Podcast: Covering a Pandemic: COVID-19 and the News Media

TRANSCRIPT: Covering a Pandemic: COVID-19 and the News Media

Ben Smith:

I think it's basically a matter of proportion. The biggest story in the country is not President Trump being a jerk to a reporter. It's this pandemic.

Ian Bremmer:

As uncertainty has loomed over the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans have turned to the media instead of government for their answers. What role has the fourth estate played in the crisis? Has the media been an indispensable source of information or is it spreading the kinds of falsehoods that get people killed? Welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm Ian Bremmer, and this is where I share extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television.

Ian Bremmer:

Today, I talk to media veteran Ben Smith, who recently left his post as editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed to be a media columnist at the New York Times. Let's get to it. Ben Smith, New York Times, used to be Buzzfeed, knew you from both. Very good to be with you, man.

Ben Smith:

Thanks for having me on from your bunker.

Ian Bremmer:

So I want to talk to you about the media and this crisis. And maybe start with the idea that in a recent poll I saw from Gallup, the news media was given the worst approval rating of all American institutions grappling with the coronavirus. So as someone whose job it is now to kind of assess and understand the media, why do you think that is?

Ben Smith:

Well, it's not new and it's not uniform. Republicans and conservatives now, if you ask them how is the media, they'll give you like a 10%. 10% of them say they're doing a good job, Democrats and liberals much, much higher. And I think it's basically in part because media has been pulled into this sort of partisan stew of American life, and that there's been both a lot of actual mistakes by the media and a real campaign on the right and by Donald Trump in particular, to demonize it.

Ben Smith:

That said, it's media, with some exceptions, [that] was mostly as behind as politicians on this, on this crisis. There were people writing in January that this was going to be a huge catastrophe, but mostly what you saw were epidemiologists on social media jumping up and down while the rest of us, media, politicians, didn't quite reckon with it until we started seeing videos from Italian hospitals.

Ian Bremmer:

I understand that in an election period, media is going to look more polarized, more delegitimized, and certainly, you look at Twitter or social media, they're not helping. But in a crisis where the media is the way you actually get information from the people that can help you respond to the crisis, I mean, this is how you are hearing from the epidemiologist. This is how you are reading, oh, I shouldn't touch my face. I should be careful when I walk out-

Ben Smith:

I know, I just did.

Ian Bremmer:

... That kind of thing. We're in our homes, we're okay. But why don't we see the media getting a bump when they're performing kind of a critical service? Or are they right now performing a critical service badly?

Ben Smith:

I think when you ask people about the media, a lot of our minds go to cable news. I think if you say to people, is your local public radio station doing a good job? Is there a local newspaper or website or newsletter that you're getting good information from? I haven't seen that with this topic. Usually when you ask people about other things, they'll say yes. But I do think that we are in this moment when the primary filter for a lot of news is political. I think when you think about what went so wrong at Fox in late February, where they were really echoing Trump and telling their elderly audience not to worry so much about this thing. It wasn't that they didn't believe in science, or not mostly that, yet this was just the latest partisan attack on Donald Trump. And they handled it in a totally partisan way and that's how it works. And I talked to, there's a public health guy at Harvard, Ashish Jha, who's been on Fox a bit and been on-

Ian Bremmer:

On with me, I know him actually. He's a pretty solid guy, actually.

Ben Smith:

... Yeah, very kind of forthright guy. And told me that he'd been on Fox a bit, he'd been on MSNBC a bit, and he was very critical of Fox since they're going to get people killed. But also said that when he goes on MS, he feels like every question is asking him to dunk on Donald Trump. And that's not really his job and it's not helpful. And I think this sort of political lens on every story is pretty alienating in a moment like this.

Ian Bremmer:

So you've been very clear that the media shouldn't take the bait, right? I mean, clearly President Trump wants to be the story all the time, and that hasn't diminished with coronavirus. In some ways, perhaps it's even exacerbated. But when the President is actively in a press conference responding to questions by going after them directly, how do they avoid taking the bait? What should they do that would allow them to seem somewhat less unhinged and also widen the aperture of the coverage they're doing?

Ben Smith:

Yeah. I mean, I think it's much more widening the aperture. I think when you're in that press room with him, it's his stage and it's not a situation the media controls. When I was at Buzzfeed, I thought a lot about this, almost really about everything with Trump, because if you're not careful, it's like a tennis match where he's got a 110 mile-an-hour serve and you're just diving to return every serve and kind of rolling around the back court and you never are on offense. And he sets the agenda every morning at 6:00 AM with a tweet.

Ben Smith:

And I think if you're running a newsroom, and I think a lot of people running newsrooms are doing this pretty well, it's really about proportion. It's not that you don't cover what he's doing. It's not that if he says something racist and inflammatory that you ignore it or say it's fine. But you do have a choice to make about your resources and about where you put your energy. And you can mostly put them into giving people good information, into accountability and investigating what the hell happened and how we got here into things like that.

Ben Smith:

I think there's a secondary problem that we are basically in the finger pointing business. Good journalism often is finger pointing. It's about figuring out what went wrong, who screwed up, and how that happened. And there's a sentiment right now that I think is real in a crisis of people not wanting finger pointing. And that to me is a very hard thing to square.

Ian Bremmer:

So I do think that the politicization of the coverage of the President has certainly not in any way diminished despite the fact that this is a very serious crisis. So I mean, normally you get a rally around the flag effect, that's not happening right now. Some of that is the blame of the President, some of that is clearly the blame of the media. Do you think that there's-

Ben Smith:

Well, I don't know. I think that if you believe that Trump made a bunch of really serious mistakes, is it not our job to point those out? And it isn't totally clear to me that he would be doing a better job if nobody criticized him.

Ian Bremmer:

I've found myself in response to a lot of people that have said the American response has been the worst response of any country in the world. And I've seen Krugman do this, I've seen a bunch of really respected folks. And of course what they're really just talking about is Trump, not about the United States. And if you compare the American response to other country's responses, then actually you get something that looks a lot more balanced and a lot more sane.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. Different parts of this strange system we have are working well and badly. Some governors are doing a good job. But it is also true that when there is a huge national crisis, nobody's first thought is, oh my God, there's a huge national crisis. What will the governor of Washington state do?

Ian Bremmer:

So talk about how you think... We'll switch to Trump for a second because we're talking about the media. How has he done, with the media, in terms of these daily now press conferences. They were saying we're not getting any access to the President. He's not doing press conferences. Now we're getting as much access as we could possibly want. Some saying too much, he shouldn't be covered, they shouldn't be live. It should be fact checked while it's happening. How should that balance work?

Ben Smith:

So there is this debate about do you cover the President's press conference? And I think the kind of regrettable thing about it is it's only happening among outlets whose viewers don't trust him. I saw the Seattle NPR affiliate is no longer-

Ian Bremmer:

Decided not too.

Ben Smith:

... taking his press conferences live. I'm sure there are listeners to the Seattle NPR affiliate who are MAGA 'Trump train' folks, but that's not really their audience. So I think it's a little academic whether MSNBC carries them live or not. I mean, he's a great TV programmer and he's programming for television, he's making entertaining television. And it's very hard for broadcasters, I think, to resist that. But I think both that and then that we all spent hours talking about it is not what public health officials think the media ought to be doing in it's role as a piece of public health infrastructure.

Ian Bremmer:

Talk about how Trump has handled the media compared to Governor Cuomo of New York handling the media. Very different approaches, both very strongly supported in their own camps, right? Interested in how you think about that?

Ben Smith:

Well, in a way, Trump is making this an entertaining reality show largely about his own conflict with the media and is trying to persuade people it's not that bad and we're going to be okay. And Cuomo is similarly, is totally dominating the same way as Trump. Is totally dominating the situation. There's no question of who's in charge in Trump's briefings or in Cuomo's. Then the reporters are the supporting cast essentially.

Ben Smith:

But Cuomo's doing the thing that leaders are often expected to do in real crises, which is to not sugarcoat it, to give you the bad news. Cuomo's been totally consistent. And I think he is presenting a pretty compelling alternative. I mean, again, this is not ultimately a story about these two guys though. It's about a virus.

Ian Bremmer:

So one thing that has come up an awful lot when we talk about this crisis is misinformation. Whether it's about the ability to have some kind of cure that doesn't really exist or sort of anything that feeds panic. Whether or not there's going to be a complete shutdown or a quarantine or how the government's going to respond. I mean, that information travels lightning fast. How do you think, how has this... Everyone's at home. People are not engaging with their communities, They're engaging with the media on social media. They're getting blasted. How's disinformation playing a role in this crisis?

Ben Smith:

Well, I mean obviously the most dangerous information that was getting put out was when public officials, led by Trump, but certainly by no means only him. I mean, Cuomo a little bit earlier had been saying not to panic, we're telling people not to socially distance. I mean, it just seems like that turned out to be the most important thing to do. To the degree people were getting mixed messages from public officials, from the governor of Oklahoma and not doing it. It seems like that'll have real consequences.

Ben Smith:

We all are conditioned to write the misinformation story and the sort of classic thing that reporters do is they fight the last war, and the last war was the 2016 election. There was a lot of misinformation. Everybody's running around looking at what are the Russian trolls doing on Twitter and where is the misinformation? And certainly there are, as in any disaster, people hawking particularly fake remedies and telling people to hold their breath or to drink bleach. And there's all sorts of bad stuff out there. But I actually think this is mostly a dog that has not barked. I think, particularly because the big social media platforms which are so reluctant to intervene in political disputes, and would love to have long arguments with you about the nature of truth, rather than actually act on anything ever. Here, feel very confident in taking the sort of advice of the WHO. This is sort of thing engineers like. There are clear rules coming from people with PhDs and so they're being really aggressive about taking down posts by the President of Brazil, for instance.

Ian Bremmer:

That's right, just this week we saw that.

Ben Smith:

And in a way that I think even if he were fanning ethnic hatred or something else that you see the platforms wrestling with all the time, they're very reluctant. They know that they don't know a lot about local political contexts. They feel like it's a slippery slope. They're very reluctant to intervene in almost any other place. With public health, they've been very aggressive about deleting things that public health officials say they should delete.

Ian Bremmer:

So you think that the average person at this point is getting pretty good information even on social media in terms of what's happening in this crisis?

Ben Smith:

Yes, I think so. That said, I'm not sure it's a good emotional state to be watching Twitter all day. I mean, the information is pretty simple. There's a horrible pandemic, stay home. I think most people have gotten that.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, you also see though, of course the Chinese, on the one hand, vastly under counting and not putting forward asymmetric cases. You see an enormous focus on country stats, which means that the United States looks, oh my God, more cases than Italy. Italy's a small country. Why aren't we comparing the US and Europe for example?

Ben Smith:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean even the New York Times, I've seen that bias that implies that somehow the United States is the epicenter of everything because of this American lens. And so that's not quite disinformation.

Ben Smith:

No, I think there's a separate thing happening, which is a sort of geopolitical fight around finger pointing where there's real disinformation. What the Chinese are doing is, I think, shocking actually, where you had Lijian Zhao, their foreign ministry spokesman, tweeting just outrageous conspiracy theories that this was an American... That the virus itself came from the United States, and I think you're seeing them do that in a softer form. There's all sorts of Chinese propaganda that's trying to point the finger at the US.

Ben Smith:

Meanwhile, there's crazy American misinformation that's suggesting that this was Chinese bioweapons or something. And there's a global finger pointing fight going on that is about American prestige and Chinese prestige and is full of deliberate disinformation, I think. Which it's not health information. Whether this is a Chinese bioweapon or not, does not actually affect whether you should go outside.

Ian Bremmer:

But it's overlapping a little because the Chinese, of course, are engaging in this big also public diplomacy campaign, which has included sending a lot of masks and kits to countries all over the world. And a number of those masks and kits have been seen not to work very effectively. So the Dutch government sent some back, the Spanish government, that kind of thing. And this is definitely getting caught up in two very different kinds of narratives being put out by the two most powerful governments in that space.

Ben Smith:

And by the way, now we're into the sort of thing that the platforms are not going to help us sort out. Mark Zuckerberg is not going to tell you whether the US is doing a better job than China. This is one where our heads are going to spin and where the Chinese narrative right now kind of looks like it's winning. Even though they are lying about their numbers, not sending it, not putting out the... The masks they're sending us maybe aren't all working. I mean I don't know if you saw this, but Huawei has been helpfully supplying lots of masks.

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely. And also, I mean, Chinese diplomacy, I've noticed that China Daily, for example, state owned media, has been taking out an awful lot of ads. The Economist Magazine, for example, was running big propaganda ads, taking money, clearly an advertisement from China Daily. Do you feel comfortable that a Western institution like the Economist should be taking that cash, running those ads?

Ben Smith:

When I was running Buzzfeed, we really wrestled with this a lot and I think a lot of publications do. Who is an acceptable advertiser? My general view is that basically if you start... It's a slippery slope. And if you start making a kind of, well, we'll take this one, but not this one call, then suddenly you're saying, well, we endorse the Saudi government but not the Chinese government. Journalists shouldn't be in the business of endorsing and unendorsing advertisers. Except in the most extreme cases, I think.

Ben Smith:

But I do think these government ad campaigns, the Russian ones too, brush right up against that edge. And the Saudi ones. Those seem like the three where maybe you wouldn't go. But what about the Emirates and what about Qatar, right? And suddenly you're calling balls on strikes on who are the geopolitical good guys. And that just feels like not what we ought to be doing.

Ian Bremmer:

I guess the subsidiary question is, should there be a difference between a corporation where you know that what they're doing is advertising a product and a media company for an authoritarian state where what they're actually marketing is an alternative information view of the world, given that's what you actually do as media, right?

Ben Smith:

Yeah, no. I mean I've always been troubled by the Russian supplements in the New York Times. I mean that's always in the post. Those were, to me, the most aggressive version of that. But that the Chinese are doing it now isn't surprising at all. I mean, think there's a question of do they think that that will get them slightly better coverage?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. They obviously do. Right? I mean, otherwise why would they be doing it?

Ben Smith:

Right. I mean, Facebook's buying a lot of advertising now too.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. You have a history of reporting on Russia and you're seeing what's happening with China right now. I mean, if you look at the Chinese and the Russians, do you see a difference in who's more effective at promoting their narrative right now?

Ben Smith:

Oh, I mean think, obviously the Chinese. Russia really never really had a narrative to promote. They were just really good at messing up other people's narratives and opportunistically causing trouble. Particularly in the media ecosystem, but [they] also have these massive, massive problems that whenever you are like, okay, gosh, they really screwed up the US election, like what's happening over in Russia? It's a disaster. And so it's not like they have a positive story to tell. I mean, right now there was days and days of chaos and mixed messaging around their coronavirus response, which went in 10 minutes from, we're really relaxed about it to you'll be arrested if you step outside.

Ben Smith:

China, meanwhile is basically promoting this sort of technology driven authoritarian model at a moment when the Western democracies look really weak and chaotic. And I think he's using this crisis in a really sort of targeted way to do that. I mean, undermined only slightly by the fact that their incompetence is part of what started it.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. So you mentioned before, and I think it is an important point, that it's not clear that people spending all this time on these social media platforms is good from a personal, emotional health perspective. What do you think the impact on society is going to be for three months, six months, 12 months of this kind of living your lives in society through primarily these lenses, these information lenses, these worldviews?

Ben Smith:

I don't know. I mean, I guess I think my impulse is that it will be more polarizing rather than less. I mean, I think there's a certain amount of happy talk about how this will all bring us together. And it's hard to see that, that that's where we're headed right now, particularly in a presidential election year. And when this shifts from the sort of immediate crisis response into more and more finger pointing, I assume it'll be even easier to avoid points of view that challenge your own. I mean, I guess except to the extent that you're locked up with your grandparents and your kids and whatever, and maybe it'll play out that way.

Ian Bremmer:

But I mean, after 9/11, after 2008, I mean, those were crises that actually did bring people together, whether it's at bars or applauding for firemen, first responders, all that kind of thing. You felt connected to people. This is not only a bigger crisis, but it's a crisis that specifically is atomizing, it's fragmenting. It's people [that] are retreating to their smallest possible units of only the people that they really, really trust. Otherwise you can't touch them. Right?

Ian Bremmer:

No one's experienced that before and now they're going to be spending all this time with precisely these algorithms that are sorting much more. I mean, you were just with Zuckerberg recently. Do you get a sense... I mean, I'm sure they see dollar signs with all of this, and of course they're the companies that are likely to do the best. But are they in any way sensing that they might have some proactive responsibility to try to help society become less dysfunctional?

Ben Smith:

Yeah. I mean, I think that in some ways they're very ideological. They do see dollar signs, but also they do think about their role in the world. I think sometimes if they would just run it a normal business, that would be preferable. I think that they all, these tech companies feel, I think rightly, like they've done a pretty decent job in the information side of this. And that their roles are shifting a bit toward giving people tools to connect to each other, Facebook groups, these remote video chats. I mean, this is very atomizing, but think how much more atomizing it would be without social media and without Zoom, which is now apparently valued more than all US airlines combined.

Ben Smith:

I do think that, and it's after, and I've written this a lot, this moment of really starting to get nervous about the amount of power and control we've seated to these giant tech platforms. I think the one real political casualty of this moment may be the sort of antitrust movement. I think that it's obvious that Amazon is this incredible logistical backbone for the country. We're in a crisis, you can not just get food, but you can get... Apparently I needed a two inch bolt the other day and the one I had was a little too thick. And in two days I was able to order new bolts for my trampoline to a very narrow specification. This is incredible logistical networking.

Ian Bremmer:

Your definition of need, perhaps, is narrow.

Ben Smith:

Right. Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

I understand.

Ben Smith:

But I don't want my kids flying off or a trampoline collapsing on them.

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely.

Ben Smith:

And the idea that in a crisis... I mean there's this incredible logistical, technological backbone for the country, which hasn't faltered at all. Where a lot of public services have basically collapsed, where the older line manufacturers are not able to manufacture ventilators very fast. And I guess I think/worry that we're headed, we're going to be in a moment when the most trusted institutions in this country are going to be the big tech companies.

Ian Bremmer:

And that's not necessarily a governance by default that we're going to be comfortable with five years down the line.

Ben Smith:

No.

Ian Bremmer:

And do you think the newspapers will survive this in hard copy form? I mean, you think about going to buy your Sunday times and do you really want to... I mean, I love it, but do you want to touch it and have it in your house for four hours? You're not going to wait for a day for it to be safe? It's kind of useless at that point. Does this kill print?

Ben Smith:

I guess my own view is that print is dead and print is a huge liability to the companies that for a variety of financial and emotional reasons are hanging onto it. And to the extent that existing news organizations are going to survive, and there are exceptions here. The Times and the Washington Post right now, in the world of unequal distributions, are in a much stronger place than almost anybody else. The Journal too. So they have some margin for error here. But I think if you are a local news organization now, I think you got to figure out how to stop printing, how to live with a cost structure where you're spending less because you're not printing and you're bringing in a lot less revenue and maybe your margins are lower. I mean, print for a lot of these outlets is right now, a still kind of a high margin business because you're getting subscribers and you're selling ads. I mean, that was collapsing already. It's collapsing faster now.

Ben Smith:

And I guess I think that the real scary thing is that there are hundreds and hundreds of local newspapers that I'm not even sure there's really a way through this for them. A lot of them are owned by financial investors at this point, hedge funds that are essentially managing them down. In some cases, have also loaned them billions of dollars at really high interest rates and are collecting that way too. But I think there was this crisis in local news where you could have blown over a lot of these institutions with a light breeze and now there's a hurricane.

Ian Bremmer:

And I mean also the knowledge economy. There you are, you've got this new flashy job in the New York Times. You seem to be pretty darn productive working from Columbia County. Unclear that the New York Times has suffered in quality because there's no one working in their headquarters, which is really shiny and expensive. Do you think that we're going to see massive downsizing of physical plant of these sorts of organizations with knowledge workers?

Ben Smith:

I don't know. I mean, I think it's hard to predict. I do think that if you're in the commercial real estate business right now, it's a pretty uncertain moment.

Ian Bremmer:

Ben Smith, thank you very much.

Ben Smith:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? I hope so. Come check us out @gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.