How do journalists defend the importance of facts in an age of high polarization and low trust in the media?
Poynter’s National Advisory Board met Feb. 10-11 in St. Petersburg, Florida, to provide guidance on how the institute can advocate for journalists and strengthen democracy in the upcoming year.
In an on-the-record panel, Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-checking Network, spoke with Eric Deggans, NPR’s TV critic and media analyst, and Anita Kumar, Politico senior managing editor, in a session about how journalists can counter attacks on their reporting.
Here are four key moments from the session, edited for clarity. Watch the full session below or read a full transcript.
On polarization and facts in big moments
Deggans: I think the big challenge we’re facing is that exact question: How do we communicate the importance of facts? And I feel like writ large, what’s happened is that we get distracted, and then something happens outside the political process or the media process that is undeniable, where facts absolutely matter.
The Great Recession happens, and the housing market collapses. And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter whether you’re liberal or conservative, you just want to save your house, you want to save your job, you want to save the economy. The pandemic happens. And all of a sudden, it’s not about whether you’re in a red state or a blue state, it’s about how can I not die from this thing? And how can we get past the point where everybody’s stuck in their homes and sanitizing their mail? …
And I think one of our biggest challenges is the growth of what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness,” where people increasingly believe that because they believe something intensely, it must be true. And we’re now in a political system where some people are trying to make that a reality. But the problem is, eventually, you come up against actual reality, right? So I think that’s our argument. If you were too trapped in your point of view, then you start to lose sight of how to create vaccines that might cure cancer. How to advance the science that might deal with climate change. We have to sort of deal in facts, or eventually, we lose control of these things that are outside of our belief systems that are rooted in real things.
Kumar: I know we’re talking about journalism and media, and of course, it’s a problem for us. But I really just feel like it’s a problem for all institutions right now. …it is about a lot more than just journalism. People don’t believe just institutions that they used to believe in this country.
I actually think Eric, interestingly enough, I think — and maybe it’s because we covered it so much during the pandemic — I really do think that the pandemic was really what you said, but it was also very partisan. You know, the school closures and openings, wearing masks, vaccines themselves. You just look at the California fires that we’ve been talking about. It’s really partisan about disaster aid.
So I think we’re at a point that there are no resets. There’s no moment where we’re all together and saying things aren’t… that we believe or that we can set aside differences. I really feel like we’re not there. This is sort of depressing, but I do think it’s more society than it is just journalism.
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On helping audiences understand how journalism is done
Deggans: I do think we have to be more open. When we have big scoops about things, we don’t often explain how we learned what we learned. And I think it’s led some people in the audience to assume that we can just find out whatever we want to know about, whatever we choose to report on, whenever we choose to do it. And people are not aware of all the hard work that goes into turning big scoops. And I think we need to get past not talking about that kind of stuff, even when it involves sensitive subjects, even when it involves stuff that might give your competitors an advantage, because we’re at a point where the public is not giving us the benefit of the doubt anymore.
We saw this with the controversy over how CBS edited its interviews with Kamala Harris. In the past, people assume that if you do a big, long interview with somebody, and you edit it down, that if you’re a traditional journalism organization, you made responsible choices. The public generally sort of went along with that. Well, now they’re not. Now they’re saying, “Prove to us that you didn’t deceptively edit this.”
And at NPR and at CBS, we resist releasing the raw audio or we resist releasing transcripts of the raw conversation because we’re worried about the precedent that would set. And I certainly understand that, but we’ve reached a point where we don’t have the benefit of the doubt from a lot of people, and sometimes we just have to put out a transcript and be like, “Okay, here’s what the original interview was, and here’s why we cut all this stuff. And it was mostly for time.”…
And it won’t necessarily convince the people who are dead set in their belief that we are fraudulent. But there’s all these other people watching this. It’s a schoolyard fight in a weird way. There’s all these people watching it go down, and what you’re really trying to do is convince them of what you’re doing. Because the people who are coming at you, many of them, their critiques are not even fair. They’re not evenhanded. But there’s a bunch of people watching from the sidelines saying, “Okay, well, is this true?” And you’ve got to do something to show them that it’s not, or that you handled it ethically, or that even if you did make a mistake, it was an honest one.
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On the international fact-checking community’s response to Mark Zuckerberg
Holan: I talked to fact-checkers around the world who are facing increased attacks and online harassment. Some of these are journalists who are working in countries where there’s no strong tradition of free press, where the rule of law is iffy. And when we talk about whether they should respond to specific attacks, our consensus has been, if it seems small, if it seems like it’s not gaining traction, ignore it. But the minute it seems like it is gaining traction, counter it with facts and evidence.
One of the examples that we had, writ large, was last month when Mark Zuckerberg said he was ending the fact-checking program, and he released a personal video where he said that fact checkers were biased and destroyed trust. And as a community, we said, “We can’t not respond to this. We have to respond to this. This is too damaging to our core mission.” And we wrote a letter where we tried to very respectfully rebut what he said.
It set the record straight for anybody who comes years later and says, “Hey, what was that, that fact checking controversy about?” We tried to leave the door open to Meta, so if they changed their mind, we could work with them again. But I do think it raised the spirits of the fact-checkers themselves to feel like they had agency and they were sticking up for their principles. And I think when we think organizationally and how we’re working with individual journalists, I think journalists need support right now that their work is important.
On what to tell young people entering the field about why journalism is a worthwhile career
Deggans: I have always been passionate about telling stories that might bring change, even if it only changes one person’s mind. And when that happens, it is an amazing thing. That’s what I would tell them. You have a chance to tell stories that bring change.
Holan: Yeah, and don’t you think we’re playing a long game here? I mean, I think people sometimes expect journalism to have immediate impact, immediate consequences. When I think of the journalism that I most admire, the problems they were writing about took decades to resolve, and it was not one individual story that solved a problem. I’m thinking about Ida B Wells and her coverage of lynching in the in the late 19th century, early 20th century. I mean, she did amazing reporting and changed minds and helped people. But it wasn’t like her reports came out and everything was fine afterwards. No, it was part of social progress that was decades in the making.
Kumar: I wouldn’t say the word change, but more like education. And that could be anybody. Someone reads something. and they decided how they wanted to vote, and they learned something and they made a decision. Or, having worked in statehouses, the governor reads something that you wrote, or heard something that you said and learned something and made a decision based on something. I mean, really, it’s education.
Deggans: You know what? That’s bringing change.
Kumar: It’s a different way of saying it. But change sort of implies, “I think it should go in a particular direction,” and I don’t actually. And so that’s why I’m saying it a little bit differently, which is, “I’m letting you know something that I’ve discovered, and you can… process that and make a decision.” So for me, the optimistic times are when I hear one person tell me — and I heard one last night that he read something in Politico or wherever I happened to be working or any news outlet — and that made someone think about something, and they learned something new. To me, those really specific examples are… the reasons, I think, to get into journalism. It’s still a great and fun profession, too, but really, just telling people things they don’t know.
