Podcast: America, Divided with Frank Sesno

TRANSCRIPT: America, Divided with Frank Sesno

Frank Sesno:

We are an experiment and we have always been an experiment, and we are an experiment in giving power to the people. That means giving information to the people.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of small puppets. My guest today is Frank Sesno, an Emmy award-winning journalist who has spent the past three decades reporting from around the world. Formerly at CNN, Sesno now directs George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University School of Media and Public Policy, delighted to be with you.

Frank Sesno:

I'm delighted to be with you.

Ian Bremmer:

So you are, I mean, historically, right, a career global journalist.

Frank Sesno:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

You are the enemy of the people. How does it feel to have that role today in the United States?

Frank Sesno:

I've never had more power than I have right now as the enemy of the people. Frankly, it feels terrible. I think it's an awful thing to frame anyone the 'enemy of the people,' unless they are really the enemy of the people. And in point of fact, what responsible professional journalists are or should be, is voices of and for the people.

Ian Bremmer:

Pet theory, which is that Trump and the mainstream media have a dysfunctional relationship. I love you. Don't leave me. True?

Frank Sesno:

Totally.

Ian Bremmer:

Why?

Frank Sesno:

Because they need one another. They feed on one another.

Ian Bremmer:

And they hurt one another.

Frank Sesno:

Trump feeds, always has fed on the media. He knows how to get a microphone and a camera on, because he knows the more outspoken he is, the more outrageous he is, the more enraged he is, the more critical he is, the more attention he will get. The media, especially now that he is president, can't really avert their eyes from that. It's like driving past a car crash in the other direction on the highway. You slow down and you watch because you have to, even though it's not in your lane. Well, this is in the media's lane. He is the president of the United States. You can't ignore it when he attacks a special counsel, a Supreme Court justice, a branch of government or the media. That's the president of the United States, launching those attacks day after day. And so the problem that we have in this weird relationship now is, how tightly do they hug and push back at the same time?

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, he says all the time, "I'm bringing you these ratings. You'd be so sorry if I wasn't there anymore." Do they get that? Did the journalists get that? The media execs get that? I mean, where is that really the point?

Frank Sesno:

Oh yeah, I think they get it, but I think that it's a very difficult line to walk. I mean, I would like to see much more proportionality in coverage, for example.

Ian Bremmer:

What does that even mean?

Frank Sesno:

It means, okay, so if the president hits send on a tweet at 3:30 in the morning attacking somebody, I don't need to hear it again and again and again until 3:30 in the afternoon and 3:30 the next morning. And that's real estate that's not being spent on other things, what I would call explanatory journalism. And we need much more of that.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you have China News, you have RT, you have Al Jazeera, not just for their own countries, but actually in English being broadcast right here in the United States. For what purpose? How are they doing? Does this make sense for them to be spending this kind of cash?

Frank Sesno:

I have no idea. And neither do they actually, because I've been on all those networks, and every time I go in, I'll ask the producer, "So how's this show doing? What's your ratings?" And they will say, every time a variation of, "I have no idea." CGTN, China television, right? Big gigantic country network. They've got beautiful facilities here in Washington and elsewhere, and they don't know what their ratings are. Al Jazeera English, ask them. They don't know what they're actually getting. But they're out there because the world is a global marketplace of ideas now. And they know they need to compete and they want to compete. And some of it is really quite good. And some of it brings very interesting diverse perspective. And for those who want to find them out online and often on cable and satellite systems, they're there.

Ian Bremmer:

So does that mean that Trump is right when he says that the United States needs state television broadcasting our message around the world?

Frank Sesno:

No. No.

Ian Bremmer:

Why not?

Frank Sesno:

Well, first of all, we actually have something like that. We have the Voice of America, but at home? State-run TV at home? That's propaganda. We should not do that.

Ian Bremmer:

State run TV abroad.

Frank Sesno:

Well, as I say, Voice of America is state.

Ian Bremmer:

No, but that's a objective independent news, as you say.

Frank Sesno:

But it's a government funded news organization that does-

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think there should be a patriotic American news organization that broadcasts pro-US stuff internationally?

Frank Sesno:

You mean, and filters out stuff that doesn't show the United States in a favorable light?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Now if you watch RT in the United States, you would think that this country was an unending race riot.

Frank Sesno:

Correct.

Ian Bremmer:

Right. And so the question is, in an environment where so much you see fake news, so much you don't know what to trust. The people, countries, corporations are all somehow filtering their message in ways that are useful to them.

Frank Sesno:

And the last thing that we should do is state-run propaganda news. That would undermine what we stand for as a democracy. Openness, accountability, truth. The truth shall set you free, right? I mean, we are an experiment and we have always been an experiment, and we are an experiment in giving power to the people. That means giving information to the people. That does not mean twisting the information so that the authors of that information are somehow suspect. Soviet Union tried that. They had zero credibility at home or anywhere else as far as the information. Everybody knew they were being lied to, but that was their diet.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, on the social media space, when you see that 50% of the posts are either are bots, they're either good bots or bad bots, and that people can't distinguish. I mean, I know that there are folks out there that say the Turing test will probably be passed by the late 2020s, but on Twitter, the Turing test has already been passed. You and I can't tell who's a real person or not. How much of a problem is that? What do we do about it?

Frank Sesno:

Well, I think it's a very big problem and it's going to become a much bigger problem as we go into the era of deepfakes where software and other technologies can take you, your face-

Ian Bremmer:

On a video.

Frank Sesno:

Your mouth, your voice-

Ian Bremmer:

Create it.

Frank Sesno:

And put words into your mouth and on your face that you never said. And it will be Ian Bremmer speaking to the camera saying something that Ian Bremmer never said. And how is the public going to discern that? Consumers are going to have to be much more aware. News organizations are going to have to be much more scrupulous. Technology companies are going to have to be much more responsible for what they are conveying. There's no simple answer to this though.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Saying consumers need to be more aware. I mean, you could say that in the last five years, that that horse has left the stable.

Frank Sesno:

How would you be aware?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, exactly.

Frank Sesno:

I wrote a chapter about this and one of the suggestions that comes from a Stanford team is that you read laterally. They call it reading laterally. It's what fact-checkers do. So as you read through an article, you open up tabs as you go, is there somebody named Ian Bremmer? Check it out. Open up a tab. Look at the bio. Is there some-

Ian Bremmer:

It sounds like a lot of work.

Frank Sesno:

It's a lot of work. And most people won't do it. Look, I liken it to our diet. Okay, we have labels on most of our food. We know what's good for us and what's bad for us.

Ian Bremmer:

We have type 2 diabetes like craziness.

Frank Sesno:

Thank you. Junk food is cheaper, tastier, or addictive and faster. And it's good. I like pretzels. And that's not the worst of it.

Ian Bremmer:

These companies are the equivalent you are saying of what the food companies have been.

Frank Sesno:

Well, what I'm saying is that, and I want to not talk about the companies for a minute, I want to talk about the consumer for a minute. You are a consumer. You have within your power to be informed about and make decisions about the food you eat, you know what's healthy, what's good for you, and what's not, and you make a decision on a daily basis as to what you will consume. And some people eat junk food every day. Some people eat organic vegan broccoli every day. Is it reasonable to expect that people are going to be label-readers constantly? And so how do we educate people and how do we help them with that? Because..

Ian Bremmer:

But let me push-

Frank Sesno:

...this is the market for it.

Ian Bremmer:

Let me push back for a second.

Frank Sesno:

Go ahead.

Ian Bremmer:

Especially as someone who has been arguing that what we don't do is bring the journalists into the rest of the country because yeah, you and I sitting here in DC or me in New York City, we have choices over what we're going to consume over our diet because everything is right there. But for much of the country, of course, those healthy options are not right there.

Frank Sesno:

Yeah, they are. Of course they are. It's right online.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, no. For media, you mean? No, I'm saying in terms of food.

Frank Sesno:

Oh, yeah. You can live in a food desert. You can-

Ian Bremmer:

You live in a food desert. Well, don't you think increasingly, given the way that algorithms are actually created, that there are lots of people in this country that basically live in a media desert? That essentially-

Frank Sesno:

No, no-

Ian Bremmer:

... They're told here, you like this. Here, follow this. No?

Frank Sesno:

Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps, Ian, but I think it's different. This is where the analogy breaks down with the food. Because if you're in a food desert, you have some distance from you to healthy food.

Ian Bremmer:

Correct.

Frank Sesno:

Anybody who's online has no distance between them and healthy information, it's there, in principle. In principle. But they need to want it. They need to recognize it, and they need to have the interest and have the time to go get it. Because the days of going home at 6:30 and watching Walter Cronkite are long, long passed. The time when somebody brings you your meal-

Ian Bremmer:

That's right.

Frank Sesno:

... is long passed.

Ian Bremmer:

Network, pick the one of the three, it's the same thing. The whole country's having one conversation.

Frank Sesno:

Gone. Right, gone.

Ian Bremmer:

But if everyone in your family and your community and your friends are watching a constellation of stuff and everything that you click onto is feeding you only to more of that stuff, you could argue that there needs to be a nudge or three or five from the government or the companies or someone-

Frank Sesno:

But here's where the challenge becomes so huge. Once upon a time, you got a newspaper, it was delivered to your door at six o'clock in the morning. It sat on your coffee table and there was a story from Europe and another story about the economy and another story about weather and right in one place. And it didn't move. It just sort of sat there. And when you came home, it was still there. And if your kid walked by it, it was still there. We don't share the same information ecosystem with our children anymore. They don't walk by and see what we see. What you see in the morning is, not only is it not there in the afternoon, it's not there three minutes later. So that's the challenge, Ian, and it's a very, very big challenge. And there is no formulaic response to this.

Ian Bremmer:

So Frank, how do we make the media great again?

Frank Sesno:

Well, we acknowledge the media that are great. Prizes work, marketing works. People will recognize brands. If news organizations were airlines, many of them would be flying empty airplanes right now. And what would they do?

Ian Bremmer:

And killing dogs.

Frank Sesno:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

For example.

Frank Sesno:

For example.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

Frank Sesno:

What would they do? They'd hire McKinsey. They'd go into big retreats. They'd think about how they get their credibility back, how they get their customers back, how they market themselves differently. This is why I say there needs to be some humility in the news business because much of the news business is still marketing itself like, "This is the First Amendment. We're doing our job. We know what we're doing, we're just going to keep going forward." And that's fine. But maybe there need to be different ways to engage the public, to speak to the public, to explain what it is that journalism is and does, and how each news organization goes about its job to inspire trust, and to create that connection where the news consumer says, yes, I understand how this organization operates, and you know what? I need them. I need them.

Ian Bremmer:

We've been talking a lot about the organizations themselves and the context in which they operate. We haven't talked so much about the individuals creating the content. It's, of course, interesting how the democratization of content creation, right? Unraveling the guild. So anyone can create content, anyone can be a journalist, anyone can write a blog. But also the price pressure, the fact that so many of these people are not trained, not making any money. I mean, what's that doing to the ability of good content to actually get produced?

Frank Sesno:

Well, several observations on that. First of all, I don't... And I think this is important, I don't actually think that anyone can be a journalist.

Ian Bremmer:

Meaning?

Frank Sesno:

Meaning you can chronicle an event or a moment. But being a journalist, which implies knowing how to work multiple sources, knowing how to go through credible information versus information that is suspect, having some perspective, putting a story into context, that takes, in many cases, a lifetime of work to do well.

Ian Bremmer:

What do you tell your students? In this environment, what can they do in that hybrid environment where you don't know who's a real journalist, where you don't know who's a trusted reporter? Something that you think is credible that they can really do to minimize the noise and get themselves in the conversation.

Frank Sesno:

It's like anything else, Ian, and it's hard to do when you're on the fly and it's hard to do with information, but you simply need to know the source. Do you buy a car before you read whether that car is reliable? Do you buy a mattress before you read reviews of a mattress? Most-

Ian Bremmer:

I like consumer reports, but that's an easy place to go. What does one do in this environment?

Frank Sesno:

You need to know what is the reputation, what do others say about this person? I mean, it's not hard to read the criticism of Glenn Greenwald. It's out there. You can see what the pushback is, just as you can see what the pushback is for anybody who's writing for the New York Times or the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or anyplace else. People are going to have to do their homework. We are going to continue to lean on news organizations, I certainly will, to be doing a much better job, to be making themselves more transparent, to be explaining how they got their stories, to be talking about where their sources come from, so there's a better understanding and appreciation among news consumers about that whole process and that output.

Frank Sesno:

But people are going to have to assume much more responsibility. You are your own executive editor now. You are your own executive producer now. You share in this responsibility that may make it more difficult. I'm sorry, that's the world you're in now. So you have to choose. Just as you have to choose on many, many, many other levels in life as to what you're going to consume and what the quality is of the information you're going to consume.

Ian Bremmer:

Frank Sesno.

Frank Sesno:

Thank you very much.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here in next week same place, same time. Unless you're watching on social media, in which case it's wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Imagine a bank without teller lines where your banker knows your name, and its most prized currency is extraordinary client service. Hear directly from First Republic's clients by visiting firstrepublic.com.