What Does the $15m ABC News Settlement Mean for the Future of Journalism?

Adrian McIntyre: 00:00:04

There have been more than a few times when a media organization that reports the news becomes the news and the story shifts and becomes about the people who report or make the news.

This has happened on numerous occasions, from the famous Watergate investigation, when the reporters themselves became the stars of the story, through to conflicts and controversies at the New York Times with their coverage on the war in Iraq. And recently, ABC News once again is in the news because of their settlement with President-elect Donald Trump.

What happens to the media, what happens to journalism in these situations? How do the power relations shift and how should any of us think about what this means for democracy?

Abbie, there's a lot going on here. What's on your mind?

Abbie Fink: 00:00:51

Yeah, you know, when I was in journalism school, one of the things that we learned was the role of the media was to be the watchdog of the government, right? That was they were the looking in and calling attention to those things that our government and elected officials were doing.

And it extends to those that are running for office and those that are no longer in office but are still in the public eye. And our responsibility as journalists to report fair and accurately and objectively. And, you know, but we're human and mistakes happen.

And when mistakes happen, there are processes in place from a media outlet's perspective on how to correct and fix and rectify that situation.

The recent case with ABC News settling the defamation accusations from President-elect Trump, and, you know, I think it's going to send some interesting shockwaves through the journalism community again in terms of how you know how and what you report and when and where do you know, if you know that the information that you're sharing is inaccurate.

So just to set a little tone, there was a report early in March that was tied to some of the criminal investigations and allegations facing the president-elect. He chose to sue for defamation. And all these months later, that case was settled.

Interestingly enough, it is settled as a charitable contribution, not necessarily as a payment to Mr. Trump as the person filing the lawsuit, is a contribution that's going to be made to his yet to be built presidential library.

I'm concerned about it. I think that it is going to be challenging for media outlets. It's challenging enough to be accurate and make sure that you've got all your facts straight. But there are procedures in place that if you learn that you have been inaccurate, how you can resolve those. It is a very high standard for those in public figures whether they are defamed or libeled in news media.

And I think this is going to set some Interesting conversations in newsrooms about, in particular now, how will they cover the President elect through his next term.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:03:29

Yeah, or really anyone in power. You know, there was this saying that has been attributed to many different people, but essentially is that the role of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

And for many years it was something that I think was a badge of honor for those who considered themselves news reporters, that they were chasing the truth. They were going to take an impartial and independent approach to their work, confirm every fact and make sure that they had multiple sources, et cetera.

And oftentimes, some of the best reporting in previous decades and even centuries has been exposes of the powerful taking advantage of their positions of power, and essentially taking the side of everyday folks.

And I think there's something really fascinating going on right now, and it's sort of hard to say because we're in the middle of it and you never really know what's happening when it's happening. Takes some time, takes some perspective. But I think some of those alliances are shifting and I don't know if we really have the language yet to talk about it.

And specifically, what I mean is, as we have mentioned many times, many folks know that newsroom budgets have changed. Ownership of many major media properties has changed over the years. They are now comfortably settled in the hands of billionaires, whether on the left or on the right or anywhere in between.

The major media organizations are themselves part of the power apparatus. And I mean, to a certain extent that was always true, but there was a bit of a at-arm's-length nature to it, right? The editorial function of a newspaper, the publisher of a newspaper was there to essentially provide air cover and funding for the journalism operations.

Now the directives are different. We're seeing editorial pages being told not to make endorsements, or in the case of the LA Times, that every critical story must be balanced with an opposing story. And these are edicts coming from the top, coming from the owners, not necessarily from the editors.

So the real question is now: in whose interests are our major media organizations operating? And what is the effect of that on everyday folks?

Abbie Fink: 00:05:58

Well, and, you know, forever, ownership of media outlets are businesses. I mean, they have a function, they have a role and a purpose, but they are a business. They have financial responsibilities.

They have to generate income in order to, or revenue in order to support their employees and the work that they do. And as more and more consolidation happens, the ... which is a business decision in and of itself. It is challenging to find the place where independent, objective news reporting lives in a business environment.

And I don't think this is universal or only in the large conglomerates. I mean, we can look in our own local markets and see the benefits of independent small community newspapers, but yet the fiscal responsibility of those means that they are looking for investors and they're looking for partners and they're looking for economy of scale. And that means that maybe they're joining forces with another media conglomerate and we're shrinking the objectivity.

Although we might have still a significant number of named newspapers in our communities, but they're all being managed by the same ownership. And I think you can argue both sides of, you know, is it better to have than not have?

And where do we have the financial support of that? We know, as consumers, we're increasingly making decisions on what to and not to participate in from a media perspective. And as we move our consumption of media into very different ways, we're not subscribing to the newspapers any longer. We are not watching the television news the same way. And so these business decisions are being made in order to stay relevant and profitable.

The biggest challenge I see really is, if when the business of the business gets in the way of what its intention is supposed to be. And you mentioned the LA Times recently making decisions about a point-counterpoint. Well, that's good editorial. Certainly an opinion should be counterbalanced, but to make it an edict and intentionally needing to have some of those things is a bit troublesome, I think.

And in this understanding of the role of the media, if their intention and their purpose is provide objective and truthful and transparent reporting of issues good, bad or otherwise, it is going to be increasingly more difficult, I think, to the journalists on the ground, when the business of the business gets in the way of what they're trying to accomplish.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:09:14

You know, I thought it was really interesting a few years ago, relatively recently, and unfortunately, I don't remember the exact time or place, But Roy Wood Jr., who many folks first got to know as a comedian on The Daily Show, but who grew up the son of a broadcaster and reporter who had covered the civil rights movement and so on. He was speaking in Washington, D.C., and I don't remember the exact context, so it's unfortunate. This is a bad anecdote without the details. But I remember what he said and it was so true. He said, the problem is fundamentally that the truth is expensive and conspiracy theories are cheap.

And so it is hard to fund investigative reporting, the kind of journalism that journalists themselves hold in very high regard as kind of the peak expression of their craft, really digging in and finding the truth and following up on things and getting access to sources and documents and revealing things that were unknown. You know, this idea that that's something to which journalists should aspire still lives as a kind of an, as an ethos or as an ideal.

The problem is that's expensive and you've got to pay people to follow up. A lot of things that don't pan out. You got to make a lot of phone calls that don't get answered. You've got to visit a lot of sources -- back when people used to actually visit sources -- that lead to nothing.

And that's expense reports of, you know, mileage and lunches and coffee and all the things that go into producing a story that tells the truth about something previously unknown.

We're now in an environment where anybody with a smartphone, which is everybody pretty much, can produce content, publish it, circulate it, and conspiracy theories can be produced so incredibly cheaply that it's hard to counteract that.

The thing that's nagging me a little bit right now is this question of what does this do to the people who still see their mission, their purpose, as serving the public?

We have to add another factor in here, Abbie, because that public is so incredibly divided. We've talked about that in previous episodes. So how do you program a TV station, for example, to appeal to audiences that are themselves incredibly divided? How do you report responsibly to consumers who make choices with their clicks as well as with their cash about what they're gonna consume? Is it even possible anymore to have a news outlet that's for everyone? This, I think, is a very real question in the minds of many.

Abbie Fink: 00:11:59

And I don't know that I have a solid answer to that. I think you're right. It is the challenge. And because the almighty dollar, it's hard to ignore it. And in order to produce, even if it is a one sided, very clearly taking a position type of publication or news broadcast, it still requires you to pay staff and have, you know, produce the paper and get it into the hands of the readers and all these other things. So even if you are one sided or the other, you still have these issues at hand.

And we are in a, our society today has significantly more influence on business than we've ever had before. You know, cancel culture and other things, right? We can decide and be very public about why or why not we're going to participate in something, go to someplace, never again go to someplace, whatever it might be. And if enough of that outrage is eventually meaning I can't afford to do this anymore, I need to make some different decisions.

And I think, you know, I am 100% convinced that there will always be these journalists and reporters who believe in that responsibility to bring forward important information. They understand what that means and the responsibility they have in bringing that forward. No.

And I've been doing this for a very long time, and there is not a single reporter that I have worked with that wants to be told there was an error in their story. Nobody wants that. No one. Nobody wants to be told they made a mistake.

But without fail, every single one of those journalists where I've had to make that note to them have been ready to correct it if they know for, you know, if, if I am able to demonstrate that the information they reported was inaccurate. Now, we make a very clear distinction with our, with our clients. There's a difference between being wrong and not liking the way it came out.

So not liking the way it came out does not require the reporter to fix it. If it is inaccurate, information is wrong, then, then the, the, the onus is on them to fix it.

And without fail, they, they will do that because their integrity is at risk if they are seen to not care enough about their writing or their reporting to fix the mistake. I think I'm not going to attempt to understand what was going on in the ABC News report that was mentioned in the lawsuit.

Whether they knew it or not, I don't know. But I think there is, there is and always will be an understanding by journalists and reporters that this is their responsibility.

Where they have to align themselves then is they work for big business. That is their parent company, the owner of their media outlet. And where does the discussion around.

You will or will not write about this because this is an advertiser or this is a big investor and journalistic integrity? I don't have an answer to that. You know, it is, it is.

There are, there are good, solid, quality publications out there that are very clear about how they run their edit, you know, their editorial content and, and the support of those that support them. That's their mission. That is great. We understand it, we work within it. We get it.

Those that are in a different mindset of that, that's their business model. And we make decisions about whether or not we participate, read them, pitch them, whatever it might be.

But I think this, you know, this fractured audience and the way consumers make decisions and the influence that we believe we have makes it extremely difficult. And this is any business. I mean, we could apply this to retail, we could apply this to restaurants, we could apply this to home builders.

You pick a subject, we can talk about the fact that the consumer has a lot more control in that than we've ever had before because of the world we live in. The focus on journalistic integrity and trustworthiness is so important to us.

And maybe I've got rose colored glasses and think it's all going to still be fine, but I want to believe that there is a place for and a need for transparent, open, honest, objective reporting in this business of the media.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:17:05

You raise a really interesting point here because the question of what is a mistake is now something of an open question. I mean, it's not a simple matter of the fact said this and you said that. So you have to put the correct facts in.

In this particular case with George Stephanopoulos and President-elect Trump, we're not lawyers, we're not going to parse the language of this, but one word was used instead of another word. In common everyday life, those words are interchangeable. But apparently this was enough of a sticking point. This lawsuit was brought and apparently the executives at ABC and the parent company Disney decided the easiest way out or the cheapest way out was to settle with the donation that you referred to earlier.

Fine, there's that. But the real question is for the rest of us and for the future, where are we now? If the media companies that are supposed to hold the powerful to account are themselves either too timid or too close or too something to be able to maintain that pursuit of truth? Whose interests are being represented?

What is the truth that needs to be told as audiences self-select into different camps, continuing as they have to choose the echo chamber media that reinforces their own beliefs. And this happens regardless of who you're talking about.

What happens to this question of what is accurate and what is not? I don't think we have a good answer for that right now. And that's a deeply troubling place to be.

Abbie Fink: 00:18:36

Right. And in this particular case, you know, I think the, and again, we don't know what was going on. So, you know, was this intentional to select the words? Was it a mistake? "I should have said this, but I said that." Was there an attempt in the next broadcast to say, you know, we had an error in the language. This is actually what the, you know, and would that have prompted a lawsuit anyway?

It's hard to know exactly what's going on, but there's a lot in that discussion. Because there's different standards for private citizens versus those in the public eye. They deserve the same truth telling, but where we hold them, there's different standards.

If a private citizen is libeled and defamed, and I know that one or the other applies, is very different than if a public figure is libeled or defamed. Right. There's, and there's, that's very clearly defined and there's also intentionality: "I knew it was wrong and I still did it," or "I didn't realize, and this is what we've done to correct it."

And I think it was, it's very interesting. And if you read any of the articles that are coming out about this particular settlement is a very clear distinction about what the financial component of this is. The settlement is a charitable contribution. They are not paying him, Mr. Trump for the damages. They are making a contribution in the amount that they felt was appropriate to do so.

So where we go with this and what happens to this is still to be seen. After the inauguration, news media will now cover President-elect Trump as President Trump. And what does that mean and how do they do that? And will there be a, a moment where journalists, reporters, print and broadcast, hesitate and do or do not say something for fear of this type of situation? And if that becomes the case, that is what's detrimental.

If our journalists start to self-select because they fear lawsuits and they fear the outcome of what that might be, I think we start to lose whatever opportunity we have for objective reporting. And that to me, is the most troublesome part of this particular settlement.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:21:06

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For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.fm, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you'll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.