The Best Conversation About News, Opinion and Censorship You've Ever Heard - Richard Miniter

31:13Francis Foster:Which time are we talking about? So sorry. Let's say 1890 to 1900. The muckrakers emerged just after that, and they do some fabulous reporting on the evil things that happen in meatpacking plants and so on. A little bit later, by 1920, Walter Littman writes a fantastic book called Public Opinion. And they are criticizing the news as being too slavishly devoted to the audience, right? To put it in British terms, too much like the Daily Mail and not enough like the New York Times, right? By the way, much later, the New York Times is founded as a Republican newspaper initially. Funny how things start out.

31:58So these progressives want to change the news. the news should not be what the public wants to consume right because from the public's point of view you consume news for entertainment reasons and to help you make decisions who do you vote for where do you send your kids to school is this a safe neighborhood to build a house in to buy a house in etc etc to make decisions and you don't necessarily expect the media to tell you what your values are. You want to find those out on your own. But there are a great number of intellectuals in this time period who want to tell you what your values are. And they come out of the continental European idea of news.

32:42And a great number of the early progressives actually studied in the socialist precincts of Germany in the late 19th century for longer or shorter periods. And they're bringing these ideas with them. This whole freewheeling, anything can happen, as long as we can prove it, we can report it, that whole ethos has to go away. This needs to be calmed down and governed and run by adults. And look, their criticisms are basically correct. I mean, the newspapers were pretty wild. They would say pretty outrageous things. So did they need to be professionalized and reined in a bit? Yes. but what they wanted to design was far more than that they wanted to design a german french model in which what the media reported and what the governing class wanted was the same so what they wanted was to reverse the decision that embarrassed the royal governor of new york in 1735 200 years later they wanted a do-over and we the great and the good should be safe from your ridicule from your jokes and they were going to construct a system to do exactly that so at first they tried a frontal assault and they uh started uh they they made friends with a very interesting character called S.S.

34:13McClure, and he starts publishing these long-form magazines, and they would publish literally 10 ,000-word articles on very, you know, wheat production and things of this nature. And no one read those, or very few people read those. And so as a commercial venture, McClure wasn't doing so. McClure's magazine is the famous progressive magazine at this time, but there are others right uh so we're we're in 1906 1908 here and they start going after um they start doing what fdr would call trust busting uh they go after rockefeller and the the other uh robber barons and they start to realize that these long dense articles aren't going to work but they still want to change society.

35:03They still want to change the media. So they pull back and they think about the problem. And this is where we see the beginning of a century of changes that give us the kind of news that make us entirely unhappy today. So first they begin with awards. Let's reward people, not just financially, because what the financial rewards are always going to line up with what the readers want. We need to be able to reward people for things that we want. So they invent the Pulitzer Prize. They invent journalism schools. These are the correct people to be journalists. It's not you. By the way, at this period of time, yes, there are some college people who write for newspapers from the beginning, but most of these are blue-collar observers of real life, right?

35:56So they've been sailors and printers and warehouse guys. And so they're not as susceptible to ideology, and they're very immersed in the real world. So like, wait, you want to do what? You want to open up asylums and let those people live on our streets? And that doesn't sound like a good idea. What are you thinking? What could go wrong? those kind of people are not congenial for the progressive cause in 1906. So in 1908, they formed the first journalism school in the United States, which is in Missouri. In 1912, you get the Columbia School of Journalism, which later awards the Pulitzer Prize.

36:39And they start to distinguish. This is the professional man who went to, you know, this law school for lawyers. And by the way, there wasn't always before that. There's the four ends of court in your country. So just as they took the casualness of the training of lawyers and professionalized it in a German way, they did the same thing in journalism. Now, in law, that's a more arguable thing. That probably makes sense. With journalism, it definitely does not, because you get a very particular class and a very particular point of view instead of a newsroom full of competing classes. and some are immigrants and some people were born here you know before the revolution and it's just a constant rolling debate and observation about society newsrooms used to be really fun wild places when I joined the Wall Street Journal back in 2000 one of the things the HR department made me sign was a document saying I would not keep a bottle of liquor in the office and that's probably because Because decades before, this was actually a problem in the Journal of Life and in other newsrooms.

37:48Okay. So they start to professionalize, they start to hand out awards, and then they realize what they really need is unions. If they can control the means of production, they control what is produced. The problem is that journalists don't like unions. And there is a battle between 1908 and 1933 to unionize. And most of these people simply do not, just like school teachers in this period of time, rejected all attempts at Union Safe. And in 19, I think it's 1908, or shortly thereafter, the LA Times is bombed by unions for refusing to unionize. The building explodes. Several people are injured. I think one or two are killed.

38:33And it made worldwide news. Half a city block was burnt or damaged by the explosion. And if the dynamite had been placed slightly better, the deaths would have been far more numerous. And ultimately, the Justice Department investigates and discovers a ring of bombers associated with the unions. And this did not help unions appeal. The journalists wanted to be free to write what they saw, what they heard, what they felt, what they thought. Doesn't mean these people were saints, but that's what they wanted. They wanted that freedom of movement. And the unions wanted a more formalized, controlled structure.

39:24And these early violent acts actually slowed down their appeal. But by 1933, they had their first major newspaper unionized. And between the 1930s, under the New Deal in the United States, and by the early 60s they had basically unionized all television, all radio, and all the major newspapers in the United States. And of course the news wires, the Associated Press, and Reuters were unionized this time. All under the same union. So now you have a cartel. Ultimately this union fractures and there's a couple of major news unions, but the News Guild of America was the dominant union at this time.

40:05And with unionization comes resistance to change and certain habits of mind which don't like dissent. Dissent is not good for being in charge of a cartel. Toxic, in fact. And this starts to drive out of journalism the people who, the oddballs, the innovators, the strange people, the people who, you know, will camp out and go after a story when everyone else thinks there's no story there, the creative and the self-destructive, right, which often can be the same person. And you left in its place is a lot of middle class people looking for a safe, predictable job. This changes what kind of journalism is produced.

40:57I'm not saying that Greek journalism wasn't produced in this period, 30s to the 60s and even after the 60s, because that would be absolutely false. There are some of the most amazing reporting, writing, investigations were in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. So I'm not casting aspersions. I'm just saying the kind of person who went into news.

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42:35Francis Foster:Visit uaustin.org. That's uaustin.org. But the progressives, even after all of this, They've created journalism schools. They've set up professional associations like the Society of Professional Journalists to issue ethics rules. They have awards. They have unions. They still don't feel like they have control over this crazy beast that is the media. So they start to push for public ownership. In the late 1940s, we get publicly owned stations, radio stations, in San Francisco, New York, LA, and a few other places. Ultimately, in the 60s, we see the emergence of national public radio and public broadcasting, which is the television arm.

43:23And it's like, let me show you guys how it should be done, is basically the approach of public media to try to condition the private market from going off, leaving the catechism. And then we also see the emergence of the media critic, the person who criticizes media coverage and basically taps everyone back into line. This starts roughly with Walter Lippmann, but it really takes off in the 1950s and by the 1970s. A lot of places have media critics and people, journalists, live in fear of being criticized by the media critic. And so if you look at what they're doing, they're creating more and more institutional strengths to try to drive the media in one direction.

44:18to tamp down dissent, to be the anti-internet to the greatest extent possible. And in the course of doing this, they're actually producing a very different kind of news than what I originally described. They want to write the orthodox official opinion. And we see the climax of this in COVID. How dare you report on dissenting views? How dare you cover ivermectin? How dare you say this? How dare you say that? Well, there's no how dare you in journalism. If it's true, report it. If it's not true, say someone's spreading a lie and prove that. But there's no, without fear or favor is the New York Times' famous saying back in the day, What about that?

45:11It's a great standard. And reality is incredibly complex and ever-changing. To think that the orthodoxy of the people in charge always comports a reality is just a childish point of view. Of course it doesn't. What's really cool is not to be a prosecutor to defend and punish what the officials think is right and wrong, but to be a detective, not a prosecutor. What's really going on? Why are these people think this and are doing this while these other people are? Be a detective. That's the original idea of news. So what we have here are two different ideas of news, which have been with us since ancient days.

45:56which we thought we banished in the 1735 Zenger case, but are very much with us today. An official establishment view that is frozen and is negotiated within itself, unaccountable to the general public, or a form of news that is constantly curious, that holds its ideas very lightly because other evidence might emerge that might have to release those ideas, that understands that the world is complex and different and barricaded and therefore fascinating. Two different ideas of news. And what we're seeing playing out with all these battles on X and on YouTube is these two different ideas are in a deathmatch, in a duel, and only one can win.

46:47And depending on which side wins depends on how we will see reality in the coming decades. Will it be dictated by the professionals, the experts, the people who know better? Or will it be wild and woolly and unpredictable and fun?

47:07Francis Foster:Well, one thing that's fascinating, by the way, 40-minute analysis of the history of... Sorry, guys. This is why we love you. This is fantastic. So much to pick up on there. The first and obvious thing to me is you haven't said anything so far about the funding model. And that must change at some point as well, because if I am in the Gutenberg era, I am selling a newspaper or a proto-newspaper to the audience, to the person who's going to buy it. If I'm running a TV... I was just miraculously in a TV channel studio this morning, not to do something, to have a coffee with somebody. and while I was waiting I watched you know they have like a 10 screen screen with different TV channels on it while I sat there waiting for my meeting within 5 15 minutes I probably saw about 20 ads for health care of various kinds for for a big pharma company the entire business is basically run so when you come back to COVID you're going that is not an accident that they were pushing a particular narrative on it because the entire business model at this point is dependent on the advertisers who dictate to them what they ought to believe.

48:22Francis Foster:And that's something that I think is probably worth delving into as well, the funding model of the business. Okay, so I don't think there are advertisers, like, I know the network news is full of, like, incontinence ads and things for old people, right? But it's not because those people run the news. I would be shocked to learn that Bayer or Merck or Pfizer actually says to the anchors of the evening news, don't do this story or do this story. That would be shocking to me. But they don't need to. But those advertisers are there because that's who the audience is. If you were selling things that were of interest to young people, it would not be a good investment because there's virtually no one under 40 watching those programs.

49:09in fact getting information from broadcast television is something that younger people just don't do in any appreciable numbers yeah so and it's i loved again loved the opening of the interview it was so rich and so informative and what i think i would love to talk to you about is a role between news and censorship. Because I was reading in pushback of This Is Wrong and PBS were giving me fake news, as it were. But I was reading that particularly in Spain and Britain, that censorship, the moment the Gutenberg press started to be used, the moment it was used to challenge authority was the moment the authorities, basically crowning church, went, I think we need to take a hold of this.

50:03Absolutely, right? um and i think the is it tyndale is the first translator of major translator of the bible into english and i think he's burnt alive outside the walls of oxford in 1557 something like this um yeah these people paid with their lives but they were a very hearty and determined lot and And they kept insisting on their right to tell people about their encounter with God and their views thereby, which were heterodox. And the more that society, the state, tried to stamp down on them, the more people who didn't share their views developed some sympathy for them. Right. And also it made people question things that had not been questioned before.

50:59and this is hard for us to fully imagine because we are living in a post-religious world especially among educated people but religion was a deadly serious subject in this time in the 16 17 1800s and the idea that your baptism might be illegitimate and then you might therefore not be saved and therefore your death might be meaningless and you might just disappear when you die was horrifying because if your death is meaningless in this time period your life is meaningless and if you take away someone's meaning you might as well have ripped out their spine they have no so this these were highly fraught issues and the idea that because it's such an important and personal issue you as a matter of conscience have the right to explore your connection to the divine and therefore your connection to the real world as well and i'm not saying the divine world isn't real i'm saying the ordinary world the world we see here now that's an extension of this core thing but in a society that takes religion deeply seriously the right to pursue and figure this out on your own as long as you're not harming other people right if you are bringing children into dangerous activities that end up in their disfingerment or dismemberment or you're compelling people not to pay taxes to the king or things that defy courts these kinds of things were not tolerated and the public largely went along with the king stamping down on that stuff but if it was just a bunch of people sitting in a room singing songs out of key the public support for this was quite low and one of the great aspects of the english constitution at this period we're talking in the 1600s uh before cromwell the king had to enforce his will through sheriffs and every county had a sheriff at this point and the sheriffs would often refused to do it.

53:12They would refuse to collect taxes if they thought the taxes were unjust. They would refuse to imprison people for, like, what these people are doing is harmless. You know, I don't like their music. I don't like their view of the Bible, but, oh my gosh, they're just sitting inside on a dreary winter day, like, doing their thing. Why do I care, right? The sheriff just wouldn't do it. And the king's ministers knew this, and they tried, there's his correspondence, So they're trying to figure out how to get these sheriffs to actually enforce the king's censorship. But also, the idea that censorship is a bad idea ultimately came to be embraced by Catholics because it was used against them.

53:53Censorship was used against them. But initially, this was a deeply, deeply Protestant idea. By the way, censorship always fails in the long run. What's tempting about it is it seems to work in the short run. So let's look at Weimar Germany, 1920s, right? Hyperinflation, jazz age. You've got this in your mind now, right? We've all seen the miniseries. The Social Democratic Party, which is the SPD, still a major force in German politics today. It was the ruling party throughout most of the 1920s. And it was worried about the Nazi Party, its main rival. and it had increasing amounts of censorship, banning books, banning magazines, banning public gatherings, and all of it drove actual support for these dangerous evil lunatics, the Nazis.

54:47And then in 1933, through a series of unfortunate events, Hitler ends up as Chancellor of Germany and takes all those censorship laws and applies them to the people who put them in place in the first place, the social Democrats. And there's a famous incident in the fall of 1933 where they cry out in the Reichstag and say, this is wrong. You're violating our rights. You're censoring us. And Hitler said, as a very cold voice, I would have much more sympathy for you and your free speech rights if you hadn't been taken hours away for the previous 10 years and the hitler supporters and others applaud hitler's cold calculating voice so this is where censorship leads it's ultimately used indiscriminately against everyone it's a very dangerous game what we're seeing in this Trump hatred today is oh my gosh you're you're using the laws against me but I'm one of the good people and there are those of us who believe in limited government who say be very very careful of the laws you write because they're you're not going to be in charge forever and those laws will still be there write rules that you can live with when you're not in charge.

56:18And it's such a good point. And yet at the same time, I do have empathy for platforms like YouTube during the pandemic, where you had conspiracy theories like David Icke going 4G causing COVID, for example, which we all know to be ludicrous, apart from a very sizable minority of people, some of whom burnt down 4G towers or destroyed them or whatever else. And people will go to the execs at YouTube and going, Well, this is your fault. How did you allow this to happen? Yes. Look, there are people, the audience for censorship is quite large and well-educated and well-placed. And they will not just say what you're saying, because that's kind of reasonable.

57:04Like, can we really push people to commit violent acts and destroy property? Is that like a good thing? Surely that's actually illegal in many cases. But you can't always get rid of the content that you don't like with such, you know, not everyone's appealing to violence, right, or property destruction. So they use copyright strikes. Oh, this person misused this, you know, he has three seconds of a song and he doesn't own a license to that song. Or he's got this photograph. Well, he put it on the screen for a second to illustrate his point. But there's no good, at least in the U.S., no good definition of fair use.

57:43And so they'll use copyright strikes to take down unpopular people. Or their claim that they have stolen intellectual property. You know, he's copying me. I said this out first. All that kind of thing. So they will be very legalistic and formalistic in taking down these things. I've always wondered why we've decided that the moderation has to be done at a central point. And if the moderation isn't perfect, the company that pays the moderators is somehow at fault. Instead, why doesn't every user get a dashboard and say, okay, I don't want to see any teenage nudity. I don't want to hear any swear words.

58:31You turn the dials, right? For all the stuff we hate seeing on our screens or we don't want our kids to see on their screens, there are other people who love it.

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59:45Francis Foster:Having both the ready to drink and the powder in my kitchen keeps me from falling off my routine. Honestly, it just makes hitting your protein goals a lot less stressful. Get Huel's full high protein starter kit online with our code trigger20 for 20 % off at huel.com slash trigger20. New customers only. Thank you to Huel for supporting Trigonometry. That site again is huel.com slash trigger20. Well, that is a really great point. And I think that it would be great if these platforms did move to that kind of model. This isn't a conversation we - Because let me just say one thing. A lot of this is bad faith, right?

1:00:23Oh, this content is so offensive. No, actually, it's just challenging your point of

1:00:27Francis Foster:Well, totally agree. And this is what I was going to bring up the example. I don't know if you saw our interview with the CEO of the Center for Counting Digital. Hey, Imran Ahmed. Great name, though. Great name, isn't it? Imran Ahmed, who did turn out to be a bit of a nutter. But one of the questions I said to him, and this is, I think, where it really is not as simple as I think you're saying for the following reason. And I said to him, look, do you think it should be allowed to call for an armed revolution on social media? And he was like, no, do you? And I was like, well, I don't know. But what I'm saying is this country wouldn't exist if people were not allowed to call for an armed revolution on the equivalent of social media of that time.

1:01:15Francis Foster:The United States would not exist. Right. Well, there were people arrested. Yeah. Sedition against the king. Right. Right. But that's exactly what I'm saying, though. If you think about it in the modern context, though, I think you'd probably find that the overwhelming majority of the public would be like, we don't want a civil war caused by people saying these things online. Do you see what I'm getting in that? They call it the risk of real world harm. Yes. But what we really don't want is these people deciding that these people shouldn't be allowed to say things which aren't really calling for violent revolution, but these people are pretending that it does.

1:01:55Totally. Just to disrupt a point of view they don't like.

1:01:58Francis Foster:Of course. And that has happened to a ridiculous, disgusting level over the last 10 years in particular. There's no question about that. But is it really as simple as saying there is never a case of restricting what people say online even when there is a credible risk of real-world violence? We don't have to reinvent this. The English common law has been looking at this problem for roughly a thousand years. There's a ton of real world collisions of interests that have produced cases and decisions. And we just have to return to these very common sense ideas. right so we can't have people marketing things as food that are in fact poison and people die right we you know there are you the classic example about shouting fire in a crowded theater um it doesn't mean that everything you say has to be provably true some to some of your freedom of speech is the right to freely speculate right i think ai will be the end of the world i think ai will be the greatest thing well you know as yoda likes to say always in motion is the future right like it's hard to know it hasn't happened yet right so people should be there should be freedom of speculation uh you shouldn't be able to hold yourself out as something that you're not you say trust me i'm a doctor this is perfectly safe well hang on you know you you did one semester in biology and you failed out like you're not actually a doctor right you can't represent things that are just not true.

1:03:30And so there's a whole body of law about what you can say and do that has been around for many, many years, in some cases centuries. We don't need to reinvent this. We just need to return to the common sense and apply it to the internet.

1:03:45Francis Foster:So should you be able to call for an armed revolution on Twitter? Actually, I mean, you're asking me about the state of the law or in my heart? In my heart, yes. In my heart, yes. now that doesn't mean i think you should and we're going to gather on third street and the arm stock is here and this is how you make the dynamite no but if you are saying this is a ridiculous state of affairs we clearly need a better ruling class you know this governor should be you know hoisted on his batard and thrown out the window whatever yeah i think you should be free to say that and think that and feel that you you know what's so interesting is that we went from the model you described until very recently, you know, that Roman model, which was here is the approved news.

1:04:31You know, we're going to give it to you and everybody else, you know, it's going to calm people down because they feel they've got the facts. All of a sudden, I don't know about you, Richard, and I've done, I've constantly feels this way. I kind of feel like I've been in a relationship with somebody and I've just realized they've been lying to me. And not only have they been lying to me now they've been relying throughout the entire relationship so i'm now in the position and i think a lot of people are what i'm like you say this is it true can i believe you right and that's the problem with being portrayed because you re-see the relationship and everything that that person or thing has done becomes instantly negative in every detail but that's an overreaction that's wrong look we all have problems with the bbc what they report and what you see on the i mean you we've all three of us have had the same experience and most of the people watching who are familiar with the bbc about this service they're at an event the bbc covered they saw what they saw and then they saw the bbc report and you're like hold on look were you guys even in the same room planet on the other hand because we feel betrayed we say everything they do is bad they've done some brilliant things over the years yeah my favorite and i recommend this to everyone is the kenneth clark series civilization which you can watch i think for free on youtube it's about four hours and the bbc was going to go to color in 1967 and they conceived this idea of having this oxford don talk about the sweep of western civilization people actually bought televisions or gathered to watch this series was the first BBC release in color.

1:06:14And the guy at the BBC who decided to give Kenneth Clark this was David Attenborough, who goes on in the 70s as a Marxist, but as a fabulous reporter of nature to give us those, now that we now satirize them and joke about them, these great accounts of how the natural world works. So yes, Francis, we feel betrayed by the BBC, but let's not let that color our thinking they did do some brilliant and beautiful things right i gave you a couple examples but we can all think of others and but you but in quibbles aside the official version is not the news the news the official version is part of the news but the rest of the news is the tenacious independent-minded investigation to get the closest approximation of the truth that you can before your deadline and that's subversive and it always will be and that's its appeal but look i'm in agreement with you but let's take that relationship metaphor betrayal it kind of look what the point you make is true but let's say you've been in a marriage for 30 years it's really happy and one day your partner cheats on you that is a fundamental breaking of the trust yes relationship yes and many times it's it doesn't matter what's happened in the 28 years previous yes if the two years during that time they've been off shagging the secretary it's incredibly difficult to go you know what i'm now gonna go back to the previous 28 years in many ways you can't do it you have to have a new relationship with media right yes and maybe that means they've so destroyed the trust that all of these great brands disappear or maybe that's not a good idea and we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater i don't know the answer it's one of those two things but i really don't know the answer but i do know this the so-called great brands the legacy brands cannot continue in the way they have been doing without restoring the relationship of trust.

1:08:37Without trust, you don't have a relationship.

1:08:41Francis Foster:Well, absolutely. And to extend France's metaphor, the thing that I've been somewhat concerned about, hence my kind of pushing back on you to try and find out where the boundaries of what the three of us believe are, is also the fact that when you've been betrayed in a relationship and you leave that relationship, it is very tempting to go on, I don't know if you call this in the U.S., but to go on the rebound. Yes. Which is to get into a series, usually, of terrible new relationships with really untrustworthy, unsuitable characters. Right, so you leave the New York Times, you end up following Crazy Loon on X.

1:09:15Correct.

1:09:16Francis Foster:And I think we're also, if we're being fair, seeing quite a lot of that going on. Oh, absolutely. And so that's where it's interesting. But also, I think the technological aspect of this in the current moment is as huge as it was at the times of the printing press and onwards, because one of the reasons people under 40 don't watch the news is just we use a different set of technology. That's also another thing that's going on. And I imagine if you're a TV executive now, if you've got a brain, what you're going is, how do we make the thing that we currently make more like the thing that the people under 40 are actually watching?

1:09:51Right. Yes. It's so bad that the term news for people under 40, they're consuming news and not realizing it because they don't go to the established legacy brands anymore even online right but when you get information from the outside world and use it to make decisions and it's more or less independently created that is news but that's not how they think of news they think of news as whatever the output is of these legacy brands and that they don't want that's toxic that's right distrusted yeah right and the internet and artificial intelligence presents an enormous opportunity to reinvent how information what i would call news is delivered how it is gathered how it is processed and verified and fact checked and then how it is delivered and to whom i don't know what device and i think five years from now it'll be completely different across the English-speaking world.

1:10:55And 10 years from now, it'll be completely different everywhere outside of China.

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1:12:29Francis Foster:Describe me the picture that you see five and 10 years from now. I think we'll see a lot more people creating news. I think we'll see a set of enforceable software rules that will verify that this is a real photograph and not an AI creation. It's a real video. You really did interview Kim Kardashian, right?

1:12:58We will get to see beyond what's in the story to what are the sources behind it. what software now makes possible through simultaneous automatic instant translation by summing up large data sets right you can first you can create an entirely new kind of experience of news and that's actually something that i'm working on now which i'll be happy to talk about offline but the technology is beyond exciting and i'm not the only one thinking about this there are other people some in legacy places some in startups who are thinking about this too there's a lot going on and if the great and the good can back off and the journalism schools can stop telling us how things should be and let things evolve i think we could get beyond the official version and have, I mean, think about who also could be drawn.

1:14:00This field is, more people have left journalism in the past 20 years than any other field. The U.S. Department of Labor keeps track of this in the United States. And the job description of newsroom reporter has shed more jobs than steel workers, iron workers, than any other profession they track since 2000. person. That should be reversed. Why isn't everyone who's creating a YouTube channel and struggling to monetize it not able to create content that meets a set of verification rules and then goes into a marketplace and becomes available to every device on the internet? You can take it or not take it.

1:14:44Think about the differences in perspective that would be possible if you have a single mother in Mexico City covering something, and a college professor in Boston covering that same thing, and a structural engineer out in Overland Park, Kansas, looking at that same thing. And all three of them are following the objective verification rules that the software makes possible, and they're all reporting it. But they're reporting it, asking the questions, and wondering the things, and investigating from their own perspectives. I guarantee you they'd see it all differently. And it's such a good point.

1:15:27But if we focus, for instance, on the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is obviously awful and terrible, you have lots of people talking about it. And it became quite a fascinating case study to look at people's reactions, including established journalists and seeing how people reported. And the thing that worries me, Richard, is that the incentives become not to tell the truth, not even to sensationalize the truth, but to spread conspiracy theories. Because that's where the money is. The money is not in the truth. Right. Well, I would divide the conspiracy theories into two pieces, right? Some are the native-born conspiracy theories.

1:16:11That is to say, I'm not talking about the citizenship status of these people. I'm just saying people who reside in our societies who think whatever they think. That's sort of item one, bundle one. Over here, we also have a lot of bots run by the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, and other groups who are trying to sow division and plant ideas in our society. And by society, I mean the Western world. and divide it over stupid issues and distract, right? And, you know, the medieval mind used to worry whether the ideas in their heads were their own or put there by some demon. When we consume the Internet, the first question we ought to ask is, is this put here by Qatar or Iran or, I don't know.

1:17:04China, Russia. Yeah, or some interest group in our country or another European country or Australian, whatever. So who is putting this out? We do know that during the 2020 campaign, for example, more than half of the followers, online followers, of the Biden campaign were bots. And some of them run out of India and Bangladesh by people who couldn't even speak English. So these are just fake followers, fake social media cred given to conspiracy theories. I don't think the answer is censorship. Let's crack down on all the crazy thoughts. Let other people answer back. And in the balance of things, the truth will sort itself out.

1:17:50But I do think we need to think about homegrown. I think the crazy people here get to have their say. But I don't think we need to import. We don't need electronic immigration into Western society from Russia, China, and other authoritarian places. and we need to find a solution to that because if we don't then what we have as you say are these people spouting crazy theories who are artificially boosted but i go on my social media and i'm going this is patently nonsense yeah it's got three million views how is this right i mean all this like pro hitler stuff online it's got to be manufactured i just i just can't believe that there is any real audience for a failed evil dictator who died, what, 80 years ago, right?

1:18:40I mean, it's just, there's no like pro-Napoleon groups to pick another dictator from a different country, right? Or pro-Stalin groups online. So it's, why is it all focused on this? Well, that serves the ideological needs of the current Russian government to pretend they're fighting nazis in the ukraine and so therefore they want to say there are nazis everywhere right is there some crazy people in a shack in rural idaho who truly believe this i can't rule it out i don't know but the online prevalence has got to be from a foreign intelligence service or foreign companies aligned with uh foreign intelligence services and then we need to look at payments made to influencers, people who are legitimate members of our society, who have very large followings, who suddenly start saying and doing things that don't fit with the last few decades of our experience of them.

1:19:38Why are you suddenly saying that Churchill was a bad guy, or maybe we weren't the good guys in World War II, or this dictatorial regime in the Middle East is actually a great place? Why are we saying these things? right are they receiving money who knows i certainly have no evidence i'm not going to say things i don't have evidence for but you do see a lot of out of character moves and we do see people on both the left and the right who seem to have been funded from overseas and we at least ought to have a rule that if you're taking foreign money you have to declare it openly so people know Fair warning, hey, you're secretly being paid off by Lichtenstein.

1:20:21That's why your views on banking are what they are. Why not? You have to list the ingredients on the food you buy. If you're taking money from outside of NATO, just tell us. You can say whatever you're going to say, but how about a little warning label?

1:20:36Francis Foster:Well, and maybe one of the, I don't think censorship is the answer to any of it, but I also wonder where the real journalism is the answer to it. Where are the investigative journalists who are looking into those allegations? Because every time I post anything that's remotely paraisal, people say, I've got$7 ,000 for that post. Well, I welcome people to look into that theory and find out. Likewise, with the people you're talking about, let's find out who's getting more income. People, first of all, don't understand the economics, right? An online video ad is, what, 12 or 15 cents per thousand impressions?

1:21:20Is that about right? Maybe you do a bit better with sponsorships and things. It takes millions of views to make a number interesting at all. Where are the investigative journalists? Investigative journalism is literally, today, is the most expensive form of journalism. So you need a very profitable publication that also has an open and exploratory mind to things together in order to have a crew of investigative journalists. And then not anyone can be an investigator. You have to apprentice. You have to study how to do it. There's a lot of tacit knowledge, a lot of skills that have to be developed to really do this.

1:22:01and the people who think that news ought to be the official story of something are very incurious. Do you hear the story about the guy running for U.S. Senator of Maine who had a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest? Right. And incredibly, the guy takes his shirt off and displays it in a video. Like, I would think if you had a Totenkopf tattoo, you would have quietly changed that years ago. But here's the thing. Here's my question. Why? He said he got it in Croatia. Are Totenkopf tattoos common in Croatia? I don't know. Probably not. But why hasn't somebody tracked down the tattoo parlor and interviewed the artist and say, do you have a whole special book of Nazi tattoos?

1:22:45Is this a common thing you do? Do you remember talking to this guy? And these kinds of questions, which aren't, it's not with social media, it's that expensive to find that person in Croatia. But it is time and money. but they aren't minded to do it they don't have the curiosity to see well how did this happen right what are the facts and a lot of your online influencer type people don't have the investigative skills takes years to hone this you need to find you know you need to know what databases to consult what's trustworthy what's your how do you design an investigation that takes time and practice and frankly you make mistakes one of the ways you learn right so this has atrophied on the left and never really developed on the right and until there's a budget and a curious mind to support it uh you won't see more of it you'll continue to see less and less of it However, I think when technology changes what kind of news is possible, technology can also lower the cost of finding out new things.

1:24:02If you really get smart at writing software, you could find that Croatian tattoo artist in a fraction of a minute. And then you can contact him across the world and say, hey, can I come see you? I'd like to look through your, because they all have sample books of tattoos they make, and they have a portfolio of the ones they're most proud of, right? And just have an open-minded interview with the guy. And what would you, maybe he doesn't remember the night, but if it turns out, oh yeah, we keep a small book in the back, you have to specially request it for the Nazi stuff, or no, we don't do that, this guy came in with the design and showed it to us, and we copied it, two different set of facts.

1:24:44But how did this tattoo come to be? Just an interesting investigation, right? And Croatia has, you know, interesting ties with the Nazi Party in World War II. There could be a cultural memory there. If he had this tattoo in Spain, I would be a lot more surprised. But Croatia, the Nazis hung on to that and to the bitter end. The militias associated with Croatia did horrible things against not just the partisans of Tito, but ordinary civilians and religious minorities um so is it possible sure and that's the thing that worries me about the death of the mainstream media i don't know if you've ever seen the movie spotlight yes which is a brilliant movie it's uh it's about the boston i can't remember the newspaper we said the boston globe the boston globe an investigation into pedophilia into the catholic church in boston and you watch this and it's based on a true story and you think to yourself that's such an important public service yes it's an important public service because there is always going to be corruption there is always going to be abuse and the best of the journalists in my opinion i'm sure you probably agree with the people who expose that and there's never going to be any less of that because human beings are what they are so if we don't have those people exposing it then we're going to be in a much darker and more unsafe world absolutely First of all, Boston at the time was a Catholic majority city.

1:26:17Going after the largest religion among your readership group takes guts, but behind that guts means you have a journalistic culture that has got a sense of fearlessness and recklessness, but it also has the professionalism to structure an investigation, to go about it, to make sure the witnesses are actually independent of each other. right so if you have two people who claim they saw something but they're both friends with each other they're not really independent eyewitnesses um now it's also interesting their their choice of targets right if you went after psychologists um especially people dealing with women following divorce or battered women there's a horrendous amount of sexual abuse there that never really gets investigated.

1:27:06There's also a tremendous amount of sexual abuse in public schools by teachers against children. Oddly enough, it appears, and I've not made a real thorough study of this, women against male teenagers. Those things don't get investigated because they don't serve a larger narrative. But still, I think it took guts. Spotlight was a useful thing. The church should be investigated like every public institution. And also I think it's important that the people in charge of vulnerable people have no sexual or financial interest in those people. That is very important. And we too often say in the name of rights and equality, oh, well, we should let this person supervise these people or be in control of this group of people.

1:28:02and that person could be great on an individual basis, but as a general rule, that will cause problems in the end. As we saw in sort of military training, when we have male drill instructors over female recruits, there were abuses. I mean, we have to be mindful of this, and we have to be clever about how we design incentives and how we surveil to make sure that wrongdoing isn't happening. And part of that is the media's job. And thank God for the Boston Globe going after the Catholic Church. And I hope they go after all the other sacred cows because accountability is desperately needed in all aspects of our society.

1:28:46And I'm afraid if we lose legacy media, we lose the muscle memory to do these kind of investigations.

1:28:54Francis Foster:Richard, that's us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Other examples of times and places where distrust in media is as high as it is today. If so, how is that trust regained within those societies?