SPEAKER 1: OK, now for our
final speaker of the day. We were chatting after lunch. We think it was three or maybe
four years ago that she last spoke for us. And we're glad she
could come back. Sharyl Attkisson is a
five-time Emmy award winning investigative journalist. Many of you know her as the
managing editor and host of Sinclair Broadcast Group's
excellent Sunday Morning News program "Full Measure." Previously, she was a
correspondent for "CBS News" and an anchor and
correspondent for CNN. And I promised her we wouldn't
hold that last bit about CNN against her. In addition, she hosted "Health
Week," a weekly medical news magazine on PBS. In addition to her Emmys,
her many other awards, include The Barbara Olson Award
for Excellence and Independence in Journalism, and the Edward
R Murrow Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting. Somehow in the midst of her
top-notch reporting work, she finds time to write
best selling books. The most recent of these
is titled, "Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us
to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism." She'll be drawing on themes from
that book in her talk today. Would you please welcome back
to the podium, Sharyl Attkisson. [APPLAUSE] SHARYL ATTKISSON: So good
to be here in person. I haven't been doing many
in-person appearances. Boy, can you guys see me? I feel like I'm totally hidden. Yeah. If you guys have a stool, if
someone has a small thing, maybe you want to bring it. OK. I, too, have some slides that
I can't see at all from here. Maybe I'll stand over here. Now I'm messing up
the camera shot. Well, I'll just stand
on my toes a little bit until we get a stool. But today I'm speaking about,
let's see the first slide, journalism and
the 2020 election. Slanted journalism. And I hope you can
take today's speech, maybe have a little fun with it. Because as sad as
these trends are, maybe when we talk about them
together, and think about ways to stay informed and
address these things, we can at least be entertained
by some of the outrage, really, that the news
business has become. Let's begin by tracing the
well-organized and well-funded movement to corner the market
on information and narratives. [APPLAUSE] This movement, I think, was
designed specifically in part, to keep President Trump
from serving his full term, or if that failed, to
impact the 2020 race. This whole strategy relied
heavily on slanted journalism. And that required
major news outlets to suspend their normal
ethics and guidelines, which astonishingly enough,
they did, unabashedly. And admitted to it,
outright, saying that it was necessary to
change the way we do business because President Trump
was so uniquely dangerous. So in the past few years,
we've experienced a sea change in terms of how the
media do their job. The emergence of Trump as a
viable political candidate accelerated this devolution. No longer do reporters, as
you know, keep their opinions firewalled from their stories. Their stories are rife
with their opinions. Dubious anonymous
sources are repeatedly relied upon even after
they've repeatedly proven shamefully unreliable. Basic fact checks go unconducted
as long as the news furthers an anti-Trump narrative. Egregious reporting mistakes,
and we'll talk about some of those today, are made by
the same outlets, and sometimes the same reporters,
over and over again. And yet are magically forgiven. Journalism ethical
standards are bent or suspended so that Trump could
be covered more aggressively and in a one-sided fashion. Some of the best
evidence for this can be found in a June
2017 opinion piece by a guy named Mitchell
Stephens and it was published in "Politico." Stephens is a
journalism professor at New York University. In his article, he cheers on
the end of media objectivity. Oh, hold on just a moment. We may have a solution here. Thank you. That ought to do it. Thank you. Much better. Thank you. OK. I'll be careful. Thank you. So he cheers on the end
of media objectivity under a new President Trump, who
was under attack by the media. The headline to his
article was, "Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And good riddance. Disinterested reporting
is overrated." It's shocking that a journalism
professor, someone teaching up-and-coming professionals
in the field of news, considers disinterested
reporting to be overrated. Disinterested reporting
was, I thought, always thought of as a
pillar of good journalism. Tossing it aside is, I think,
a bit like a medical school professor telling medical school
students that diet and exercise are overrated. In fact, they're fundamental. Neutrality and objectivity in
news reporting are fundamental. But if one were trying
to brainwash people into thinking
journalism is really about the opposite
thing, then yes, one would say the fundamentals are
outdated and to be rejected. Stephens goes on in
his very partisan piece to heap praise upon the New
York Times' public dissent into blatant partisanship. He writes, "Our most
respected mainstream journalism organizations
are beginning to recognize the failings
of nonpartisanship. Its tepidness, its blindspots,
its omissions, its evasions." He says, "It was news
when the patriarch of American journalism,
The New York Times, finally used the word 'lie' in
a headline atop its front page September 17, 2016, to
describe a Trump assertion." Stephens goes on to note with
satisfaction that other legacy media followed suit. He wrote, "Other legacy
journalism organizations began more regularly calling
out Trump's falsehoods if not actually
accusing him of lying." About a week later,
the Los Angeles Times declared, also on
page one, "Never in modern presidential
politics has a major candidate made false statements as
routinely as Trump has." On April 5th, 2017,
The New York Times, reflecting the New
World Order quickly changed a headline
from, "Trump says Susan Rice may have
committed a crime," to, "Trump, citing no
evidence, suggests Susan Rice committed a crime." Anchorman Scott Pelley
at CBS upped the ante by calling Trump's statements
"divorced from reality." No attribution, just Pelley's
own critical opinion. So what the Journalism
Professor Stephens sees as worthy of a claim,
I see as irresponsible. A journalism professor is
teaching a new generation of reporters to inject
agendas and opinions in their reporting, to
forget about the firewall that we used to attempt to
put between news and opinion. That kind of reporting
that Stephens applauds would have gotten a
traditional news journalist fired not all that long ago. Today it's part of what makes
it so easy for the narrative to take hold and can make it
so difficult for the truth to be told. There's endless
evidence for this sort of slanted reporting today. Little quiz for you. Based on this headline
in The Atlantic, who would you guess came out
on top in a September 2019 election in North Carolina? Democrats or Republicans? It says, "North Carolina Gives
Republicans a Wake-Up Call. The results of a
special election portend trouble for
the GOP in 2020." Sure sounds as
though Republicans got their clocks cleaned. After all, the
headline states they got a wake-up call
and the results portend trouble for the GOP. So you might be
surprised to learn, as I was that, the
Republicans actually had a successful night. It's laid out right
there in the article if you get past the
misleading headline. Here we go. In a congressional race,
the Republican candidate beat the Democrat by a
far wider margin, it says, of 4,000 votes. And separately, in a
state special election, Republican Greg Murphy
won as expected. How on Earth did those
Republican victories elicit a headline implying
that the Republican had lost? It's as if somebody was bent on
pushing a particular narrative, regardless of how the
actual election turned out. In this way, we can
see how reporters who are pushing a
narrative don't care much about the facts. Pesky facts that
contradict a narrative are nothing more than a
nuisance to brush off. Reporters simply devise
ways to dispense of them. Another example demonstrates
nearly every trademark of a narrative and
the perils that come with reporters
advancing it blindly. On April 15, 2020, Politico
reports that President Trump owed the Bank of
China tens of millions of in a loan coming due in
2022 as he dealt with China on the coronavirus pandemic. The implication
there is that Trump can't be as tough as he
needs to be on China, and Chinese leaders,
for unleashing COVID-19 and covering up
its seriousness because he is beholden to them. This news makes headlines
around the world. "Trump owes tens of millions
to the Bank of China. And the loan is
due soon," blares the headline on Politico. "Donald Trump's debt
to China," reads The New York Times' headline. And National Review,
"Trump owes millions to Bank of China for
building loan, reports show." But it isn't true. Shortly after this news circled
the Earth, the Bank of China issued a statement saying it
had held that Trump loan only for 22 days before selling it to
a US real estate firm in 2012. In other words, tens
of millions of dollars that Trump supposedly
owed China, due soon, was actually owed
for only three weeks back in 2012, eight years before. Obviously, these facts
negate the whole idea behind this story. But the media are not about to
admit that they made a mistake. Politico simply
changes its headline, Trump owes, to Trump owed China. Past tense. They and the other media
pretend the false information they published had little
bearing on the actual news. National Review,
likewise, simply changes Trump owes to Trump owed. Politico could have
avoided the error if it hadn't failed to
follow a basic rule that's taught to every 19- and
20-year-old journalism student. Contact the people you're
talking about in a story before you publish. Of the three reporters bylined
in the article, Marc Caputo, Meridith McGraw and Anita
Kumar, none apparently thought to contact
the Bank of China before publishing the story. And apparently,
no editor thought it was necessary
to do so, either. Had they done their
job, they likely would have learned,
prior to publication as they were supposed
to, that there was no current loan to Trump
from China, thus avoiding their major flub. There are so many
of these mistakes. it starts to look
like a pattern, a strategy against Trump. Not just sloppy mistakes. And I tracked the
major media mistakes and never found one
that favored Trump. That starts to look
like a pattern, too. On Thanksgiving Day,
2019, a little less than a year from
election day, we passed the one hundredth
major media mistake in the era of
Trump, by my count. This error was committed by
Newsweek's political reporter, Jessica Kwong, who wrote a story
and published a tweet asking, "How did Trump
spend Thanksgiving? Tweeting, golfing, and more." She went on to write
that Trump was spending Thanksgiving Day at
his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The story implied that Trump
was, once again, goofing off compared to his heroic
predecessor, President Obama, who used to only
do selfless things. [LAUGHTER] The problem is, her
story was false. Trump had actually left
Florida the evening before Thanksgiving to
fly to Afghanistan, where he spent the
holiday, not golfing, but serving dinner to US troops. [APPLAUSE] When her mistake became
clear the reporter, Kwong, claimed she'd made
an honest mistake. On Twitter, she wrote that
she was deleting her earlier, incorrect tweet with fabricated
information about Trump because, quote, "It was
written before knowing about the president's surprise
visit to Afghanistan." There are five key problems
with this explanation from an ethical
standpoint in journalism. So I'm going to go over those. First, she demonstrated
a shocking lack of reportorial knowledge. I'm not a political
reporter, nor do I closely follow the White House. Yet, I knew enough to
wonder, whether on a holiday, the president might be making
a surprise visit to the troops on Thanksgiving because all
recent presidents have done this at one time or another. One would think a national
political reporter and her editors would know to
watch for a possible surprise visit by the president. Second, that Newsweek
article demonstrated an inexcusable
failure to attribute. Kwong's mistake
wouldn't have been as problematic if she had
attributed the claim that Trump was golfing on Thanksgiving
to an actual source, instead of reporting
it as if it were her own firsthand
confirmed information. Kwong isn't the
only one who seems to have abandoned the
basic journalistic practice of attributing
information to its source. Reporters now routinely
declare information to be a fact as if they have
personally confirmed it, when they could not
possibly have done so. There was no election
fraud, or there wasn't enough to change the
outcome of the election. The reporters
claiming these things haven't gone to any precincts
and examined records or interviewed
witnesses on the ground. They're just declaring something
they want to believe as a fact. Third, the problem with
the Newsweek story, there was a baffling
failure to fact check. This is one of the most
basic tenets of journalism. No matter how obvious
something seems, no matter how many
others are reporting it, no matter how
obvious a video clip may seem to show something,
it often proves to be wrong. That's why it's so
critical for reporters to check their assumptions. Kwong should have
contacted the White House to see if her claim, that
Trump would be golfing on Thanksgiving, was true. If the people
there had said yes, and she attributed the
answer to the White House, then even if Trump had
ended up in Afghanistan, Kwong could not have been
journalistically faulted for the mistaken information. She would have done
her job correctly. Instead, she reported
false information as if she had checked it. Fourth, there was
a glaring failure to correct the mistake
after the fact. Although Newsweek fixed the
story, it really correct it. Editors called the
revision an update. This is disingenuous. The story hadn't
changed or been updated. Newsweek simply learned that
its original report was false. That merits both a
correction and an apology. And fifth, the false
information persisted well after the update. Newsweek retained
its false headline stating that Trump
golfed on Thanksgiving. He didn't. I think that's still
up there today, because I checked
in the last week. I really think one of the
most remarkable things about this whole story, is
that it's a case of history repeating itself. It's an example of lessons
not learned by the media. NBC had generated a similar
scandal less than a year before, also tying
itself up into a pretzel to make it seem as if it
had not bungled a story. The NBC saga began
on December 25, 2018, nearly eight hours before
Christmas Day's official end. The timing matters. You'll see why in a moment. The network published
a headline blaring, "Trump becomes the first
president since 2002 not to visit troops
at Christmastime." The story claimed
that Trump had broken from a recent tradition
of actually visiting troops and wounded warriors. The article took
multiple jabs at Trump to advance the anti-Trump
narrative of a president who could not live up to the
standards of his predecessors. What NBC did not know, was
that contrary to its reporting, Trump had left the White
House late on December 25 to visit the troops in Iraq. What happened when the mistake
was revealed is quite telling. Like Newsweek, NBC was
unable to admit its mistake. Instead of a simple
apology saying it originally had no idea
the president had sneaked off to Iraq and that it had made
an assumption without bothering to verify it, NBC published
a lengthy editor's note parsing the definition of what
constitutes a Christmastime visit and claimed
the original article was technically correct. Depends on what the meaning
of the word "is" is. OK. So the NBC editor makes the
argument, well, maybe Trump visited the troops around
Christmas, after all. And yes, he did leave the
White House on Christmas to go to Iraq. But he did not arrive in
Iraq until after the stroke of midnight. And the day after
Christmas isn't really a Christmastime visit, is it? So instead of an apology,
NBC defends its mistake by arguing when Christmastime
technically begins and ends. The NBC's editor's note reads-- this is so twisted, "As of
the end of Christmas Day 2018, Trump had not visited the troops
during the holiday season, and had announced
no plans to do so. The article was correct. But on December 26,
the situation changed. Trump and the First
Lady, Melania Trump, made an unannounced
visit to troops in Iraq. As a result, the
thrust of this article is no longer correct, even
if it was at the time. In the interest of
transparency, we are keeping the
article on NBCNews.com so that the record will
reflect the situation on the day the
article was published, and are directing readers to
an article about Trump's Iraq visit here. We're also altering one line
in the article, as well as the headline, to
be more specific and to note Trump was the first
president since 2002 who didn't visit military personnel
on or before Christmas, rather than at Christmastime." Claiming the article was correct
at the time but the situation changed, without acknowledging
the journalistic malpractice at issue, here, is remarkable. The corrected
article then goes on to double down on its mistake,
in a way that's still designed to make Trump look bad. Because, after all,
that's the goal. First, NBC chooses
a new tack that fits the narrative
it set out to prove and stuck by it,
regardless of the facts. "By staying home on
Tuesday," said NBC, "Trump became the first
president since 2002 who didn't visit
military personnel on or before Christmas." And then elaborates, "Based
on a check of NBC logs, President Barack Obama visited
troops at Marine Corps Base Hawaii every Christmas he
was in office, [LAUGHTER] from 2009 to 2016. Before him," said
NBC, "according to a check of news releases,
President George W Bush visited wounded warriors at
Walter Reed from 2003 to 2008. Trump previously said,"
NBC goes on to say, "he hasn't visited a combat
zone because he's had an unbelievably busy schedule." Among the anti-Trump press,
the new version of the story, comparing Trump unfavorably
to Obama and Bush, goes viral. No attention is paid
to NBC'S mistake. It's like it never
even happened. The focus becomes the
newly revised scandal that Trump is the
first president not to visit the troops on
or before Christmas Day. One exception to the
groupthink, which surprised me, is the normally,
anti-Trump, Erik Wemple of the Washington Post. He actually took issue
with NBC pointing out, "Trump didn't stay
home Christmas Tuesday, as NBC claimed in the updated
version of its article, at least not all of Tuesday. He left the White House
late on December 25." Wemple goes on to say,
"the NBC story appears to rest on a lawyerly definition
of Christmastime, Christmas Day, and the days
and weeks before it. However, other common
definitions of Christmastime expand that understanding
to the Christmas season, or the period from about
December 24 to January 1, or January 6. But," Wemple says,
"NBC seemed intent on making the story be about
whether they could technically defend that they
hadn't jumped the gun and made a false assumption,
rather than what Trump actually did over the Christmas holiday." NBC could have
chosen numerous facts to highlight about
President Trump, if it were focused on
disseminating information rather than generating a smear. So let's look at some of
the actual stats I found when I did a little research. It turns out
President Obama never visited US troops in foreign
countries or combat zones on Thanksgiving or
at Christmastime, as Trump had done
twice by early 2020. The closest President Obama
got to spending Thanksgiving or Christmas in a combat
zone with the troops, was a visit to
South Korea a week before Thanksgiving in 2009. President Bill
Clinton was kind of close to a Christmas visit
with a December 22, 2007, visit to Bosnia. But that was after
the war ended. The annual Christmas
troops visit that NBC rushed to credit
Obama for, all of those had taken place not
in a combat zone, but stateside, conveniently
near Obama's home in Hawaii. Not that there's
anything wrong with that. But what I'm saying
is, if they were looking to disseminate
factual information, they could have come up with
an entirely different story. Another point made in
the slanted NBC article about Trump, was that he had yet
to visit an active combat zone, as if it were an anomaly,
that he supposedly had gone almost two years
without having done, so. In fact, according
to military records, presidential visits to combat
zones are relatively rare. Presidents have
visited a combat zone only 27 times in US
history, prior to Trump. By early 2020, Trump
had added at least four to that historic tally. Visits to South Korea,
Iraq, Afghanistan, not to mention that
he was sometimes accompanied by First Lady,
Melania, who has made at least two visits to a combat zone. I discovered another
interesting point while researching presidential
trips to combat zones. Although you might
not immediately think of South Korea
as a combat zone, it technically is one, because
our war with North Korea was never officially
declared over. Both North Korea
and the US, which is allied with South Korea,
patrol a demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas. But remarkably, when counting
Obama's combat zone visits, the military and media included
his trips to South Korea as notches on his belt. But
they did not count visits to the same place for Trump. At the very time when the press
was claiming Trump had never visited a combat zone, he had
made two trips to South Korea. Punctuating the
point, Wikipedia-- oops, can I go backwards? Punctuating the point,
Trump's Wikipedia page claims that Trump's
first combat zone visit was on December
26, 2018, to Iraq. It, too, ignored his earlier
visit to South Korea. In contrast, the official tally
for Obama counts all three of his trips to South Korea
as combat zone visits. Apparently, among
the slanted media, South Korea is a combat
zone when Obama visits, but not when Trump does. So here are seven other true
headlines that could have been written about Trump's
Christmastime visit to Iraq, but weren't. Trump Becomes the First
US President in 16 Years to Visit US Troops
in a Combat Zone. Trump is One of Only
Three US Presidents to Spend Thanksgiving Day with
US Troops in a Combat Zone. Melania Trump Becomes
the First First Lady to Spend Christmastime Visiting
US troops in a War Zone. Trump is First President
Since George W Bush to Spend Thanksgiving with
Troops in a Foreign Country. President Trump is Only
the Third US President, All of Them Republicans,
to Spend Thanksgiving with US Troops in a Combat
Zone or US Troops Anywhere. Trump is the Only President to
Visit the Troops in a Combat Zone So Close to Christmas Day. And President Trump is the
Only US President in History to Visit US Troops Both in a
Combat Zone on Thanksgiving and So Close to Christmas. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] So this deep dive into just
a couple of specific cases demonstrates, I think,
quite clearly how the media has changed
the way it operates. Largely, as I described
in my last book, The Smear, because the media
has been successfully influenced and in fact infiltrated
by corporate and political interests. This explains why
it's no mystery and no accident, the devolution
of the news, as I call it, is by design. And it ties in quite directly to
this accelerated and dangerous trend towards censorship we've
seen the past four years. But in particular, I'd
say the last six months. I'll summarize by saying, on
the censorship trend, in 2016, by that time the news
landscape, in my view, had largely been dominated
by political and corporate interests, who were defining
the terms of what we could and couldn't report about, the
language that we had to use, and the kind of people
we could interview. But these people saw that Trump
got elected anyway in 2016, despite the fact that
most of the media had told people
not to vote for him and that he was
inherently dangerous. So these people, seeking to
influence the information landscape, they
blame the internet. They thought that people were
largely controlled in the news that they could get. But we could still go online
and get other opinions, see other scientific studies,
hear other viewpoints. So they set about, I think,
spending the last four years trying to figure out
how to control the internet. And if you remember,
before 2016, Big Tech did not
have great interest in this sort of censorship. There were issues with
privacy and other problems. But they were not doing what
I call fake fact checks. They were not censoring accounts
and interfering between us and our information to tell us
what we can and cannot believe. Now fact checks, whether
they're done by nonprofits or newsrooms, are largely
funded and influenced by political and corporate
interests who want to control that information. And in fact, David
Brock of Media Matters, the propaganda group, took
credit for convincing Facebook right after the 2016 election,
to start up those fake fact checks. This was a lobbying campaign. Fact checks now become simply
another tool of propagandists. How do we fight censorship? Well, when a person or idea
is fact checked, or banned, or censored, or
controversialized, I think we should
make it our mission to find out more about
whatever is being censored. And ask the question,
why do powerful interests not want me to have
this information, and make up my own mind? OK, our final examination
of how the media changed the way it operated to impact
the 2020 election and control narratives, looks at the
verbiage of the narrative. Before Trump, we
as news reporters, might have pointed out
discrepancies or contradictions between claims made by
a news maker, and facts. We might have noted that
a statement or a claim was disputed, or that it had
proven incorrect or false. But we did not declare
newsmakers' statements to be lies. Why avoid using the L
word in news reporting? Well, a lie is a
very specific thing. And short of a confession,
it requires a reporter to claim to know what's
inside the mind of the person speaking. In fact, when somebody gives
contradictory information or makes a false statement,
it could theoretically be for many other reasons. Let's go back to the Ford and
Firestone tire rollover scandal in 2000. I covered a lot of stories
where the executives of these corporations said
there was no evidence that there was danger. They had no realization that
the tires had a safety issue. But that contradicted
documents that we had that showed they had
discussed this long ago. It was a well documented trail. But I never said
they were liars. It's possible, theoretically,
that their staff gave them poor briefings, or
withheld information, or they might have seen
the documents in question, but misinterpreted them, or
forgotten what they said. As unlikely as those
excuses might seem, it's not the place
of a news journalist to claim to know what's
in a person's mind. In fact, there are
very few instances I can think of, where it's
appropriate for a reporter in a news report to claim
that a newsmaker lied. There's another
important reason to be circumspect as a news journalist
with accusing people of lies. To the news consumer,
such language tends to sound as
if the reporter is being biased or pejorative. It begins to feel very personal. It removes the
sense of neutrality that we try to maintain
in our hard news reporting in order to be seen as
fair reporters of fact. It's best to stick
to the facts and let members of the public form
their own conclusions. The good practices that I've
described, the reluctance to pretend to see inside
the mind of the subjects we report on, used
to be considered the norm in journalism. But all of that has
gone out the window. Now reporters frequently
take sides, boldly declaring one side or one
news maker, to be telling the truth, and
another, usually Trump, to be lying, even
when the truth is unproven or impossible to know,
or when the differences are matters of interpretation,
or clashing opinions, or even when the
lies or exaggerations are misstatements. The New York Times,
as I mentioned, has led the way in
declaring itself arbiters of Trump's lies. And we've seen other media
quickly followed suit. And biased observers
heralded it all as brave and groundbreaking. So yesterday, I conducted a
Google search using the term "Obama lies" and it
produced 41 million results. I then searched the
term "Trump lies." That returned 612
million results. In other words,
after one term, Trump got about 15 times more
search results about lies than Obama had after two terms. A closer analysis shows that
many of Trump's internet hits about lies are links to
news stories and blogs and lists of his lies. And in contrast, Obama's hits to
many of his articles or blogs, were defending him against
accusations of lies, or with Obama officials
accusing Trump of lying. Instead of providing
critical pushback to this questionable
journalistic shift, in which reporters call opinions of
their enemies or opinions they disagree with lies,
Columbia Journalism Review jumped on the bandwagon patting
The New York Times on the back for calling Trump a liar. "A precedent has
been set," declared Columbia Journalism Review
approvingly, "which is great." Columbia Journalism
Review goes on to say, "By using a word that comes
from the vocabulary of advocacy in its own voice, The Times,
and other news organizations, have taken the truth-telling
standards of the news business to a new level. Until the rise of
Trump," they say, "only on rare occasions,
criminal convictions, and instances of plagiarism
and falsifying resumes, were words like 'lie'
ever used by the media describing news events." I'm taken aback to see a
Journalism Review publication explicitly applauding
a news organization for using the vocabulary of
advocacy in its news reporting. Author and former New York Times
reporter David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize
winner, is quoted as saying he was "thrilled
and flabbergasted" to see the Times
call Trump a liar. Why would that be a thrill
unless one is steeped in bias and seeking to
advance a narrative, rather than report the facts. With hearty support
from journalism groups and their peers,
it's understandable that reporters would
grow even bolder. They began to expand
the lie label to cases when targeted newsmakers are
simply exaggerating, joking, or misspeaking. Or when there's no
possible way to know for sure, whether a
statement is true or false. One example can be found
in news reports declaring, Trump was lying
when he stated there was fraud in the 2020 election,
or that the election was stolen. Unless one can somehow
prove that Trump does not believe the election was
stolen, but is saying it was, that wasn't a lie. Whether you like
Trump or not, this is pure journalistic
practice and further erodes our credibility as an industry. Another example, Trump's 2019
State of the Union address. When the president
claimed, "Our brave troops have now been
fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years,"
the media's eagle-eyed fact checkers called that a lie. The actual length of time the US
had been fighting in the Middle East, they countered,
was not almost 19 years, but a bit more than 17. Actually the media's
own fact check about the length
of the Afghan war could be characterized as
a lie by its own standard. The war began in October 2001. The State of the Union
address in question took place more
than 18 years later, closer to Trump's
almost 19 years, than the media's 17 years. But that doesn't fit the
Trump is a liar narrative. There's a second
set of news phrases the media invented and deployed,
specifically against Trump, without evidence. No credible evidence,
and no evidence. First, without evidence. As a news journalist, I don't
recall ever using or uttering the phrase "without
evidence" when reporting on anybody or anything
over the course of about 35 years, until we covered Trump. At first glance,
it might seem as though phrases like
"without evidence" and "no credible
evidence" are more fact-based and responsible,
than tossing around accusations of lies. But they can be
just as problematic. Who decides what
evidence is credible? An absence of evidence
does not necessarily mean a claim is discredited. After all, there was
no evidence that polio could be transmitted via water
or through the oral polio vaccine, until there was. There was no evidence
that some cholesterol's good for your health,
until there was. Without evidence is
an invented concept for the purpose of
slanted reporting. Consider that throughout
time, few newsmakers have presented evidence
when making statements. It was never expected that
each comment or speech would be accompanied by a set
of footnotes or citations. Until Trump. Now, without evidence
is commonly invoked in a one-sided fashion,
usually against Trump and his supporters,
and typically, when the media want to
call them into question or disparage them. When it comes to Trump
Russia collusion, and other anti-Trump
narratives, we in the media allowed two years of outlandish
allegations to be made, virtually free of challenge
and without credible evidence. Many of those claims
proved to be untrue. And there were more. Trump may have not paid any
income taxes for decades, if ever. He never really wanted
to be president. He's lying about
immigration being a problem. He was Russian President
Vladimir Putin's stooge, a spy for Russia, the list goes on. At the same time we're
calling out Trump, we're violating the very
evidentiary standards to which we hold him. In our zeal to get
Trump, we are letting our own journalistic
principles slide. We've laid bare our own bias
and our own double standards. We can blame Trump all we
like for the death of the news as we once knew it. But the truth is, we've
done it to ourselves. If you're interested,
my book Slanted goes in far more depth
about all of this. I interviewed a lot of
colleagues and top network news executives. And there's an appendix that
lists the media mistakes that I categorize one by one. The mistakes made against Trump. When reporters get caught
doing bad journalism, like I've described today,
they and their colleagues often retort that Trump
lied more than we do. Or Trump mocks the media
and his enemies on Twitter, before he was banned. The fact is, Trump mercilessly
mocks, and is mercilessly mocked by, his
political detractors, such as leading
congressional Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Chuck
Schumer, Adam Schiff. Collectively, political
figures have no obligation to be neutral or fair. In fact, the nature of politics
breeds this kind of dynamic. But journalists are different. Our professional obligation is
to cover our subjects fairly. We must maintain the
same high standard, even when we don't like
somebody we're covering, especially perhaps,
when we don't like that person. Otherwise, why have
standards at all? The implication that somehow
the media's mistakes and attacks are justified because
of what we believe to be the flawed moral
character of our subject, is a precarious one. The way we cover
those we perceive as the enemies of
our own viewpoints defines how well we do
our job covering the news. And I'm happy to
take some questions. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER 2: Thank
you, Miss Attkisson. If you have a question,
please raise your hand and wait for a microphone
to be brought to you. AUDIENCE: Could
you please comment on the influence of the Poynter
Institute in Journalism? SHARYL ATTKISSON: Yes,
the Poynter Institute. I've discussed some of
that in my book Slanted. Like the Columbia
Journalism Review, and a lot of other non-profits
or journalism organizations, they've all been
co-opted to some degree by the same political
or corporate interests, accepting funding from the same
handful of dubious sources, in my view, partisan
sources that fund the fact checks, whether it's on social
media or news organizations or these non-profits. It's the same group of people. And you can see the
change in their reporting. Maybe, now, Poynter Institute
relies on Media Matters, this is one example, as
a source in its writing, without disclosing
that Media Matters is a partisan propaganda group. And so young people are
learning this from them because they're told to look to
Poynter Institute as a standard in journalism and ethics. So there's a problem from
virtually every angle we're looking when it
comes to journalism. The organizations that
are supposed to help watch over us, or set
standards for the kind of reporting we do, they're
cheering on this trend that I'm talking about. SPEAKER 2: There's a question
to the speaker's right. AUDIENCE: Yes. What do the people who are
writing the slanted news hope to gain? SHARYL ATTKISSON: It's a mix. It's a complicated question. Because in some instances,
there are more traditional news journalists who are censoring
themselves and shaping what they report because
they're rewarded for it. They're moving up in the
hierarchy of the newsroom when they embrace this
sort of reporting. And they're not rewarded
when they're not doing so. So. There's an element of
people transforming themselves to keep their job
and advance their careers But I think one of
the bigger factors is the trend I described,
where propagandists, political and
corporate interests, have infiltrated the news,
not just figuring out how to influence what we report,
and lobbyists and send us, by way of third
parties and nonprofits, talking points and things
that are supposed to be news that we then pick up. They now work for
us in our newsrooms. We hire them as
editorial people. We bring them on as analysts and
pay them six figure salaries. They should be paying
us to appear on our air and distribute their
talking points. But we're paying them
handsomely to do so. So I think the news business
has been transformed, where now there's no
firewall between us and the interest trying to
slant the news because they have a whole different goal in mind. We're one and the same. And that explains, and
really is only thing that explains, why so many
formerly well-respected news organizations are
getting so much wrong, and yet there's very
little repercussion for that kind of reporting. The people who do
those stories continue to be reported and heralded
and given awards and so on, because we now are them. We're one and the same
as the propagandists, in many instances. SPEAKER 3: We have a question
on the speaker's left. AUDIENCE: Ma'am, would
you please comment on the massive collusion between
the mainstream media, the, social and a number
of government agencies to totally censor the Hunter
Biden corruption scandal that was first broken by
the New York Post, and what is possible
implications were for the election outcome? SHARYL ATTKISSON: Well, I can't
say what would have happened. Although, there's been some
polling done talking about what could have influenced
the election if this news had gotten out. And I'll point out one thing. The New York Post didn't
really break that story. The Hunter Biden story
was well fleshed out and discussed by liberal
news outlets the fall before. Before Biden was the Democrats'
nominee, there were, I take it, other Democrats that
were planting stories in the press to try to keep
Biden from being the nominee. And so some in the left-leaning
press did some very good and important exposés on the
Hunter Biden alleged conflicts of interest, as well as other
members of the Biden family. But once Biden
became the nominee, fast forward to this
story sort of resurfacing with news of his computer
being confiscated by the FBI. And all of a sudden,
everybody acted like it was the first
they'd heard of it. And then many on the left
acted like it was a conspiracy theory, even though
they had well reported on this some months before. And it's just the
craziest dynamic. Glenn Greenwald
of The Intercept, who is a left-leaning
reporter who thinks much like I do
about news and news trends, he started The
Intercept with the goal in mind of having a news
organization that would not be beholden to political
and corporate interests in the same way as what
we call legacy media. And you may know that Glenn
Greenwald quit his own news organization because
they censored his story on Hunter Biden. This is not just a problem
of the left versus right. There's just a
problem, in general, by those seeking
to manage the news. It's not always
along partisan lines. Again, I think we're left
to guess what impact it might have had on the election. SPEAKER 2: We have a question
on the speaker's right. AUDIENCE: Do the news reporters,
particularly the TV reporters, actually believe what
they're reporting, or are they simply
following what they're told to do from higher ups? And then secondly, how do
corporate interests, which you mentioned, gain
from false news? SHARYL ATTKISSON: If I
forget your second question, remind me in a minute. But I get asked all the time
where the reporters believe what they're talking
about, especially when it's proven later to be wildly
wrong or when it's very biased. And again, I think
that's a mixed answer. I know some of the reporters
involved that you would think are very biased, who used to be
fairly straight-news reporters. But they've gone to
a news organization where there's a powerful
dynamic of groupthink and peer pressure, where the bosses want
a certain kind of reporting. And when you
deliver that, you're surrounded by people
who pat you on the back and tell you how
brilliant you are. And maybe you were
not considered really too far above average
in the old dynamic, but now you're a big star
because of all these kinds of things you're reporting. So I don't know if
they become a believer in giving their own opinion and
thinking that it's valuable, and even when proven
wrong, if they have a way to sort of justify it because
they don't get punished for it, and they're still being
rewarded by their bosses. But then, the second dynamic is,
and I believe strongly in this, as I said, we've hired
these propagandists. They've found ways to be
hired in our newsrooms. So they don't think
it's a mistake. And even if they
know they're wrong, and even if they get
caught after the fact having disseminated
false information, they're not embarrassed
because they still accomplished their goal. If they're not
journalists, they're not trying to tell the
truth, necessarily. They're trying to put
forth a narrative. And if they succeeded at that,
even if the narrative isn't true, they've still
done their job the way they hope to do it in my view. AUDIENCE: Does this not prove
President Trump's comment, not so much fake news, but
the news media has become truly enemy of the people? SHARYL ATTKISSON: Well,
that's for you to decide. But I do think he made
a lot of good points. And as I talked about in
my last book, most of you may think President Trump
thought up the phrase "fake news" in its modern context. That was a liberal invention. And I traced that to
September of 2016. It was first used in
its modern context by a nonprofit
called "First Draft." And shortly after that,
President Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon,
in which he suggested, for the first time I ever
heard that somebody needed to step in and curate
our information, start curating the internet
in this Wild, Wild West media environment, as he called it. And I remember thinking at the
time, if you can take yourself back just a couple
of years, nobody was asking for people,
third parties, to come in and censor and curate our news. They had to create
the appearance of a demand for such
a program so that they could control the news. So I went back seeing that
there was some kind of operation going on, here. Who is First Draft? And I called this
nonprofit and said, where do you get your funding? Because they hadn't
filed tax forms yet. And they admitted that they
got their funding from Google. And they were invented around
the start of the election cycle, this non-profit, that
invented the concept of going after fake news, which was just
defined at the time as mostly conservative news. And Google, is
owned by Alphabet, who was led at the
time by a man named Eric Schmidt, who was
a top Hillary Clinton supporter and donor. So I think that was
a big operation, the beginning of the efforts. They saw, Trump's
enemies, that he was making inroads
with the public, despite their
control of the news. And they saw that they had to
do, or thought they had to do, something about the internet. Because they blamed the
internet for the rise of Trump, outside of this controlled
news information landscape. Trump took over the
fake news phrase, being the master
marketer that he is. I call it a hostile takeover. Every time they cried
fake news, he just like threw it back at them. You're fake news. And pretty soon he
was so good at it, that by January following the
September when this started, The Washington Post is
printing articles that were saying things
like, it's time to retire the term fake news. They didn't like how it's
being used now by Trump. AUDIENCE: Yes. There seems to be-- SHARYL ATTKISSON: I
can't see where you are. I'm sorry. AUDIENCE: I'm right over here. SPEAKER 3: We have a
question in the back. To the back left of the speaker. SHARYL ATTKISSON: OK. OK. AUDIENCE: Hi there. Thank you for being here. There seems to be a
virus among our media, particularly even in
conservative media, lately, to even question the
validity of the election. I'm noticing it on
talk radio and it's almost as if they will
not even bring it up. And they deflect it
when anyone calls in. And I'm assuming we know
what happens, right? And I'm just wondering,
is it a matter of, maybe, buying time until we have some
more secure platforms to be more honest? Is this, perhaps,
what's going on? Or are we relegated to just
this very limited narrative for fear of being canceled. SHARYL ATTKISSON:
It's a good question and I think we should all be
cognizant of not being bullied out of using our common sense,
making our own solutions, seeking out answers and
various sides to stories, and saying what we think. My own view is, only that which
is illegal, should be censored, and the rest is fair game. It's up to us to figure out
what we want to believe. And by the way, if we want to
believe something that's false, we have a right to do
that in this country. It's not up to somebody
else to say, well, you shouldn't be
thinking such things, or talking about such things. But being an optimist,
and I've talked to some people that are
looking for solutions, I think there will be
something that fleshes out in the next four years. Because, as I like to say, the
truth finds a way to be told. And over history,
and over time, when people have been
suppressed, and their views have been suppressed,
they've always found a way, at least
in this country, to express how they feel. And there are people
working on the challenges from three standpoints. There are investors
who do want to invest in fair reporting
and open information. So the money is there. They just don't know
where to put it. But number two,
there are people that are trying to
accomplish the question or the task of how do
you not get deplatformed. And they're trying to invent
ways outside Big Tech. We're addicts. We got hooked on Big
Tech when they weren't trying to do this censorship. We thought it was wonderful. And now we all
communicate that way. And they've sort of done
this bait and switch. Now they can control us because
we're all relying on them. And they're changing the rules. Well, there are ways involving,
far beyond my understanding, but involving things like
blockchain technology. There are ways to
design platforms that can't be so controlled
by what we consider Big Tech media. There are people working
on that problem, too. And then there are
news people, like me, who want to report
in a open way showing different viewpoints and
different scientific studies and different opinions. So those three things, I think,
will come together, somehow in the next four years or so. And there will be new emerging
technologies and solutions. But I would say in
the meantime, we have to work really hard
not to be bullied out of being Americans. And being heard, whatever we
think, and whatever we feel. Particularly when you're
talking about the election, to criminalize
feelings and thoughts, about something as
important as the election, even when you're
using common sense and calling into question
some things that happened. Then to be treated
like, or told, that you're practically a
criminal for thinking that, or for expressing that. This is a very dangerous thing. And I hope we don't allow it. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER 3: We have time
for one more question. AUDIENCE: It's really
not a question, it's more of an acknowledgment. As soon as your
first book came out. I read it and loved it. And when you announced
the second book, I got an early copy. And as soon as I
got it, I read it. And I'm a big fan. I just want you to
know that you're a person who is
intellectually honest and has the courage
to tell the truth, despite all the crap that
you're getting from the media. I want to acknowledge
you for being here. You're one of the reasons I came
here today and this weekend. Thank you. SHARYL ATTKISSON: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, everybody. [APPLAUSE]
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To complement the posted video clip....
The Big Money Behind the Narrative – Sharyl Attkisson on Media Bias & Spin -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwuyUcA0s8s
“There are all kinds of people paying an awful lot of money to pull strings behind the scenes to make sure we see certain things on the news, read things in the news, and that we do not see certain things on the news.”
I watched this earlier today and loved it, I even sent it to some friends. Definitely support this post.
Vid. offers a deep insight into the shenanigans by MSM on every level...Thanks!