everywomanChangemakers Podcast Transcript How can more diverse newsrooms change the way we see the world for the better?

Anna (00:06): Progress. It's in the actions we take right now and in daring to think differently. Each one of us can do something to change things for the better right where we are now, and a thousand small things done with intent adds up to real change. For some people, that initial spark becomes a fire.

Anna (00:26): Welcome to the Everywoman Changemakers Podcast. I'm Anna, your host, and every month I'll be talking to inspiring leaders and activists who are changing outlooks, challenging perceptions, and making a difference in the worlds of inclusion, business, the environment, sport, travel, and more. We'll be discussing their work, motivations, and vision. And most importantly, how a revolution of one can lead to a positive, powerful change for the many.

Anna (00:53): Today, we're talking to Kelly McBride, Senior Vice President of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school and research organisation based in Florida that champions freedom of expression, civil dialogue, and compelling journalism that helps citizens to participate in healthy democracies. She's also the chair of the Craig Newmark Centre for Ethics and Leadership so welcome Kelly.

Kelly McBride (01:12): Thanks for having me.

Anna (01:13): Let's start with a context question. I mean, when we're talking about media ethics, what are we talking about for the lay person and why is it so important, especially now, I imagine, in an age of digital journalism where it's a free fall, isn't it, anyone can publish anything and have it read by a lot of people and create a lot of influence.

Kelly McBride (01:32): Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why journalism ethics are important. The main one is that the information that you get, you have no idea where it's coming from, and so you really want to gather information as a citizen, whether it's deciding where you're going to eat tonight, or who you're going to vote for, or whether you're going to get an immunisation shot, you really want that information to come from a system that is designed to get you the most accurate, up to date, thorough information. And that's what journalism ethics is, it's about getting the information right. Now, it seems really simple when you say it like that, in such a simple way, but if you look at serving any sort of community, you have to also include notions of diversity, and how do you make sure that the information isn't just for people who are at the top of the power structure, but the information serves everybody?

Kelly McBride (02:38): And so you really want to think about the information that you get, sort of like the way you would think about the healthcare that you get, or the air that you breathe. You don't actually know what the systems are that make sure that those are good, but you assume that they're there, you assume that somebody's looking after that. And that's sort of what journalism ethics is.

Kelly McBride (02:58): Now, the interesting thing is, is that for the most part, I mean, certainly in the United States, but even in many other places, journalists are unlicensed. So unlike doctors, or lawyers, there's no one system of ethical decision-making that journalists are tested on, expected to understand, and there's all these different forces that can undermine that value of public good. And good journalism organisations understand what they're after, who they're trying to serve, how they're trying to meet the public's need, but there's plenty of other journalism organisations that are really just about the commercial interests, just about serving their bottom line, and they don't really care about the public good. And so they're going to create a very different product.

Kelly McBride (03:52): So journalism ethics, it's hard to describe it because it doesn't exist in one place, every single news organisation has a different set of ethics and a different set of ethical expectations. There are some general values that we can apply to journalism such as independence and fairness, not letting conflicts of interest push the information in a way that would deceive people. Unlike doctors, like if a doctor lies to you and tells you that you don't have cancer and you do, that doctor's going to get in trouble. A journalist doesn't have that same level of accountability.

Anna (04:35): Also, I would imagine, ethics drives the way in which we see the world, and the way in which the world is explained to us by these sources. And I talked about the age of digital journalism. I mean, is it fair to say that before the advent of the internet and this sort of sense of citizen journalism, which is another adjunct, I mean, if not a sense of personal ethics, there was a sense of professional ethics. You knew that if you read a newspaper like The Post or The London Times, that it would have at least checked its facts, even though it obviously would have had a spin, it would have had some kind of a perspective, but it would have been a reliable source, we weren't living in an age where opinion and fact were necessarily consecrated. Would you agree with that?

Kelly McBride (05:18): I actually think that it's a little more complicated than that. I mean, there was a simpler time, right? There were fewer sources, and those sources were more dominant. And so, the ethical standards that they embraced seemed more universal at that point. The reality is though that, even in that time period, there were variations on what the standards were by region, by medium, and even by department, the ethics and the sports department were not the same as the ethics and the news department.

Kelly McBride (05:54):

I think things got more complicated as the barriers to publishing and disseminating information were lowered so that everybody could participate in it. I actually think that we think more and talk more about ethics now than we did back then. And back then we sort of took a rule obedient approach to the news in ways that didn't serve everybody. So it was much harder to challenge assumptions back then than it is now, now you can very easily challenge the assumptions of journalism, back then it was almost impossible to do it.

Anna (06:41): You are the chair of the Craig Newmark Centre for Ethics and Leadership. In terms of elevating discourse, what do you think the biggest challenges are now to a better discourse?

Kelly McBride (06:51): I think there are two big categories of challenge. So the first is the economics of journalism. It used to be that journalism was predominantly supported by a advertising model. And so, there were certain standards that were baked into that model so that the advertisers would have faith in it, and it was really about the advertisers believing in the ability of the model to reach an audience than it was the audience having faith in it because the audience didn't have a lot of choices so they had faith in it because they had no other choice, they had no other place to get information. Those economic changes are profound, they are driven by the internet and by social media, and they've changed a lot about journalism.

Kelly McBride (07:42): In addition to that, the other thing that's happening now, particularly in the United States, but I'm detecting it the world over is, in every society there's a group of people who are, who are at the centre of power, and journalism has traditionally reflected their point of view. So in the United States, the white middle upper class point of view, there are many journalists in the system now who are bucking against that and saying, "It is unethical to assume that white is the default, and that middle class is the default, and that every other interpretation of the world is a variation or a difference. It's certainly in the United States where in the younger generation, close to 50% of the demographic is people of colour, it certainly is a bad business proposition. If you were creating a product and you start with the assumption that a white person's reality is the reality and that every other reality is a divergence from that reality, you've harmed your audience, and your potential audience really because you're not going to get the audience that you really want, you're not going to get that diverse audience.

Kelly McBride (09:11): But a simple sort of example that illustrates this is we recently had a mass shooting here in the United States that targeted women of Cambodian and Vietnamese descent. Many of the stories pointed out that the bulk of the victims were Asian, but most of the stories did not point out that the shooter was white. Why is that, because we default to white, we assume everything is white, unless we say otherwise. There are people in journalism who are saying, that decision alone is emblematic of hundreds and hundreds of decisions that you make every day that you don't recognise are an ethical system, that you have created this world where white is the default. And they're challenging that, and the structures of journalism are pushing back. As many people in the United States participated in Black Lives Matter protests, journalists were asking the question of, "Is that really a conflict of interest if I say

Black Lives Matter, or if I participate in one of those marches with my children and my spouse, and does that really disqualify me from being a journalist to say that?"

Kelly McBride (10:27): And it is a real conversation in the United States where certain old school editors would say, "Yes, that is a political statement." And younger journalists would say, "No, that is a statement of dignity and human rights. The dignity and human rights that we are asking for should not be limited to white people." so just that pressure of how you can bring your whole self to your work as a journalist is a very challenging, ethical problem that many newsrooms are just in absolute convulsions over at the moment.

Anna (11:05): That's fascinating. I want to talk to you about the default position as well possibly being male. I mean, most of the... Certainly the people that own the newspaper organisations in England are white and male. How does that impact on the diversity issue and all the things we've been talking about here?

Kelly McBride (11:24): Yeah. They own it and it's also the people who run the papers, the editors are predominantly male. The number of by-lines that get on the front page are predominantly male. The number of people who are quoted in the homepage or in front page stories, the most significant stories of the day are predominantly male. Those are all related to each other, and it is a problem the industry has had, even though 70% of graduates from journalism school are female. What you see is this falling off of participation. So even though 70% of graduates are female, only 50% of new hires are female, it's about 50/50. And then women leave the profession for a number of reasons at a much higher rate. Journalism companies have not done a very good job of accommodating families and caregivers, parents, but not just parents, children who have to take care of their parents, any sort of caregiver struggles in journalism. I know I have, just in my own life.

Kelly McBride (12:37): In addition to that, there is this unconscious bias to give certain assignments that lead to advancement to men over women so assignments in conflict zones. I mean, there's this sort of formula for if you want to become an executive at , you had to have served overseas, preferably in a conflict zone, you had to have run a department where you have edited other journalists. And if those are given predominantly to men, you can see how the pipeline would tighten and fewer women would get through that pipeline. We recognise it and there are many news organisations that are actively working against it.

Kelly McBride (13:24): I will tell you, I came into journalism in the early 1990s and my assumption then was that we had fought all these battles and it was a meritocracy and I had as good a shot as any guy. And it wasn't until like 15 or 20 years into my career that I started seeing these studies that showed by-lines and sources that I realised that like, "Oh, I totally missed out on even making the argument because I assumed that when I was passed over for a promotion or for a plum assignment it was because of my skill, not my gender. And in fact, we've managed to surface it, we have not managed to eradicate it in the field yet. And I think it's actually worse in Europe right now.

Anna (14:22): Coming back to your point about the younger generation and that sort of culture change that is coming, one hopes that journalism still exists as a profession by the time they come through the pipeline. But do you think that that is a hopeful sign for change?

Kelly McBride (14:36): Absolutely. The centre was designed as a place for news organisations to come to work on these ethical standards. And so, we do it through consultation, through training. And I have detected in many of the requests that I'm getting, an uprising from younger journalists who are demanding that the industry treat them differently and create a different culture in the newsroom. It's just been a horrific year to be a journalist, it's been really, really hard. Your whole working environment changed, you were dealing with the story that you were covering when it came to COVID, many journalists came down with it because they were exposed early on, their family members had to deal with it, they had to teach their children from home while they were working, whether it's anchoring the news, or reporting out stories. Then we had the protests and suddenly many journalists who are working in domestic settings are seeing themselves as combat journalists because of what's happening.

Kelly McBride (15:49): And then we had all these other horrific stories, we had devastating wildfires and other weather events. So there was a journalist who was working on the west coast for an east coast based publication. She had been covering protests, violent protests, and then she was covering the wildfires. And she was about to take a break, and another batch of wildfires broke out, and her editor called her and said, "I need you to move locations from one wildfire to another wildfire." She mentioned to her editor that she was feeling a fair amount of trauma and stress from this series of very difficult assignments where you're exposed to a lot of trauma and stress. And the editor said, "Yeah, when I was in this war zone and I felt that way too. Sorry." And it maybe wasn't that flippant, but the message was, "This is journalism, get over it." And she was like, "Nope, not going to put up with it. I need something more. I need this organisation to marshal its resources and provide more support to me."

Kelly McBride (16:57): Now, I never would have said that as a young journalist, never. It would not have even occurred to me, and I'm so grateful that there are younger journalists who are coming along who are saying, "We want to be managed differently, we want the culture of the newsroom to be more sensitive to our needs, and we think that this will make the journalism better." And I actually believe them, I think it will make the journalism better too. And so a lot of the ethical standards that I'm creating now are about how you balance the need to be a human being and to experience the world as a full human being and to have some sort of fair and distant observation of it so that you can tell the rest of the world a valuable story.

Kelly McBride (17:50): And the thing is, is when you go back to sort of those halcyon days of journalism where everybody trusted the news, there were a lot of stories that were left out of the news, there were a lot of perspectives that were left out of the news, and unless you were a white middle class individual you did not see your reality represented in that world. And so, that's really what these voices are demanding in the difficulties that newsrooms are facing in managing their ethical standards right now is really this existential question in journalism of, "How do we provide a news product and information in a way that is more inclusive and more representative of the audience that we serve?".

Anna (18:42): The lack of diversity in newsrooms, as you said, has a massive impact on the culture of decision-making, doesn't it, in terms of reporting of different stories. I mean, we touched on some of them, but there's sort of been a lot of social justice movements over the past year. How does it impact on perhaps how those are reported?

Kelly McBride (19:02): Well, I mean, it influences who listens to the news. There is a direct connection between when you're listening to news in a broadcast format, whether it's radio, or television, or internet video, if the voice sounds like a voice that you're familiar with, or if the voice sounds like the default to white, that sort of white broadcast your voice. America is a vast country with lots and lots of different dialects. Culturally and ethnically there are also different ways of speaking that are all acceptable and valuable and accurate. And if we force everybody to sound exactly the same, then we lose a portion of the audience that doesn't sound like that and doesn't recognise that as a familiar, trustworthy voice.

Kelly McBride (19:58): So here's one other example. Since the rise of coronavirus there's been a rise of hate crimes against Asians in the United States, probably the world over as well, but definitely in the United States. That has been woefully under-reported, and when you go back, now that we've had this horrific crime against them, when you go back, you can see that many news organisations missed the story before that. But when that crime happened, there were a lot of things that were said by police officers that were then parroted in the media that turned out to be stereotypes and woefully insensitive and just downright inaccurate.

Kelly McBride (20:44): So for instance, all the businesses were described as massage parlours, which is code for illicit sex business. None of them have parlour in their title, and nobody, when they started using that term, have reported out whether or not any sort of illegal activity was happening there. So that's just one way that, had the journalists who were reporting that story in the initial 12 to 24 hours after it happened been more diverse and been able to listen to the diversity that does exist in their newsroom, somebody probably would have asked that question, like, "Is that the right term to use? Why are we calling them massage parlours? Is there any evidence that there was illegal activity going on in any of these businesses? Are they all three the same?" That's a classic example of how a lack of diversity leads to inaccuracies in the report that's delivered.

Kelly McBride (21:46): And then that report that's delivered becomes the narrative, it becomes the language that the rest of the country uses to talk about something. That's really unfortunate, we have incredible amount of power to set the news agenda, to give people the language with which they describe their reality, and when we get it wrong because we lack diversity, that is a failure to our mission as journalists.

Anna (22:21): Well, let's talk about the idea and the ethics around freedom of speech. This is a big topic at the moment. The ideas of what that actually means seem to be quite confusing for some people.

Kelly McBride (22:32): Where we see this is on the social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and what they will allow and what they won't allow. All of those social media companies insisted from the get-go that they were not publishers and that they did not want to have any regulation or a lot of regulation over what people could say. And what they very quickly discovered is that that led to devastating circumstances, it led to people getting killed because of hate speech. It led to ethnic cleansing, it led to hate crimes, it led to people believing that strangers were coming in and kidnapping their children, that certain ethnic minorities were spreading disease. There was a lot of misinformation. And that misinformation came from a number of sources, including democratically elected leaders, including trolls who were just trying to make money, who were just creating to make money, and people who actually believed the hate that they were spreading, and were invested in the chaos that would result from it.

Kelly McBride (23:56): It took way too long for those platforms to recognise that they needed to put some mechanisms into place. And when they started putting mechanisms into place, those mechanisms were generally less effective rather than more effective. And I mean, at the Poynter Institute, we have helped with some of those mechanisms so we have found ourselves in a position of saying, "Do we try and help? Do we try and do what we can? Or do we just stand on the sidelines and criticise?" And we decided that it's probably better to get in there and influence and do what we can and iterate and try and make things better even though we don't get to control anything on any platform. But we have a fact checking division, PolitiFact, which is a major American fact-checking organisation, is housed at the Poynter Institute, as is another organisation called the International Fact Checkers Network, as is another organisation called MediaWise. So we've been working in all of these areas.

Kelly McBride (25:03): The reality is, you should have a human right to say whatever you think. I believe that, you should have a right to free speech. A business should not have that same right. And I believe that a business that is publishing and disseminating information widely has a different standard and obligation. And once you start profiting off of things that are harming people, you have a moral obligation to curb that damage even if it harms your profits.

Kelly McBride (25:41): We're talking for most of these companies about the difference between making a lot of money and a little less money. We're not talking about, yes, some profit, or no, no profit. That's not even the choice that they're making. In the same way that if you are a hospital and somebody shows up at your doorstep and they are in need of care, you should treat them whether they can pay you or not pay you, and then you should figure out how you stay open and how you keep paying your staff. But you do have this level of, there's a human need out there and you have an obligation. And so as a company, I think the obligation is to create an environment where people can get truthful, solid information, and have political debate because I think political debate is part of this. But when you see actual harm happening, whether it's to individuals, or communities, or democracy itself, you have an obligation to intervene.

Anna (26:51): Let's talk about fake news quickly. I mean you have the fact-checking facility at Poynter. I mean, obviously you've been using it a lot over the past four years I imagine with Trump who seems to have coined the fake news market. Were you using it before then? And now that Trump is out of office, do you think that trust has been irreparably damaged, or are people deciding where truth is? And I think I talked about a post-truth society earlier on, have we got to that point, what are the ethics around that, and how do we make positive change in that area?

Kelly McBride (27:32): Well, so first of all, the fact checking movement, and PolitiFact was founded in 2007 as Obama was running for president and announcing his candidacy, and it was founded because we were recognising that social media was going to become very powerful, and that politicians who were running for office were going to be able to get their message directly to the audience without having the mediating influence of journalists. So they were going to be able to say stuff, and nobody was going to come back and say, "Hey, this is true." Or, "This isn't true." So PolitiFact was founded specifically to address that environment. And then it was expanded to go beyond politicians to pundits and other people who were making claims in the marketplace of ideas. So they were really good by the time Trump came on, they really knew what they were doing by the time Trump came on the scene as a political figure in the United States.

Kelly McBride (28:36): Interesting to remember that one of the biggest lies that was repeatedly called out was the fact of Obama's birth as an American citizen in Hawaii. And the person who was responsible for that was Donald Trump, long before he declared that his presidency, and I actually think his ability to get traction around that lie played into his decision, ultimately, to run for president. He realised that the environment could be manipulated. Now that Trump is not in office, first of all, he's still quite influential, particularly over the Republican party, which holds most of the governor's seats in the United States, and is still incredibly influential. And so he is still the de facto head of the Republican party at this moment. So he's not going away and he's going to continue to probably be a newsmaker and somebody worthy of fact checking for a long time.

Kelly McBride (29:49): What's interesting is, is there's a significant number of American citizens who are no longer listening to him, he doesn't dominate the news cycle. That may actually make him more influential because in the last election, you could not avoid the reality that people were working with two completely different sets of facts and different realities, and just whether our elections were secure or not. And all of the research, all of the science, all of the observers, all of the attorneys general and secretaries of state who monitored the elections certified them, every state certified its own election, even states with Republican leadership. But that did not stop this narrative from progressing that the election was insecure and therefore stolen from Donald Trump, which led to the insurrection of January sixth. In the run-up to president Biden's inauguration, you could not avoid the fact that we were living in a world where about 65% of the people believed one thing, and about 35% of the people believed another thing, and there was no bringing them together.

Kelly McBride (31:07): You can actually avoid that now around most issues. Whether you're going to get the COVID vaccine is the one that is turning out to be the most contentious issue that people are still talking about. But for the rest of it, it's all separated into filter bubbles. And so, ethically, I think part of our job in journalism is to keep reminding the 65% that most journalists are talking to right now that this other 35% is still out there, and here's the type of information they're getting, and the messaging that they're getting, and the actions that they're taking as a result of that messaging. And their current refusal to take the coronavirus vaccines is the biggest piece of evidence that we have, that reality is an accurate one.

Anna (31:59): Given that arguably the question of how we report and how we include diverse voices and perspectives even if they're at two ends of the spectrum into a public discourse, it's going to keep running and running. What is a change that you would most like to see in the next few years, maybe the next decade, when it comes to increasing the quality of journalism, the quality of public discourse?

Kelly McBride (32:23): We need to get more diverse in the leadership level of journalism. And we need those new leaders to come in and acknowledge the sins of the past. And we've had this, in the last decade, we've had a wave of news organisations apologising for things that happened in the 1920s where like they fomented racial hatred. But we need these leaders to say, "The 1980s weren't so great either. We were responsible for demonising black teenagers as criminals, gang members, drug addicts." And own that in the very recent past, journalism has caused harm because of the lack of diversity, and pledge to do better and do better by building a news culture that brings in diverse viewpoints.

Kelly McBride (33:29): The challenge is going to be what to do with the rage. And I don't know that I have a good answer for it, but there is this rage at the news media and its inability to accurately describe these issues, it's going to have to find an outlet somewhere in these news organisations. And so I think what journalism's going to have to do is acknowledge this rage and find an outlet for it. Very specifically, so in addition to diversifying our news organisations, what I would like to see is journalism become more audience centred and recognise that, as an audience member, when I'm consuming a piece of journalism, I need some key pieces of information that aren't currently provided to me. These would all fall under the headline of radical transparency.

Kelly McBride (34:24): So if I'm subscribing to your product, or even if I'm just consuming it if it's a free product, I need to know what your business model is, I need to know who pays your bills, and what conflicts of interest you might have. I need to know what your news priorities are, why you choose certain stories. And then I also need the product that I get to be engineered in a way that I know whether it's news or opinion, I know how well edited it is, is this something that you produced in a couple of minutes and posted up or did it get layers and layers of editing? I know how trustworthy you think this piece of information is.

Kelly McBride (35:07): Because the reality is, is that even among the most trustworthy news organisations, there is a range of trustworthiness within the work that they're doing and they never talk about it publicly. Citizens pick up on it. People who try and influence those news organisations pick up on it because they know how to exploit the weaknesses. So transparency is a habit and it's a muscle that you flex, and news organisations are just at the beginning of this journey. And so developing more radical transparency, I think, is the only way that citizens are, one, ever going to learn to become more media literate themselves is if they can see the lessons of media literacy, and two, it's the only way that trust is ever going to be restored in the new media,

Anna (35:57): Kelly McBride, thank you for joining us.

Kelly McBride (35:59): You're welcome.

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