The core principle of journalism is to "seek the truth and report it," a mission that is constantly challenged by those who don't want the truth to be told.
The First Amendment protects journalism in the United States, yet there is a growing concern about governmental restrictions on press freedoms. Journalists are facing unprecedented attempts to silence them through lawsuits and intimidation, raising alarms about the future of the free press.
Can the truth survive an assault by the US Department of War?
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of press and speech, but these rights are increasingly under attack by new government restrictions and litigation.
Journalism is crucial for democracy as it holds power to account, yet current trends threaten to stifle investigative reporting and free expression.
The lines between news, opinion, and entertainment are blurring, demanding that audiences become more critical of their media consumption.
Young journalists may become discouraged from pursuing hard-hitting stories, leading to a prominent decline in investigative journalism.
Advocacy and support for journalistic freedom are vital in preserving a healthy, informed democracy and counteracting misinformation.
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"Seek truth and report it." That's the first line of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. It's the guiding principle that informs professional journalism. And yet the truth, what it means to seek it and how to go about reporting it have always been up for challenge, question, debate, and certainly pushback by people who don't want the truth to get out.
The job of journalism, as it was once said, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And now, in the United States of America, the only profession named in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, journalism, despite our bulletproof First Amendment protections, is under attack by the Department of War. Abbie, what's on your mind?
Abbie Fink:
Isn't that ironic? Yeah, I've been really grappling with the headlines recently regarding not so much the accusations against journalists and the fake news and some of the things, the rhetoric that's been out there over the last handful of years, but really this constant lawsuits and attempts to shut down and attempts to stymie the reporting.
The job of our journalists in reporting the truth by individuals in leadership simply because they don't like what's being talked about or written about them, and with no real regard for the truth of what's being said, no real regard for the impact of what that's going to mean if the free press and our right to free speech is taken away from us.
And I don't want this to turn necessarily into a political discussion, but I do really want to think about, especially in the context of what I do for a living, but what it's going to mean and continue to mean when legitimate journalists, news operations that we have come to know and trust over many, many years are being shut down, are being accused of and are being the subject of lawsuits simp because they are attempting to report the truth. And again, truth being whichever side of the discussion you believe in.
And that is now spilling into the entertainment industry and other places where people who have opportunity and a platform to speak are being shut down, fired, and all sorts of ways to keep them from doing the work that they have set out to do. And that's extremely troublesome to me.
And not what I believe in as a journalist, not what I believe in as a public relations practitioner, and certainly not what I believe in as someone who values the right to express your opinion in a safe and protected way.
Adrian McIntyre:
You know, as always, there's a lot going on. Some of it's clear, some of it's not clear, but the latest salvo in the struggle between the forces of truth and the forces of government, which is a story that has played out everywhere, you know, forever. That is not new. But in the United States of America, the protections of the First Amendment were considered by most to be rock solid, you know, until tell they're not. And that is the concern.
The Department of War, of course, announced on September 18 that there were new restrictions on reporters. And we should point out, because I don't think this has been pointed out, that this is in the context of some very legitimate clarifications of the procedures around access to the Pentagon.
There's a document that includes details about security measures, clearances, where you can go where you can't, when, when you have to be escorted, all the things that are perfectly normal for anyone who works in almost any environment. I've dealt with that in corporations or nonprofits, where you got to get a visitor's pass if you don't have the right thing and you got to go to the office and they check, you know, that's normal. In the middle of all of that, however, there are statements about the restrictions on coverage.
So journalists who agree to these rules, as I said, most of which are entirely legitimate, having to do with the physical security of the premises, et cetera, can have their access revoked if they publish information that was not authorized, even if it is unclassified. Now, what the heck is this? Are you saying that journalists can't dig and find sources and get information that you've essentially asked them to become the arm, the propaganda wing of the Department of War? We're not even going to get into the discussion around the renaming of this government agency. But this is a problem.
This is a big problem, and it has caused a lot of hand wringing amongst professional journalists, but also amongst people who are watching the slow and gradual disintegration of some of the most American principles that I would think, regardless of party affiliation, anybody ought to support. This is troubling.
Abbie Fink:
It's extremely troubling. And, you know, look, you're 100% correct that, you know, access, physical access, you are allowed to go here. You are not allowed to go here. It's a matter of national security. You can come into the building. You can't go past this door because that's where patients are and that's protected space.
I've worked a variety of events in my professional career, and we would issue credentials and they would request the credential and they would provide, you know, identification of the media outlet they were working for and a photo id and if they matched up, you know, they were granted access to cover the event. If I put myself in the role of serving as a gatekeeper to information, that's what we do. We help manage, we help guide conversations between our clients and the journalists.
And for us, it's never been that we are not going to allow reporters access to our information. We may time it a little bit differently, we may manage it around a crisis in a different way. But you know, our guiding principle and what we will share with clients is we will never be unavailable for comment. That is not how we operate.
We can work with you to ensure that the conversation is done in a professional manner, that both sides of the story is being told. But our side of the story is never going to not be in it and we are never going to prevent that from happening.
And I think in the context of what this particular issue is, is really saying you can be here, but only if you agree that you're going to only say certain things and those are the certain things that we're going to allow you access to. And that is not the role of a journalist and it's certainly not the role of a journalist that covers the government in any fashion. They are there to be the watchdog over this entity.
And I think we need a distinction here as well between, you know, a journalist that works for a recognizable media outlet, those of us that have taken that craft, and we may be bloggers or have our own platform that may or may, you know, may be probably one sided or another, and the distinction between that and entertainment and you know, what we watch for entertainment value and all of which quite honestly deserves the same access, but the management of it may be a little bit differently. Different.
But I'm very concerned that by creating these opportunities to block that information and that only allowing the general public to know certain things and not other things is going to set us up to be an uninformed population. And we are not going to have access to the kind of information that we need to have to make an informed decision.
And I want to give enough credit to the, to the, you know, the, the, to all of us that are out there seeking information that yes, there are some of us that are believing one thing over another and there's a lot of debate about what's being, you know, set out there.
But the bottom line has to be that we get access to that information and if we start putting a parameters around what we know and what we are allowed to know, we stop knowing anything. We will only understand and get access to what someone else believes we should know. And that can't be, that cannot be what we are.
And the impact that that's going to have over time is extremely troubling to me. It's scary quite frankly of what that's going to mean if we don't, if we don't have truly what a free press is.
And look, there's a lot of stuff out there that is, you know, clearly lands on one side of the aisle or the other, but it isn't being it's out there as that. I mean my opinion is this fantastic, you're allowed for that opinion in mainstream general public types of media outlets.
We need to be able to have all sides of a story, have an opportunity to come to light. I might be looking at it through rose colored glasses, but that is how I feel.
Adrian McIntyre:
Well, it's a feeling that is backed up by the founding principles of this experiment in democratic self governance. The idea being, although I think we are quite far away from this, that the citizenry elect people to represent their interests and among those interests are keeping tabs on potential government overreach with regard to spending, with regard to things that are done in their name, with regard to nefarious behavior of various kinds.
My concern, and this is such a multifaceted issue that I really struggle to think about how to even frame the conversation around it. So let me just pick up on something you, you said and then I'll use it to kind of wind my way into or out of the mess I'm about to make with my words.
You made a distinction between reporting truth based, factual journalism, opinion and entertainment. And I think that's valid. But it's also so important that we notice how those lines have gotten blurred. I would venture to guess that most people who consume media of all kinds couldn't tell you which of the individuals they follow and like fit into which one of those categories. And let's be clear, all journalists are media, not all media are journalists. And so they don't have the same code of ethics, they don't have the same obligation.
Although at some level, I would think in this country we ought to be just generally opposed to lying without accountability. That seems to be, at least in the America I grew up in, something that my parents and all of their friends, and I'm guessing your parents too, would have felt really quite strongly about. And I'm saying "you" to everybody listening to this, regardless of your family's political, religious, cultural, whatever, nobody thinks that lying is a good idea. But it's the norm in so many cases now. So anyway, let me not get down that rabbit hole too far.
We have situations like, clearly, Jimmy Kimmel is not a journalist, he's a comedian. But he has a show on television that a lot of people watch. And in that show he criticizes members of the government, notably the President of the United States. You know what? In America, you're supposed to be able to do that. People may not like it, and I get that.
The manipulation of general public opinion, however, has gotten really out of hand. And I'm not sure how we put this genie back in the bottle, how we get this black cloud of doom back in Pandora's box. Again with the metaphors.
I don't know how we fix this, because one set of misstatements can create a massive amount of rage, even when it turns out not to be true. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, Jimmy Kimmel did not criticize anything to do with Charlie Kirk. His criticism was aimed directly at the President. Go watch it. But in any case, that upset people. I think they were upset for the wrong reason, but here we are.
So, we've got opinion, we've got entertainment, the space for truth telling, the space for factual journalism, which, by the way, is generally expensive and doesn't create a lot of ratings. The truth costs a lot. Conspiracy theories are cheap.
We've ended up in a situation where we do not have an informed citizenry, even about the things that are informing them, right? There are networks claiming to be fair, honest and objective that are everything but that. So what do we do? How do we get this conversation, this national conversation, back on track? I don't know.
I think everyone should go back and reread their 8th grade textbook and ask themselves, what is my government all about? Because it's in there. Three separate and co-equal branches, checks and balances. None of this is true right now, but this is the basic idea of how this thing was all organized.
And we've got to be very careful not to buy into the rage machine because this is the other dimension. I said this gets messy. The other dimension is a lot of people. Well, a relatively small number of people, but there's a fair number of that small number are getting very, very rich off of fomenting anger, fear and outrage. And we're playing into it with our eyeballs, with our swipes, with our clicks every single day. That's what bothers me.
Abbie Fink:
Well, I agree. But I think the underlying message there, however, is if we believe in true First Amendment right to free speech and we believe in a free press and the context that surrounds that, in a lot of ways, that type of information should be allowed to be out there. We are doing a podcast. We have our own opinions. We are. Sometimes you and I agree, sometimes we disagree.
Sometimes we're talking about, you know, nonsense headlines, and other times we're talking about really serious topics. But that's our choice. We have created this platform. We have made this, you know, our copper state of mind. It's what's on our mind.
What's, you know, kind of bothering us at a particular moment. Nobody is telling us what to do. This is our platform. We do it. And we hope that those that listen in find value in what we're talking about.
If they don't, they click right off. That's fantastic. You don't like what we have to say on this particular episode, don't listen. You don't like my voice, don't listen. That's perfectly fine. The difference is, this is not a news platform. We are not reading the news. We are not. We are talking about things in the news that interest us and our opinion about it.
If we were to put this out there and say that Abbie and Adrian are, you know, this is the Copper State of Mind newscast, we would have a different obligation in the information that we are sharing. We would have to cite sources for what we're talking about. We would have to be quoting other people.
There's a whole set of things that goes around reporting news and factual information. This is not that. This is not what this podcast is about. Now, I like to think we're basing our information in truth, but it's our truth.
Adrian McIntyre:
And a whole lot of really, really smart thinking, because clearly that is the source of all of our opinions.
Abbie Fink:
Clearly. And no one, nobody else can spout off metaphors as well as you can, so we've got that going for us. But, you know, if we look at the situation with Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air for whatever that was, five days, for perception. Now, that's entertainment at a big corporation. And to the best of my knowledge, a lot of vetting happens before anything makes it on the air.
What the outcome of that was is it was off the air for a few days. Jimmy Kimmel will be fine, right? If he wasn't allowed back on the air, in theory, he would be fine. Everyone else that works for that show, everyone else surrounding that show was going to be out of a job as a result of it. The networks, there were many that chose not to carry his return to the air. That's entirely up to them to make that decision.
Where I land on being more upset by these things is the fact that that was allowed to happen. But the lawsuits against large national newspapers where messaging is being curtailed because you want to say something and you didn't want to say something, and what is that chilling effect going to be?
The problem I see in the long term is I'm a young up and coming journalist. I really want to work for one of the, you know, granddaddy of them all type media outlets. But I'm fearful. So I'm just going to write very basic, I'm going to write very top surface level stuff. I'm not going to dive deep. So all of a sudden we lose our investigative journalists. All we are getting is surface level or what we can, you know, are getting in crafted messaging from the higher ups. What's the point? Why do we need a newspaper to do that? Why do we need the nightly news if we are not able to do that?
And there's been a few quotes that have been bandied about recently over this, but one of them came from a former President of the United States who basically said it's the job of the late-night hosts, it's the job of the political analysts to talk about elected officials and to put us out there. And we as elected officials have to understand that some of that we are not going to appeal to everybody and we are going to be the topic of conversation and it is the job of those individuals to keep an eye out on us. And that's a pretty forward thinking conversation to have.
And really rather being comfortable in your own abilities to do the work that you've been elected to do. I don't know where to go with this. Like I'm struggling with where does it stop? Where does the populace say enough already.
When do these media outlets and the ownership groups of the media outlets and let's face it, the advertisers that help, you know, keep the paper printed and the television news on the air either say we're going to roll over and this is just the way that it's going to be, or I'm sorry, we're done, you know what, we're going to take our advertising dollars and do something else with them, which doesn't help us either. If we shut them down, it doesn't help us either.
But you know, there are young professionals coming into this, young individuals coming into this profession. And I worry about what they're going to do and how they're going to be able to take this career that is so important in our society and and move forward when all of these parameters are starting to be put around the work that they're doing and where does it stop and who has to be the ones to do it.
And I think we have to have a serious discussion amongst our profession, which is definitely happening through things like the Society for Professional Journalists and the Public Relations Society of America and other, you know, communications organizations, about what role do we play as adjacent to the industry to ensure that it stays free and open and truthful and transparent and unbiased in the places that that needs to happen. And I'm not sure I have the answer, but I know I want to continue to seek that answer for the good of what I have chosen to do as my career. But for society, certainly that deserves to have access to a free press.
Adrian McIntyre:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It's easy to do, just click the "Share" button in the app you're listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast Apple. We publish new episodes every other Friday.
Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.
For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.fm, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you'll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.
