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Nov. 20, 2020 - Epoch Times
49:48
The Big Money Behind the Narrative—Sharyl Attkisson on Media Bias & Spin | American Thought Leaders
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There are all kinds of people paying a lot of money to pull strings behind the scenes to make sure we see certain things on TV and on the news and read things on the news and that we do not see certain things on the news.
Much of the media today seeks to advance narratives to the exclusion of facts, fairness and accuracy, says Cheryl Atkison, a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist.
In many cases, there are big interests and big money involved.
At the same time, big tech curates what people are allowed to see and applies third-party, quote, fact-checkers to dictate what is accepted truth.
Atkison's forthcoming book, slated to be released on November 24th, is titled Slanted, How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Cheryl Atkison, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
Cheryl, you start your book slanted with a quote.
In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Now, this is something that I've actually had on my Facebook page for over a decade.
Very familiar with the quote.
I always thought it was from George Orwell.
Turns out it's not.
Tell me, why is it that you started the book off with this particular quote?
I think that for reporters and people who provide information from any source, actually providing truthful, factual information has become something that is looked as something to control by other people.
It's looked as something to controversialize, depending on what it says and what the facts say.
And it's becoming harder and harder for people interested in accuracy, fairness and facts to simply do the job of telling these stories or those facts without censors and curations and interruptions from propagandists and special interests.
I think I told you this earlier, but reading your book, I kind of felt chapter by chapter increasingly like, "Hey, I'm not crazy." Someone else is seeing these things that I'm seeing as well.
Namely, one of the themes in there, for example, is this idea that, in some cases, if you simply do report the facts straight up, you're perceived as partisan.
And this is a bizarre phenomenon to me.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
Well, as I talk about in Slanted, the act of simply being down the middle and fair has become such an anomaly in the managed information landscape that if you do that now, you are branded as conservative simply because For whatever reason, you're not following the Liberal Party line, which is now considered the default.
So as you stay in the center, that is a position that is viewed by the propagandists or at least portrayed as farther and farther to the right when it's not.
But it's all a part of trying to controversialize facts that are uncomfortable, to try to keep stories and information that certain interests don't want told from getting told.
And then by personally attacking and controversializing the outlets Or the reporters who are not following the party line in such a way that there is hope on the part of the propagandists that a large section of the public will not believe or will not listen to the accurate facts.
Instead, they'll just chew on the propaganda and the spun facts.
It's incredible.
You call this the narrative, and this is something, of course, I've heard many people refer to over past years.
So tell me, what is the narrative, and when did you first become aware of the narrative?
It's a word that when I first heard it used in the news industry, I didn't really understand what it meant.
And now I say it all the time to myself.
I write about it.
But I realize that a lot of people, they hear narratives and that's not necessarily the word they may apply to it or the phrase that they may associate with it.
A narrative, I say, is a storyline that certain interests want to be told to accomplish a different goal.
So they may make sure that a common thread of a story, a narrative, runs through most any factual context until it even changes the story or plays fast and loose with the facts or even changes the facts to accomplish a storyline, an overarching storyline that they're trying to advance to the general public or a certain audience.
That's a narrative.
So in the book, I give examples such as climate change may be a perfectly valid discussion to have in certain contexts, but then when you see on the news that every event, let's say somebody ties to climate change to the exclusion of Well, that's furthering a narrative to the exclusion of the facts and fairness and accuracy.
And we see that now.
We've seen the narrative largely take over the news as we know it today, compared to what it was really just about 15 years ago.
Cheryl, you're making me think of these giant fires that we've had in California that have affected communities, of course, the forests themselves.
Many prominent politicians are ascribing these to climate change as if it's the obvious cause.
I'm thinking there's at least one other very significant variable that I'm aware of, namely the buildup of brush in the forest, improper forest management, which a few people have pointed out.
What are your thoughts?
So the narrative demands in this current environment that you not say those things.
That's the frightening thing, the idea that there are now thoughts and science and views and facts that are deemed to be unacceptable in the information landscape on social media or on the news.
I can think of three other factors and we've reported on all of those on my Sunday TV show Full Measure.
There is the lack of properly clearing the brush, which is a known factor.
They haven't done a good job and they've complained they haven't had the money to do it.
So we've talked about the financial battles over that.
Secondly, there are arsonists, as you know, that have been caught setting fires.
That's certainly not climate change.
And thirdly, we reported on this extensively last season, the power company PG&E has paid billions of dollars to victims of some of these worst wildfires in California because their power lines started the fire.
They did not start a number of fires because they did not properly maintain the aging power lines and they would spark during certain weather events.
And with the brush not properly cut away, these would lead to these catastrophic wildfires that A lot of people are improperly attributing to climate change.
This is fascinating because I didn't even know that last one.
I didn't see the most recent episode of Full Measure clearly, or I would have known that, which, by the way, is an excellent program that I'll recommend to everyone watching today.
Well, thank you.
You can look that up at FullMeasure.News.
If you search PG&E, you'll find that segment.
And I find a lot of people don't know, when we did this story, we had no agenda.
We just set out to go look at the California wildfires.
We've done quite a bit of reporting.
And then we learned that there was this huge court case.
I don't know why.
In these court cases, but again, it's because it has to do with the narrative driving the news in such a way that when you turn on the TV or read your information, unless a certain special interest has put that information in front of the reporters or on the news, a lot of times you're not likely to see it if it's off-narrative facts and science and information.
I don't know if we can put percentages on this here, but how dominant is this narrative-focused or narrative-leaning reporting in our landscape today, across the whole media landscape in your view?
I'd say 90 to 95 percent.
You know, reporters used to take great pride, and there's still some who do and would if they could, take great pride in digging up original stories that the interests do not want us to report, that no PR firm or political figures and super PACs and Nonprofits that actually work for special interests, that they're always bringing these story ideas to the table, trying to get them to float to the top, sending out talking points, planting them with the analysts that we've hired to be on the news.
But our job, I believe, is to find those other stories that they're trying to push off the air that the special interests and the powerful money interests don't want told and the angles that they don't want us to know about.
That used to be how we approached Our industry is particularly investigative reporting, but in general, news reporting, when I was in local news, my goal was to try to bring something new and different to the table than what was being put out there by the people trying to manage public opinion.
Now, it's as if we in the media and the news have almost totally acceded ourselves to these special interests, and I argue in Slanted that we've allowed ourselves and the news to be used as a tool of the propagandists, even inviting them To use us to put out their talking points on each side every day as if we're learning anything from it.
And then we're paying these pundits and analysts to use us as a propaganda vehicle to present their information to the public every day.
It's a really topsy-turvy and baffling environment that we've allowed ourselves to do this.
And if you look up the term propaganda in a dictionary, that's the pure definition of what much of the news is doing today by inviting a political So you use this term,
the propagandists, I'll say that in quotes, Obviously, we're talking about pundits.
Obviously, we're talking about special interests who are looking to forward their own narratives and so forth.
But it almost sounds like there's sort of this ominous, unseen group of people.
What do you mean exactly when you're saying the propagandists?
Well, I really covered this thoroughly in my last book, The Smear.
There is a multi-billion dollar industry that has grown, largely unseen by much of the American public.
They see the effects of it, but the whole point of these propagandists, or I call them smear artists, is to have the result impact the public, but have their fingerprints not be seen on the product.
In other words, they're operating behind the scenes.
And I interviewed many smear artists, Democrats and Republicans, for the book.
You might be surprised that they're happy to talk about what they do and how successful they are at manipulating public opinion.
But as one of them told me, and I've spoken of this, it gave me chills when he said it.
He said, "Virtually every image that crosses your path on a daily basis, not just the news, but in movies and comedy channels and billboards and things nonprofits put out, He said almost everything was put there for a reason by somebody who paid a lot of money to put that in the public view.
And once you start understanding, I call it sort of the Truman Show, an old movie as some people have seen it, but you start understanding we're sort of in a Truman Show, we're a product, we the public, and there are all kinds of people paying a lot of money To pull strings behind the scenes to make sure we see certain things on TV and on the news and read things on the news and that we do not see certain things on the news.
And now this, as you know, has expanded since particularly 2016 with President Trump entering office to social media because those who control and largely were successfully controlling the terms of what's on the news saw that on the internet they lacked that same control.
Starting in 2016, they needed to create the perception among us that we needed our information online curated and fact-checked and culled through by third parties.
Now we're seeing the fruits of that, the poisonous fruit of that, whereby we've acceded our control to these special interests That control us through the big tech companies.
And now they're telling us we can't access certain facts, certain studies, certain information, certain viewpoints in a way that is very Orwellian and I think dangerous.
Well, I definitely want to get back to this idea that, you know, it's almost like the public has kind of willingly been a willing participant in being censored.
And that is something very interesting that you discuss in the book.
Before we do that, as you were describing the situation, it's almost like a kind of extreme product placement.
Then you mentioned the Truman Show, which is precisely that, right?
Everything, you know, he lives in a manufactured world.
another excellent film, by the way, if our viewers want to have a couple of hours of a really remarkable piece of cinema, The Truman Show is highly recommended.
But it's almost as if we've become this sort of—you describe it as we're a product and What does that mean exactly?
Well, the ability to impact our opinions, our thoughts, what we purchase, how we vote, what we believe is a very valuable commodity.
And this smear industry, which is dark money groups and nonprofits and super PACs and charities and all kinds of things you don't even think about on a daily basis, and government and people who revolving door their way between corporate and government, This is how they pay and train each other to appear in these forums where they can slant or change our thought and make us think certain things and the internet and social media has opened up an entirely new opportunity
for them and they're really good at it because it's easier than ever before with the internet and even fairly inexpensive To control social media accounts and opinion with, as I talk about in my last book, The Smear, everything from robotics to placed fake tweets that then become a tweet campaign that impacts how the New York Times makes its decisions on news.
Wikipedia is manipulated.
Snopes is manipulated.
I think a lot of people, smart people, know something's going on, but they only think one layer deep.
They think, Well, I'll go to Snopes and see if it's true, but you have to go two, three layers past that and understand that Snopes is conflicted as well, because anything that can be bought, purchased, or impacted is being bought, purchased, and impacted to influence our opinions.
One sort of unlikely, probably wouldn't think of example of that in my last book, the smear was the Federal Register.
And one of the smear artists explained that they are paid, these propagandists, by special interest to post comments on the Federal Register before certain federal rules go into effect.
And those comments, you've probably never posted one, maybe you have, but I don't know anybody who's ever posted a comment before a policy change online on the Federal Register.
or who's doing all of that activity?
Well, these are corporate and special interests who hire people to pretend they're ordinary people to make comments about things to try to influence whether a policy's impact is implemented and how it's implemented.
Anything that you can co-opt, they found a way to do so.
I have to ask you, I have an example for the Epoch Times ourselves, where there's something that simply has completely no basis in fact, it's easily disprovable if someone were to just go look, but somehow has become, at least in certain circles, an idea that keeps being forwarded.
Notably, this was in an NBC piece, maybe a year, year and a half ago now, that were some sort of dark money operation.
Election-focused, basically.
You could look at the ads, you can see their subscription ads, you can see our funding is pretty transparent, you can look at our filings and so forth.
Yet, somehow, this kind of something that simply has no basis in reality, and you have a lot of examples of this, frankly, in Slanted, which were, again, extremely fascinating for me to see these things play out.
But how is it that something that Actually, it's just sort of an idea that someone cooked up a convenient narrative can be promulgated over time and almost become accepted fact, even though it's not fact.
How does that work?
That's the goal.
I mean, it's perfect, isn't it?
From their viewpoint, when they finally have gotten this false narrative to be so ubiquitous that people just sort of accept it and respond to it.
but sometimes even the people who are being smeared sort of accept that that's how people view us.
And they've moved into this space where they've been totally shaped by the narrative.
Well, I'll give you one example of how it happens.
Let's say a big money interest doesn't like Epoch Times reporting because it's factual.
Maybe it's dual-sided on a climate change issue.
There's a ton of money, as you know, being put out there to control people's thought on climate change.
So they need to controversialize you rather than just argue the points of the story.
They need to make it where people won't read your publication or they automatically think it's discredited, right?
So that's the goal off the top.
How to accomplish that?
They go big money.
This is a hypothetical example.
These big donors send their money through a fundraiser, so you can't trace it, to a group like Media Matters, which is run by the conservative smear artist turned liberal smear artist David Brock, who runs this network of super PACs and non-profits, names that you may know and thought were independent groups, but they're all under this umbrella.
I diagrammed it in my last book, The Smear.
And all he has to do is write a blog about it.
And the unquestioning media is either on board with the same thing because we've hired these propagandists in our newsrooms, or they're unaware and sometimes reporters are lazy.
They take this information sent to them about what a big story this is.
Look what we found out about Epoch Times.
And they don't do their own checking.
And then they have it put out through their nonprofits and their watchdog groups.
So it looks like to the media that all these different groups have discovered things about Epoch Times.
It's really just one group and a guy and some funders that started this.
But it's to give the appearance that there's widespread support for or against somebody or something.
And pretty soon, the news is reporting it.
Word for word, lockstep, you talk about first, sometimes it goes with the quasi-news like Salon and Vox and Huffington Post and all the people that march to the same tune when Media Matters says go.
And it's really hard to stop that momentum of opinion when it's been put down and become so pervasive like that.
And I think that's what's happened to Epoch Times.
I think it started with your publication when you became to be Came to be more and more noticed for doing fair off-narrative reporting on really important topics that the mainstream media was not itself attacking and investigating.
And instead, when you started doing important work, that's when I saw, you know, all of this bubbling to the top, all this controversy trying to be stirred up about the publication.
Well, it's fascinating also when you're in media and this happens because people can just go to the website and see what's there.
That's what's really interesting to me.
They don't want the facts, and I talk about this in the book as well.
When you understand that the narrative is the goal, not honest reporting, you've got to get out of the mindset that these places still By and large are trying to do honest reporting.
They're working with a different goal in mind to advance a narrative so they succeed.
They don't want the other information that you want to provide them.
It doesn't matter what you show them and tell them.
They're going to stay on that narrative.
I have ignored many false things that have been said about me over time because It almost drives that further.
They take the people who are driving the false narrative, take what you say as you prove that it's untrue, and they're able to spin and turn that up into a ball and make it all sound like that's also part of the narrative.
It almost feeds it.
And that's the natural thing what most people do.
And the false narrative becomes bigger and bigger and more pervasive and more people find out about it, and it's almost counterproductive sometimes.
I'm just remembering something, actually.
Early in the book, you were discussing your work at CBS and how some of the stories that spent quite a bit of time on very thoughtful pieces just were killed.
But the one example was kind of startling to me, and it was the editor, I believe, just simply says, I believe religion is the root of all evil.
We're not running this as is.
I may be embellishing a little bit here, but this is kind of a Bizarre concept, because if there's people that are thinking this, prominent in newsrooms, killing stories, I can really imagine how a narrative would be shaped.
Just this specific question, how prominent is this kind of thing in newsrooms across America?
And this was some years ago.
I think it's fairly common.
In local news, I will say, I felt there was more freedom for local reporters.
It was less political.
What we did on a daily basis wasn't about politics in general.
And I didn't feel like there was that heavy-handed shaping.
But then coming to national news, When I was at CNN back in the day, in 1990, we weren't shaping.
Nobody was telling me how to anchor and what to say.
It's totally different than today.
We didn't put our opinions or anything.
But fast forward to CBS, and I'm not just calling out CBS, because I know from my friends and colleagues, the same things have happened and are happening in national newsrooms.
But even before we saw how pervasive it was, there are all of these little ways that narratives slip into our reporting by what we report and what we don't report.
And I was trying to, with these anecdotes, talk about how I've put a lot of thought into it.
I made, I'm sure, many mistakes without thinking about how we're shaping the news and biasing the news.
You know, sometimes unconsciously.
But there are these startling examples like that.
Now, I say in the book that I'm not a religious person, but that's irrelevant to the notion of whether I am going to address religion and a story in a fair way and let people on both sides of an issue that impacts that speak.
And that's exactly what I was doing in a story.
But because it's so seldom done, at least it was seldom done in this fashion at CBS, one executive, when the story was finished, had the nerve, well, they were all kind of like, Poo-pooing the story.
And the only reason was because in a dual-sided story with different people in it, there were people on the pro-religious side that didn't look like nuts and fools.
And quite frankly, there were executives that wanted me to replace these people who are quite typical Christians, basically, here in the United States on that side of the story.
For a story we were doing, they wanted me to replace those people with people who appeared more extreme and unreasonable to represent the religious view, so they wouldn't look like they're people that the public can relate to.
And I refused to do it.
And I just said, I'm not going to put other people in the story.
These are the people that we spoke to, and they represent that view well.
But that happens not just with that, you know, religious stories, but that's just one example.
You describe and sort of come back to this concept repeatedly in the book, the substitution game.
Tell me about the substitution game.
Well, I think a lot of people play it today, but it's just that I gave it a name.
I think I started in the last book.
If you see a news item treated a certain way when one person or one side does something, and then it's treated entirely differently when another side or another person does it, then you can probably think that there's a narrative involved.
And this happens all the time.
And I played this on Twitter the other day where I tweeted out and said, Donald Trump has announced that he's going to hole up and not take questions from reporters until next Thursday and not make any appearances.
And then I said, not really.
It was Joe Biden who did that.
But can you imagine the news coverage if Trump were to say, I'm just not going to take reporters' questions or appear in public for days, a week and a half or two weeks before the election?
So when you And I'm not saying which is right or which is wrong.
I'm simply saying that whoever does that thing should be treated in the news the same way.
It shouldn't matter who's the one who did it, but too often I think we at home know that incidents are treated differently depending on who did them and what narrative is being furthered on the news.
Well, and there's this propensity kind of to infer motive, right?
And I'm thinking now of the New York Times headline that you describe where the president, basically, I think he denounced racism, denounced white supremacy.
I mean, it's curious because this is something that came up recently, of course, in the debates.
He was actually asking, are you ready, sir, to denounce white supremacy?
I recall reading your book that it was actually on the front page of the New York Times, but that headline was changed, right?
Yes.
So for once, the New York Times actually put an honest headline about Trump that said he had, you know, denounced racism or promoted unity.
And the New York Times got so attacked by the mob, the leftist mob on Twitter.
And again, these can sometimes just be a few people creating the appearance that there's a big mob, that the New York Times actually changed its headline.
And we can see in that chapter about the New York Times that there was a later discussion at a staff meeting about, and a lot of headlines have been changed on the Times like this by the mob.
You know, sort of like news by popularity contest.
And there were people who were arguing, well, you know, they've been demanding Trump denounce racism.
And by the way, I did a podcast on this the other day.
He's done this since 2000 explicitly so many times, but the media always pretends he's never done it.
But there's always demands for him to do it.
And then when he explicitly does it, these New York Times staffers were arguing, well, we shouldn't report that he said it because he didn't mean it because we all know he's a racist.
So on the one hand, they're demanding this disavowal of racism and condemnation, which Trump has done repeatedly.
But when he specifically does it, and it makes a headline, they say, "Well, the New York Times, we should not grant him that because we're just doing his bidding by reporting what he said." And they change that headline to say something completely different.
They went off on another narrative.
I don't know if we can call it journalism anymore, but it's actually not just trying to tell you what happened and dig into that, but to tell you what to think about it.
And hence, this inferring of motives in your And you have a number of really fascinating examples of this that you're describing.
So how is it that We as an audience, I guess I'm in the media, I play both sides, but how is it that people are complicit in getting this type of, whether you want to call it censorship or kind of shaping of narrative in only a particular direction or only a particular few directions?
How are we complicit in that?
Well, you know, I'm blaming us because we are in part to blame, but the people who are doing it to us have been quite clever about the way they've done it.
I spoke a little earlier about how prior to 2016, if you look at the news, people were not asking for their news to be curated.
They weren't asking for these massive fact checks by third parties and conflicted nonprofits and academics.
There was a market for that that was cleverly created in 2016 by those who wanted us to demand it and then be so happy when finally Facebook was fact checking things for us because we don't know what to think and we don't know what to say.
Think about that.
Five years before this happened, nobody would have, you know, that concept, I think, would have just really stunned everybody that we would invite companies who have no expertise in any of this stuff, by the way, no matter how many experts they hire, that they're going to be the ones that step in on a moment's notice with a news story and tell you what's true and give you context that they're going to be the ones that step in on a moment's notice with a news story and tell you what's true and give you context and tell you But now we've become so numb to the notion we're actually inviting it.
I mean, the subtitle of my book is How the Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.
Many of us are inviting and cheering on these fake fact checks and the curating of our information, our news, not realizing, I think, the slippery slope that we're going down, whereby I think in 10 years, if we don't change things, It'll be a distant memory that we could find most information we wanted to find on the internet.
We won't be able to access it anymore, only that which the powerful interests wish for us to see.
It's deeply, deeply disturbing, obviously.
And it's almost like we want to only be reading the things that we already agree with.
You know, one thing, this debate over Section 230 without getting too arcane, but a lot of people are saying, you know, well, these big tech companies are censoring Trump and Trump supporters and Republicans, but not liberals.
And I fear that what comes of that is, again, clever people pulling strings behind the scenes to make us go, you should censor the liberals, too.
And what we're doing is if we say that, we'll just do it both to all of us equally.
We're basically giving more control and we're giving up more of our own thoughts, you know, control of our own thoughts and information to the same players who will then go, okay, well, we'll censor left and right.
We'll censor everybody.
We'll really be heavy handed.
When I think we should be looking, you know, 30,000 foot high level, stepping way back and telling them not to touch our information, except that which is illegal.
Not in a subconscious way demanding that they actually censor more.
That's not going to, I think, ultimately help anybody.
Another thing I just thought of, a few people have asked me about this, actually, and I said, well, I don't know.
How do you see yourself politically?
Are you to yourself as conservative?
Do you see yourself as liberal?
Do you try to stay out of those categories?
How do you fall personally?
Well, I have not talked about my politics and I just don't.
So a lot of people mistakenly assume I'm conservative.
For years, people mistakenly assumed I was liberal.
And just in a general sense, I will tell you that I think I'm like a lot of Americans.
I probably If you pick certain issues and I told you how I felt about them, I would be liberal on some, conservative on others, change my mind, depending on the circumstance.
And what I think is really important to do, and I've worked very hard to do this, maybe I didn't think about it in my early years, But assuming I feel a certain way based on who I interviewed or what I said is going to be wrong.
I mean, it's pretty hard, I've found, for reporters to take away their own personal vested interests.
But if you can, it's a beautiful thing to open your mind, regardless of how you feel about something, and invite in a different viewpoint or opposing viewpoints.
And I've told myself as a reporter, one way to do that is to start with the premise that Most people have a point to make.
Like, there are sometimes ridiculous points that don't make any sense.
But in general...
People who view things differently often have rational viewpoints on both sides.
And when you start to say, as a reporter, I'd like to represent the most rational viewpoints I can find on both sides, it just sort of opens up reporting, and I think you get it more of the truth, you become more accurate, and you don't feel like you have to shove your, you shouldn't feel like you have to shove your own opinion down someone's throat.
If the job of your reporting is, and I think a lot of reporters do this, if you think people need to come away at the end of the story thinking like you do about a topic, Then I think you've made a big mistake.
I think the goal should be to present viewpoints and facts, especially if powerful interests are trying to hide them.
And then I say to myself, at the end, if you're unconvinced of what someone in the story was saying, or if I think taxpayer money was wasted and this is demonstrated in the evidence, but you don't mind how the money was spent, I'm good with that.
I just wanted to bring the information out there.
And I think that's sort of how I approach my job, and I do it in a nonpolitical fashion.
So you mentioned Section 230.
This is something that I've covered a number of times on the show.
Speaking of basically social media giants becoming publishers, which is what that question really is, it seems like Twitter, frankly in the past week now, has kind of taken things to a different level where they decided to suppress a story that That they transparently said hadn't been fact-checked even by one of these,
you would argue, not necessarily legitimately even fact-checked.
But I was thinking of using the slanted lens to look at the story and how it's playing out, because I thought it's almost like a textbook example of all the lessons or ideas that you're bringing up in slanted.
Can we do that?
I think absolutely.
I mean, the notion that Twitter would claim to be an instant expert on a story they have no knowledge about, and their experts can't possibly, even if they were to try to contradict some of the Hunter Biden story that was in the New York Post, They certainly have no more credibility than the New York Post, who presumably has been working on the story longer.
And neither do the one-sided experts they may consult who would tell them that that story is not true.
They weren't in the room.
They weren't in a position to verify or not verify emails.
But you go back to the Russia-Trump collusion story, which turned out to be, as we all know, and even as Trump's enemies working on the Mueller team acknowledged, there was no evidence of any American working with Russia We're colluding with Russia in 2016.
And how many stories do we still have, and did we have at the time, forwarded uncritically by the press, without counterpoints, without evidence, as they like to say, but they didn't say it was without evidence, as if true, anonymous sources presenting false information, presumed to be true, no counterpoints.
I mean, this was the classic way that you cannot, as a journalist, legitimately cover a news story, and we did it for years.
And then here comes a story that has some documentation and on-the-record documents and sources, and all we hear about is unverified, without evidence, and it's immediately taken off Twitter.
What Twitter is doing in these final days before the election speaks to me of desperation.
The big tech companies—I'll have a story on this on Full Measure in a couple of weeks— Insiders talk about how important it is to some of these companies and the people leading them and the employees for President Trump not to be president, for certain agendas to be advanced, social agendas in a one-sided fashion, and how they make sure algorithms and the things that they design accomplish these very partisan political goals in ways that are often unseen to us.
And I can only say that they've decided or they've been fearful that in these last weeks that hasn't been enough.
So they're actually stepping in and putting their thumb on a scale in such a visible way with people and accounts.
They don't even care if Congress calls them in and slaps them, you know, in a couple of weeks because the election will be over.
They're trying right now to play the short game, you know, out of desperation to try to make sure Trump doesn't win another term.
So there's all sorts of people saying these laptops or these drives or this whole thing is Russian disinformation.
Well, I mean, again, let's look at the real Russian disinformation campaign that we know Trump-Russia collusion involved Russians providing false information to an intermediary of Democrats to the FBI, and that was never flagged by the same people as Russian disinformation.
And yet now, something where there was no evidence of Russian disinformation, that's the default claim that's thrown out there, because it will take hold.
And you see as it does, because the public's been primed, a certain segment of the public, by the narrative to believe and to accept that.
And Glenn Greenwald had an interesting article.
I think I read a little bit of it with a tweet.
He's the liberal publisher of The Intercept.
And a lot of classic liberals see these things the same way you do, some of these You know, things that we're talking about.
And he said, can you imagine a public that has gotten so basically brainwashed that everything that happens is deemed to be foreign interference or interference by the Russians and that the public buys that?
You know, how sad is that?
And I think he was spot on with that.
But that's all...
Part of the narrative that's been planted since late 2015 or early 2016 and has really taken hold among people who are, I won't say unthinking people because they're not all unthinking, but a lot of people that don't have time to do or the desire to do their own thinking for themselves and their own research and they just are pummeled with these narratives on Comedy channels and just everywhere you look—the news,
of course, and social media—it just becomes their reality, and that's what they believe.
It's incredible.
A number of media have been largely silent on this, but I did notice actually that CBS has started to cover it.
I thought that was interesting.
And the other thing, speaking of the whole Russia collusion and everything associated with that, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the FISA abuse, CBS did hire Catherine Herridge, who seems to be doing a pretty straight up journalistic job around this material.
And again, does this suggest that CBS is deciding to go off narrative here?
Well, it's hard to say.
There are so many things If you read the books that I've written about this, there's so many competing things going on at the same time.
Sometimes an outlet, in my view, will hire somebody so that they can keep them quiet or keep them less visible.
Catherine Herridge, I believe, had far more visibility when she worked at Fox News because she was on all the time with Breaking Stories.
You know, I've talked to people at CBS. I think she's done great stuff.
I've seen her tweet out some things.
She is not...
Now, maybe this has changed in the last month.
She is not seen frequently on the evening news.
She tweets a lot of stuff that she probably can't get on, or maybe she's on the morning show.
This is how they bury, you know, they pretend to want to cover something, but there's a way that certain people can, in fact, bury the news and make sure it gets less prominence.
They're also competing.
They hired, I don't want to name a name, but they hired somebody else that had a lot of promise and talent in an arena like that some years ago, and then Basically proceeded to never use that person on the air.
This is not an unusual thing that happens.
That having been said, not everybody at all the networks, there's still some great people.
There are still some good news people.
There's still some great reporting being done, even at the New York Times, which as you know, I spent a whole chapter talking about the devolution, even at CNN. So it's not a monolithic thing for which there are no exceptions.
But in a general sense, I think we've reached a place where, you know, like you just said, you're surprised that there's an instance where, wow, CBS actually covered one of the biggest stories of the last week.
They actually gave two minutes to it.
You know, it's sort of like we think that's progress because the situation is so, the starting point is so bad.
You mentioned earlier that you feel like in 10 years we might be past the point of no return.
I don't think you were meaning to be alarmist, but you're saying things are heading in this direction where there just isn't a lot of news anymore.
I don't know if you agree, it seems to be accelerating in that direction.
What do you see, and this appears a bit in the conclusion of your book, But what do you see as the path forward to try to get back to straight-up journalism, frankly, and let people make up their own minds?
Well, I think people should definitely keep speaking about it.
Don't quiet down and just accept that this is the way it is.
Fight and call it out when you see it.
But I think the answer, there's a lot of people working on this problem, because in the general public outside of Washington, D.C. and New York and outside of the newsrooms, The public wants regular old news again.
And I've asked a lot of questions of people over the years, even those who want to watch CNN and MSNBC for their left news and want to watch Fox News for their right news or CBS or whatever, CBS for their left.
They still all say they would go to a place that was in the middle if there was a place because they know they have to kind of discount the news they see depending on where they watch it.
You know, they know that if they see a certain thing, well, you know, I know where they're coming from.
And they want a place where they can go and kind of get the straight story and believe that they're getting a factual representation.
So there's a market for it, I believe.
And a lot of people know this, and a lot of news people are trying to figure out how to make the most of that and how to make it where these big tech platforms then don't control...
What they're doing.
So on two fronts, there are news people that are trying to develop news sources that do that very thing.
And secondly, there are technical people that are working on the problem of being able to distribute news and opinion outside the platforms controlled by the big tech companies in a way that they can't de-platform you and take your opinions off and take certain scientific studies out.
So I think we'll have a breakthrough because there's smart people working on the problem.
I'm not smart enough to know technically what form that'll take, but I'd like to think we'll go down that road.
One of the scariest things to me, let's look at the coronavirus example.
Google announced that it had developed a partnership on the front end of this with the World Health Organization to make sure when people were searching under coronavirus early on that they would be directed to, you know, World Health Organization approved information and sites.
How dangerous is that?
Especially when you consider that WHO admits it was wrong about so much.
But by doing this, Google has cut us out of the equation of being able to say, we know you guys are wrong, medical experts are sometimes wrong, and the government is sometimes wrong, and certain experts.
And then they've cut you out of being able to easily do your own research and find unconflicted information, because they're directing what you'll see when you look for information.
And again, by their own admission, we're dead wrong about quite a few things that they put out.
But that's where we were being pointed to.
So imagine that, and that's happening with other issues, too, that they're not disclosing, on a massive scale where pretty much any information you try to access, they get to control who you're pointed to, and you will never find the scientific studies that say the other thing because they'll have effectively buried them or made sure that they're unseen.
Well, this is a very interesting point because I think there's tons of evidence that the WHO was compromised by perhaps the biggest special interest out there, the Chinese Communist Party.
Well, so that is the most important reason, again, why I at least don't want special interests coming in and curating my information and my searches.
And I firmly believe if a private company wants to offer that service to the people that work with it, hey, would you like us to curate your information?
Would you like us to aim you to places where we want you to look?
That's fine.
But I also think we shouldn't have to opt into that because there are some of us On various topics that want to do our own research, some of my best stories have come from me being able to go off of the narrative, off of what's being reported by these news organizations that would be accepted as the only true sources, but are actually reporting wrong information.
And I'm able to dig deeply and find counterpoints and people who know different information and other scientific studies that ultimately turn out to provide the truth.
If you cut that off from people, You know, you've a thousand percent been able to just control, you know, the line of thought in a negative way.
And I joke that if this were the case, you know, several decades ago, we would still say cigarettes were safe because let's say there are all these studies that show cigarettes can cause cancer.
Well, prevailing opinion at the time said that that wasn't true.
Doctors at the time said there was nothing wrong with smoking cigarettes.
They would effectively be able to impact what we see and know so that we would never see those studies.
That show that cigarettes were actually unhealthy.
And we would be bouncing around today, happily smoking or, you know, believing that that was true, I guess, and wondering why people were dying, without understanding that there were many scientific studies supporting that review, because we wouldn't have been able to access them under this sort of control that we're talking about.
Cheryl, there's many, many of these examples, and I think your book is an incredibly thoughtful treatment of this whole issue, and frankly, in a very, very balanced way.
That's why I asked you about your political inclinations, because you keep them close to yourself, clearly.
When is the book coming out, and how can people get it?
November 24th, pre-order now anywhere.
If you don't want to order from Amazon, you can order from HarperCollins or anywhere you like to get books.
And on my website, thank you for asking, CherylAckison.com, if you click where I'm promoting Slanted, you can find out how to get signed copies or a free signed bookplate sticker to put in there as a gift for somebody.
Whatever you want to do, all the information is there.
And I've said that It would really be nice.
My social media is throttled down, if people know what that means.
My reach is far smaller this year than it has been in past years, even though I have a much greater following because it's being dialed back.
And so I'm trying to promote the book any way I can.
And I say, wouldn't it be nice for the New York Times to be forced to put my third book in a row on its bestseller list when there's a chapter in it about the devolution of the New York Times?
That's like one of my goals.
So I hope people will consider pre-ordering.
So I wish you the best of success with that.
Any final thoughts before we finish up?
Well, I would just say that as simple as something, I've gotten some very nice reviews and discussions of the book from people like you and others.
But interestingly, I thought it was interesting, Publishers Weekly, wasn't even sure what that is, but they put out what I consider a very lukewarm review and Doesn't even look like they read the book, very short review, where they call it unconvincing.
And I'm thinking, this is interesting.
It's another example of, in my opinion, somebody who doesn't want people to read the book for their own reasons, made sure a review was written.
There's no name signed with these reviews that they put out, but they're pretty well read inside the industry.
And they put out sort of a negative review.
And this is all, again, part of, I think, I suspect...
A shaping of the information landscape.
And it reminds me of Scott Adams, who's off narrative.
He's written those comedy books, comics about Dilbert, and he's a Trump supporter.
And he talks about, and I have this in my last book, When he became a Trump supporter or became someone that people didn't like for that reason, his speeches got canceled.
He got negative reviews about his book that was coming out that were suddenly posted.
There are all kinds of things that are happening in ways that are unseen to us.
And I just say...
Dig deeper.
When you see something happening or a narrative being forwarded by so many people, your first thought should be not necessarily, I believe that, but who wants me to believe that and why?
And that, I think, will lead to a lot of truth.
Cheryl Latkeson, such a pleasure to have you on.
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