about Shakespeare today is considered ridiculous, because everybody knows that Shakespeare is elite. And you have to be educated and wealthy in order to appreciate Shakespeare. Not true. We let things be defined as elite. What is it, the New York Times has got the most advanced reading level of all of the newspapers in the country, and I think it's like a 7th or 8th grade reading level. Like, Mac and I are always dealing with students who come in and they want to write in these long, flowery, compound complex sentences with lots of clauses. No. You can't do that. You can't do that in journalism.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Now, there is the expense. A subscription to the New York Times is not cheap, and I'm not going to pretend that it isn't. But it is affordable. It is accessible. We just have to get out of this mindset that says only the members of the elite are the ones who are reading the newspapers.
Eileen McNamara:
And you know, everybody pays whatever you pay for a cup of Starbucks coffee.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
Oh now you're going to get me into my public radio roots. How much do you pay for your entertainment? Is this news coverage worth $12 dollars a month to you?
Eileen McNamara:
I mean, if you care about this issue, subscribe to your god damn local newspaper because your local newspaper is dying on a vine. And your subscription might keep a reporter in city hall. And you need that reporter in city hall because you don't know what those guys are doing down there if the reporter's not there watching them. That's just a fact. And you need them in your state houses. And if you're in a small town, you need them at your board of selection meeting. You need them. Subscribe to your local paper.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. That actually feeds perfectly into the final question of the evening.
Eileen McNamara:
Okay.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Which is basically, what needs to happen, or what needs to change to keep good people doing the critical job of journalism, and also who are your heroes in the business today?
Eileen McNamara:
Okay, I'll let you take the critical, the big part.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
What needs to change. This is going to be dodging the question. I'm worried but I'm not apoplectic. Ever year, it didn't happen this past year because of COVID. But every year in the spring we will have a fair for all of the accepted students at Brandeis. So, we have one in the fall when students who want to come to Brandeis visit Brandeis. And then we have one in the spring where the ones who have been accepted come to Brandeis and it's a totally different dynamic. They're selling themselves to us in the Fall. And then we're selling ourselves to them in the Spring. And every year that we do this, there's always some dude, and it is always a dude. It is never a mother. It's a father. And maybe his kid is interested in journalism. Maybe not. But he'll always come up and want to have a conversation with me about how journalism is dying.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
And my stock answer is like, "Well, geez, gosh. I hope not because democracy dies." Oh gosh that should be a slogan maybe for a newspaper. You think that might work? Democracy dies in darkness? Democracy does die in darkness. Journalism is not dying. Journalism is changing it is certainly the case that there are far fewer sexy jobs in journalism. I mean, Mac, you got to hang out with some really interesting people in your career. I like to regale my students with the story of when I got to cover the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and I walked through the metal detector behind Ariana Huffington, and in front of Joe Lieberman. Oh, that makes for great cocktail party talk. And is definitely the case that there are fewer of those kinds of jobs available.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
But there's still lots of jobs out there. There's lots of good journalism out there. It pays crap.
Eileen McNamara:
It's always paid crap.
Maura Jane Farrelly:
That's a problem too, in terms of diversity in the newsroom. If we want more diversity in the newsroom so that we can have more diverse stories in the newspapers, we need to make it possible for people who cannot rely on their parents to pay their rent for the first five years out of college to work as journalists. But I am not worried journalism is going to die, which doesn't really answer your question.
Eileen McNamara:
Right. So, heroes. So, I think Maura and I agree on this first one. Marty Barron is the editor of the Washington Post, and I formally worked for him when he was the editor of the Boston Globe. Without him, the Spotlight series on the abuse of children by Catholic priests never would've happened. And he has famously said in this era of Trump, when he's been accused of attacking the president, his newspaper. Marty has said, "We're not at war with the Trump administration. We're at work." And that leads me to my second hero which is David Fahrenthold, who wrote some of those stories Maura was referring to before. To get to the bottom of Trump University and the Trump foundation, you spend a lot of time going through documents trying to piece reality together. It is not glamorous work, but it's really important work and David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post.
Eileen McNamara:
And a good friend died this week from the New York Times, who was ... his name was Jim Dwyer and he was a columnist at Newsday, and the New York Daily News, and finally at the New York Times. And he was a different kind of metro columnist. There's this fiction in journalism that great metro columnists are all men who smoke cigars, and hang out with the cops, and they drink their whiskey straight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. There are great women columnists as well.
Eileen McNamara:
But Jim Dwyer, he was of New York. And I guess in some ways he was in the tradition of Jimmy Breslin, but he didn't have that bravado, and frankly that sort of bullshit persona. He wrote about the ordinary people in New York. And those are my heroes in journalism. People who don't write about bumping into Joe Lieberman. It's the people who write about ordinary people, and bring their experiences to light.
Eileen McNamara:
You know, Maura said earlier, she can't be at the judiciary committee, so she relies on a reporter to be there in her stead. Well, maybe you don't know what's happening in the black community because you don't live there. You need reporters to go there and tell you. You need to understand what it is to be immigrant crossing the southern border. Reporters have to go there and tell you. Those are the reporters who are my heroes. The people who go there. They go there.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you both so much. Maura, Eileen, as always it was wonderful to hear your perspective, and you gave us a lot to think about. And thank you for spending time with us this evening. We really enjoyed it. Thanks to all of you for joining us tonight. We will share the recording of this event in approximately a week once we have all the captions and everything all set with that. Please also continue to check your email for weekly updates about upcoming virtual programs. Check the alumni website. Check our social media, and we hope to see you at more events. So, thank you again, and from us on the east coast, good night.