- The real story about America and the media right now is about the voters, [tense dramatic music] about the people who think the media is out to get them, the people who think the media is the enemy, the people, when in fact, media is the people.
[slow relaxing music] - Hello and welcome to GZERO World.
I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, we are looking at the media's role in politics and in democracy itself.
Trust in journalism is rapidly eroding, and at the same time, the level of partisanship online is skyrocketing.
What impact will all this have on the 2024 election, and how will the first election in the age of generative AI play out?
I'll be talking to media experts, Brian Stelter and Nicole Hemmer, about that, and a lot more, don't worry.
I've also got your Puppet Regime.
- We have reached critical moment of decision for me.
- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.
- [Narrator 1] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.
- [Narrator 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, [uptempo dramatic music] and scale their supply chains.
With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.
Learn more at prologis.com.
[uptempo dramatic music ends] - [Narrator 1] And by.
- [Narrator 3] Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.
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- [Narrator 1] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, and.
[upbeat music] [logo whooshing] [upbeat music] - [Ian/ "The medium is the message," that's a famous line from one of the first books on Media Theory, written in 1964 by philosopher Marshall McLuhan.
It meant that the way content is delivered can be more powerful than the content itself.
Case in point, four years before McLuhan's book was published, 70 million Americans tuned in live to the first ever televised presidential debate.
- The candidates need no introduction.
The Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy.
- [Ian] As the story famously goes, Nixon showed up looking pale, refused makeup, and was sweaty by about 12 minutes into the program.
- I believe that we have the secret for progress.
We know the way to progress, and I think first of all, our own record proved that we know the way.
- The opening statements- - Telegenic was barely a word in 1960, but John F. Kennedy defined it for a generation.
- This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country, and this is a powerful country, but I think it could be a more powerful country.
- [Ian] The polls turned around overnight.
Nixon had a thin lead before the debate, but the next day the advantage went to his tanned and powdered rival.
Lyndon B Johnson, then Kennedy's running mate, was surprised, he thought Nixon had won the debate, but that's probably because LBJ reportedly listened to the debate on the radio.
A lot has changed since the early days of television, a 24/7 cable news cycle, hyperpartisan talk shows on the radio, do you remember Rush Limbaugh?
Scores of political podcasts, and the endless doom scroll of social media have created an information and disinformation overload.
It's impacting trust in the media.
According to a Gallup poll, journalists rank just above car salespeople, members of Congress, and telemarketers on the list of mistrusted professionals.
Shout out to nurses though, a well-deserved first place.
Trust in the media is so low that half of Americans surveyed believe news organizations are deliberately trying to mislead them, present company excluded obviously, and some major recent developments are doing little to help the cost.
Fox News settled a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million.
Fox then canned Tucker Carlson, a chief perpetuator of the big lie that voter fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 election.
And that, of course, was fake news.
More recently, a US district judge in Louisiana prohibited agencies in the Biden administration from pressuring social media companies.
A lawsuit claimed that officials frequently tried to squash stories about things like COVID vaccine safety, election integrity, and Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.
These examples give politicians in the United States a bogeyman to point to and say, "See, I told you so."
But media is also taking a trip to the upside down world these days.
CNN hosted a controversial town hall with GOP front runner Donald Trump.
- That was a rigged election, and it's a shame that we had to go through it.
- And Elon Musk invited Tucker Carlson to host a show on Twitter.
- UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life.
- As if the media landscape weren't already littered with landmines as we head into another election, along comes this.
- You know, people might be surprised to hear me say this, but I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot.
Yeah, I know.
I'd say he's just the kind of guy this country needs, and I really mean that.
- No, she doesn't, because she never said it, except maybe late at night to Bill just to annoy him.
That was an AI generated deepfake video, one of unfortunately thousands that we will be exposed to over the course of this campaign.
This will be the first presidential election in the age of generative AI, and the potential for pitfalls is enormous.
If Marshall McLuhan were around today, I wonder if he'd come to the same conclusion that the medium is the message.
Maybe now it's more like the message is all that matters if enough people believe it.
And here to talk about all of this are two of the greatest minds on the matter.
Self-proclaimed media nerd, Brian Stelter, is a journalist and former host of CNN's "Reliable Sources."
And Nicole Hemmer is a political historian and expert in partisan media.
Brian Stelter, thanks for joining us today.
- Great to be here, thanks.
- And Nicole Hemmer in Nashville.
Thank you.
- Thank you so much for having me.
- Okay, so lots to talk about today.
I want to start, because when I was a kid-kid, tiny kid, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.
Today, the media is very, very, very far from that.
What happened?
- I think the word, trust, is the keyword, the war on truth that was seen during the Trump years, and continues to this day.
It's really more than a war on truth.
It's a war on trust.
But I think trust has been eroding for decades, it's a generation-long event.
Trump is just in some ways a dramatized part of it.
This war on trust, you know, it was underway in the '70s and '80s in some parts of the Republican Party.
It was advantageous to the Republican Party to try to create an alternative to the mainstream media, an alternative to the Walter Cronkites.
We see that with Fox News in the '90s, but also with the rise of talk radio, and then to some extent, the rise of alternative social networks that's happening now.
So what we see is a, you know, a fragmenting, right, from three, the big three networks to dozens and to hundreds and to thousands now to millions, and in that environment, trust has collapsed.
- And nobody watches the same thing anymore, right?
I mean, so it's not just a question of left versus right, but it's also, there's no common narrative in the media where when there were three big networks, there really were.
Nicole, how did that happen, and how problematic is or isn't that for civil society?
- Well, it comes from a lot of different sources.
Of course, back in the '50s and '60s, conservatives were making the argument that you shouldn't watch liberal media, you should only trust conservative sources, and only watch those.
And that comes into connection with a big change that happens in the media in the '80s and '90s with the rise of cable, and that fragmentation of the media dial, and that sort of fragmentation of the audience has an enormous effect on a kind of shared culture, shared information.
So part of it is technological, right?
Technology changes cable, then the internet and social media allows you to kind of curate what you're watching more.
It also gives rise to a kind of desire to make news more entertaining, and that emphasis on entertainment as the way of consuming news that also changes what people expect from news, the kind of news that they're drawn to.
It changes news values in really important ways that helps to contribute to that erosion and trust that Brian was talking about.
And it really does matter, because that lack of shared information, shared understanding, does lead to a fragmentation of the culture.
One that is, again, both technological, but also coming from the right, really purposeful as a way of getting their audiences to trust them more than other sources.
- It is interesting, I saw Elon Musk over the weekend saying that, "Hey, we're never boring."
In other words, "We've got circuses for you," right?
- [Brian] Yes, right, that is not the case.
- I mean is that really, I mean, media is in part meant to ensure that the people will be amused.
- That's absolutely true, and Musk is saying that now in defense against this new service, Threads, that Mark Zuckerberg has been promoting,.
Basically Musk's argument is, "Well, we're more fun over here on Twitter.
And yes, more fun also sometimes means more dramatic, more divisive, more polarizing, but you're going to have fun here."
I do think that hits on a broader point about media that I felt when I was at CNN for almost nine years there, I was doing a weekly show about media, and I was talking about politics in that context.
And I oftentimes realized, you know, there's good television, and there's good journalism, and sometimes not the same thing.
You could have a program that's really strong journalistically, but it's not great TV, and you could have a program that's really fun to watch television that's not great journalism.
The goal, of course, in cable news is to be both, to be in the middle, to be in the middle of that Venn diagram.
But it is a reality that the most entertaining programs on TV are of course not news.
And the most popular things that smell or sound like news on TV are the ones that are actually more entertaining, more polarizing, more bombastic.
Tucker Carlson, who was recently fired from Fox, is the most dramatic example of this.
He put on, as Nicole said, a us versus them show.
The entire theme of the show was us versus them.
He's trying to protect against what he thought were the evil elites.
It was a very entertaining show for his fan base, and frankly, very scary for everybody else.
We live in this environment where there's so much treasure, but there's also so much trash.
And the challenge is sorting out the trash and the treasure knowing what the high quality journalism is, and what the stuff is that stinks, that's actually just pretending to be news.
It's harder than ever for people to know the difference, to process the difference.
I see it all the time that consumers just feel overwhelmed and inundated by information.
They don't know what's real and what's not anymore.
And that, I think, more than anything else contributes to this war on trust.
- Now, Nicole, frequently, I mean, I read the New York Times, I read the Wall Street Journal, and frequently the stories I will see are very, very similar.
The headlines that I consume are radically different.
How intentional is that in your view?
What's happening between the meat and the headline?
- Oh, it's absolutely intentional, and part of it is because there's this desire to get people to actually click.
If you can elicit enough shock from someone when they see the headline, then chances are they will at least click through to see what's going on.
And this is part of, you know, how media have changed during a social media age, but it's not just about social media.
I mean, newspapers have been going for grabby headlines in order to goose sales for well over a hundred years.
So that's not necessarily new.
I don't know that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editors, as they're working on their headlines, are aiming to mislead their readers.
I mean, they want to be trusted by their readers.
It's just when you get that set of journalistic values coming up against that set of business interest that you sometimes get some of these misleading headlines and that kind of clickbait that has made readers, I don't know, a little more suspicious of newspapers, a little more wary of clicking through, because they don't know whether they should trust the headline actually matches the story.
- Which leads to the question on Trump, right?
Because of course so much of Trump in 2016, was the media just throwing him in every possible headline.
The guy's an incredible showman, he's a marketer, aware of his brand, like almost no one the American public has ever seen.
But then when he runs for president, suddenly, like he is literally getting wall to wall coverage on CNN's morning show, on "Morning Joe."
Whether or not they like him or hate him, it's just their wall to wall coverage.
How did you deal with that?
Did you feel, first of all, did you feel complicit?
Did you feel culpable?
As this is happening, and certainly at the beginning, you must be thinking to yourself, "This guy has no chance, doesn't matter, but it's a fun story."
- Well, more importantly, Republicans thought that, remember the Sean Spicers of the world thought Trump had no chance.
- Absolutely, that's right.
- Trump was from the outset, one of the biggest stories of our lifetime.
Even if he had lost in 2016, he would still be a gigantic earthquake within the Republican Party.
So I think it's important to recognize how newsworthy he was, and to this day still is.
Now, that said, the ways that he is covered make a big difference.
Whether he is scrutinized, whether with questions are skeptical, whether there are appropriate follow-ups, all of that matters.
But I don't think it matters as much as people sometimes want it to matter.
What I mean by that is, at the end of the day, there is an alternative universe, a Republican media operation led by Fox that was driving Donald Trump's success.
He was calling in not just to CNN, but to Fox.
Fox was propping him up every single day.
So to the extent that.
As a thought experiment, if the rest of the American media had ignored Donald Trump in 2016, I don't think it would've mattered.
He had the right wing media in his pocket, and this country is split up now into two competing media universes.
I think it is completely, almost entirely separate at this point.
I think what we have to reckon with is the reality that if one arm of the American media is doing the fact checking, that actually might strengthen and enhance some of these demagogues, some of these populist candidates, and that is a challenge I don't know the way out of.
He came up recently with the CNN Town Hall with Trump, CNN was widely denounced for having a town hall with Trump.
You know, there was an argument that it made him even bigger and more popular among the Republican Party, but is the answer not to question the candidate, it's just we're in this paradoxical moment where questioning the candidate, fact checking, scrutinizing him sometimes makes him stronger.
- Nicole?
- There definitely is something to this idea that Donald Trump was a very challenging figure to cover in media.
The thing that Trump was able to do was to align his electoral incentives with media incentives, right?
So that even when you had these aggressive questionings or attacks on Donald Trump, it was making him the center of the story every single day.
And audiences have a responsibility for that, because the reason ratings were so high was because people could not get enough of Donald Trump.
But even that pushback becomes part of the narrative, it was a way that Trump was able to draw in media criticism as part of his campaign, right?
To say that he was being attacked by CNN, that he was being attacked by the New York Times, and that became a big part of his campaign.
- I mean, he can't be fact checked in real time, right?
I mean, this is something that we saw, you know, during that town hall that I'm going to ask you about in a second, Brian.
How do you handle that in real time?
- Oh, it's a great question, because you're exactly right.
Like if you're bringing facts to an ideology fight, you're just playing on different fields, so you're both getting something out of it, right?
Kaitlan Collins gets to look tough for constantly pushing back and fact checking Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump gets all of this air time to spew all sorts of untruths and message to his base.
I mean, one of the things that you would want to do differently, I think, is have a different audience.
If you were going to have any audience at all, obviously with the town hall, you have to have an audience to have it so thoroughly stacked with Trump supporters and other Republicans, I think creates an atmosphere in which Donald Trump is going to thrive, and which fact checking is going to fail.
But there is something about that interview format, any kind of live format with Donald Trump, I think is going to be a failure in a way, because it just allows him to steamroll, and there's very little that you can do to push back, and actually, you know, stop spreading misinformation in real time.
- But also, I mean, the guy's running a business, Chris Licht at the time, and you know, I mean, Donald Trump is the brand, and it's not like he's saying, "Oh, okay, you don't want to have Republicans in the audience.
Sure, I'm willing to do it with a neutral audience.
I'm willing to do it with no audience."
He's going to say no, he's going to say, "You're either doing it in my way, or I'm not giving it to you."
What do you do in that situation?
- Trump had all the leverage, but there is still a choice about whether to platform him or not.
That is always a choice.
It's a choice now about Robert Kennedy Jr, and his claims about vaccines.
There is always a choice about whether to platform or not.
I do err on the side of presenting these broadcasts, maybe not live, but presenting them, and letting the viewers see who these people are and who these candidates are.
We need to hear so much more from voters, and frankly, so much less from these politicians that are pandering to them.
Because the real story about America and the media right now is about the voters, about the people who think the media is out to get them, the people who think the media is the enemy, the people, when in fact, media is the people.
You know, the person I trust most in the media is the local editor of the paper closest to my hometown.
The media is not the enemy, the media is the people, and yet that messaging has gone so awry, it's gone so far off the rails, because we need to hear more about why people have lost trust.
And that's how I thought about the town hall.
Forget about Trump, let's talk to Trump's voters, let's learn more from them, because then we're getting closer to the big story.
I sometimes wonder if when people complain about the media, what they're really complaining about is the existence of the politician the media is covering.
And I do think there's an element of that that's going on here when it comes to some of these far right candidates, and makes some extent, maybe, you know, a RFK Jr, who is putting pollution into the information ecosystem.
- So Nicole, I'm hearing from Brian, it's not the meat's fault, no part of it, right?
- [chuckles] Not entirely.
- What I think we need is much more analysis, right?
That's the way to cover somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, is to bring in experts to talk about what it is she believes and why she's so popular, why she is this kind of mainstream in a way, or at least, huge national figure, despite representing a very small district.
Why does she get so much outsized attention?
And what does that mean?
What are people responding to?
What do supporters of Marjorie Taylor Greene think?
And how can you address the kinds of things that they're going to her for?
And there's some things that you can't do, right?
Like if people are entertained by, or interested in conspiracies about Jewish space lasers, there's very little you can do about that.
But you can go into those conspiracies, explain the kind of work that they're doing, and that's probably not as entertaining as interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It might not bring in the same kind of ratings, and that becomes the kind of push-pull that's happening in journalism right now is how do you do that kind of analysis in a way that satisfies audiences without necessarily platforming some of the most odious people in the country, who, again, you don't actually need to talk to Marjorie Taylor Greene at this point to know what she believes, she has been on countless platforms saying exactly that.
So moving the conversation beyond just what Marjorie Taylor Greene believes or says to some of the broader dynamics around her.
- And before we close, I want to ask about disinformation, and I want to ask specifically about artificial intelligence.
2024 election coming up, we've already seen AI-generated photos, tapes, audio, as well as video.
What do you think needs to happen?
What do you think the implications are that you've seen so far of that trend.
- I'm an optimist by nature, but I'm a pessimist when it comes to this topic, because it does seem to me the energy around defeating disinformation, policing, guarding against it, that energy's evaporated.
There was a lot of energy five years ago around making sure that there were some guardrails on social networks to give people some recourse if they were being smeared and lied about, if there was a crazy disinformation campaign targeting your family, you at least had some way to maybe have some recourse from Facebook or Twitter.
It feels like a lot of that's gone away.
The energy's dissipated when it comes to this war against disinformation.
I think AI's going to supercharge us, of course, make it a lot easier to have a lot more information pollution in the atmosphere, and that pollution does choke everybody.
I think the danger is it causes people to decide, "I just don't know what's true.
I can't decide what's true anymore.
I can't figure it out.
I'm just going to tune out, check out.
I'm just going to drop out, and not participate in the American conversation.
That is the real danger of this environment of disinformation, and of politicians pedaling propaganda.
But I never buy this idea that we're in a post-truth society though, because we're only in a post-truth society if we all give up, like if we all surrender, you know, there are many, many, many millions of Americans out there defending the truth in all their individual ways.
Some go out and they launch Substacks, they launch blogs, they launch newsletters, they post on Facebook or Nextdoor, and educate their neighbors about what's going on in their world.
There are all of those little green shoots out there that make me hopeful about this media environment.
But where I do feel pessimism is about disinformation and AI because it is going to make a bad problem even worse in the short term.
- Nicole, it is a spectrum, right?
I mean, I'm not saying it's wholly post-truth, but my God, there's a lot of elements of post-truth out there.
Where do you come down?
- I join Brian in his pessimism about this.
I mean, it requires so much attention and media literacy in order to parse what's true and not true.
And as Brian was saying, like you find then like one voice out there who you can really trust, and you subscribe to their Substack, and we become even more and more atomized as news consumers, because there is so much distrust out there.
And again, you're seeing a war on trust happening, even as these new technologies and innovations are emerging.
I mean, Twitter's verification system gets destroyed at a moment when AI-generated disinformation is becoming even more and more rampant.
And so now, you're tossed into a sea of, "I don't know who to trust, what to trust, and all of the signals that I was relying on in the past don't exist anymore."
And that is an enormous problem moving forward.
I do think that people, many people don't want to be post-truth, they want to know what is real in the world, and they want to use what is real to guide the choices that they make.
It's just so much more difficult than it used to be.
Not that there was a golden age or a nirvana where everybody had easy access to true facts and the ability to sort through them easily, but that we are in a particular flood of misinformation and disinformation right now, and the tools for navigating that are just not as strong as we would like them to be, and so maybe that's the next big project, maybe that's where we'll see those green shoots is as people innovate ways to make it easier to navigate a world that's awash in this kind of disinformation.
- But this new AI crisis, it makes old news outlets even more important, even more impactful I think.
Real news outlets should verify or debunk the nonsense on the internet, and tell people what is true.
And what I'm hoping is that in an environment that's going to be overwhelmed by AI and power disinformation, there's going to be a little bit of a walled garden of real news outlets, that you can actually enter that garden, and feel like you not always can trust every bit of it, but can have more confidence in it.
- Nicole Hemmer, Brian Stelter, thanks so much for joining us today.
- Thanks so much for having me.
- Thank you.
[slow relaxing music] - Now, it's time for Puppet Regime, roll the tape.
- After so many months of anticipation, we have reached critical moment of decision for me.
Shall I embrace realism, history, and awesome power of nuclear weapons?
Or do I surrender at last to a more utopian off-ramp from current reality?
In other words, what to watch first, "Oppenheimer" or "Barbie?"
♪ Puppet Regime ♪ [uptempo dramatic music] - That's our show this week, come back next week, and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you're like, "Hey, beat up on some more people in the media, we'd enjoy that," we can do that.
Check us out at gzeromedia.com.
[logo dinging] [slow gentle music] [slow gentle music continues] [slow gentle music ends] [slow relaxing music] - [Narrator 1] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.
- [Narrator 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, [uptempo dramatic music] and scale their supply chains.
With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.
Learn more at prologis.com.
- [Narrator 1] And by.
- [Narrator 2] Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.
We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.
Learn more at cox.career/news.
- [Narrator 1] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, and.
[upbeat music] [slow relaxing music]