The Future of News with Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein, and Sara Fischer - CES 2018

[Music] hello hi everyone I'm Brent Weinstein I am a partner in head of digital media at United talent agency we are lucky enough to represent so many extraordinary personalities journalists thought leaders pundits from every corner of the political spectrum on every platform that you can imagine traditional new media and we are so excited to be a part of today's conversation we're going to be exploring the future of news news has been radically disrupted by technology the way that news is gathered and shared and consumed maybe even trusted has been changed so dramatically by many of the forces that are on display here at CES this year and to have this conversation I'm so blessed to be joined by three really talented experienced thought leaders in this space I'm gonna introduce them one at a time they're gonna come out here and then we're going to get going and dig into the conversation so our first panelist is the editor-in-chief of daily wire and the host of the ben shapiro show which is the number one conservative podcast in the country and typically ranked as one of the podcasts top podcast in the country across every every chart he is a Harvard graduate UCLA graduate he is a published author seven times over again a New York Times bestseller he has been a syndicated columnist since he was 17 and he has done an extraordinary job building a business in large part because of this digital disruption and his use of social me social media so please welcome Ben Shapiro our next speaker is a covers the media at Axios which is one of the most dynamic new media outlets in the landscape today prior to that she was at the Washington Post and at CNN and was one of the early people at Politico she covers the media which is why we're so excited to have her today to get her perspective Sarah Fisher our third panelist is the managing director of teal Capital although today he is here in his personal capacity he is a PhD from Harvard in mathematics he is an Oxford fellow he is a frequent writer lecturer speaker on a number of topics including the theory ax sorry the theory of news itself please welcome Eric Weinstein no relation so before we get started and because this is being live-streamed and it'll be available on demand later I do want to say we're very sorry that our good friend yes our all we could not be here today he's an extraordinary person a fantastic journalist he had an illness in the family he had to attend to so our thoughts and prayers are with him you're sure if you're watching we hope that everything goes well thanks everyone for being here thank all of you for being here we're excited to have this conversation um I want to jump right in and talk about the difference between news and opinion it feels like so much of what's going on in today's discourse really hinges on that differentiation although it's not talked about that often and I want to start by asking what is the difference and where is the line and and do consumers even care are they willing to accept and I'll use people from both sides Hannity and Maddow as hard news whereas anyone that they don't believe in even if it's hard journalism fact-based reporting is just partisan hackery then what do you think what's the difference between news and opinion well I mean typically if I'm trying to find news what I'll do is I'll read something from my site which is a right-wing site and then I'll read something from Huffington Post and wherever the facts are in common those are the facts and everything else I can sort of filter out as the opinion that said I think that the media has done itself of tremendous disservice the objective media's done a tremendous disservice over the course of many years in portraying itself is fully objective I'm sort of a a realist when it comes to this I think it's very difficult for news sources particularly reporters to remove their own biases from the stories and so they can do their best and I respect people who try to do that but I think that it's almost always better to just come out and state first and foremost where you stand on the issues and then we can all filter out exactly where we think that your bias lives because otherwise everybody's got their bias I'm open and honest about the fact that I'm right-wing but there are a lot of people on the left or not when it comes to mainstream outlets and that's led to this blowback but you've seen that's been so effective for president Trump where he attacks fake news and there are a lot of people who are willing to go along with that because they'll assume that CNN is biased in the same way that I'm biased well that's not actually true right CNN makes its job trying to theoretically report facts in a way that I don't because my bias is so overt but by the same token their bias is there and refusing to acknowledge that their biases there leads them down I think a primrose path where president from can Club them routinely and get away with it but even within an outlet like CNN or let's take Fox do you think they would be better served by actually defining like a big stamp on the screen or a stamp on the article or on the video that says this you know you know this is news versus this is opinion I mean think I think they do some of that right I mean I think that if you're taking Bret Baier in the same way that you're taking Sean Hannity you have to be kind of nuts I mean Sean and Brett are not remotely the same person and I think that the same thing is true on MSNBC some of the reporters in the middle of the day are not the same thing as their primetime lineup but yeah I mean I think that a little clarification would be necessary it's mostly necessary I think not in the distinction between Fox News's primetime hosts and and some of it's daytime host it's mostly necessary I think for outlets that purport to be objective but are clearly not I mean the fact is that as somebody on the right I've spent my entire career bashing bias in news and that involves me monitoring places like CNN and pointing out where I think there's bias in the news right the Jim Acosta was just made the chief White House correspondent for CNN and Jim Acosta is a partisan hack I mean break it to everybody but Jim Acosta is a very left-wing guy who clearly does not like President Trump but portrays himself as objective it gives the opportunity for people like me to rip on CNN which I think see and and probably like to avoid but the best I think the best angle for CNN would be to say yeah Jim Acosta doesn't like Trump and we're sending in there anyway so Sarah you're working with your colleagues and Axios to build what a lot of people believe myself included is a really exciting innovative new media brand and well talking a bit about the sort of emergence of these new brands and and and how they relate to and are juxtaposed against some of the more traditional news brands but how do you think about that how do you think about the notion of presenting Axios as something that is fact-based not to steal Fox's tagline but fair and balanced versus acknowledging a bias either at the company level or at the individual journalists level one of the things that we've looked into a lot is what are the financial incentives to being a completely nonpartisan news organization if you are nonpartisan does that mean that you're able to you know sort of cater to certain advertisers more than you would if you were just a partisan news outlet do you are able to garner the same kind of engagement as you would sometimes you can't for us and we've felt the same way at Politico being a nonpartisan was a really important editorial decision but also an important business decision the other thing that we think about a lot of Axios is how do we leverage UX design and technology to ensure that if there is news versus opinion on the site it's really easy to make that distinction and one of the problems that we're facing which I think goes exactly to what Ben was saying is the transparency of news versus opinion online has become so blurred because we have a lot of platforms that treat a lot of content the same you know if you post an opinion article online from CNN on Facebook Facebook's not gonna flag it as opinion and CNN in their headline lightly won't flag it as opinion and so if you're just reading the headline and sharing the headline and reading it you know captioned and sharing that caption you're not capturing the fact that it's not a news based article so one of the things we're trying to do at our outlet is how can we use really intentional design and UX to give readers those visual cues so that they know hey this is an opinion op-ed on Axios it's not a news article or so that they know hey this has no biases whatsoever it's just a fact-based thing we created something called facts matter for that exact reason it's just lists of facts that's bright purple text so that people know that it's any sort of editorialized content so we're really looking at it I guess said from those two perspectives one it's an editorial decision as much as it is a business decision and two it's a design decision and a technology decision so much as it is an editorial decision so Eric and your you know study of the news world do you feel that the consumers are willing to accept both of those things as Sarah described and what I mean by that is the moment that a news organization has any sort of opinion or allows for opinion does it make it that much harder for them to also overhear say but we are objective and facts based so if the opinion is right-wing if it's left-wing does the entire organization inextricably get linked to that thought process yeah I don't think it hinges on fact-based versus opinion based perspectives I think that the problem is is that there is no known way of producing news that is simply fact-based and we have to accept that and the key question is can we unspin the news that we're given so for example in the Economist arrives weekly I feel fairly confident that I don't carry that particular spin but I know how to unspin it and get the news I want because they distort it in a way that can be undone on the other hand when the New York Times reports I don't have that ability to do that I find that it tends to be destructive of information and the real thing that people haven't figured out is that we have to move from critical thinking to critical feeling that fundamentally we don't actually have opinions about facts that Frank Luntz was probably the person who figured this out most powerfully people in this room are for undocumented workers and they're against illegal aliens they they oppose the death tax but they might support an estate tax on very wealthy families and these are the same things so depending upon what the emotional cadence is that it's imparted to the to the readers they will find that they will oppose a dictator and they will support a president even if the person carries both descriptions and this is the the really dangerous thing about the established media is is that they have sort of safe used their opinions into the language so that we can't even think outside of the frame that they're handed because what they're really telling us at least the people who want to be told what to feel who to empathize with and who to deny empathy to they're giving those them instructions so that the information superhighway was not accompanied by the emotional or the empathic superhighway so we're getting data from everywhere but we're still getting our cues as to who to support and who to oppose from these major organs and that's what's now crumbling and partially what's going on is new outfits like this are taking a very fresh take on this and that's where they're getting their rocket fuels to build this new niche let's move from what we all hope is actual news research regardless of sort of how its presented into fake news as been mentioned I think this goes well beyond a presidential talking point there's lots of fake news out there and it runs the gamut from actual falsehoods being put out into the world in order to shift perception in an inorganic way to things that have maybe a tinge of truth but they're presented in such a way where truth has been distorted beyond reality um how do you think of fake news like then how do you define fake news because it's out there and and where is the line is something if something is 80% true or 90% true or 60% true but either because of a certain partisan slant or because of some misinformation or a couple of facts that got wrong here there does it automatically become fake is it only fake if it's a hundred percent well I mean I think that there are things that are true and there are things that are false and it depends if you're talking about a specific fact and one of the things that drives me nuts about some of the fact-checking organizations is they will take a statement that is true on its face and then rate it mixed by drawing an implication out from the statement and then suggesting that the implication is false they the this happened with us with with Snopes for example on a story that we did where we mentioned that police in the United States shoot have shot more white people on a yearly basis than have shot black people on the early basis this is true right but what they did is they said well you're drawing the implication that what the black people are not disproportionately shot which is not what the story said oh and then they will rate the implication false so one of the things that that I think it's important to do is actually read the words on the page when you do that what you see is that there is the fact and there is the opinion I think a couple of things have happened that have really destroyed the entire question of fake news the first thing that happened was that the left decided I think the Democratic Party decided that they're gonna put a lot of emphasis on the idea that fake news had somehow skewed the election that it was a bunch of people reading fake headlines that had generated president Trump's victory and that's it's just frankly not true I mean the idea that it was a bunch of people reading news that was that was blatantly false and that's why Trump won the election it's it's not true the the Congressional studies that have come out have suggested it's not true the New York Times had a piece yesterday suggesting that it was not true and so what Trump did is he jumped on that he said well that itself is fake news well once you are labeling an opinion fake news then we're now arguing over opinions we're not arguing over the actual truth or falsity of a factual statement so I would like to relegate the term fake news back to what it originally was which is an objective piece of falsity not an opinion that you disagree with or an opinion that you find largely unpalatable let's get back to the idea that if you say something that is 100% false that's fake news if you say something that is based on a fact and it's an opinion that you don't like that's not fake news that's just an opinion you don't like Sarah how do you guys think about it at Axios I think we think about it in a similar way that the facts are not big news and that anything that is even a remote river you know departure from that is fake news but one of the weird things that we found in fake news becoming a loaded term is that we see so much attention drawn to fake news on tech platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Google and if you take a look at the way that they define fake news for so long it really was false commercialization it was spam tactics it was clique they to get people to engage with their contents that they could make money off of it and so those platforms have done a lot of work the past year to remove the financial incentives of those sort of bad actors to create fake news or hyperbolic news that just is created for the sake of making ad money that's one part of this equation that I think we can't overlook you hear about these troll farms in places like Florida right here in the United States where they create fake news on the right and on the left it's not being used to cause division so much as it is being used to take advantage of platforms that let them make money off of it so that's one big definition that I think everyone needs to really wrap their heads around that a lot of people could take fake news as false commercialization like spam and it's really not that's not the context that we're talking about here we're talking about things that are not fact and when you look at some of the tech platforms there isn't a legal incentive we have such weak internet libel laws we have no legal incentive for those companies to really go after information that isn't technically not true some of them are going after it on their own volition but are they going to be regulated that way they're not and that's why you might see that they're taking more action on things like spam then they are things that aren't true correct Eric you know you spend a lot of time but because of your vocation and also your geography studying the platforms and and really understanding what Facebook and Twitter and other companies are doing this is a really big deal you know I know as a consumer and as I mentioned you know as we were prepping for this panel because I live in Los Angeles if I see something on my Facebook feed from the Los Angeles freebee knish Journal Times Herald saying that we had Donald Trump and brocco bomb and I had a lovechild I know that that outlet doesn't exist because I live in LA but the truth is I have no clue if there's an Albuquerque Post versus Times versus something and if I see it in my newsfeed I is there a burden on me as a consumer to go and see hey is there such thing as an Albuquerque Times is there a burden on Facebook not to allow that to be you know put forth what do you think the platforms are thinking about this well I think it's a great question and getting back one of the first times Ben and I are on pretty different ends of the political spectrum and but we keep agreeing on everything so finally something where I really disagree Ben so about the lovechild thing what if you saw John Edwards has a love child and it came out of the National Inquirer you'd know it was nonsense right because that's a tabloid and it's right next to the cash register except it turns out to be true so part of the problem is that you can't simply go buy I mean if something is completely fake newspaper then you can then say it but that's in my opinion the least interesting form of fake news the the the taxonomy I have is is that there's a four-fold decomposition there's algorithmic there's institutional there's narrative driven and then there's just false and you're talking about false I think this is absolutely the least interesting and it's imperative in my opinion and I say this coming from the left perspective that we actually apply fake news much more broadly for example if you say all the news that's fit to print but you assiduously avoid reporting a story that is counter-narrative to your newspaper your newspaper shouldn't have a strong narrative because the facts haven't come in why do you have a narrative arc that lasts six months that's pre-planned by a group of editors if you don't know what the truth is yet right this is really really where things are dangerous and the algorithmic which is to your point on the platform is this new kind of fake news where for a while a lot of us were finding each other on Twitter as influencers and now people say I never see your tweets in my stream and a lot of us have this question of what is going on with the algorithms because even if I limit the number of people that I follow I don't seem to see what other people they're doing because we were boosting each other's signal and we were reaching across the aisle so Ben and I can go for hours you know helping each other hone points because we have a common you know goal we have a belief in reason and we've divided on a small number of things but I believe that what's going on is is that we're stuck on the Truman Show and what happened after the election the sudden emergence of this mania over fake news I found incredibly inauthentic and if I go back and I think about things like you know real things that we found out through the church in Pike Commission's about operation Mockingbird about how Poe how Pro worked I'm very concerned that I don't know where these narratives are everybody is now a conspiracy theorist either you believe there's a Russian conspiracy or you think that there's a Clinton conspiracy or you think that they're the same or pizza gate or any one of these things but everybody is now settling on various conspiracy theories I think it's very important to ask where did the fake news narrative suddenly explode from because it didn't feel real to me and it felt like exactly what when we took over the tobacco Institute archives they have an entire playbook of how to manipulate people at scale and that was exactly what we needed we needed an enemy we needed to be mobilized we needed to feel that we needed we are begging for safety save us from fake news save us from Russian interference well I want to make damn sure having waited out this crazy period of time where people believe that free trade had no negatives that immigration was a pure good that there's zero connection between Islam and terror all of these things which are just childlike fairytales and we're pushed almost universally there's no explanation for how you got the high levels of unanimity even if I'm free trade if I'm Pro free trade Pro immigration and feel that Muslims are being unfairly maligned the narratives were too stupid and too simple for too long something broke and it brought us Donald Trump and I believe it's because we lost control what I call the gated institutional narrative that thing that the New York Times and The Washington Post can write to the rest of us cannot and fundamentally that's where we are is is that we are out of control and out of control is twofold it's the good sense which is we're not being controlled we can we can have a world in which any one of us can publish things and things are also careening out of control which is terrifying and both of these forms of out-of-control are happening and I'm very worried that we not dial this back to just false news it's much more important to go after the narrative driven and algorithmic and the algorithmic is your point on the platform so you know Ben and Sarah respectively you know fake news as we've discussed is now being is a term that's being thrown around pretty liberally how do you defend against that as operators of media platforms how do you make sure that your our stories your opinions are are received with the seriousness that they deserve as opposed to being labeled fake news and having that label carry forward just because someone disagrees with you so the truth is that Tara and I are actually in very different businesses we actually glom off of Sara's business in order to do ours right I mean she actually has a bunch of reporters who go out and report things and we largely recast that reporting through the opinion guys that we that we are and I think acknowledging that is the first step toward recognizing the difference between our sites you know hers is a new site ours is a news opinion site and it's not like we have independent reporters tracking down the same stories that you do over at Axios which is why we're grateful that their outlets like access out there except the res we have to hire all your reporters and that be really expensive one of the things though that's happened is that you know I think that when it comes to to go to go to Eric's point for one second I think that you know the idea that we're out of control I think that's actually a good thing and I'm very fearful that the attempt to reassert control by gatekeepers is going to be really deleterious to the news business and the reason that I say that is because the impact of the actual thickness like the things that are openly false is so small and instead what you're seeing is people are so freaked out about the feeling of being out of control that they're giving institutions like Google enormous power to basically curb whatever Google doesn't like I mean literally today there was a story about how Google had changed the algorithm so that when you search for my site on Google there is a there is a Snopes page that comes up right next to it right it where it goes through all of the stories that we've gotten wrong or that we've corrected there's no such thing for CNN which has gotten much bigger stories wrong than we have there's no such thing for slate there's nothing for Huffington Post it's only for Daily Caller us Breitbart news and the Federalists right and so that is Google trying to reassert control over a certain political narrative by suggesting that conservative sites that are opinion oriented are less factually driven than left sites that are opinion oriented and so when it comes to the problem of fake news I'm less concerned about frankly I'm less concerned about the problem of fake news I have faith that people have the ability to read than I am concerned about the idea that there's gonna be a top-down reassertion of power where gatekeepers at Google who don't know what the hell's going on in news anyway I'm more in the news cycle than anybody at the top levels of Google I mean I I live and breathe this stuff and I'm sure they're busy you know making a billion dollar company it but the idea that they're going to control the news flow and that it's their responsibility to control the news flow I find not only utterly insulting but completely problematic and counterproductive and if I could just jump in here it's really important when you're speaking on the left to be able to say Ben is exactly right that I think that what is being done to our conservative friends across the aisle is unfair and Ben returns the favor Ben will say look here's where conservatives are out of control and here's where we're a conservative narrative isn't isn't correct you know when Jamel Hill was ripped by the White House I said it's completely incorrect so just a Burge Avenue so partially what's going on in our and I would say our mutual opinion is that the left has to stand up for the right and say hey we can see that this is actually real this is not some sort of right-wing lunacy and the right-wing has to do the same thing at some level - we all have to clean our own houses if we're going to do this efficiently if we can get back to something like a unified narrative with slight variance as opposed to completely different bubbles I think going back to a little bit about what Eric was saying about where are why are we creating these conspiracy theories or like these philosophies that these narratives that we keep building on and I'm gonna say you know you really have to cook you can for one aspect of this look at economics if you look at what performs really well on Facebook or what performs really well in these algorithms it's a lot of it's like emotionally driven content it's things that will drive a lot of engagement and again drive a lot of ad revenue this is a really difficult time for publishers and I've watched a lot of publishers sort of you know cater themselves to the algorithm to the point where they're letting their journalism sacrifice whether that's a hyperbolic headline whether that they're covering something that really just doesn't warrant coverage I think the example I use all the time and I spent two great years at CNN was the Mike Pence haircut when that was put on face book live you have to think what is the assignment editing decision in broadcasting this to our viewers now it did really well and so is their value if you know that your audience wants it or do you have to say to yourself you know we give our audience a service or really great straightforward important news and we're going to not give them exactly what they want because we don't think it has the editorial merit that they deserve and so as a from a publishing perspective constantly weighing how do we you know give you the facts straight but at the same time make sure that we are engaging our audience this isn't I think has led to like what our founder calls a crap trap of publishers just publishing stuff so that they can cater to the business and if you look at some of the legacy institutions the Washington Post's in the New York Times they are caught into a really middle weird middle ground with this in one sense the Washington Post wants to become a national play and so they have to build this great audience you'll see that their Facebook content actually reflects that it's a little bit less hard news but then at the same time they're trying to craft a subscription business where people are going to pay for hard news and that's where you have to really make sure that it is straight laced reporting and so I think most publishers are doing this weird dance between how do I give our audience what we deem is to be most editorial is sound important and truthful and also cater to the fact that we want to serve them with what they want the middle ground for acts uses serve them where they are but not necessarily what they want so if they want straight news content but they want it on Twitter or they want and on snapchat we have to go out of our way to deliver it to you there but it has to be hard news versus changing what our news is to meet you and your expectations I think that one of the things that's interesting here is particularly the headline business because the truth is that people I mean we all know if we're in the news business we know the number of people who read beyond paragraph three is extraordinarily small right in fact on Twitter the entire news business is basically driven by somebody who reads the headline on Twitter and then responds to the headline on Twitter without clicking through right so this so one of the things that I think has happened is that there is a way to serve people where they are and maybe serve them maybe not even what they what they want but by writing a headline that is click here and so maybe a solution for the New York Times in the Washington Post is don't write shitty headlines I'm sorry the new york new york times is sort of famous for writing a three-line horribly bleak headlines and then they're shocked when nobody clicks on those things and then they go to Facebook and they whine that somebody wrote a catchy headline and now it's got a bunch of clicks on it well maybe if you didn't write such crappy headlines I would click on your content but as a reporter you cringe like you you're totally right I will say there are times when I write a story that's I think has a lot of importance and then the headline looks totally different than when I submitted and my editor says because our headline was really boring right like you need to engage the reader so they read this really smart story but you're so you know caught - not wanting to be completely factual and completely perfect that you end up writing something that's really boring that balance is such a hard thing to find and I know you know that from the publishing landscape it's not a right or a left wing or a middle ground thing it's just the state of the publishing industry when people are inundated with so much trying to find a way that you can be truthful but get their attention is tough let's talk about that you know if you think of the history of the news business it wasn't that long ago when everyone got their news from the same few sources on television it was the three broadcast networks in print it was your local paper that mostly covered local stories maybe picked up some ap syndicated articles CNN came onto the scene and created the notion of 24-hour news but it wasn't as it wasn't portrayed the way this today Fox came along in the 90s and and allowed for a different perspective but there hasn't been that much change over a very long period and then over the last ten years there's been this massive explosion and now there are so many for lack of a better description niche media brands that target more specific consumers who have more specific points of views and that is a really good thing in a lot of ways the downside to it is confirmation bias the notion of people increasingly living in their bubble if all they're doing is hearing the same narrative over and over again from the same outlet and then sharing that narrative with their friends who feel the same way you live in a world where everyone around you is talking about the same thing in the same way and it makes you feel like everyone else must be then crazy for disagreeing with you how does the notion of going from broad media to niche media and the inherent selection and confirmation biases therein how does that play itself out going forward does it continue to get worse are we gonna increasingly find ourselves in these bubbles or will it open up a little bit I think one of the things going on is the and I sort of just disagree with this thing about the headlines I view the the news is like some unbelievable sprawling palace and there's like this guided tour where you're only allowed to go to these seven rooms and you have to walk and follow the tour guide and as soon as you break off of the tour man there's like you know crazy indoor waterfalls and mermaids and everything is just unbelievable Diamond chandeliers and so I feel like you really have to work to make the news this boring you know fundamentally what did Hillary do wrong and will she try again who cares I don't care you don't want her back I don't want her back let's get somebody new it doesn't have to be the same faces I hear the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are like the most respected people in the country you know sixteen years in a row this is preposterous news is so fascinating women and in Iran are tearing their hit jobs off and saying we don't want to be run by clerics and I just want to like stand up and Cheer in my pajamas and it's like I can barely find the news that wants to talk about this and I've got you know John Kerry telling me or you know Susan Rice you know Shh it's the Iranian people's time it's not our time to talk well I don't know what that is but that's some very weird creepy stuff about meta-narrative maintenance and so you know the news is fascinating it it sells itself it's not that fundamentally it's difficult to find stories that are going to get people to buy papers the problem is is that the clearing price of news is not clearly a business it may be so high that I wouldn't really pay for real news or you know you have the Forgotten innovation of gonzo where the person interjects themselves so much in the story that you very clearly understand where they sort of you know became influenced by the news rather than pretending to have this objective lens and so my feeling is let's break off of the guided tour let's fundamentally start getting you know I turned off Twitter during the Tahrir Square sorry I turned out regular news during the tyree R squared demonstrations because I kept saying it was a revolution I kept getting thrown out of Manhattan cocktail parties because it was only protests or unrest or demonstrations it was a revolution because I was being controlled it was an ally and somehow the narrative we have to support our ally had gone down to the level of effect if you simply start looking at primary sources even people tweeting in languages 50% of the tweets are in a foreign language you know it's not for you it's not stage-managed for you think of all the gory Pulitzer Prize winning photos that we had in Vietnam that are burned into all of our minds and the fact that we don't know how have them when we go into Iraq something has changed and you have to begin to believe that the news is fascinating sells itself it's not about the headlines it's about being in a stage manager position where you're very carefully placed somewhere to see this small spectrum of all the beautiful and amazing and terrible things that are happening what do you think I mean I feel like I am placed in this small little spectrum to explain all the beautiful things that are happening I am covering the regulatory you know the intersection of legislation and regulation on media so everything that comes from repatriation fees and taxes and all those sorts of things and I will say you're a hundred percent correct and maybe this is a slight on my ability as a journalist but sometimes it is difficult to get somebody to pay attention to a story about repatriation fees and taxes and so we have to figure out a way that we can make it more colorful to your opinion and sometimes that's the skill of the writer and sometimes that's the skill of their resources I will say though when it comes to sort of like how do we divide what's news versus what's opinion we do something at axis where we say our thought bubble this is the first time in my life whereas I've had to write something and they want me to tell the audience from what my thought bubble is on it this is a very strange combination of news and opinion I write an entire news article and then I give you one or two sentences about what I think about it and I think that's a weird but interesting and effective way of separating news versus opinion and the reason they want us to give that opinion is because they have me standing in this one little niche corner they want me to tell the audience okay like from your perspective somebody that lives and breathes this every single day how does it look to you and I do find that it gives the reader a little bit of value in the sense that I'm not just telling them exactly you know the facts facts fact I do tell them a little bit like hey you know these are all the numbers by the way you have to take these numbers as a grain of salt because it's an interesting technique we'll see where we go and I think I think it's great especially because I think that that's actually I mean you guys have your own business strategy you don't need my help but I think it's a grape isn't a strategy simply because I think that so much of the profit model is driven by personal brands the US before how you know what you can trust and how people figure out what they can trust people use cognitive shortcuts the number of people who actually wade through the news and try to determine what's true and what's false is minimal there's not that many people who are gonna do like I wish everybody would do it you're talking about Eric where they just sift through all of the Farsi tweets that are happening right now in Iran but the number of people who are actually gonna do that is is extraordinarily low as a typical manner you people are lazy and they usually are going to rely on somebody to sift through those for them and then provide them in some sort of forum that they can that they can manage to wrap their brains around and so what's ended up happening and I think the cure to being stuck in the bubble is you have to find people who you think are not stuck in the bubble and I've found that over the past couple of years this has become a really interesting intellectual exercise like a lot of people who I've become very friendly with our people who are actually on the other side of the aisle who I feel are smart enough to try and move outside their own bubble and recognize truths from my side of the aisle and people on my side of the aisle are stuck in their own bubble and refuse to acknowledge or anything outside of that are people I don't trust if I love the news I think it's one of the reason and our audience has grown so explosively that's a Lee Weyer is because I've been very clear that I don't agree with everything that's happening on my side of the aisle and I'm willing to hear perspectives that are not necessarily in in agreement with that and that's lent a bit of credibility the same thing I think is true for a lot of the reporters who have gained a lot of prominence people who are pretending that the New York Times is an institution where people are subscribing for the news are missing missing the point people don't subscribe to me know times for the news they subscribe for the editorial page in the same way that they subscribe to The Wall Street Journal for the editorial page nobody subscribes to the news cuz people think news is free right this is the biggest problem that a lot of websites face is that it's an advertiser model for the most part and if you're doing stuff that's not as quickly like you're talking about how do you the advertising money now you're looking for subscriptions well the only way you get subscriptions we have a subscription business a daily wire and we have an advertising model the news is all free nothing's behind the paywall the stuff that you get for the subscription is more of my personal perspective behind the paywall and that of some of our other opinion hosts and that's the stuff that people are willing to pay for and typically that has always been what people are willing to pay for is the opinion not the actual journal but our orany service remember 30% of the New York Times subscriptions last quarter we're cooking and crossed right exactly and so if you think about trade work like I consider myself almost like a trade reporter people either want that opinion or they want that very niche coverage of a particular topic that matters to them so yeah I again I'm really enjoying the disagreement I don't think that's why you're getting paid then I think what you're getting paid is the same reason that other people are getting paid in your niche who may not even put on anything behind a paywall friends of mine are being paid for free content where people are saying I have to reach into my pocket and give you money it's the weirdest business model until you figure out what it is courage fundamentally there is a new courage economy and when you show up at Berkeley and you need over half a million dollars worth of security something has gone can we say betcha it is like an actual correction Ben didn't need it they needed it yeah exactly sorry yeah beg could take care of himself right but but but the point is is that the new model is this independent thing we were just talking about the intellectual dark web which is who are these people who are fundamentally tarred you know with with with feces and constantly run through the mud for sharing opinions that are off narrative and people want to pay for this because they need to be hooked up to something that they recognize as a sense making source and you know the proof of what you're saying is the fact that when Facebook tried its fake news algorithm people were clicking more on the fakeness yes right right exactly you guys were on so the the reason for that is because people feel like they are being told to shut up and they feel like they're being silenced by big conglomerates and so they feel like anybody who is announcer this is the danger because of the crackdown people feel like anybody who is transgressive must be telling the truth right and those things are not necessarily the same it's important to have people who are transgressive but not everybody who is trans restive is saying something yeah but one of the things is that you look at the number of people who say I mean Ben will say look I made a mistake on X or friend Sam Harris let's say I made a mistake why Dave Rubin says you know I've moved my position over time as I became aware of these facts and this kind of level of being open about one's biases being introspective metacognitive resonates with a large number of people and that there is a class that I've learned about through Jordan Peterson who exploded onto the scene of disagreeable people and disagreeable people are sort of I think the great growth industry because they fundamentally stand alone and so it's one thing that's very moving to see a bunch of people in a movement and then you see people who are just like saying you know I even agree with some of the aims of that but you're using methods and tactics that I I cannot live with and so I forego this and I choose to stand alone these people are making huge amounts of money because fundamentally the individual is what's roaring back is a replacement for the institution I think a lot of that plays in and to the growth of your brand over the past 18 months in that as a conservative you stood alone you were one of the most prominent never Trump errs as a Orthodox Jew you were probably subject to more online and tastes somatic behavior than anyone on the planet and yet people called you an anti-semite right and and I think it goes to the notion of your willingness to stand aside actually galvanize a lot of people who said oh I get it like this guy actually has a point of view he's not just like going along with the flow in order to generate cliques do you believe that that has a big part of the growth of your business I mean I definitely think that one of the things that's distinguish our brand from other brands is the feeling like you don't necessarily know where we're gonna be on a given day because the principles don't change but the politics do and it's very easy for people to take their cues from politicians so it's been very interesting because you know people who've been following my career know that I've been deeply deeply conservative my entire career like since I was 17 years old I've been writing in deeply conservative ways but during the last election cycle I was really discomforted by by the Trump campaign and a lot of the stuff that Trump was saying and I was very obvious about this and I was very clear about this and I didn't back to Mountain and and when Trump does and the new model for us has been the same as it was before when you does something right I'll praise him when he does something wrong then I'll criticize him and I think that in a world where there's a feeling of chaos and that feeling of chaos makes people want to look for safe harbor and I think that the safe harbor is as Eric you're saying in the individual but also in an individual who you feel is honest so I think whatever else you can say about me I think that I've tried to be honest and I think that people on the other side we've tried to be honest too and those people who are or who look like they are trying to be honest you look like they're not following just the road that's been laid out for them those people are succeeding in a way that people who just back the horse to back the horse or opposed the horse to oppose the horse are not seeing any benefit and so you know I think that that's I think that's where the future of the media is I mean I think that's even even for individual reporters who feel like they're and they're not necessarily beholden to the powers that be and I hope that that spreads I mean I've said to people stop I mean I say this in speeches and then of course it doesn't work but I say yeah stop following the leader and started thinking for yourself and when you do then you're gonna feel a lot more honest and clean about the news cycle you don't have to wake up every morning with a pit in the bottom of your stomach thinking the person you're invested in is gonna fall because you're no longer invested in that person you're invested in yourself Sarah you know Axios does extraordinary reporting but it feels like the role of and the job of investigative journalism hard news is getting much more difficult forever that world has depended on their being a safe space for people willing to speak on background and whistleblowers and the notion of confidential sources were protected and trusted and that is very much now something that is being attacked how do you guys address that how do you address that at Axios the notion of you need to go out and get the story but sometimes you got to get the story by talking to people who want to you know be nameless I think that you know it's an instinct thing you have to know yourself and know the people you're talking to and apply any sort of context that you have is to well if they're not willing to go on the record does that mean that they're you know perspective is not something that they feel you know strongly enough about or you just have to kind of imply and take everything case-by-case it really does come down to having experience knowledge and just kind of working with other people that you really trust and having a lot of conversations about it there's no when it comes to sort of peeling back a story cut and dry way to do it at all the one thing I will say is you know we're seeing some headlines about like for Mike example Michael Wolf's book receiving some examples of people that thought that they were off the record that it then turns out that they're on the record I think getting to the truth takes a lot of different you know tactics and conversations but as a reporter I think the most important thing for me is that I honor people who just want to tell me something off the record or on background or on the record and if I can't find a way to tell the best story through that source because they won't particularly come on the record then I need to figure out another way this is something that you hear Kim masters talk a lot about a lot at The Hollywood Reporter she was working with a young woman who she knew had a story about Harvey Weinstein and the woman was not comfortable going on the record and can't no relation no relation to either of these fine gentlemen and her you know she spoke about this in a recut possible podcast her reaction to this was you know I have a duty as a reporter to protect the source who doesn't necessarily want to come out on the record and so I'm going to continue to try to nail the story without her and then perhaps if we can nail knits you know bits and pieces that source will then feel comfortable to come back to me and go on the record and that's exactly what happened so as a reporter you have to be you know really sharp about honing your best editorial and personal judgement in every conversation and decision that you make and you have to be honest if you're gonna tell somebody that you're not going to do something you're gonna do something it's in my opinion that you should always be good for your word on that and as someone who is more from the opinion side you know reacting to the news that's generated when you see a story from a credible ish outlet maybe on the range from credible ish to very credible but the basis of the story is an unnamed source right a source within the administrator or whatever it might be do you discount that in any way automatically is it entirely based on how you feel about the journalist or or the outlet so I think that number one you know if you're on a hundred point scale you automatically have to take ten points we have ten anonymous source just because it just because the person obviously has some motivation for staying silent sometimes that's a good motivation sometimes that's a bad motivation particularly in political stories it's usually a bad motivation and it's usually somebody who's trying to spin the reporter to report something in a certain way which is why Michael Wolf's book really should have been called as told by Steve Benin because everything in there is basically Bannon just saying stuff and then Michael wolf not bothering to verify any of the anecdotes and then every and then him going on national TV and saying if it feels true it is true which is just an insane standard of journalism that's not journalism at all you know is you do have to look at the body of work that the reporter has performed as you say you know every reporter treats sources slightly differently in terms of you know what they're pushing this the source to say if that reporter has over and over printed stories from anonymous sources and the sources have been good right the stories keep panning out then obviously you're gonna treat them with more credibility than if it's somebody who just quotes an anonymous source who really is their best friend's mother and because that's the other thing is that you do see this in in less credible journalistic sort of stories and sometimes more credible journalistic outlets where somebody will have a source and the source is not a great source but the story is so good they want to run with it anyway and so let's say an anonymous source says right and you don't know where that's coming from you don't know if its third hand sometimes it is second hand and the story's too good for them to actually verify through any other means so yeah I mean it's up to the reader to be discerning in the end and it's up to the reporter to be honest but it's up to the reader to discern which reporters are honest and which ones aren't I think let's talk about the Wolfe book for a minute I think that it's an interesting Rorschach test I think that depending on your perspective and what you're hoping to get out of the book you meaning the reader it's either a brave dive into this complicated messy world of trumpian politics or it's total nonsense or somewhere in the middle and I'm curious to me as a reader not just inject my personal opinion you are come away certain that someone told him these things happened and maybe he even observed some of them himself but there's so much in there that is wishy-washy at best that it tends to cloud a lot of what's written and and I'm curious how you feel well I mean number one I think that but what's hilarious about the the reaction to the book is that it's basically making an argument that anyone who follows president Trump's Twitter feed can make I mean basically the argument is things are chaotic inside the White House the president is not a policy wonk he speaks out of his butt a lot and he doesn't really know what's going on all the time like I wasn't aware that this was a giant mystery I think that everyone who voted for him basically knew this in 2016 this attempted to suggest that he is totally crazy in a different way that he's suddenly suffering from early onset Alzheimer's is a thinly veiled attempt to invoke some sort of you know 25th amendment solution which is insane in and of itself the the book I find to be I think the the best the best proof of what the book is is something that has nothing to do with the book there was it there's a twitter account called pixelated boat this is I love the story so much we're a pixelated boat wrote up a fake episode from Wolf's book because Wolf's book does not distinguish between the stuff that he has seen personally the stuff that he has heard off the record from people the stuff that he has heard from Steve Danon third hand the stuff that is on that like doesn't distinguish any of this otherwise it is the other people God's eye view right other organizations clear reporting that is unattributed there's some things in there yeah rectly taken from other people's report and there's stuff that's blatantly wrong I mean there's they're a bunch of errors in the book as well and so this guy pixelated boat put together a fake story from the book that he put out there as a parody and the story was that President Trump had had was obsessed with guerrillas and wanted his and wanted his staff to put together the guerrilla channel and so his staff put together a 24 hour guerrilla Channel which they had beamed into the White House and all it was was nature videos of guerrillas but President Trump didn't like that because there were too many shots of guerrillas who are not fighting each other so he insisted they cut out all the footage of all the girl was not fighting so all you had was 24 hours of guerrillas fighting and the president would sit in front of the screen and talk to the guerrillas it's them to attack one another and the report suggested that the president thought that the guerrillas could hear him this was parodied by a bunch of people on the mainstream left like they're a bunch of actual verified Twitter account people on the Left who started retweeting this and saying can you believe the president watches 17 hours a day of the gorilla Channel first of all if there were gorilla Channel we could all watch 17 hours a day of that but second the the fact that people bought that is pretty much exactly what people are reacting to in the wolf book people who want to buy the stories about President Trump you know changing his own sheets right and President Trump eating KFC because he's afraid of being poisoned as opposed to eating KFC because he's a fat slob who likes KFC which seems a lot more plausible to me all of that suggests that everyone is now taking the news as the Rorschach test and it's people in the news who are doing it which is inexcusable if the audience for the audience to take it as a Rorschach test in the same way that he can add crime book is one thing but for a Katy tur to go on MSNBC yesterday and then congratulate Michael Wolfe for the president disliking the book and then they wonder why people like me are critical of how the media roll out the news and he's been he's been an excellent litmus test I think in exposing well in assets has to be a better a better determine he's been a great asset test for the media because people who are reacting and giving this book credibility in a way they never would with their own network is is demonstrative of I think a lot of political biases Sarah a taxi us again where you go to such great lengths to have fact-based reporting and and double and triple text triple check sources and then this comes out and you know it's treated as a message as a Bible of sorts of what's going on inside the White House what's the reaction from a hard news organization I have a panic attack every day when I publish because I always think I could have called eight more people did I get every single perspective on it and my editors have to say to me like you called six people who know this better than anyone what are you talking about you don't have you could work on the story forever and to me it's never good enough it's never true enough I never can get the best version of the truth ever I feel like for every issue I cover I need to talk to hundreds of people and just to kind of hear accounts of you know sloppy reporting where you're not going through everything little thing I mean reporters make the mistakes all the time I've made mistakes but I you know personally I hold myself to this standard of you cannot afford to risk any sort of falsehood any sort of triplet if you don't have the best version of the truth that you were able to obtain don't publish it that's the that's the school I come from that's the school I think we have it Axios and so I think the takeaway from the book and Mike Allen who's our sort of executive editor has spoken about this a lot is that yes there are narratives that ring true in the book yes they could have been obtained by reading Maggie Haberman or by you know being Twitter or whatever but you can't ignore the fact that some of the things that are inside of the book are blatant factual errors like Wilbur Ross's title or they kind of seem to be a little bit hyperbolic because at the end of the day my opinion I don't speak on behalf of my organization in this particular perspective but I think you're only as strong a journalist as your weakest report and if you put out anything that isn't 100% the most tried and true version of the truth it's really hard for anyone to take anything you write seriously so to what degree and Eric would love your perspective on this does this discussion about the Wolfe book relate back to what we talked about a little bit earlier which is sort of the motivations of media organizations and platforms and the algorithms and what consumer wants and clickbait and you sort of want to do this but you know that advertisers want that and this is what generates demand is the Wolfe book essentially a byproduct of supply and demand people want it and thus someone supplied it and here we are I'm just trying to think whether I tweeted out anything about the guerrilla channel I think that I have very little to add by the way I just totally despite my really negative take on journalism totally inspired to hear somebody coming from an old-school journalistic perspective that's that's unfaithful and you just feel it I think that what's happening is is that people are so thrown for a loop that they are willing to grab at anything that starts to organize things and this is this crisis and sense making on this particular book I don't want to wade in yet as to what's going on because I have a bigger fish to fry which is how do we really communal sense making it a semi reliable level so that we can get on with the business of the nation and being decent to each other even if not always loving each other perfectly we have a huge vacuum and all sorts of things are rushing to fill it and pessimistic as I am on traditional journalism more people with Sara's perspective will do a lot to rebuild us towards semi reliable communal sense maybe so let's end on this topic the traditional news landscape today and if you look at television news in particular 24/7 news for sure it tends to follow some version of the same formula a host sets up a topic provides you know most of the time some some some pretty objective facts but then you turn to X number of pundits to their left the next number of pundits of their right and everyone screams at each other for an hour until we get to the next block or a different host in different pundits scream at each other about the same thing for an hour and we sort of do that ad nauseam what's refreshing about the newer entrants in the media space with its Axios or Daily wire or crooked media or there's others is that they're embracing new formats that it's not about filling airwaves 24/7 and that's having to regurgitate the same things that it is a podcast that hits something for an hour and then everyone goes on with their life until you come back tomorrow and you pick the most important things to talk about for an hour it's stories that are carefully curated do you believe that in that regard new entrants like yours have a leg up in the race to define what news will be going forward because you don't have the burden to fill airwaves 24/7 I mean I definitely agree with that I think that i think the 24/7 media news news outlets are going to die i mean the fact is that i cut the cable a while ago and and the reason that i did is because the news that i get is much faster online than it is and you know like i know the news that's hitting an hour before it breaks on on fox or CNN just by watching twitter and not only that you can pick as you say it's in it's in on-demand society now right it used to be that the the reason that if you watch Wolf Blitzer its breaking news and then it's the same headline literally every 12 minutes I know because when I'm in the gym it's stuck on the TV and I can't get it off and it's every 12 minutes they just repeat the same headline the reason is because they figure it's a new people who are tuning in every 12 minutes it's not the same person who's actually watching for an hour well podcasts you know in which is a medium that we've done really well in what that's about is the idea that anytime you in a day it's the same news story so instead of me having to just get on the air for 12 hours and repeat the same story over and over if you want to download it download it you want my opinion you've got my opinion you can move on with your life and the same thing is true for for terrestrial talk radio which is based on that 24/7 news medium sort of outlet I mean the idea that you're only going to engage for a 15-minute segment with Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity which is why he has to have a three-hour show if you listen to three hours continuously of any talk radio show usually they've covered everything they have to cover within the first hour and a half and they start repeating topics in a different in a slightly different way yeah I think that the on-demand culture which is something for people my age and your age you know the idea that it and Eric your age to the idea that that so many people are engaging with media through their phones and picking up stuff you know not necessarily because if you want breaking news you go to Twitter and then you check in for five minutes then you go about the rest of your day if you want an opinion then you check a podcast that has considered that news over the course of 24 hours and it's filtered out all the stuff you don't need to know and now you've got that very condensed version you listen to it a two times speed so now you've gotten it done in half an hour so instead of you sitting by the TV all day waiting for Sean Hannity to bring his opinion on a piece of news that broke at six o'clock this morning that has been repeated now 20 times throughout the day you don't have to engage that long I think that's that's really good for consumers it's it's somewhat bad for people who are in the business of long form journalism because again it caters to the short form attention span because the same thing that that draws you to these short bite-sized pieces of news drives you away from reading 20 paragraphs of a thoroughly researched regulatory story I think yeah I mean I completely agree with that the one thing that I think is missing from this conversation is from an economics perspective one thing people don't realize about legacy institutions whether it be the New York Times or the CNN let's think of New York Times for example a lot of those employees are binded by a news guild which means that if they don't have the skillsets to adapt to news reporting styles whether it be tweeting out stories recording things on snapchat writing shorter they're still locked into these organizations I was at the New York Times it's something that we faced same type of thing happens to CNN you have two years of you know advertising contracts that are built around a 24/7 news channel that has that type of programming to just pivot one day and create on-demand content is incredibly difficult and for some of these companies that are publicly traded like Turner week or you know Time Warner it would be very difficult for them to start injecting resources into this network just so that they could start to invest in the on-demand programming CNN tried it they tried CNN go it was supposed to be some like an ESPN rundown of on-demand news that was updated by the hour for digital I mean this stuff is just so hard for legacy institutions to get into because they don't have the infrastructure they're not built around that infrastructure a lot of times don't have the technology and they don't have the sort of business model to support it when you're a new entrant like us you're able to craft your entire infrastructure around a completely different system I can't stress this enough our data and design executives sit right there on top with our sales and editorial executives we've created an organization that's crafted around the way that consumers consume content and so when we need to be adaptable we can be and I look at some of the legacy institutions that are delivering 24 hours of live news that are delivering you know really long content a lot of it's because quite frankly they're just not built and it will be really hard for them to ever pivot to get to the point where they can get you know be new and innovative I worry about this for Axios like look at look at Politico when we launched Politico was so innovative at the time 10 years from now later you know politico's still an incredible news organization but I'd argue that they don't technologically have the same format and delivery as us just because those 10 years of latency matters so that's the really big trend is that if you're not pivoted and rooted in some sort of infrastructure that's built around adaptable technology and consumer needs it's very hard for you at this point to completely change your business well on that it sounds like your businesses are both very well positioned thank you to Eric for being here thank everyone for being here thanks to everyone watching on the livestream and we hope that you have an amazing time at CES there's a lot great programming today tomorrow if you're interested in media there's a fantastic track about the music business that takes place on Thursday at Aria as part of C space that's one of the last programs of the week but it's going fantastic with some amazing high-level speakers from across the music industry so thank you everyone for being here thanks to the panelists [Applause]

Channel: kush

Views: 141,976

Keywords: journalism, news, media, technology, ces 2018, ben shapiro, eric weinstein, sara fischer

Id: HOxmIjiRqTw

Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018