Podcast: The past, present and future of political media

TRANSCRIPT: The past, present and future of political media

Brian Stelter:

The real story about America and the media right now is about the voters, about the people who think the media is the enemy of the people, when in fact media is the people.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are looking at the media's impact on democracy. In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, "The medium is the message." He meant that the way content is delivered can be more powerful than the content itself. Case in point, 4 years before McLuhan's book was published, 70 million Americans tuned in live to the first ever televised presidential debate.

Announcer 3:

The candidates need no introduction. The Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the Democratic candidate Senator John F. Kennedy.

Ian Bremmer:

As the story goes, Nixon showed up pale and sweaty. Kennedy was tanned and camera ready, Hyannis Port, you might say. And Nixon lost his thin lead overnight. The rest, of course, is history. Today, it's a much more complicated landscape. Partisanship abounds on television, podcasts, social media, and we now have a new technology tool to toss into the equation, generative AI. How will all of this play out in the coming presidential election and can trust in America's so-called "fourth state" ever be restored? I'm talking about all that and more with journalist and former CNN host Brian Stelter, and Nicole Hemmer, the Vanderbilt University professor specializing in political history and partisan media. Let's get to it.

Announcer 4:

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Ian Bremmer:

Brian Stelter, thanks for joining us today.

Brian Stelter:

Great to be here. Thanks.

Ian Bremmer:

And Nicole Hemmer in Nashville. Thank you.

Nicole Hemmer:

Thank you so much for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, so lots to talk about today. I want to start because when I was a kid, kid, tiny kid, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. Today, the media is very, very, very far from that. What happened?

Brian Stelter:

I think the word "trust" is the keyword. The war on truth that was seen during the Trump years and continues to this day, it's really more than a war on truth, it's a war on trust, but I think trust has been eroding for decades. It's a generation-long event. Trump is just in some ways a dramatized part of it. This war on trust, it was underway in the '70s and '80s in some parts of the Republican Party. It was advantageous to the Republican Party to try to create an alternative to the mainstream media, an alternative to the Walter Cronkites. We see that with Fox News in the '90s, but also with the rise of talk radio, and then to some extent, the rise of alternative social networks that's happening now. So what we see is a fragmenting right from the big three networks to dozens and to hundreds and to thousands now to millions, and in that environment, trust has collapsed.

Ian Bremmer:

It's not just a question of left versus right, but it's also, there's no common narrative in the media when there were three big networks, there really were. Nicole, how did that happen and how problematic is or isn't that for civil society?

Nicole Hemmer:

Well, it comes from a lot of different sources. Of course, back in the '50s and '60s, conservatives were making the argument that you shouldn't watch liberal media. You should only trust conservative sources and only watch those. And that comes into connection with a big change that happens in the media in the '80s and '90s with the rise of cable. And that fragmentation of the media dial and that sort of fragmentation of the audience has an enormous effect on a kind of shared culture, shared information. So part of it is technological, right?

Technology changes, cable, then the internet and social media allows you to kind of curate what you're watching more. It also gives rise to a kind of desire to make news more entertaining. And that emphasis on entertainment as the way of consuming news, that also changes what people expect from news, the kind of news that they're drawn to. It changes news values in really important ways that helps to contribute to that erosion and trust that Brian was talking about. And it really does matter because that lack of shared information, shared understanding, does lead to a fragmentation of the culture. One that is, again, both technological, but also coming from the right, really purposeful as a way of getting their audiences to trust them more than other sources.

Ian Bremmer:

It is interesting. I saw Elon Musk over the weekend saying that hey, we're never boring. In other words, we've got circuses for you.

Brian Stelter:

Yes-

Ian Bremmer:

Right?

Brian Stelter:

Right, they were circuses.

Ian Bremmer:

Is that really... media is in part meant to ensure that the people will be amused?

Brian Stelter:

That's absolutely true, and Musk is saying that now in defense against this new service, Threads, that Mark Zuckerberg has been promoting, basically Musk's argument is, well, we're more fun over here on Twitter. And yes, more fun also sometimes means more dramatic, more divisive, more polarizing, but you're going to have fun here. I do think that hits on a broader point about media that I felt when I was at CNN for almost nine years there, I was doing a weekly show about media, and I was talking about politics in that context, and I oftentimes realized there's good television and there's good journalism, and sometimes they're not the same thing. You could have a program that's really strong journalistically, but it's not great TV. And you could have a program that's really fun to watch television, it's not great journalism. The goal, of course, in cable news is to be both, to be in the middle, be in the middle of that Venn diagram.

But there is a reality that the most entertaining programs on TV are of course not news. And the most popular things that smell or sound like news on TV are the ones that are actually more entertaining, more polarizing, more bombastic. Tucker Carlson, who was recently fired from Fox, is the most dramatic example of this. He put on, as Nicole said, an "us versus them" show. The entire theme of his show was "us versus them." He was trying to protect against what he thought were the evil elites. It was a very entertaining show for his fan base, and frankly, very scary for everybody else.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, Nicole, I remember in response to some of the suits against Fox and Tucker Carlson, Fox's response was specifically, this isn't news, this is infotainment. It's kind of like buying Ginsu knives. How much does that hold water? Does that really protect them against whatever they have to say?

Nicole Hemmer:

Well, it hasn't protected them. We saw with those lawsuits that Fox ended up shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in order to pay for defamation. So the idea that we are just entertainment certainly isn't a defense in court, and it's not a defense that Fox makes publicly. Fox has long run on its slogan, "We report, you decide." "The most trusted name in news." Sometimes they try to [inaudible] over because they really do position themselves as a news network. It's in the name itself, Fox News. And so while they're saying in court documents that they are just there for entertainment, it is quite clear for viewers that they trust Fox as news, as a source of information. And that gives Fox a real power to shape the kinds of conversations people are having, the kinds of information that they have access to. So it's a legal argument that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't but when it comes to the culture at large, that's not how Fox News viewers view Fox.

Brian Stelter:

Because they try to have it both ways. They try to have it both ways. They try to say they are printed by the First Amendment because they're a news operation, but in reality, they also are playing to people's worst impulses, trying to scare the bejesus out of viewers, trying to stoke fear, and yes, trying to amuse and entertain. You'll notice this week they've promoted two of their stars into even better time slots who are basically entertainers, who are court jesters, who are trying to make the viewers laugh. So there's such-

Ian Bremmer:

You're speaking of...

Brian Stelter:

Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters.

Ian Bremmer:

Jesse Watters, yeah.

Brian Stelter:

Now, Jesse's at eight, Gutfeld's at 10. The fact that Fox News even has a late night talk show, comedy show, that speaks volumes about the strategy.

Ian Bremmer:

But if you're watching cable in the evening, isn't that already telling you that you don't really want news?

Brian Stelter:

I don't think so. I think when Russia began to invade Ukraine, it happened at 10:00 PM Eastern Time and Don Lemon on CNN went live to seven reporters all across Ukraine on CNN. That's real news. Now, the issue, of course, is what happens to all the rest of the days when there's not an emergency somewhere in the world. But I think that gets to the chaos of the news environment more broadly. We live in this environment where there's so much treasure, but there's also so much trash. And the challenge is sorting out the trash and the treasure, knowing what the high quality journalism is and what the stuff is that stinks, that is actually just pretending to be news. It's harder than ever for people to know the difference, to process the difference. I see it all the time that consumers just feel overwhelmed and inundated by information. They don't know what's real and what's not anymore. And that, I think, more than anything else contributes to this war on trust.

Ian Bremmer:

I read the New York Times, I read the Wall Street Journal, and frequently the stories I will see are very, very similar. The headlines that I consume are radically different. And if you're on social media and you're not clicking through and you're only seeing the headlines, my God, you'd think these stories weren't the same thing. How intentional is that in your view? What's happening between the meat and the headline?

Nicole Hemmer:

Oh, it's absolutely intentional, and part of it is because there is this desire to get people to actually click. If you can elicit enough shock from someone when they see the headline, then chances are they will at least click through to see what's going on. And this is part of how media have changed during a social media age, but it's not just about social media. Newspapers have been going for grabby headlines in order to goose sales for well over a hundred years. So that's not necessarily new. But that idea that then you're not buying the newspaper, that you're not reading the story, that you're just sharing the headlines, and sometimes even just screenshots of the headlines, that is shaping a conversation in a really important way and it is deliberate in the sense that you want your headline attached to your story to be making the rounds.

There's a certain message that a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal is trying to get across, so it's intentional in that sense. I don't know that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editors as they're working on their headlines or aiming to mislead their readers, they want to be trusted by their readers. It's just when you get that set of journalistic values coming up against that set of business interests that you sometimes get some of these misleading headlines and that kind of click bait that has made readers, I don't know, a little more suspicious of newspapers, a little more wary of clicking through because they don't know whether they should trust the headline actually matches the story.

Ian Bremmer:

So Nicole, I understand they're not trying to mislead as a business model, but if the algorithms are showing you that you're just going to get far more eyeballs, far more clicks with certain sorts of words by being more dramatic and that appeals to your core audience or otherwise, people are going to slam on you. You're getting constantly nudged, the term of art, in a direction that is just going to lead you in that direction. Clearly that's a big piece of what's going wrong with media right now.

Nicole Hemmer:

That's absolutely right. And we saw the consequences of that during the Trump era. That was one of those moments, especially during the 2016 election where there was so much interest in Donald Trump, and there was so much glee at many news outlets about the kind of money that was coming in because people were clicking on all of the stories and they were testing the headlines to see what people would click through on. And if there was a Donald Trump event, they'd make sure that they covered it and that does lead to a sense of mistrust.

And I'll take an example from 2016 from CNN. CNN would sometimes say that an event or a debate was going to start actually a half hour before it actually started in order to get those eyeballs and sell all of those commercials in the half hour before. And that does lead to distrust, right? Viewers tune in, they find out that they don't have accurate information. They might still stay tuned in because they want to see the debate, because they want to see the press conference or they want to see the rally but that kind of misleading that happens while chasing dollars really does damage to the underlying value and the underlying trust in the news itself.

Ian Bremmer:

I wanted to ask, as well as the headlines, also the photos that go along with them. And I certainly see on CNN, Hunter Biden usually looks like a pretty solid citizen. He looks pretty drug-addled when you watch on Fox, where Don Trump Jr. [looks] exactly the opposite. Have you noticed that? Did you ever have to go in and say, wait a second. Come on. Why are you using that photo? You just undermining the person that we're talking about.

Brian Stelter:

There are definitely conversations in newsrooms and also at these kinds of more entertaining outlets about what kinds of photos do you use, what they're trying to show. Are you trying to show someone smiling, trying to show someone frowning? It all does make a difference, and it's why people have to be media literate and bring a kind of sense of media literacy to their viewing and reading experience. I hate to say this is all on the audience, but most of this is on the audience. We're talking about a supply and demand issue here, and there's often a demand for more sensational, more provocative coverage, and thus there is a supply that's given provided by news outlets and by these media companies.

Ian Bremmer:

Which leads to the question on Trump, right? Because of course so much of Trump in 2016, was the media just throwing him in every possible headline, guy's an incredible showman. He's a marketer aware of his brand like almost no one the American public has ever seen, which it speaks to his success. It's not about his business prowess, it's about his brand prowess over many, many years. But then when he runs for president, suddenly, like he is literally getting wall to wall coverage on CNN's morning show, on "Morning Joe," whether or not they like him or hate him, wall to wall coverage. How did you deal with that?

Brian Stelter:

Trump was, from the outset, one of the biggest stories of our lifetime. Even if he had lost in 2016, he would still be a gigantic earthquake within the Republican Party. So I think it's important to recognize how newsworthy he was, and to this day still is. Now, that said, the ways that he is covered make a big difference. Whether he is scrutinized, whether questions are skeptical, whether they're appropriate follow-ups, all of that matters. But I don't think it matters as much as people sometimes want it to matter. What I mean by that is at the end of the day day, there is an alternative universe, a Republican media operation led by Fox that was driving Donald Trump's success. He was calling in not just to CNN, but to Fox. Fox was propping him up every single day. So to the extent that... if it was a thought experiment, if the rest of the American media had ignored Donald Trump in 2016, I don't think it would've mattered.

He had the right-wing media in his pocket, and this country is split up now into two competing media universes. I think it is completely, almost entirely separated at this point. So Trump has that right-wing media universe no matter what. Now, that said, I don't say that to let other outlets off the hook. There's attrition in American journalism. It's important just to note that he has his own propaganda arm and he would have it regardless. Now, that said, I went back after Trump was elected, and I reread all the transcripts of my shows that year because I wanted to see, was I tough enough? Was I skeptical enough? Was I booking the best guests?

And I came away thinking, wow, CNN, we were really aggressive pointing out his lies. We were really aggressive scrutinizing his character, but it didn't matter that much, did it? And that's, I think, an uncomfortable part about media conversations is all the news coverage in the world, all the commentaries, all the essays, all the broadcasts, they might not matter as much as people want them to matter. At the end of the day, voters are going to feel what they're going to feel and they're going to react the way they're going to react. Do you think I'm just totally letting media off the hook?

Ian Bremmer:

I think if I were talking to a corporate about the fact that we have type two diabetes like nobody's business in the United States, and you're providing supersized meals and you are the one that's making sure that did you want fries with that? How about a really big Coke? The fact is that these things affect... where you put it on the supermarket shelf really affects it. So yeah, I believe the corporations matter and yeah, I believe the media matters and absolutely, I don't think that it doesn't matter that he got wall to wall coverage.

Brian Stelter:

I think what we have to reckon with is the reality that if one arm of the American media is doing the fact checking, that actually might strengthen and enhance some of these demagogues, some of these populist candidates. And that is a challenge, I don't know a way out of. We came up with originally with the CNN town hall with Trump. CNN was widely denounced for having a town hall with Trump. There was an argument that it made him even bigger and more popular among the Republican Party. But is the answer not to question the candidate? It's just we're in this paradoxical moment where questioning the candidate, fact checking, scrutinizing him sometimes makes him stronger.

Ian Bremmer:

Nicole.

Nicole Hemmer:

There definitely is something to this idea that Donald Trump was a very challenging figure to cover in media, particularly from non-conservative sources but conservative sources had real difficulty covering him as well. The thing that Trump was able to do was to align his electoral incentives with media incentives so that even when you had these aggressive questionings or attacks on Donald Trump, it was making him the center of the story every single day and audiences have a responsibility for that because the reason ratings were so high was because people could not get enough of Donald Trump. But even that pushback becomes part of the narrative. It was a way that Trump was able to draw in media criticism as part of his campaign, to say that he was being attacked by CNN, that he was being attacked by the New York Times, and that became a big part of his campaign.

There's only so much that you can do to guard against that. I think it's fair to say that because there was so much money coming in, there was a little bit of credulousness amongst many media outlets, journalistic outlets, to just keep more and more and more coverage of Donald Trump as part of the news cycle. At the same time, the journalists have also come into criticism for the way that they chose to cover Hillary Clinton and her campaign as a way of trying to balance out their very negative coverage of the Trump campaign. So I think that has to be part of the analysis too, the kind of ideas about balance and fairness that then affected the way that outlets were covering Hillary Clinton in her campaign, how that shaped the way that voters responded.

And you take that all together, and it does seem like 2016 involved a lot of journalistic failures and media failures. And I think one way that we can measure that is that things changed a lot in the way that Trump was being covered by 2020. And it's still changing as people are figuring out how to cover him during his indictments, during the new campaign season. I think there is still a grappling that's going on within journalism, which suggests that at least a good chunk of journalists think that something went wrong in 2016 in their coverage.

Ian Bremmer:

He can't be fact checking real time. This is something that we saw during that town hall. It's a fire hose, and his supporters don't care, in the sense that it is just about their support for him that determines the narrative. It is not about fact checking. So how do you handle that in real time? If you're Kaitlan Collins, what do you do that's different? Or do you say, I don't even want to do this? If you were in her position, what would you have done, Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

Oh, it's a great question because you're exactly right. If you're bringing facts to an ideology fight, you're just playing on different fields, so you're both getting something out of it. Kaitlan Collins gets to look tough for constantly pushing back and fact checking Donald Trump and Donald Trump gets all of this airtime to spew all sorts of untruths and message to his base. One of the things that you would want to do differently, I think is have a different audience, if you were going to have any audience at all. Obviously with the town hall, you have to have an audience to have it so thoroughly stacked with Trump supporters and other Republicans, I think creates an atmosphere in which Donald Trump is going to thrive, in which fact checking is going to fail.

But there is something about that interview format. Any kind of live format with Donald Trump, I think is going to be a failure in a way, because it just allows him to steamroll and there's very little that you can do to push back and actually stop spreading misinformation in real time. And maybe that's not the role of the journalist, but coming away from the CNN town hall, there were a lot of journalists who felt, again, something had gone wrong and that we still haven't quite figured out how to handle this level of misinformation when journalists are trained to do something, I think a little different.

Ian Bremmer:

And I want to know how you felt about it, but also, the guy's running a business, Chris Licht at the time, and Donald Trump is the brand, and it's not like he's saying, oh, okay, you don't want to have Republicans in the audience. Sure, I'm willing to do it with a neutral audience. I'm willing to do it with no audience. He's going to say no. He's going to say, you're either doing it my way or I'm not giving it to you. So what do you do in that situation?

Brian Stelter:

Trump had all the leverage, but there is still a choice about whether to platform him or not. That is always a choice. It's a choice now about Robert Kennedy Jr. and his claims about vaccines. There is always a choice about whether to platform or not. I do err on the side of presenting these broadcasts, maybe not live, but presenting them and letting the viewers see who these people are and who these candidates are. But let's try to forget about the candidates. Let's talk more about the voters. I wish and in my dream world, and this wouldn't have been able to happen live on CNN, but I wish the moderator could have walked onto the audience and started talking to the audience, why are you cheering for this? Why do you support that? We need to hear so much more from voters and frankly, so much less from these politicians that are pandering to them.

Because the real story about America and the media right now is about the voters, about the people who think the media is out to get them, the people who think the media is the enemy of, the people, when in fact, media is the people. The person I trust most in the media is the local editor of the paper closest to my hometown. The media is not the enemy. The media is the people. And yet that messaging has gone so awry. It's gone so far off the rails because we need to hear more about why people have lost trust. And that's how I thought about the town hall. Forget about Trump. Let's talk to Trump's voters. Let's learn more from them because then we're getting closer to the big story.

Ian Bremmer:

Because it was interesting, Nicole, I don't know if you saw... I'm sure you saw the town hall, but afterwards, there was the focus group that CNN ran, CNN talking to the members of this focus group that are not CNN watchers, and it was very clear they had a lot of anger for the way that CNN was going after their candidate. They felt like they were a big part of the problem.

Nicole Hemmer:

I did see that, and that is to be expected because again, the idea that non-conservative media are the enemy is something that now has a 70 to 80 year history. It is part of what it means to be a conservative in this country. Fox News is largely a media criticism organization. That's what a lot of their programming actually is. And if you think about it that way, if you think about how that animosity is part of a political ideology, part of a political identity, then it makes a lot of sense that you would have that kind of animosity come up in the focus group afterwards, and that it would light up a lot of what Donald Trump was saying in the town hall itself, the way the audience was reacting.

There's a deeply held belief that an organization like CNN can't be trusted in the way that Fox News can, and that Fox News can't be trusted in the way that some further right outlets can. That is simply part of what it means to be a conservative today, and that has to be taken into account when journalists are thinking about how to both cover the right, but also how to, as Brian was saying, connect to conservative voters and viewers. It's a pretty big hill to overcome, a pretty big obstacle to overcome, but it is a project worth undertaking.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you heard from Brian, he trusts his local paper. Local news, of course, has got destroyed over the past years. The business models have fallen apart. There's been some efforts. Axios has tried to go local, for example, some others, but certainly nowhere near the level of coverage in your local papers if you even have one. I remember... I went to Tulane undergraduate, Times-Picayune just fell apart, right? Despite the fact that it's so important news to cover locally, any green shoots you see there, Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

There is a whole swath of alternative media, often alternative newspapers in places like Nashville and places like Washington DC and New York and Chicago. All of these different cities have an alternative press that is often struggling pretty mightily. Underlying all of this conversation is a story of economics and a lack of money and a lack of resources and a lack of willingness to pay. There are some young enterprising journalists who are reaching people through social media, who are reaching people through podcasts, who are reaching people through these alt weeklies. And it is also no wonder that the places where this has been thriving the most, places like Twitter, are again being dismantled because they have been sources of some of these green shoots that you're talking about. I do believe that there are always going to be enterprising young journalists finding ways to use new forms of media, new forms of outreach.

The question is, will they have the resources? Will they have the funding? Will they have the subscribers and the donors to make that happen? I do think that there is a real hunger for that. So if the dollars follow the desire, then I have some faith that will have something in the future that looks like local journalism. It's not going to look like the past. I don't think we'll ever see that level of resource in local journalism again. That was really a function of the 19th and 20th centuries and the 21st century has largely abandoned it but that doesn't mean that something new can't come up in its place and that new thing can't generate the kind of trust that we would like to see in journalism.

Ian Bremmer:

So Brian, I want to ask you a little bit about standards for platforming. All of us clearly understand why one would want to cover Trump. The guy was president, the guy is now by far the leader for the Republican nomination. There's no question you're going to cover him. You're going to have to do an interview with him. I would not platform, personally, Marjorie Taylor Greene because I believe that her national platform far outweighs her actual sort of substance slash content on the program. And I think that the media's a big part of the problem. They've been facilitating and promoting that in ways that they should not. Where RFK Jr., for me, is kind of in between because he's sort of relevant and interesting in the Democratic race. He's far more serious than Marianne Williamson, but he also is actively promoting almost every conspiracy theory that's out there. Now for me, that's been kind of arbitrary. I'm wondering, you've had to deal with this. How do you make those decisions?

Brian Stelter:

Marjorie Taylor Greene was on "60 Minutes" earlier this year-

Ian Bremmer:

And they did a horrible job.

Brian Stelter:

Was widely, widely criticized, right. But there was this moment where Lesley Stahl seems shocked when Marjorie Taylor Greene likens Democrats to pedophiles. And I was surprised by her surprised. And I think there are many millions of her supporters and many millions of far-right believers in those conspiracy theories. I guess what I'm trying to say is I think it's important to look that dead in the eye, not to shy away from it, not to pretend like these scary and sickening thoughts are not out there and getting popularized on Facebook and Twitter all the time. We have this crisis in trust in all institutions on the right, there's a loss of trust of even Republican politicians on the right. I just think we can't be in denial about just how bad it's become in some corners of our American politic.

Now, that said, then the question always becomes not whether to interview, but how to interview. So people thought "60 Minutes" did a poor job interviewing her. There's been criticism of some of the interviews of RFK Jr. recently as well. I sometimes wonder if when people complain about the media, what they're really complaining about is the existence of the politician the media's covering. And I do think there's an element of that that's going on here when it comes to some of these far-right candidates and to some extent, maybe a candidate like RFK Jr. who is putting pollution into the information ecosystem.

Ian Bremmer:

So Nicole, I'm hearing from Brian, it's not the media's fault, no part of it, right?

Brian Stelter:

Not entirely.

Nicole Hemmer:

I do think that there is still a question about whether to platform, because the reality today is that all of these folks, whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene, whether it is far right people like Nick Fuentes, anti-Semites and white supremacists, there's no shortage of platforms. If you want to hear what Nick Fuentes or Marjorie Taylor Greene or some of these folks have to say, you can go out and find clips. You don't actually need to bring them in and sit down and interview them. What I think we need is much more analysis. That's the way to cover somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, is to bring in experts to talk about what it is she believes, why she has these pedophile conspiracies that she's spreading, and why she's so popular, why she is this kind of mainstream in a way, or at least huge national figure, despite representing a very small district.

Why does she get so much outsized attention? And what does that mean? What are people responding to? What do supporters of Marjorie Taylor Greene think? How can you address the kinds of things that they're going to her for? And there are some things that you can't do, right? If people are entertained by or interested in conspiracies about Jewish space lasers, there's very little you can do about that. But you can go into those conspiracies, explain the kind of work that they're doing, and that's probably not as entertaining as interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene. It might not bring in the same kind of ratings. And that becomes the kind of push-pull that's happening in journalism right now is how do you do that kind of analysis in a way that satisfies audiences without necessarily platforming some of the most odious people in the country, who again, you don't actually need to talk to Marjorie Taylor Greene at this point to know what she believes. She has been on countless platforms saying exactly that. So moving the conversation beyond just what Marjorie Taylor Greene believes or says to some of the broader dynamics around her.

Ian Bremmer:

And to be fair, Jewish space lasers, no more crazy than COVID construction to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese and Finns, I think if some reason no one talked about the Finns, I think the Finns are important to this.

Brian Stelter:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

RFK Jr. As much as we've been talking about the far right, in part because Trump is sort of the leader of the Republican Party today, this is on the far left too. And we are seeing this issue with RFK Jr., who you believe Brian, to an extent, is a creation of the media. Explain what you mean by that.

Brian Stelter:

Yeah, and I think it's important to recognize how these primary campaigns work. Months before anybody gets to vote, when these candidates are out on the trail, these are mostly for the media. These are spectacles that are designed to get cameras and get attention. Most of what RFK Jr's been doing is campaigning through television interviews, through podcasts, as opposed to-

Ian Bremmer:

And through social media.

Brian Stelter:

... holding public events and through social media as opposed to public events. This is mostly a media spectacle and a media creation. And then of course, the media conducts polls and goes and finds out how popular the folks are as a result of all the media coverage. There's a 'snake eating its tail' quality to this that we need to be aware of.

As much as I've made an argument here about the media's limited power, we do need to recognize the media does have a special amount of power when it comes to covering campaigns. And here's where the power lies in the questions that are asked, in the agenda that is set. The media, going back decades, has had an agenda-setting function and that can be used in all sorts of ways, either to demand Trump answer questions about how to build a wall or to ask him about income inequality, to ask him about all various plagues upon our society. So that's true for RFK Jr. as well, the questions we're asking.

Ian Bremmer:

But not in the amount of attention. I'm not hearing that. I'm hearing yes, the tough questions, the way it's asked, the audience, but I'm not hearing, "We give these people too much platform because we want to sell lots and lots and lots of ads."

Brian Stelter:

I think the attention conversation's more difficult in this environment where there's unlimited content, where everybody is a member of the media everybody's creating content, and you can get unlimited attention on everything if you so choose. There's entire channels on my TV now for 50 year old sitcoms and dramas. There is no shortage of attention anymore and so I don't know if we can control attention. What we can control as individual journalists and media outlets are the topics and the agendas that we prioritize.

Ian Bremmer:

We can decide what leads, though. We can decide who we give a town hall to.

Brian Stelter:

True.

Ian Bremmer:

We can decide who we want to platform. And Elon Musk has been very clear, "I want to have DeSantis sort of show up on my platform. Why? Because Trump isn't tweeting right now." "I'm prepared to have RFK Jr. Why? Because that's a useful place for me to be." He's not getting as much attention on other places, then they'll pay attention to him. So I do think that there are active decisions that are to be made on what's breaking news, what gets the headline, what's A1, what's above the fold? Where am I getting that attention? In the same way that Trump did early on, RFK now seems to be attracting that level of attention. Nicole, do you see that?

Nicole Hemmer:

I do see that. The thing about covering somebody like RFK Jr. is if you're covering the Democratic side of the primary, it's actually pretty boring. You have a sitting president who is going to run for reelection. He's not somebody who brings in audiences in huge numbers. This story, I think, when we look back at it in six months or 12 months or two years, is going look like, I think a foregone conclusion most likely. And that's not a particularly interesting story to tell. So now you have RFK Jr., who in some polls is in the teens or maybe the low twenties, and even though you have historical precedent, right? When Barack Obama ran for reelection in 2012, I think there was a felon in West Virginia who ended up getting 40% against Obama in the primary because people were looking for a different option.

But we didn't spend months talking about this West Virginia candidate. We focused on the fact that Barack Obama was going to be renominated and then looked ahead to the reelection, to the work he was doing as president. RFK Jr. is a little different because he's running as a national candidate. He is a household name in many ways. He's getting tons of attention, particularly from right-wing media, which sometimes does act as an agenda setter for non-conservative media outlets. So I do think that there is something about the attention economy that both journalists and these candidates are using. And again, it means incentives are aligning. RFK Jr. is giving us something new and shiny to talk about, that is going to goose our ratings, and that is going to get RFK Jr. the coverage that he wants.

And so I think the challenge is figuring out how to either unalign those incentives or to find a different way, and I don't have all the answers here, but finding a different way for covering the political dynamics without necessarily lathering attention on a candidate who, to be clear, is not going to be the Democratic nominee. And if you start with that and let that dictate how much coverage you give him, I think you end up with a different level of coverage.

Ian Bremmer:

And before we close, I want to ask about disinformation. And I want to ask specifically about artificial intelligence. 2024 election coming up. We've already seen AI generated photos, tapes, audio, as well as video, which in some cases have moved markets, certainly have attracted a lot of attention and misdirected people. What do you think needs to happen? What do you think the implications are that you've seen so far of that trend?

Brian Stelter:

I'm an optimist by nature, but I'm a pessimist when it comes to this topic because it does seem to me the energy around defeating disinformation, policing, guarding against it, that energy's evaporated. There was a lot of energy five years ago around making sure that there were some guardrails on social networks to give people some recourse if they were being smeared and lied about. If there was a crazy disinformation campaign targeting your family, you at least had some way to maybe have some recourse from Facebook or Twitter. It feels like a lot of that's gone away. The energy's dissipated when it comes to this war against disinformation. I think AI's going to supercharge us, of course, make it a lot easier to have a lot more information pollution in the atmosphere, and that pollution does choke everybody.

I think the danger is it causes people to decide, I just don't know what's true. I can't decide what's true anymore. I can't figure it out. I'm just going to tune out, check out. I'm just going to drop out and not participate in the American conversation. That is the real danger of this environment, of disinformation and of politicians pedaling propaganda. I think what we have to do as individuals, as citizens, is to resist that, to fight against that, to be louder than the liars. And we can all do that in our own individual ways, whether that is chipping in a few bucks for your subscription to a real news outlet that's trying to defend truth in an environment of lies.

But I never buy this idea that we're in a post-truth society though, because we're only in a post-truth society if we all give up, if we all surrender. There are many, many, many millions of Americans out there defending the truth in all their individual ways. Some go out and they launch Substacks, they launch blogs, they launch newsletters. They post on Facebook or Nextdoor and educate their neighbors about what's going on in their world. There are all of those little green shoots out there that make me hopeful about this media environment. But where I do feel pessimism is about disinformation and AI because it is going to make a bad problem even worse in the short term.

Ian Bremmer:

And Nicole, it is a spectrum, right? I'm not saying it's holy post-truth, but my God, there's a lot of elements in post-truth out there. Where do you come down?

Nicole Hemmer:

I join Brian and his pessimism about this. It requires so much attention and media literacy in order to parse what's true and not true. And as Brian was saying, you find then one voice out there who you can really trust and you subscribe to their Substack and we become even more and more atomized as news consumers because there is so much distrust out there. And again, you're seeing a war on trust happening, even as these new technologies and innovations are emerging. Twitter's verification system gets destroyed at a moment when AI generated disinformation is becoming even more and more rampant. And so now you're tossed into a sea of I don't know who to trust, what to trust, and all of the signals that I was relying on in the past don't exist anymore, and that is an enormous problem moving forward.

I do think that many people don't want to be post-truth. They want to know what is real in the world, and they want to use what is real to guide the choices that they make. It's just so much more difficult than it used to be. Not that there was a golden age or a nirvana where everybody had easy access to true facts and the ability to sort through them easily, but that we are in a particular flood of misinformation and disinformation right now, and the tools for navigating that are just not as strong as we would like them to be. And so maybe that's the next big project. Maybe that's where we'll see those green shoots is as people innovate ways to make it easier to navigate a world that's awash in this kind of disinformation.

Brian Stelter:

But this new AI crisis, it makes old news outlets even more important, even more impactful. I'll tell you a quick funny story. I was at the fair with my daughter last fall. I look on my phone, there's an article on some crazy fake news website that said I had been arrested by military police. Same crazy website said a few weeks later that I had been indicted, that I had been sentenced to death at Guantanamo Bay. And I get an email from a fact-checker, and the fact-checker says, "Are you really heading to GTMO or are you sentenced to death?" But the twist here is that the fact-checker who reached out to me, was from a right-wing website. They were from the Daily Caller. They were from a conservative site, they wanted to verify-

Ian Bremmer :

But they're not a crazy, crazy right-wing website.

Brian Stelter:

But I appreciate it and they're funded by Facebook to do this fact checking. And what I thought to myself was, in a weird, weird way, the system's actually working. The system's working. There's a fact-checker who verified that I'm actually still alive and not under arrest. And they published an article that reported the truth, and then Google ranked that true story above the lie. Now, if that counts as a win, and this is the information age, that's pretty pathetic.

Ian Bremmer:

And you're still here.

Brian Stelter:

But it's true.

Ian Bremmer:

You got out of GTMO.

Brian Stelter:

I'm still here.

Ian Bremmer:

Somehow.

Brian Stelter:

Somehow.

Ian Bremmer:

Somehow.

Brian Stelter:

And that gives me... I hate to say that's a positive story, but that's how the system should work. Real news outlets should verify or debunk the nonsense on the internet and tell people what is true. And what I'm hoping is that in an environment that's going to be overwhelmed by AI and power disinformation, there's going to be a little bit of a walled garden of real news outlets. That you can actually enter that garden and feel like you not always can trust every bit of it, but can have more confidence in it.

Ian Bremmer:

Nicole Hemmer, Brian Stelter, thanks so much for joining us today.

Nicole Hemmer:

Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Stelter:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter? It's called GZERO Daily.

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