Joe Hamilton
Joining me today is Kelly McBride, who’s a Senior Vice President at the Poynter Institute, is also a public editor at NPR and the chair of the Craig Newmark center for ethics and leadership. It’s a lot of stuff. So let’s start before we dig into topics about news, media consumption, the business and all that. What’s an average day look like for you? So we just sort of level set what you’re what you’re doing on a day to day basis.
Kelly McBride
Oh, man. Okay, so an average day, I get up and workout almost every morning, and I check in with my brother, who lives with me. He’s developmentally disabled. He’s the Bagger at rolling oats, Tim McBride, many people know him. I used to be known for all those titles, and now people are like, Oh, you’re Tim’s sister. Yes, that is my claim to fame. So I get him off one way or another, and around 830 or so, I work either from home or from my office at the Poynter Institute, open up both of my laptops, one for NPR, one for Poynter, and I juggle both of those jobs throughout the day,
I may working on writing something. So I’m doing reporting, interviewing people. I may be working on building out curriculum that I’m using in Poynter’s teaching. And so that’s a lot of creative work, too. And then I may actually be teaching. And a lot of times I will not even be here in St Pete. I will be elsewhere also, and on the road, doing teaching work. So it’s a lot. It’s a lot.
Joe Hamilton
I enjoyed a great couple days when you brought a crew in to talk about AI and ethics and journalism, and now you’re taking that to New York in the near future too.
Kelly McBride
We just did it. Actually, it was just last week. Yeah, it was great. AI is a technology that’s moving very fast, and there is a wide degree of disagreement among journalists about how transformational it’s going to be, and a wide degree of cynicism and hope, right? So, like some journalists, think it’s not going to be transformative at all. Some think it’s going to be really transformative, but in like, a horrible way, and that journalism is just going to get screwed over by technology. And some people think that it’s really going to offer some opportunities.
Joe Hamilton
Yeah, it’s funny with these new, transformative technologies, I remember very clearly when blockchain came around, there was nobody that hated blockchain more than financial advisors, age 40 or older, because this was their whole identity, and life was wrapped up into this traditional monetary sort of way of doing things, and then this disruptive, trustless, non governed way of doing things. Just threatened that. And so they were very bearish on it, and didn’t like it. I, I gave a talk to a group of bankers, and, man, it was just like, remind me, like the old Roman days when they were just, , shouting and Off with their heads, that kind of thing. But so, yeah, it’s tough when you’re in it and, , and it threatens you, which is actually sort of apropos to some of the stuff we may talk about today, is how our own personal interests inform our perspectives, which also informs how we how we absorb our content. And you mentioned working out in the morning, which is working on your physical health and your body diet. How about your mind diets, a concept you’ve been looking at, working on, with regard to news.
Kelly McBride
I have had this idea that we need an information pyramid, the same way that we have a food pyramid, right? And that we need to think about all of the information that we consume like every piece of information that comes into our brains the same way that we think about food nutrition. So like, social media is junk food, right? It might lead you to better food, but for the most part, it’s junk food because of the way that you consume it, right? You consume it. You’re usually, when you’re on social media, you’re looking for a little dopamine hit of some kind, right? It’s like, show me that funny Instagram video or that cute Tiktok dance or whatever. So you’re looking for something that’s just gonna move you a little bit, but you’re not necessarily working toward a goal. Most of the time when you’re on social media, in terms of information, that’s not always true. Breaking news might be a little different when there’s something that you really huge, that you really need to know about, but even then, you want to get to a point where you’re getting information that is both nourishing and restorative, and some information is good for making you smarter. Some information is good for politically engaging you. Some information is just like standard carbs, right? Like, you’re just going to get through your day with this information, but you need it right, like what the weather is, or maybe the air pollution, or whether there’s a hurricane bearing down, down on you, right? And so I do think that, and I really want, I really want to do more research on this. If anybody out there has a grant that they would like to give me, I think I need about million five to do all this research. But I really want to look, I really want to build a food pyramid for our information ecosystem. And, , I know, , you’re really into, like, the local ecosystem, and I think that’s going to be the hardest one, right? Because locally doesn’t matter what market you’re in, you might have a lot of choices, but, and some of them might be healthy, but it they may not suit your style of consuming information. So locally, I think it’s really, I think it’s really difficult.
Joe Hamilton
Don’t get your information from a drive through, essentially.
I think one of the challenges is how news gets wrapped into serving other needs. So you could say some of it is the low, low value carbs and sugar, but you also mentioned other emotional needs that information can serve. And sometimes the news can serve those and even in a positive way, but it’s still, it’s still a colored way, , it’s a, it’s a flavored perspective, or whatever. I mean, one interesting think.. variable rewards are such a driver for people that it actually usurps the information need. There was a famous experiment that was done where they had, and this goes back to our caveman days, where you’d go out and hunt and only come back one out of 10 times successfully from the hunt. And so your survival, , essentially, when the hunters came back, there was almost like a slot machine. Did I come back with a losing bet, or did I come back with a jackpot? And they did an experiment where they had rats in a cage, and they could press a button and get a treat, and 100% of the time, the treat would come out, and the rats would press it, whatever, six times, eight times an hour, and eat a normal number of treats. Then they just randomized it so a treat would come out every third time, every eighth time, they weren’t sure, and it kicked a completely different part of the brain into gear, and they started pressing the button hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, just because the rewards were made variable. Essentially, this is what a slot machine is. You press it and it rolls, and you win some you don’t. And that’s kind of what social media is. It actually mimics a slot machine as you doom scroll. It’s like, crap post, crap post, crap, post, very interesting posts. And that’s like the mini jackpot, and that’s what spikes the dopamine, because you’re getting those relative interesting things as you scroll through the non interesting things,
Kelly McBride
when you do that, there’s an opportunity cost, right? Because you only have so many hours in a day to consume media, and we, basically, as humans, have really ramped up how much media we consume. It’s way more than anybody thought was possible. But we are maxing out right at somewhere around for some people, like, 12 hours a day. It’s a lot of media. But if you were to, some people’s phones give them, like, here’s what you spent your time on. But even like, like, my phone is like, Oh, look, you spent like, four hours on the New York Times. And it’s like, yeah, that was a really hard Wordle, right? Like I was not doing anything that was really good for me, like I was, I was doing the mini crossword or something like that. And so it we don’t have a really good way. Of truly even monitoring our own media consumption, and we don’t have, like, a blood test to tell us, like, how much we’re how well we’re doing, or how badly we’re doing. And I do think that there is this feeling of disconnect that might be the blood test, right? This feeling that that, especially if you think about your local community, and I’ve, I’ve lived in Saint Pete since 2002 right? So I’ve lived here for a long time. I raised all my kids here. My parents live here. I should feel really, really connected to this community. But most of my work is not here, right? Most of my work is with companies that are outside of St Pete, and there are times when, like, I have a really hard time understanding the community that I live in and just how much it’s changed, because it has changed dramatically. And I don’t know. I don’t know how to get there, right? Like, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do to feel more connected to our community. And I’ve done all these things, right? I started this little bowling nonprofit for people with special needs, right? And I hang out with a group of athletes, and I try to do local athletic events and stuff like that. I try and follow my own interests that would connect me to other people, but I still feel like I get in a bubble and like I do not understand truly what my community is all about, and where I live and who my neighbors are.
Joe Hamilton
I wonder how much of that is just simply it being squeezed down by competing interests. I look at the paper, a local paper, which still exists, but, has gone more, a little more national, and the content experience on there is not as good..from our previous conversation about dopamine or whatever. And so the content experience was better on social so people gravitated to these national platforms, which weakened the binding agent of our communities, and had them spending more time on the Kardashians and things like that than they have on local equivalent. And I don’t know if that will ever come back. I mean, I don’t know. And the only thing to me that could bring that back was an equally compelling content experience that also had the additional value prop of being real life, local, that, , gave you that additional value that something national couldn’t. But it seems now that that’s, , that doesn’t the dopamine piece of it, the social piece of it, the more interesting things. And I think, , ultimately, they’re just the whole world is more interesting as a whole than local is interesting as a whole.
Kelly McBride
Yeah and I mean, the problem with that is that a lot of the that pop culture stuff that’s really interesting that you follow compulsively is a manufactured reality, right? And like, you can’t really do that with local because you live here, right? Like you would know that, like, that’s a manufactured reality, and so you wouldn’t be able to, you wouldn’t be able to do that, right? It’s like, so the reason that, the reason that, the reason that we love, that those national narratives are because they’re not completely real, right? They’re they’re pretty trite and pat and manufactured, and I don’t know like so that I don’t think that would ever work, right? It’s and so it’s possible that that we’ve just ruined ourselves, right, and that we’ve ruined our ability to really connect locally.
Joe Hamilton
Yeah? I mean, it’s a cold, Stark, big batch of work to do to craft that reality, versus having a really comfortable, attractive, interesting one spoon fed to you. So I think that makes a lot of sense.
Kelly McBride
Yeah. I mean, like, I have this great neighbor group, and we do dinners together every six weeks or so.
Joe Hamilton
What are you talking about?
Kelly McBride
I mean, yeah, do we talk about what’s going on in St Pete? No, a lot of times we talk about national stuff. We talk about our kids, but, yeah, we don’t talk about like the local community much, even though we all have jobs. I mean, like everybody else has a job. No, that’s not true, actually, that’s the other thing is I guess about half of my neighbor group have jobs where they actually work. They’re remote workers. They actually work for a national company, or, like, they don’t even go into an office here. Yeah, interesting, isn’t that? I mean, band, that hadn’t even occurred to me until right then, I wonder if that that our ability to work elsewhere, yeah. I mean, if it’s, if it’s a into a larger, , just the dispersing of our attention nationally and then our severed brains, right, like, that’s where we. Are we’re at work. Yeah.
Joe Hamilton
And to your point with it, it’s one thing you can say, if someone’s eating McDonald’s non stop, you’re gonna be able to look at them and see that. But what’s a little more insidious about your information diet is a lot of times, if you don’t even know it’s happening to you, right? To you just it’s all just sounds normal because your friends on Facebook or wherever, or kind of seeing the same information and feeling the same way as you and I’ll see that a lot, when you see like people coming out and just believing that there’s a basement in the pizza place in Washington with a pedophilia dungeon, or whatever place doesn’t even have a basement, but there are people that were compelled enough that that was true enough to them, that they took a gun to the place, right? And there are just 1000s of people in these groups. And so it almost takes to have a truly – I think there were going to be a diet check or a blood test of have to be some sort of third party objective thing that can sort of be outside of your peer bubble, because a lot of times you get that group think, and just tacit acceptance of that a reality because you’re all eating the same food?
Kelly McBride
Yeah and I do wonder about physical spaces versus virtual spaces I am in. I am frequently in physical spaces where people don’t agree with me, right? Like and people have a variety of viewpoints, but I bet that’s a lot less than it used to be, and part of that is the my own choices that I’ve made, right?
Joe Hamilton
I think you’re a unique animal in that regard, that you are in places, by your job and by choice that do challenge that.
Kelly McBride
Yeah, but it’s, but it’s less than it used to be, right? And I think, I don’t know. I think it’s harder now. It’s really hard. It’s like we’re almost wary of being in a space with people who have different opinions. I mean, part of it is so I have noticed this a lot in my work. People can be really rude and nasty online, right? There is this coarseness, and we see it now in a lot of the way our politicians interact with each other. And sometimes people are like that. They sort of It didn’t used to be that they would bring those behaviors, but a couple of times I’ve been on planes, and when people hear that I am a journalist, like they just lay into me and like I had this one guy recently who believed that the mainstream media he saw I had, I used to have, I actually took it off because I didn’t want this to happen again, but I had an NPR button on my backpack, and he was like, Oh, are you a donor to NPR? And I was like, Well, I am actually a donor to NPR, but I’m also and I work at NPR. And he started quizzing me, and I could pretty quickly tell that he was doing like a legitimacy check, like he was asking me what universities I went to, and then he mentioned these universities that he was affiliated with, which were these sort of rather newish universities that had recently been founded To create a whole other narrative about what a university should be. And he just kept wanting to argue with me about everything. And I finally, I finally was like, I’m gonna, and this was not a lie. I was at the time judging a podcast contest. I was like, I have, I’m judging a podcast contest. I have like, 20 podcasts to listen to between now and tomorrow when I have to have a meeting, so I’m going to put my headphones on and listen to these podcasts and and, but, but I, but I also just did not want to be in an argument, because I didn’t even know what we were arguing about.
Joe Hamilton
Well, and I think that’s, again, another one of the insidious aspects of going to national platforms is that there’s a lot of energy built up, but there’s really no place for it to go. You can’t personally affect an outcome in the Ukraine or in some of these national issues. And so with this energy, the only outlet, the only satisfaction, the only sort of feeling of validation, and I’m aliveness, you can get is to defeat somebody else in a verbal sparring match online. And that’s the way a lot of these conversations go. And so that’s become a craft in unto itself, because it’s literally the only place in my mind for for a lot of that energy to go and so repeat that for 10 years, and it’s inevitable that it will spill over into in person interactions, because it’s become such a fabric of 80% of their lives spent doing that.
Kelly McBride
We should start. , there are these movements, like one is called Better Angels. And they are these movements to deliberately bring people together in physical spaces where they can. Relearn the skills of just talking to somebody to understand what their perspective is, rather than talking to somebody to defeat them. We should start one of those. Here.
Joe Hamilton
There are. There is one, actually, yeah, there’s a startup that was doing that, and it came from the name off the top of my head, I’ll try to include it in the show notes. But it was a couple years ago. I don’t know where it’s gone since then, but it was, it actually was like a public environment where they would, they’d have two people, and it was meant to be a civil discourse and and then to have sort of a networking opportunity after that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s unfortunately, the people who agree to participate in that are probably generally thoughtful people anyway, who would be the most susceptible for being successful? , it’s the people that wouldn’t even do that or, , but maybe they would come in just a fight,
Kelly McBride
yeah, I don’t know. I think there is a benefit, and in practicing it because I feel like I’m getting out of practice.
Joe Hamilton
I think that we had a with the internet, a bloom of information, so that if you had a passion, I think about the rabbit holes I go down on YouTube, right? And the stuff I’m really into that I’m, I feel like an expert on, because I just watch professional pickleball, right? So, like, I know everything that’s going on in professional pickleball, and I don’t know anything that’s going on a professional tennis, right? And so that’s, that’s my perspective. But to the neighbor who thinks Pickleball is noisy and hurts the neighborhood and things like that, and they’re living that deeply themselves, , we’re gonna have two very different but very valid perspectives, and then mixing those two, , my first, first sort of hurdle will be, what’s the, what’s the motivation? Why do I need to spend my energy in this busy world, to mix, , to try to come together with that person who owns the house across the street from the pickleball. There’s just a lot of people with a lot of very embedded perspectives, and each one of them is almost like a Mount Everest to climb to gain any kind of common ground. And when you have a busy, busy, full life, a lot of times people just opt out of even trying,
Kelly McBride
right? Because nobody models it for us, right? Like it’s not, it’s not that you need to convince the person who lives next to the pickleball courts and now longer can have their windows open that they should just suffer for the common good of all these pickle players, pickleball players who want to get their game in before nine o’clock in the morning when they have to go to work. Yeah, I know you are. I see you down there, because that’s not the goal. The goal is just to be more aware, right? And just to be aware that, like, oh, this phenomenon of all these people playing pickleball, that other people experience it in a very different way. And we particularly don’t like to listen to people who are suffering, right? And sometimes it’s because we want to invalidate their suffering, like, whatever it’s there’s 40 people out here having a great time, and there’s, three people in your house who have to get up earlier than they want to because the pickleball is making so much noise, and sometimes it’s just because suffering is unpleasant, right? And like just acknowledging that, and there are varying degrees of it, it’s easy to talk about, the neighbor to the pickleball court because it’s, it’s a mild form of suffering. But I can tell you from, I created this very small nonprofit called Saturday bowling with friends. And when I talk to people about how difficult it is for people with special needs to really find a place where they can be comfortable. People want the feel good part of it, but they don’t want to acknowledge that like we have created a world that is inaccessible to a lot of people, and they cannot live a full and satisfying life because of the world that we’ve created. And I’m always like, as I’m trying to get volunteers and donations, I’m always, I’m always like, we owe our neighbors something in this, but people don’t like that argument, and I have discovered that is not a good way to get volunteers or donations. The better way to get volunteers and donations is to be like, Look how happy this is. Look how much happiness we’re creating. Look how much joy we’re creating. So people like to think about the positive things, but they don’t, unless it’s their own anger and their own suffering. They don’t. Really want to delve into.
Joe Hamilton
That’s the other byproduct of this proliferation of expertise, because there’s also expertise and suffering. Because for every person who can make a case for special Needs folks, there’s people that will make a case that’s compelling, for LGBTQ, for the environment, for animals, , and for all sorts of things that are all equal, that are all true and to a general person, ionce you open Pandora’s box of being, wanting to delve into the world of suffering to cure some of it. It’s essentially endless. It can consume you. And so therefore, it’s the people who are directly affected by it, that are the champions for it, because they’re willing to go deep into that one realm, and then they leverage their connections, friends and general prowess as an operating human to help make a, to make that piece better. But I think that’s an age old struggle that will probably , only get more complex as actually, the awareness of different needs continues to grow.
Kelly McBride
Yeah, we sort of lost there used to be a religious component to it, right? Like you used to be instructed by your religious communities to alleviate suffering, to make the world a better place. And there were all sorts of ways of doing that, tithing and evangelism and simple charity. And we don’t like even the religious communities that I’ve been involved in don’t do a lot of that anymore. And then we had sort of turned that all over to the government and said, Okay, that’s the government’s job to do all that. It’s going to be interesting to see what we do. I mean, to a certain extent, we are this world of incredible resources, just incredible resources, and yet we have a very hard time sharing them. Yeah,
Joe Hamilton
And case in point, the religious folks are struggling, to not have to sell their churches anymore, and so it’s put your own mask on before before you help others put their mask on. And a lot of churches don’t have masks anymore and they’re just struggling to raise themselves. So it’s changed the nature.
Kelly McBride
They don’t have the congregation. They don’t have, yeah, they don’t have, yeah, churches. I mean, formal institutions have been on the decline. Yeah, it really does feel like we’re at a pivot point, though, and that our connection to our local communities may be the first thing that’s going to fall apart.
Joe Hamilton
What I have hoped for, as the next iteration of wisdom and thinking or leadership, is people who can blend perspectives. I think if we got to a world where the person who.. there’s that I forget, that the philosopher who said, or somebody who said, intelligence, is being able to hold multiple opposing ideas in your head and make sense of them, the people who can say diplomatically from a trusted position. And this is where I think journalism, potentially could, could move into this space as well. It’s saying, . And I think we use an example of offshore drilling before, right? Offshore drilling is an environmental risk. It’s a tax asset, it’s a corporate asset, it’s a national defense, less reliance on foreign oil, source of jobs, source of jobs, . But it could affect tourism, but it could also fund tourism, right, if it’s paying into the tax base. So, like, there are a lot of sides to offshore drilling that are all very valid and very true, and within each of those sides, there are deep experts who will argue eloquently for from their perspective, and you’re stuck in the middle, what you’re essentially have to decide is which of those perspectives is most compelling to you, and then move into that one. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t negate the other perspectives. And so, perhap this post perspective wisdom is the person who could stand in the middle of all those perspectives and, consolidate them and parse them out in a way that brings everybody to the table, and they’re lauded for that which, over time, changes what we value as , intelligence and leadership is people who can actually do that and that they know that that’s maybe solves some of the problems we have today.
Kelly McBride
interestingly, I mean the media landscape. This actually came directly out of the AI Artificial Intelligence conference that Poynter hosted last week in New York. So the media landscape is, for the most part, still organized around the unit or the post or the article, right like that is how everything is organized. It’s how all the workflow is organized. It’s how all the delivery systems are organized. There is this concept that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, that something else will replace that unit, right? So that the unit of information is something else . It could be bigger. I don’t know, like, what you’re talking about is bigger, yeah, but it’s possible that it could be even smaller, yeah. It’s possible that it could be a nugget of information rather than a point of view. It is, it is going to be interesting to see how technology changes that.
Joe Hamilton
I know this will be met with feelings of unease, but I’m, I’m comfortable with it, but I think, this agentic AI, agents that are the digital other half of your brain, which I think is an inevitable place that will be in a decade or two, they could actually hold that role for you, because by definition, they’re parsing information. Obviously, you have to look at the underlying logic and data and data out and all that sort of thing. But really it’s, with all the complexities of trusting other humans and being able to be that, , that sort of parser of information across many different plates in many different ways. Like, I think we have that now in a bad way with, like, people looking up to media personalities and things that just say, interpret the world for me, because it’s too much right, and I’ll just believe what you think right. And this is where we get these sort of streamlined, it’s almost like religion again, where you can just fall into an identity and they just tell you how to be right. But I, , I do think there is a world where the AI and that that personalized agent that you have can act as that parser and serve that role, but in a way that you feel you have control over, so you’re actually shaping it and having a one on one relationship with it in a way that actually reduces the trust need, because you’re essentially trusting yourself and thinking of it as a tool To do this for you. So it’s like bionic thinking,
Kelly McBride
Wow, that is so incredibly optimistic. So the other more likely scenario, though, is that extra shop at Walmart Well, or it just like so in what we’re seeing with the AI, with generative AI. Now, is it, is this, this sort of drive toward mediocrity, right? And I think, like the Google AI is a great example of that, right? Like, if you ask Google, if you search for something, you first get an AI generated answer for it. And a lot of times, if anything about that subject at all, like if you did anything on pickleball, you would be so dissatisfied with what Google gives you, because you would recognize that it was mediocre at best whatever you were asking and that’s because of the way generative AI works, right? And even when you like, like, I’ve even noticed there are a lot of newsrooms that are using generative AI and chat bots around a specific area of expertise, right? Like, there’s one in San Francisco called Chow bot, right? Then it’s just around restaurant reviews, because the San Francisco Chronicle has a fabulous restaurant section, and the Washington Post has one about the environment, and because they have a deep set of environmental reporting, and so even when you limit that the inputs of what it’s scraping to come up with your answer, I find it not satisfying. And one of the things that we discovered in this conference was that there is this longing for the human fingerprint, and it’s almost innate, right? Like, like, almost everybody can recognize AI, not completely. And like on the quizzes, sure, because the quizzes are meant to trick you, but like when you are presented with something that comes from Ai, it often feels unsatisfying, and the human fingerprint is so much more satisfying. And I think about this even in music curation, right? So my favorite radio station next to NPR, of course, and w, u, s, f, my favorite radio station is W, M, N, F, right? And I love it, because everything they do is human curated, right? And it is just somebody picking music for me to listen to and I I appreciate that so much more now. And I do think that so I don’t, I don’t know that we’re ever going to get there. And I think that if we ever do have that alter ego agent that’s going to be aI powered, that’s really going to. Yes, but it’s going to be aI powered. I think it’s going to be the most mediocre version of us.
Joe Hamilton
I’m going to respectfully disagree. I think that we, I think AI is in toddler phase right now, is just, I mean, the fact that a year ago, you couldn’t make a decent picture, and now you can actually develop a full app that is a beautiful app in 30 minutes, like this, that’s going so fast and so I think the AI, that’s why I said, in a decade from now, I think the AI in a decade from now will be just an insanely more advanced version of AI than it is now. Yeah, agreed it’s, it’s 100% mediocre now. But I also just see that it is a path of least resistance, and there’s precedent for it, like, we take a machine and hook it up to our heart and believe what it says, right? And it’s like, your heart’s healthy. Your heart needs this, and we’ll cut you open if it says we need to. And we do it, and we go to WebMD. And a lot of people, self diagnose now for a lot of their issues, and so some, some tranche of medical stuff, people don’t go to doctors for anymore. They just use the internet. The internet’s just a rudimentary version of AI
Kelly McBride
So let me ask you, would you rather go to an AI doctor who’s going to be more accurate than your current doctor, but isn’t going to be able to explain anything to you in a way that you were really going to understand it. Or would you rather go to a real doctor?
Joe Hamilton
You’re baking in weaknesses to the AI doctor. So I would say I would always choose more accurate information and then trust that I’ll be able to figure it out. Or even if I can trust the AI and it gives me the most accurate information, I would just do what it tells me versus, , because again, even when a doctor explains it to you, they’re putting things, in terms you kind of understand, but you at the cellular level don’t understand what those pills are doing when they put it into , it’s just you have this, and it’s these symptoms, and so we give you this, and it’ll do that, and I feel good about it, but , the hard science behind it is, if I can, if I can eliminate human error in diagnosis, I would always personally go for the more accurate diagnosis. Of course, I love talking to a doctor more, and I have a relationship with my doctor. And I would also say that one thing I’ve learned is never make assumptions based on your generational place. Like you and I are about the same age, and , where we grew up with the family doctor, and I love that and all that things, but the kids may not care. They’re just like, , oh yeah, telehealth, that’s what we do, right? And then next their kids will be like, Oh yeah, AI, doctor, that’s what we do. And there’s so many things now every generation laments, what we lost when the TV came out, people lamented it. When the internet came out, people lamented it. So I think it’s natural for everyone to look at the juxtapose what they their foundations were, versus what is now. But we have to remember that the next generation’s foundations are this. And that changes things?
Kelly McBride
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you’re not wrong. I don’t know, though, when we did that exercise, it was interesting. I think people who’ve had crappy healthcare would much rather go to an AI doctor, right? And if you’ve ever had a difficult diagnosis, yeah, you want to go to the AI doctor. But if you’ve ever felt like you’ve been in a factory, sure for your health care, and you’re, you’re getting, , mediocre care from the factory, yeah, well, I mean, that’s the other option.
Joe Hamilton
In England, we know that, it’s notorious for taking two to three months to get in to see a human doctor. So then the question is, would you rather see an AI doctor in 10 minutes, or see a real doctor in three months, and then all of a sudden the question, just reframing it that way may change people’s answers.
Kelly McBride
Yeah that makes a big difference.
Joe Hamilton
So, news diet,
Kelly McBride
news diet, back to the News diet, back to the News diet, that’s what we were talking about.
Joe Hamilton
Let’s dig in a little bit. Just because this is so much a part of what you’re doing now, I think we’d be remiss to not talk about it. So obviously, there’s a lot of cuts happening. I think Doge is officially a verb. Now people are being, the Doge, being Doge, yeah. So, as someone who’s on the front lines with, , obviously NPR and news organizations, what’s, what’s the state of things?
Kelly McBride
This current administration does not like the media. That’s a headline. I’m gonna tell you all about it. In addition, so the first thing they did was cut USAID. And that work was often supporting democracy in places where democracy is unstable. And a lot of that was supporting fact checking in journalism organizations. Around the world, right? So that was the first hit. The other thing that they’ve done is changed how the White House press pool and the Pentagon press pool work. So they have sort of kick the AP out of the White House press pool. And I’ve heard from a lot of people who are really worried about that, because the way the press pool works is you can’t have every organization go with the President, so they pick a small group of people to travel with the President. But the AP, because of the nature of what it is, right this, this international wire service that serves people all over the country and all over the world. They always had a spot which meant that they were really good at it. And there’s a lot of concern. And people who see the press pull reports now are worried that they are not as thorough and they are not as complete, and that the President, especially on the weekends, could do something, have a conversation with somebody, and the press pool would not see the significance of it, and would therefore not report it out to the rest of us, and we just never know what happened. So that is a concern. And then there is also, there have been all these regulatory actions right, where they have sued various journalists or journalism organizations or attacked their licensing. And then the FCC has an investigation into several different organizations around their FCC license, which would be for broadcast bandwidth, including NPR and PBS, and then Congress also is looking at the funding that goes into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports portions of NPR and PBS. And so all of that is all of that can create a chilling effect on the media, and we’re very much at Poynter trying to work with journalists to help them understand that you don’t want to pull back, right? You need to be doing really good observational journalism, right? You have to report the facts, you have to ask the hard questions, you have to get the documents. You have to dig into, dig into what’s going on. And so we just, actually, just today, had a webinar that we had like 300 people on it, and it was just, , looking at the legal and regulatory threats, and as an individual, what as a journalist, you should be doing to insulate yourself so that you can do good work. So yeah, the economic forecast comes at a time when, obviously, the stock market’s tanking. At this moment, the economy is looking scary to a lot of people, journalism has been and local journalism in particular, has been a really scary economic world for a good 15 years now, so that it is bound to, it’s bound to cause further cutbacks in journalism.
Joe Hamilton
One was Facebook cut their of their funding, right? Because the fact checking.
Kelly McBride
Facebook had been one of the single biggest funders of fact checking, right? And it’s because they were funding fact checkers to fact check things that were on Facebook, and, like, everything was on Facebook. And so Facebook would pay fact checking organizations to do fact checks that they would then supply to Facebook, and Facebook would decide what to do about the content. But, yeah, that’s gone now. So there are, there’s a lot less fact checking in the world that’s being paid for. There’s nobody else is stepping up and saying, I’ll pay the fact checkers. And so they’re mostly doing it, not for profit kind of work, yeah, yeah.
Joe Hamilton
So I would say that the audience of this podcast is probably, probably 5050 right. So, , and most people when I say 5050 left, right is what I mean by 5050
Kelly McBride
so kind of like the country, kind of like the
Joe Hamilton
country, yeah. And most people on the left will make constant digs and jokes about Fox News, right? And most people on the right will make similar digs about the WMNFs of the world and just based on demographics. So if we get to a place where a right president, right leaning president, is going to target left leaning media, left perceived, I’m gonna used perceived left leaning media. Eventually the it’s not unlikely that a counter to Trump would be a left style Trump, that’s a little more boisterous and whatever. If that’s if that’s what’s in vogue to be nowadays, he might equivalently look at. At, , excluding Fox News from the from the pool. So where does that end up, Is there, is there such a thing as.. Is there any group that you see that’s that can actually be in the middle? Or is it impossible to be in the middle? Now, because if you’re not on the right, you’re left, and if you’re on the left you’re right? Yeah, I
Kelly McBride
That’s a hard question to answer. I think there are a lot of organizations that are painted unfairly with a label right, and that doesn’t mean that there aren’t shades in that, but like, they’re painted the full on, , like, like, full on so liberal. And people do that with NPR all the time. And it’s like, NPR is so incredibly middle of the road. It just, it surprises me, right? That that like, oh, that’s what you think is liberal, right? And so, and I get it all the time, because I’m the Public editor, right? So when people complain about NPR being liberal, they usually complain about, they actually don’t complain about the political coverage. What they complain about is that NPR talks about race. Now, NPR has a mandate to reflect the country, and the reason that they talk about race is because it’s an area that a lot of people are interested in, but, but, but the audience, it’s really been these, these political voices and pundits who have, who have created, in my mind, a distortion. And they will pick, they will cherry pick things and say this is representative of NPR coverage, when my job is to look at NPR coverage all day, every day, and I don’t see that. I do see this. NPR is based in Washington. It’s got offices in Los Angeles, got an office in New York. I think those are traditionally liberal places, but it also has this like national network of news organizations, and to the extent that it can, that it can lean more on those like across the network, I think it can actually show the country itself better than any other news organization, but I don’t know. Back to your question. I don’t I mean, it’s such a distortion when we talk about the media that I don’t even know. Like the Wall Street Journal has always been considered very conservative by journalists, and yet most of the people who hate the media, who hate the mainstream media, would say that the Wall Street Journal is not conservative at all, and that they are liberal, and yet, editorially, right, their editorial page is super conservative. Like, let the markets do the market thing, and their coverage is, is for people who want to know about capitalism, right? And about like, Why? Why companies are valued the way they’re valued. That’s essentially who reads the Wall Street Journal, and yet that would be painted as liberal now. So I just think that, I think that we have a hard time even identifying right now what’s liberal and what’s conservative, and so that’s the problem. Like, I think somebody could stand in that space of being right in the middle by a number of different measures, and they would be described as liberal,
Joe Hamilton
yeah. I mean, maybe that goes back to who’s doing the describing, right? So it’s their their purpose for making that noise is not actually to get to a middle of the road place. It’s to serve their own agenda. So , if you’ve got, if you’ve got restaurant a, no matter what restaurant B’s menu is, it has to be unhealthy to serve your purpose at restaurant a. And so no matter how middle of the road they are, how much they have some healthy options and some unhealthy options, you’re always going to be harping on the the unhealthy options, because you actually don’t care about the balanced diet. You care about making your restaurant popular
Kelly McBride
Yeah, so you’re basically saying that people are disingenuous, and yet, I don’t think they all are disingenuous, but there are a lot of disingenuous people out there in the media, including even in the on the liberal side, right, like I do hear from a lot of liberals, consumers of NPR, who are just irate that NPR is as middle of the road as , and they just, they just think it is. A travesty, and they often start their letters by saying, I’ve been donating to NPR for 30 years or 50 years or whatever, and I’m not going to donate anymore, because you are you are enabling this world by being so neutral.
Joe Hamilton
I see it when the information is parsed out. I look when Elon went into Twitter, he kind of went in, and it’s the only equivalent I would have to his efforts with Doge, he immediately cut, what, 80% or the staff, or whatever, and he overcut and caused a lot of turmoil, and people lost their jobs in, unexpected fashions, and there was a lot of misery attached to that. And that’s what the Elon haters talked about, and then the people who thought there was bias and shadow bans, they talked about that. And Elon went in as a business person, and now we’re a year down the road, and Twitter is operating functionally, again, I won’t get into whether it’s a good platform or not a good platform, but functionally as a business, it’s operating at 20% of staff had had before, I’m sure there’s some elements of it that are not as good or whatever. So it’s like there were just three different sets of voices. People looked at it objectively, as a business decision. And did it work? That’s their cost basis gone down by a ton? Are they a healthier business? Yeah, probably did. Those people did lose their jobs. And blah, blah, blah. And has it become has the actual content gone the wrong way? And depending on where you lean, , people shouted equally loud about about all of those. And I kind of see the same pattern happening with those. And obviously there’s much bigger ramifications when USAID gets cut around the world and whatnot but that’s, but it’s from, I would assume, from Elon’s point of view, that it’s, he’s treating it the same way. He’s not coming in ideologically. He’s just coming in from the same way. He just said Hey, and his lever is, again, I can’t speak for him, but from what he said, his lever is the budget, right? That word trillions, we can’t even afford to pay the interest on our loans now, and this is the way out of it. And people just reacted very strongly to various elements of what he’s done kind of based on, on their content diet.
Kelly McBride
Our job as journalists is just to describe what’s happening right and to and that is hard because, because there are the facts of it right. Like, so this many people have been cut, and this much money has been saved, but even that has been hard to nail down, right. Like, I think journalists have done a really good job fact checking the doge charts, but I think there’s going to be, I think there’s going to continue just to just to even accurately describe what’s happening, but then you have this problem that you’ve been describing, which is, who’s actually interested in that? Yeah, right? Who wants to know that? Right? Because, because what people really want to know is the emotional component of that, and whether it is a good emotional component or a bad emotional component, and that is the weight that gets attached to every single piece of information now, and it makes the actual information very hard to judge. We’ve never in I’ve been a journalist for more than 40 years, right? And I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much news need to be documented, right? Like a total remaking of the federal government, two wars, both with nuclear powers involved. , and, and, and then a all out reshaping of the international economy. On top of it hard to imagine that those are not going to have consequences. And then, like, and then we’re like, Yeah, but like, how do I get to know my neighbor, it’s like, I don’t know, right? Because out there in the stratosphere, there’s a lot going on.
Joe Hamilton
but hopefully this, this experiment we have, it’s definitely worth fighting for. If you look, if you look at a grand, sort of global historical point of view, it’s been people in power, just grabbing and seizing that power at all, And it’s happened in countries that were supposedly advanced and and just even in the last decade, incredibly awful things have happened in what you would consider advanced societies, because people, seize power. S this, this experiment in democracy we’ve been having for 150 Years has been a good one so far, and hopefully we fight to keep it going. Thank you so much. Enjoy talking to you.Kelly McBride, Poynter Institute, NPR and Craig Newmark, Center for Ethics
Kelly McBride
Saturday bowling with friends. Don’t forget that
