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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
27:59
What’s Going on with American Journalism? | 30-Year Veteran Journalist Will Swaim
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Time Text
Don't just read a headline and assume you understand.
I'm guilty of this because I'm a human.
I'll read a headline and go, ah, that confirms my bias.
I like that story, but I don't read into it and I don't check the links.
Look at the logic behind the article and where it came from.
Yes.
And it's hard, you know, the public shouldn't have to do this.
Journalists should be really good at sorting through this stuff and telling people this is what it says and this is what it doesn't say.
But we can't trust, never could trust, somebody else to do this job for us.
We cannot, what's the word I'm looking for, outsource our democratic responsibility to somebody who runs a newspaper.
What is the current state of journalism?
Is it practical for journalists to keep their opinions out of the newsroom?
How does the business side of media influence the news that you read?
And how can you navigate the media landscape to ensure that you're getting the facts?
We sat down with veteran journalist Will Swain.
He's the president of California Policy Center and was the publisher of OC Weekly.
He's been a journalist for over three decades.
He's going to share with us his insider insight into the profession of journalism.
Welcome to California Insider.
Thanks for having me.
Welcome.
And we actually want to talk to you about journalism, the profession of journalism.
You've been in this space for three decades, 30 years, and the trust is eroding in media.
Can you tell us what's going on right now with journalism?
Sure.
I'll do my best.
I think you have to start with a misconception, which is that somehow there was a time when the media were different, when they were reliable and authoritative.
And I know a lot of people think that somehow the 60s and maybe even the early 70s were the halcyon days of journalism when guys like Walter Cronkite told you how it was and it was always straight.
But journalism throughout the world and certainly in America has been partisan, unfair, biased, unbalanced since the very beginning.
If you go back to the founding and before of America, you find papers that were directly affiliated with political leaders and political parties.
They made no attempt, zero attempt, to tell the other side fairly.
These papers were built as hammers to destroy the opposition.
You can see this in the War of 1812.
You can see it in the war with Mexico.
You can see it in the reporting on the Civil War.
There were Republican and Democrat papers during the Civil War that were either openly hostile to President Lincoln or openly supportive of him in denouncing anybody who had any questions about Lincoln and the Union's role in the Civil War.
My point is, this has been, it's always been this way.
So how come we hear that it was objective, that news was objective?
Was it in the 70s or 60s?
Yeah, it's in the 1970s that, in fact, you can start to see the origins of something called objectivity.
That's the idea that the way a scientist approaches an experiment with an hypothesis and testing the scientific method this is how journalism really is and that you can trace that back to the origins of sociology which is the early 20th century this idea that we can treat humans as that as humans we can treat other humans in a completely scientific and objective way in terms of their thinking So,
the rise of social sciences, I think, crests in the newspaper business in the 60s and 70s, and it's following, really following Watergate, I think especially, that you start to see papers like the New York Times separate out.
The opinion section from the rest of the news section.
So what is that supposed to signal?
Well, over here on these four pages, we have only opinion.
Everything else is not opinion, right?
That's the declaration of papers that made that dividing line.
That was an attempt to pretend that one thing was absolutely neutral and objective and scientific, that's the regular news section, and that everything over here was opinion.
That's the only place where we're allowed to say what we really think.
But the fact is, Reporters and editors always, perennially, from the moment they choose this story and not that one, have made a subjective decision.
When they choose to talk to those people but not these people to interview them for that story, they're making another subjective psychological preference decision, a biased decision.
So bias is built in.
It is inescapable as human beings that we're biased.
It's how we're built as animals.
And when you were in the newsroom, Would you bring your ideology into your reporting?
Oh, 100%.
But keep in mind, I never worked at a big daily newspaper.
I started as a columnist in some daily papers, but again, that was the idea that somehow this is just opinion.
And as an opinion writer, I would laugh at how biased the stories were in the news section, right?
Because again, just picking a specific story means that you're already predisposing the reader to think that that story is important, but another one is not.
So when I came, when I really got into journalism, I was a business reporter first for four years.
And, you know, that's neither here nor there, except that that's kind of where I learned the craft.
And then I started a paper here called OC Weekly.
I started it with lots of other people and a lot of backing.
And that was 1995.
And that paper had as its avowed, advertised perspective that we were lefties.
We were all lefties.
And we were here to correct, we thought, we believed, and I think we did, an imbalance in the press coverage in Orange County.
We had the LA Times.
And we had the Orange County Register.
The Register, particularly, was a much more kind of conservative libertarian paper on the op-ed pages, on the commentary pages.
The reporters were out of control sometimes, quite left.
But we were there to really kind of correct that imbalance.
You know, a paper that constantly could be counted on to protect Republicans, that's the Register, and the LA Times that should be counted on to represent Democrats.
So we were there just kind of trying to blow those two guys up.
And most of the people in my newsroom were left to far left.
I was perhaps the most conservative person as a kind of, what would you call me, a lefty libertarian.
And it was in that reporting, by the way, that I started to see you really can't trust parties.
You really can't trust, like, the Republicans will always be right or the Democrats will always be wrong or right.
It just doesn't work that way.
It's about individuals.
It's about issues.
And they'll be right or wrong.
So as a reporter, you have to be very, very careful.
There's an old saying in journalism in the newsroom, if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.
You're supposed to be skeptical.
Even if your mother tells you she loves you, you must be skeptical.
Has that gone away now in this space?
I would say it was never really present.
But is it worse now?
It's worse in some obvious ways.
I don't know if you watched the dismissal or resignations of opinion editors at the New York Times.
You had two people, one who was kicked out for green lighting a piece by Tom Cotton that the rest of the newsroom didn't like, so that guy went away.
And then it was just last week that a Jewish lesbian writer who should have all the progressive boxes checked off announced her resignation because she was bullied so badly for allowing that there might be conservative perspectives that are reasonable to include.
As she says, Twitter's not on the masthead of the New York Times, but it runs the New York Times.
So is this a problem?
Yeah, I would say it's gotten worse.
It was always there, but it's gotten worse.
Now, was there more balance in terms of the people that were working in the journalism profession, like different people had different...
So then you could balance each other out.
You know, when you were choosing a story, then your editor would say, this is too extreme or...
I think editors were better at checking people's perspectives, at requiring reporters to get a different side and to be fairer, I will say.
The New York Times now avowedly, I think, 60 percent of their reporting is probably OK.
Forty percent of it is just pernicious and wrong and so overtly biased that it's remarkable it's allowed to go through.
But it's clear the New York Times is now like what OC Weekly was in the 90s, that the reporters there have really taken as their mandate, their mission to advance a social agenda.
Rather than just trying to find out what the truth is and what really works, a lot of the reporters at places like the LA Times, like the LA Times, for instance, a lot of these reporters at these big dailies now consider it their job to hash out the liberal agenda, not to tell us what really works.
If we compare the content that's coming out of the media now to 30 years ago, does it seem that it's a lot different?
There's a lot more anger or...
Frustration in the articles?
Well, as I say, I think now major papers have accepted that their job really, not entirely accepted, but I think they've mostly accepted their job now is to advance a more, I'll call it, statist or government-oriented or liberal kind of perspective, certainly at the LA Times.
Just watching how reporters put together stories and the evidence they stack up and the things they emphasize and don't emphasize, it's very clear that whether they're aware of it or not, The reins have come off, or the leash has come off, and the reporters are now allowed a lot more latitude in telling a story with a, I think, predetermined perspective.
Do you think they're aware of it, or do you think they're doing it unconsciously because they believe in a cause?
That's their reality?
Yes.
Yeah, that's a great question, because I do think they believe that what they're doing is telling the truth.
I think that the most dangerous reporters have always been those who don't know about human frailty, who don't understand human bias and how it's inbuilt, and who see themselves in this kind of utopian way as the people who are really sort of above partisanship.
I have met reporters like this who say, I'm just reporting without fear or favor.
None of us is reporting without fear or favor.
I do my best to tell the truth, but I have a very explicit perspective, and I'm upfront about that.
I'm not hiding that from anybody when I report.
When you were reporting back in the day and you had your views of the world, were you thinking you were biased?
Oh, 100%.
Okay, you knew that you were biased.
Yes, I knew that I was biased, but I was biased because I had studied these things so much that I had come to the conclusion that free markets were dangerous and that what we really needed was more government regulation.
Now, I would like to say in my defense, in the defense of my colleagues, that some of us have changed, some of us haven't, but that I tried that out as a hypothesis, and it was in reporting that the results came back to me.
The idea that somehow government was a neutral arbiter, or that a regulator could be above partisanship, a government regulator, became clear to me.
That's not what they were about.
They were humans too, every bit as much as I was a human.
So government was subject to the same human frailties.
This is why the founding to me is so critical.
Pardon me for saying this, but I think that the Constitution is framed in a way that recognizes the human failing, the human frailty, the desire to use government for oneself.
So don't trust me to be your lord.
Don't trust that guy to be your lord.
That's what democracy is supposed to be about.
So as a young reporter, yes, I was very much a Marxist lefty.
And then you switched over time?
I switched over time.
It was impossible to be an honest reporter or editor and not see the failings on the one hand of some business companies, right, that they were incompetent or corrupt, but not see that as complete evidence that markets were failures.
Markets were, what was it Churchill said about democracy, the worst of all systems except for the others?
Free markets are like that.
They're not perfect.
Fortunately, there's a mechanism in place to punish the bad actor.
In government, you don't have that mechanism that punishes bad government.
It just continues to draw on resources infinitely and to continue to grind on in its own way.
So it was in reporting on things like government unions and their power To shape local government and state government in California that began to persuade me, maybe my idea that government regulators are great and that they're somehow neutral arbiters, not right.
That maybe this whole system has been captured.
So now, let's go to the business of media.
And you've been in the business of media.
There's been some major changes.
And how are these changes affecting media?
I'm glad you brought this up because I do think that, you know, again, to go back if I can for a moment to our conversation about objectivity and whether the 60s and 70s were the high watermark of journalism integrity, the whole notion of separating out opinion from fact, right, reporting from opinion, was designed to appeal to advertisers who were concerned about being upset by what they saw in the newspaper.
So an advertising salesperson or the publisher could meet a big advertiser, and the advertiser might say, I hated that story you did about my industry.
It made us look bad.
And the ad sales rep could say to that advertiser, I got it.
We can correct that stuff in the opinion page.
Those are just the reporters.
You know how that is.
But the opinion section over here, we got you, right?
Don't worry.
That's not us, in other words.
So you could tell national advertisers, we're neither right nor left.
We just tell it like it is on the news side of it.
But on the editorial side, we correct for these excesses.
And that persuaded lots of advertisers to stay in the game.
All of that changed.
I was really lucky.
When I came in to run The Weekly in 95, we were writing a crest of...
We ran a newspaper, and if you wanted to reach our audience of people who were between 18 and 35, who had probably lefty liberal politics and certainly wanted to live a slightly alternative lifestyle, like they were into rock and roll or hip hop or punk rock or whatever, they were going to be reading our paper.
And so we had a lock on that.
And then watch what happens as you get Craigslist.
Some people, you know, a lot of our younger viewers here today probably don't even know what Craigslist is anymore.
But Craigslist comes on and offers free ads.
And that immediately has the effect of blowing up the monopoly which newspapers have on a huge section of advertising revenue.
The classified ones, right?
The classified ads, right.
So our parent company was the Village Voice New York.
Fifty percent of their revenue came from being able to post rental ads in the back of the newspaper.
I could tell you about how important the Village Voice was in the rental sector of the economy in New York City up through the 90s.
And all of a sudden Craigslist comes out and starts offering this for free, right?
Well, the revenue just went away.
I mean, it went away in like 18 months to two years.
It was just gone.
And the Village Voice lost, I think, 25 to 50 percent of its revenue in a couple of years.
So now, if you're running a newspaper, a paper paper, as you guys do at Epoch Times, it's hard to get advertisers, right?
Because you may have readers in South Orange County and in Sacramento.
You're now limiting yourself to the kind of advertiser you can run, right?
Because a guy who runs a restaurant in San Clemente has no interest in readers in Sacramento.
They're not driving down for dinner tonight.
So you limit who you can go talk to.
The online media help answer that by being able to target specific audiences.
You know all this.
Geographically, by gender, by age, you can do all that stuff in a way that you can't in the newspaper industry.
So I was there when the newspaper industry was cresting, doing really well, and I was there in the early 2000s when it all started to collapse under the pressure of free ads online, Craigslist, and other competitors.
And what did it do to journalism?
Was it that the journalists need to write more stories?
Yeah, clickbait became the biggest problem.
So reporters were increasingly pressed.
And if you talk to any reporter of a certain age who was working in the early 2000s, they'll tell you that the pressure suddenly was no longer to go cover a big political issue like a City Hall scandal.
That didn't matter if, in fact, Somebody else who wrote a story about cute puppies with a bunch of photographs got 10,000 clicks, right?
Your City Hall story got me 100 eyeballs, or 100 sets of eyeballs.
This person with the cute puppies got 10,000 pairs of eyeballs.
Which do you think is better, the reporters would be told?
So you have these investigative reporters who are doing very important work, heavily subsidized.
I mean, you know what it's like to do investigative reporting.
It takes hours and hours, weeks and months.
Yeah, yeah.
To do a good story.
And what's the payoff?
Maybe a thousand people care, right?
But you show me pictures of cute cats doing weird tricks and you got a million hits, right?
So where's the advertising revenue going to go?
If you're just concerned about eyeballs, the market solution of advertising is going to be really problematic for you.
So we started to look, even when I was in journalism, we started to look at things like the nonprofit model, the way that National Public Radio operates, or PBS, for instance, that these are cultural institutions like the ballet, like opera, like theater, like museums, like a public charter school.
These are things that require the backing of significant, you know, financial interest to support that effort.
And it's why you have to subscribe to a paper like Epoch Times.
You know, if you like this kind of coverage, advertisers aren't going to pay for the hard work you guys do, I'm guessing.
I haven't looked at your books or talked to you about this.
We don't have much advertising, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So it really does depend on the subscribers to support this and other people who have a vested interest in seeing the truth come out.
So a lot of reporting went the direction of frothy and fluffy, dumb stuff that we all like.
I like to watch a funny cat video as much as the next guy or a cute dog doing a dog trick.
I'm like most people.
Yeah, those are cute.
But I'm really looking for investigative reporting, and that's hard to come by.
So I subscribe widely all over the place.
So that's my next question to you.
And in this climate of how The media is the landscape, and what would you recommend to our audience to do if they want to see the facts and they want to figure out what's going on?
Well, it's a great question, and I talk to everybody I can about what they do.
You know, like, I'd love to know what you do.
Here's what I do.
I subscribe to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bee, did I say the Orange County Register?
It's worth saying twice.
I subscribe to Epoch Times.
Why do I do this?
Because I am first just really interested in getting the widest breadth of information I can from a variety of sources.
I don't want to be a guy riding a train looking out one window and thinking I'm seeing everything on the planet or the cosmos.
You know, so I try to subscribe widely.
I haven't even gotten into my literary interests or film or anything like that.
There's, you know, ten other subscriptions there.
So, that's number one.
I read widely.
I watch almost no television news.
I just, I don't have the time for it.
Why don't you do that?
Because I think that it's not aimed at somebody like me.
It's more entertainment?
It's entertainment, yeah.
And that's not to say that I can't find good stuff watching CNN or Fox News.
You know, typically it's because somebody has sent me a link and said, watch these three minutes.
I don't have the time to sit in a, you know, you'll pardon me, a Barker lounger all day, and nor do you, and just watch CNN endlessly.
So I read quickly, and I'm really intrigued by—this is my second point— Come to totally different conclusions about something.
And so I'll dig into, at that point, I'll click on the links.
This is one of the virtues of online journalism, that we can actually link as reporters, and I still do this, to primary documents.
So I'll tell you a story.
About six weeks ago, I was working with the Orange County Board of Education as part of CPC, the California Policy Center, where I work.
And I was helping them develop a white paper on reopening schools.
And the question they put to me was, are kids at risk?
Are kids K through 12, are they at risk?
So I went out and I did a bunch of research, talked to a bunch of doctors.
They guided me to stuff online.
I read reports in foreign languages and tried to translate them into Google and then check back with the doctors to see if I'd understood this correctly.
Chinese studies, French, German, Scandinavian, American, of course, Canadian, you name it.
I was reading all over the place.
And it became very clear very quickly that, number one, kids do not suffer coronavirus at the same rate that adults do.
They don't transmit it in the same way or at the same level with the same kind of aggressiveness that adults do, and that they're certainly not dying.
I mean, if you look at the California state numbers, kids are not dying from coronavirus no matter what the teachers' union says.
But this was what the teachers' unions were arguing in California was the logic of closing the schools.
What about the kids?
And if the kids get it, they'll bring it home and they'll kill their grandparents.
Well, all this research that we'd found showed that, in fact, that story was bogus.
It wasn't true.
And furthermore, the American Academy of Pediatrics made the same claim, absolutely the same claim.
So I cited that.
Well, within a week of putting out that report, citing American Academy of Pediatrics, President Trump comes out and cites the same report.
And at that point, the media can no longer sit still.
They must begin to beat up on this organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Hitherto, always a really estimable organization with a great reputation, suddenly the left is questioning this.
And huge surprise, the American Academy of Pediatrics comes out with a joint press release that says, and it's a joint press release with the teachers unions, the NEA, the National Educators Association, the American Federation of Teachers.
And it says, basically, we stand by the science.
Science is really critical.
And by the way, we think that these All of these reopenings ought to take place in the context of local transmission conditions.
Well, the local transmission conditions in most of California are pretty low.
They're actually quite good.
L.A. might be an exception.
But the Academy argued, look, closing schools is more damaging to children than leaving them open.
Kids have more to risk by being locked out of their schools than they do going back.
So I'd written all this in the white paper document, and then people are starting to blow me up and say, hey, you got this all wrong.
The American Academy has walked back.
And they would send me a headline from NPR. American Academy of Pediatrics walks back, or did it say rescinds its scientific paper?
Well, the fact is, if you go back and click on the press release, as I asked many people to do, nobody did, go back and read the original press release, it doesn't rescind anything.
It says nothing about a change in the document.
And furthermore, if you go back to the original document, they haven't updated it.
They haven't changed it at all from the first moment we reported it.
So one of the great things that the online media allows us to do, whether it's Epoch Times or California Policy Center or the L.A. Times or anybody else, is link to original documents.
And I encourage readers all the time, be smarter.
Don't just read a headline and assume you understand.
I'm guilty of this because I'm a human.
I'll read a headline and go, ah, that confirms my bias.
I like that story.
But I don't read into it and I don't check the links.
Look at the logic behind the article and where it came from.
Yes.
And it's hard.
You know, the public shouldn't have to do this.
Journalists should be really good at sorting through this stuff and telling people this is what it says and this is what it doesn't say.
But we can't trust, never could trust, somebody else to do this job for us.
We cannot, what's the word I'm looking for, outsource our democratic responsibility to somebody who runs a newspaper.
to remain vigilant as readers.
So you go back to the hyperlinks in these stories and you ask yourself, read as much as you can tolerate and ask yourself, does the headline match the original source document?
So I tell that story.
I hope it's not terribly boring.
But my point is only that, you know, people read headlines.
They don't read the source documents.
They don't read into what's being done there.
I found it ironic in this instance, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics original document is science.
The joint press release with two political organizations is political.
So which of these two documents in determining whether your kids should go back to school, which of those do you want to rely on?
I'd say rely on them both because they both say the same thing.
But if you read the spin on it, oh my gosh, they've rescinded and walked something back.
So now let's get into, I want to ask you about the 22-year-old that wants to be a journalist that's actually about to graduate from school and is coming out in this climate of the land, in this space.
What would you tell them?
Well, I would hope to get to them before they're 22, because what I would say is don't go to journalism school.
And I can hear, you know, a hundred faculty members' heads exploding around the country right now.
But the fact is that journalism school is like learning how to be a blacksmith or a welder or something, right?
It is a technical thing, and that's fine, but the most important part is critical thinking.
And for that reason, I would say, you know, study a humanities, perhaps, or study science or business or something like that.
That is not just journalism.
Anything that teaches critical thinking is amazing.
I would recommend history if you're going to go to a good school that has a good history department.
Good luck finding it, however.
But once you graduate, I think the opportunities are still out there.
They're still myriad.
It's just not quite the same place as it was when I got into the business.
It's very different.
What I would recommend is go to a place and work, if you have to, for almost nothing.
And my first journalism job, so-called, were freelance jobs and working for free for people.
And my goal in working for those people It was always to learn more about how it was actually done.
So I sold my first piece of journalism to the Alternative News Weekly in Denver called Westward.
And they paid me $35, I think, for this piece.
And it was the experience of working with an actual editor that I was looking for, who didn't care about me, didn't love me.
They just wanted the piece done and done right.
That's all they cared about.
So finding an organization where you're not going to be abused, that is to say, where someone's neither going to tell you on the one hand, everything you do is golden, I wouldn't change a thing, because that's not real mentoring.
Look for a mentor, I guess what I'm saying.
Nor are they going to be so...
Mechanistic, they're going to treat you like a cog in a machine.
You're just going to be doing junk until somehow you miraculously come to somebody's attention.
Because you can develop bad habits.
Go to a place where you're going to be mentored.
At California Policy Center, for example, probably the same at Epoch Times.
We actually mentor our young writers.
We don't just throw them out there and say, hey, you've never written about, I don't know, global economics, write about the trade imbalance with China.
We don't do that.
Start small.
Start them with fact-checking, right?
Start them by looking at another reporter's work and going through and highlighting every question of fact and then researching to make sure it's accurate.
Teach accuracy.
So what I would tell a 22-year-old is put yourself in the position to learn.
No matter where it is, if you can afford it, work for nothing if that's the best opportunity.
But be wary, because the institution you enter has a bias.
It's an institution with a kind of a culture, and you want to make sure that culture reflects values that you can live with.
I would recommend if you end up at a place like the LA Times, you're going to drift leftward.
That's just the center of gravity at the LA Times.
If you go over to Fox News, it's going to be a very different thing, right?
I would argue if you go to Epoch Times, there's going to be yet a third thing and probably more balanced.
So find a situation where you can be mentored and taught more.
Treat it like graduate school.
That's what I did.
I couldn't believe it when I got my first journalism job at about, I was in graduate school, applied for and got a job as managing editor of a business publication.
And I thought, they're paying me to go to graduate school.
That's what they're really doing.
And they were paying me the princely sum of $40,000 per year.
In current dollars, that's probably $42,000 per year.
But the goal was learn.
Learn how this thing works.
And I couldn't believe people would pay me while I learned.
Thank you, Will.
It's great to have you on.
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