Budget and workforce cuts. Loss of local news. Accusations of fake news. New platforms and changing habits. Journalism is facing a crossroads. As media institutions lose their funding, Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser invited professors Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center, and Duncan Watts, director of the Computational Social Science Lab and co-director of the Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy, to discuss the role of journalism in our democracy.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: Hi everyone.

Welcome to Annenberg Conversations.

I'm Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication

at the University of Pennsylvania and the host of this, podcast series.

In this podcast more generally, we explore groundbreaking research on

media and communication that we conduct here at the Annenberg School.

So thanks for coming, and listening to us today, I think today's conversation is long overdue.

it's a conversation about media bias and journalism and, journalism structures.

One that goes beyond just fake news and partisan divides, but

to talk about some of the structural changes that are happening, not only just in

newsrooms, but also those that are transforming the field of journalism itself, and

not always, or even in the current moment, not often in ways that serve us very well.

So I am, joined today by two of my colleagues, who approach these questions about journalism.

structures of journalism, media bias from, different but equally

essential angles.

So, my first guest is Professor Victor Pickard.

He is the C Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg

School, and he co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center, which we call MIC.

His research has focused on the history and political economy of media institutions,

media activism, and the politics and normative formations and foundations of media policy.

And he's particularly concerned about the future of

journalism and the role of media in a democratic society.

He writes powerfully about the structural issues that have

led to the crisis in journalism that we're facing today, but also he's a

remarkable media historian that reminds us of the role of journalism in

the public interest and reminds us that there is another way to do things.

So welcome Victor.

Victor Pickard: Thanks so much for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: My second guest is my colleague, professor Duncan Watts.

He is the Stevens University professor and the 23rd Penn Integrates Knowledge University

professor at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a very, very long title.

That means that we have to share him with the Wharton

School and the School of Engineering here at Pennsylvania.

He directs lots of things, including the computational social science lab, and also

very recently, is co-directing the Knight Center for Media Technology and

Democracy, which is a sixth school consortium that promises to really

uncover some of the issues that we're going to be talking about today.

He's interested in social and organizational networks, web-based experiments.

And analysis of large scale digital data, including

the production, consumption and absorption of news.

His work spans, again, lots of different disciplines including network science,

social influence, and how information actually moves through our world.

his research helps us see how information bias and networks shape what we perceive to be true.

So today we're going to talk about the crisis in, local journalism and in part, but also we're going to

talk about the things that we are not talking about enough when we talk about news and journalism.

Things like how bias lives in structures, not just in people, not just in how we understand

the news, but how the news is produced, and what new models of journalism could look like.

And again, I think that, having, a history of communication here at the Annenberg School is crucial

for this, because we've seen what journalism has been and what it could be, and what it is now.

So, let's start with something that I think you both

share, and that is, that this moment feels pretty urgent.

That this is, we feel like we're in a crisis, in news and journalism and polarization.

We're living through what some people have really described, kind

of feels like a slow collapse of local and independent journalism.

As more and more billionaires own our newspapers and our legacy

media, we see local journalism disappearing, unfunded, defunded, and

It feels sometimes, not just even like a slow collapse, but like a free fall.

So I want to ask you both what part of this crisis or what parts of this crisis that

we're experiencing right now in journalism do you think doesn't get talked about enough?

Victor Pickard: Sure.

Such a important, impressing, even terrifying question

and there's so many problems we could point to.

I think the one that I will start out talking about, that's already been hinted at is this local

journalism crisis which according to polling data, shows that the vast majority of Americans have no idea that local journalism is facing a crisis and according to casual

observers, It probably seems like there's more information available to people than ever before.

But just in the last 20 years, and this comes straight out of the recent

Medill report out of northwestern, that's been putting out these reports every

year on the state of news deserts, in the last 20 years, we've lost over two

thirds of our newspaper journalists, and over a third 40%, of our newspapers.

Now tens of millions of Americans are living in these news deserts

where they have access to little or no local news media whatsoever.

And we know intuitively this is bad for democracy.

In fact, we have empirical data to show.

There's a new study every month or two showing what happens when you have this

natural experiment where a local community loses its local news media institution,

and sure enough, people are less likely to vote who are living in those areas.

They have lower levels of political knowledge.

there's higher levels of polarization, higher levels of corruption.

So we know this is bad for democracy, but another aspect of this

local journalism crisis that doesn't get discussed enough is this

structural nature, this idea or this way of framing the problem that shows that there

really is no commercial future for the local journalism that democracy requires.

The advertising revenue model that existed roughly for 150 years, that supported some level of

local journalism has irreparably collapsed and it's not coming back, and so that is terrifying.

That puts us in uncharted territory, but it's also can

be liberating because as we know, every crisis is also an opportunity.

And I think it broadens the parameters It could expand

our imagination about what journalism could and should be.

And I'm sure we'll get more into that in the discussion about potential solutions.

But for now, we should stay with this idea that things are really bad right now.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: Thanks.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've said in the last couple of years, like every

crisis, there's an opportunity and I keep saying it with like more and more of a grimace on my face.

Duncan, what do you think is happening or shapes this crisis

that we're in right now that we're not talking about enough?

Duncan Watts: Yeah, I, completely agree about the need

to, think about media through the lens of ownership.

And I think it's actually a great example of the kind of measurement issues

that I was just talking about because, one of my PhD students Summer Haida has

just spent the last few years putting together, I think, the largest data set.

of news organizations in the US which includes, the news deserts, data

set, but several other, data sets as well, and one of the things we learned

is that, when you see the documentation for these different organizations, it

sounds like they have a comprehensive list of news organizations in the country,

but it turns out they have relatively non-overlapping sets of news organizations.

So, it really was a tremendous amount of work to try to pull all

these from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsGuard, and AllSides and

Fonte, uh, PaperBoy.

and the news desert.

So several different data sets, all of which classified things in different ways.

And had different pieces of information.

And he's, been, putting this together and has this

very comprehensive, view of both, online and print.

as well as local television.

And then he's been using, really interesting methods

from machine learning and AI to find, patterns in these data.

So, one totally random thing that he figured out, is that, so

there are thousands of these local news websites across the country, right?

So, in some sense maybe this is why people don't

realize that there's a dearth of, local news reporting.

because actually many local communities actually have a news website.

But what's interesting is that many of these news

websites are actually producing identical content, right?

That they have these content management systems on the backend, they're all

essentially owned by the same entity but superficially, they look different.

They look like they are, your local news organization, but they're all pulling on the same, backend.

And so he has, by using methods from natural language processing and these, uh,

transformer methods that, are popular now in, in language models, he can use the

appearance of identical or near identical content to extract, these networks of ownership.

And you can find, just as Victor was saying, that there are a relatively

small number of these entities that are effectively controlling, all of

these websites and, they're really kind of scattered all over the place.

You would never be able to pick them out any other way.

And so I think, by using methods like that, we can start to look

at, how much genuinely local content is there versus, essentially

centrally produced content that's masquerading as local content.

And

where is the bias coming from and is it associated with these ownership structures?

So.

I really like the question and I think, that we, have these new methods now that allow

us to start to dig into it in a novel way and hopefully, find some interesting, patterns.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: That's super interesting, this work about local news sites and

how the content is basically the same across all of them, or across many of them.

I guess this is a question that I would ask both of you then.

Since you're no longer a conspiracy theorist, Victor, and, and since now we've all

validated, we've all, we've validated your, theory about ownership and since your

measurements, Duncan are finding that a lot of this news is identical news source.

So it's not exactly local, right?

If it's scattered across multiple local websites.

And it's the same content.

We can't really call it local.

So, and I know this is a really hard question, but in your mind, as you're doing this research,

what, would a media outlet look like that would actually serve the purposes of democracy?

And I know that's a very hard question.

I'm thinking also of my undergraduate students, and I'm teaching a class right now where we

talk about the role of the media in democracy and deliberative democracy every single week.

And they don't get their news.

And we know this, this is a kind of tired now statement, but they

don't get their news from legacy newspapers or local journalism.

They get their news from TikTok and they're so smart and so well informed.

And so that is not to say that the news from TikTok is garbage.

Right.

The news from TikTok is a very particular curated kind of news.

Is that the media outlet that we're looking at?

Or what is your ideal

media landscape to address this crisis?

Duncan Watts: I love this question.

I

think I see two ways of answering the question.

The first one might seem surprising, and this is coming from another, PhD

student, Sam Wolken, whose research is on local news, and local TV news.

and it turns out that, one, remaining source of local news

that is actually pretty.

I hesitate to use the word

vibrant, but at least flourishing, is local television news.

And local television news has long had a bad reputation among

media scholars as being mostly junk food, a lot of weather, a lot of crime,

a lot of human

interest stories, a lot of sports.

And he finds that all of that is true.

But there's a decent, percentage of, local news coverage.

that is actually about, local politics

and even state and national politics.

and further he finds that, because of the way that local news is kind of

interspersed between other types

of programming, it tends to reach people who are otherwise not getting very

much news.

And, potentially that's a good thing, that we should

be happy about in, the midst of all of this other bad news.

The other one is that, as much as social media has a really bad reputation.

it's very hard, I think, to make generalizations about social media.

These platforms are so vast and so heterogeneous.

To me, I think it doesn't make sense to talk about averages because the variance is so big, right?

So there's a lot of garbage out there.

There's a lot of really terrible stuff, but there's a lot of really high quality stuff.

And I have to say, if I were just relying on, legacy,

media, I

would have no idea what was happening.

in this country.

Right.

and so much of the really graphic content about what's happening on,

the streets of cities like

Chicago and LA

and people being

kidnapped and dragged into unmarked vans and everything, really, really terrible,

terrible stuff is just people with their cell phones out on the streets.

It's like citizen journalism.

And you're not going to hear about that from the New York Times, right.

And so, same with protests, same with, there's a

of, I think just organic content that's coming up

from the grassroots that you essentially can only get on social media.

And so I think there, there is some hope that, amidst, all of the

troubles, we are seeing, other ways of getting, high quality information

that is capable of informing you about, the state of the world, that is,

augmenting at least, or perhaps even replacing what we might,

get from traditional journalism.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: I've been thinking about this question a lot and thank you for that answer.

I think if there was a way that we could figure out how to have some

kind of convergence of social media news and legacy news, in a way that,

young people in other generations and low news consumers would watch.

but, I think that it's always this kind of

either or, you either go to social media or it's legacy media.

And as you said, social media is such a vast heterogeneous landscape that there's no way that we

can just, say that it's all garbage, but it's also very hard to sift through what isn't garbage.

And I often think about Alyssa Richardson, who is a journalism professor

at, the other Annenberg School at USC, Who wrote a book about the

moment of celebration or hopefulness at the beginnings of citizen journalism, at the height of the

Black Lives Matter movement, when there were, citizens who were filming cops, pulling out guns on

black people and, other things like George Floyd and everything else, like very violent images.

And there was this moment where we thought, aha, this is going to change things.

This is going to change things because we are seeing these images and then, you

have other layers of structure like the courts and policy and everything else.

That ends up actually not giving that kind of journalism

a legitimacy that perhaps it needs or deserves.

And so it's complicated and I don't think it goes in one direction.

But I mean, Victor, what would your ideal, I mean, so I've just given you

mine, which I'm not a journalism professor, and so my whole thing about merging

social media and legacy media, I just want everyone to know you heard it here

first, after, after talking to Duncan and Victor, I came up with this idea.

Victor Pickard: I like it a lot.

I, I might try to steal it from you.

But I do,

I think a lot of the

things we've just been discussing shows us that there are these

building blocks, or at least these potentials there that can be tapped.

but I think the missing

ingredient

as it were, is a lack of economic support for much of this kind of activity that we'd like to see.

And this should also include the boring types of journalism, like

covering city hall and the local school board and the state legislature.

And these are the types

of journalism that have rapidly disappeared.

And I do think at the end of the day, and I talk a lot about

This, and this is probably where I get accused of being not

a

conspiracy theorist, but rather a utopian.

But I think that this is going to have to be a public model.

And I don't just mean NPR and PBS, but I

think we're going to have to find a way to make those public investments, to make sure that there

is this kind of journalism happening that the market won't support, and there are various

data points we can look to that suggest a public model could be good for democracy.

Timothy Neff and I did a study a few years ago where we looked at

33 democracies around the planet, and the countries that had the strongest

democracies, according to the democracy index, also happen

to have the most robust public broadcasting systems.

It doesn't suggest causation, but at least positive

correlation, they tend to rise and fall together.

And we also see this even in the United States where although we've been a global

outlier for how little we've allocated towards our public media system before.

Congress, uh, recently rescinded

the

the paltry federal funding that they actually get.

It came out to about a buck 59 per person, per year, just literally off the chart

compared to most, democracies on the planet and how much they spend at the federal level.

So, despite all that, despite our impoverished system here in the States, it enjoys relatively

high levels of trust across the political spectrum, and that's true for local media in general.

We hear all these polling, data studies that show that, you

know, people no longer trust the media, but if you dig down a little

deeper and you talk to them about their local media institutions,

they often have warm, fuzzy feelings towards those institutions.

even amongst people who hate the media, they like their local

media.

So I think there are these little glimmers of hope where, it's not going to happen

at the federal level anytime soon, but we can look at the state and local levels.

That's what New Jersey's been doing for a number of years now.

with the Civic Information Consortium.

They've been allocating public grants to various local media initiatives.

There's actually a bill that was recently introduced here in Pennsylvania.

So even if it's not happening with the federal government, of course

nothing's happening with the federal government at the current moment.

We can look to state and even

local governments.

and then at some point we will need a national plan, to try to create

What I think of as these public media centers.

That

are guaranteed in every community across the country, federally

guaranteed, but actually owned and controlled by local communities.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: thank you for that.

And it leads me to the next question that I have, starting with Duncan.

But then Victor, you want to, come in and that is, it was interesting what you just

said about local journalism, and in part that a, a lot of it is about the mundane.

Is about, city council and, different neighborhood communities and that kind

of thing the definition of local journalism doesn't really fit the bombastic,

spectacular, news media that we see and legacy news or that gets on the front page.

Right?

And of course we know a lot of that is because there are certain things that get attention.

Caitlyn Petrie's book, all the news that is fit to click, right?

That, there's this way in which what clicks, what grabs

the attention economy is something that becomes our news.

Invisibilize is the mundane, right?

it literally eclipses it from

the spotlight.

And so, and a lot of what the news is that's fit to click is misinformation.

Right.

So, Duncan, you had mentioned, we started off this conversation

with Joe Rogan and thinking about things like the manosphere.

as someone who doesn't study the news, but studies misogyny,

misogyny gets a vastly disproportionate attention on social media.

Then, something like, what the local city council is doing, right?

But it gets vastly, disproportionate attention versus all sorts of things.

misogyny sells, it turns a profit for these media companies, and, there's an argument.

That I've made, that I won't make now, but that I've

made that misogyny itself is at its core misinformation.

Right.

And so is there something, Duncan that you have learned, you don't have to talk about misogyny,

but if you've, is there something that you've learned lately about the ways that misinformation

and polarization spread that surprise you, that, maybe have to do with this idea of what.

we should be working towards in terms of our news consumption.

Duncan Watts: I'm surprised by everything.

Right?

I mean, nothing,

Nothing.

ever

looks the way that I imagine – (SBW: It’s bad if we're not surprised,

right?)

I think, one theme that has been

emerging from a bunch of interrelated projects.

in my lab recently, is something that we call narratives matter more than facts, right?

And this is, really in response to the last several years of what is now.

called misinformation research.

And again, this is a big community of people and this is a, a

sweeping generalization, but I think it's true that, when you're

at least talking about the empirical work in this field, the way people operationalize

misinformation is as

false information, things that are demonstrably false.

that would fail

a fact

check.

And what I think we have convinced ourselves of,

through a number of projects is that if you define misinformation, that way,

it's actually like a pretty small fraction, of the content that is, available.

whether in regular media or.

Or even on social media, that

there's certainly flagrantly false information circulating.

And the numbers actually look pretty big until you look at the denominator and then

you realize that it's, really a very small fraction of everything that's out there.

And what is much more common is stuff that's not exactly false, but

might be misleading.

Right?

And the way that we try to operationalize this

information is in terms of, narratives, things,

storylines, ways of framing the world, who are the good guys?

Who are the bad guys?

Who should,

you be mad at?

Who are the heroes?

These are the kinds of, cognitive devices.

That we use when we tell stories and that we

use when we try to interpret the world, and you can

construct these narratives out of all kinds of, material, right?

And facts are in some sense just grist for the mill, right?

So yes, people use facts to construct narratives, but to some extent it might not matter

all that much which particular facts they are, or even whether they're true or not.

Right.

The thing that's doing the work is the narrative.

Right?

And so when you think about what's happening in social media and in the media in general in

terms of, narratives, it, it gives you a different lens for thinking about misinformation.

And it gets much trickier to

say what's true and what's false.

Because very often there's no like.

ground truth that everybody can agree on, that would allow us to, make

these differentiations or these distinctions, in an objective way.

It does, I think , still help in terms of understanding where the action is.

Right.

And I think if you think about, again, the last election is a good example.

Like what were the narratives that drove the last election?

We had this, this narrative about.

transgender athletes, for example, which, as an

empirical phenomenon, essentially doesn't exist, right?

It's like a almost, it's as close to a non-existent thing

as it can be without being actually precisely zero, right?

And yet it was this incredibly powerful

story that continues to resonate with many people.

And so it's not that these were lies.

That may have been lies, I'm sure there were lies that were told.

But you can easily spin that narrative without saying anything that's like factually incorrect.

Right?

In some sense, the narrative is still problematic, right?

So I think we want to really try to refocus the attention of

this work away from, let's try to pull out these atoms that we call facts.

And if we can just get rid of the false ones and, correct them.

Then everything would get better.

I think actually it might not make any difference at all, right?

Because the action really is happening at this higher level of the stories that we're spinning.

And very often you can do that in a misleading way without

saying anything that would fail a fact check, right?

And so I think if we can start to grapple with

that, unit of analysis, we might start to make some progress.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: That is super interesting and, really, really helpful I think for me and

just thinking about this, but for also, for me teaching I've been talking to my students about.

This productive way that living with ambivalence rather

than zero sum or, either or, or some kind of true false right.

Might actually help us find our way through and might actually help us use our imaginations in ways

that could, think differently about what the media can offer, us both in terms of structure and.

production and consumption.

So I think that that idea that that narratives are the

things rather than facts that maybe we should be focusing on.

And you're right, there's like an overdetermined amount of attention on misinformation.

it becomes like the only thing that a lot of

academics and political pundits talk about, and it's an interesting way to think about

it, that it actually works as a distraction from some of the more high level narratives.

And I think that Victor, your, incredibly important points about local journalism

and how to rethink it in terms of a public good also is about that narrative, right?

About using narratives rather than facts.

I mean, we can still have the facts of local journalism, but if

the narrative is that journalism and the public good and our.

Autonomy and empowerment as citizens are all interrelated

and that we need local journalism in order to see that.

That could be a really powerful way for us to think, beyond just the funding issue, which is

Absolutely essential.

But there's also the imaginative, part of this, how do we

think differently about narratives, and how do we think differently about bias?

I could continue talking to you both all day.

but I think we should probably, wrap up, as usual in these,

Podcast conversations.

it's such a privilege because I get to be, in conversation with my incredibly brilliant colleagues

and friends it reminds me of the really, really important work that we're doing here at Annenberg.

and so thank you both for sharing your thoughts, about this.

I'm really hopeful with both of you doing this kind

of work that we actually will find our way through.

it's just not going to be a straight line, I don't think.

having the two of you as guides is going to be really crucial, so

thank you so much for, having this conversation with me today.

Victor Pickard: Thank you, Sarah.

Duncan Watts: Thanks Sarah.

Sarah Banet-Weiser: Thanks everyone for tuning in, for this episode of Annenberg Conversations.

we'll be back with a new episode soon that will highlight the really,

really wonderful work that we're doing here at the Annenberg School.

So, till then, goodbye from me, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and

again, thank you to Victor and Duncan for joining me today.