Censorship and Freedom of Expression

This event was part of the 2025 CFR Local Journalists Workshop, which is made possible through the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. TRANSCRIPT ROBBINS: Hi. Everybody having fun? Great. I’m Carla Robbins. I’m a senior fellow here, and I’ve met some of you from the Local Journalists webinars and I’m hoping that those of you who attend our monthly Local Journalists webinars will persuade the rest of you to do it. I’m also a long-time journalist. I spent a good part of my career at the Wall Street Journal covering national security and diplomacy, and then the latter part of my journalism career I was on the edit page at the New York Times, and now I run a master’s program and I’m here at the Council, and it’s just really great to be here and really good to be talking about a somewhat—let’s face it, it’s not going to be an upbeat panel so but an important panel. So welcome to this session on “Press Freedom in a New Era of Reporting,” and you have the full bios of our colleagues. So just a few of the highlights. Aimee Edmondson is the associate dean and a professor at Ohio University Scripps College of Communication where she teaches First Amendment law, the history of American media, and data journalism, which is pretty eclectic and pretty wide. She spent a dozen years as a local journalist in Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee so she’s got great street cred. George Freeman is the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which is a nonprofit membership association for members of the media and their defense lawyers. He is also, in full disclosure, my former neighbor and a colleague at the New York Times. We rode the train together, and for over thirty years he was its newsroom and First Amendment lawyer. And Jodie Ginsberg, and she’s the chief executive officer of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the former CEO of Internews Europe and of the London-based Freedom of Expression Group Index on Censorship. She’s also a longtime reporter and foreign correspondent with postings in Ireland, the U.K. and South Africa. All with Reuters? GINSBERG: Yes. ROBBINS: So just a quick word on format. This is on the record. We’re going to chat for about thirty minutes up here and then open it up to Q&A, and we will finish promptly at 11:30 because there’s more interesting conversations as well as lunch to come. So, Jodie, let’s start with you. CPJ has issued a really powerful report—and if you haven’t seen it we really commend it to you—on the state of press freedom in the U.S., and I’m just going to read the first sentence of the introduction just to give a flavor of your findings: “These are not normal times for American press freedoms. In the first hundred days of President Trump’s second term there have been a startling number of actions that taken together threaten the availability of independent, fact-based news for vast swathes of America’s populations.” So in the first term, of course, the president attacked the press with really inflammatory and autocratic language. I mean, fake news—you’d expect to hear that from Putin but we heard it all the time. We almost became inured to it. So what’s so much worse this time around? GINSBERG: So in the first administration we heard a lot about language, right? We had the enemies of the people language, the administration or the president himself denigrating particular news outlets, calling them fake news and so on. But what we didn’t see were a high level of actions from the administration against journalists and news outlets. And so what we’re seeing now is very different because we’re seeing the administration take specific actions and that has taken a number of forms. So it’s taken the form that you’ll be familiar of, of the White House banning the Associated Press from the White House press pool, and one of the reasons that I think has perhaps garnered less interest is because a lot of people don’t know what wire agencies do. But, of course, for many local journalists I’m sure that many of your organizations will get an Associated Press feed, right? That’s how a lot of local news outlets around the world, not just in America, get their national news. When they can’t send someone they have an AP person there on their behalf and they’re getting the wire copy. So one of the things we’ve been trying to explain to people is why removing the AP from the pool isn’t just a question of, well, I just want to bring in some of my—some other people. We just want to bring in Breitbart and we just want to bring in the Daily Caller. It’s actually about having a source of news that’s available and delivered to hundreds and thousands of local newsrooms around the world. Then we’ve seen, obviously, the legal threats. Those started before Trump got into power so the defamation suits and other suits against organizations like the ABC, CBS, and others. We expect those to continue. Then you’ve seen the effect of dismantling Voice of America and RFE and other USAGM outlets, in addition to the threats that have been brought against PBS and NPR, and then we’re seeing more regulatory threats. So we’re seeing Brendan Carr, who’s been quite explicit about using regulatory means to target— ROBBINS: Brendan Carr being? GINSBERG: The head of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. So going after news outlets for perceived bias or not fulfilling their public interest duty as organizations and, therefore, you can take away their licenses. And then, of course, most recently we’ve seen the removal of a really important piece of guidance that was introduced during the Biden administration around leak investigations and subpoenas, and that’s a real worry. So the guidance effectively provided protections for news organizations so they were not going to be forced to give up their sources in public interest investigations, and those guidelines have just been repealed. I think we are going to see many more leak investigations. The last thing I would say is a lot of the focus is, obviously, at the top in the administration but what we know from experience—and the Committee to Protect Journalists has been doing this work for forty years globally—is that inevitably that has a trickledown effect and we’re already seeing that. We’re seeing it at the state level, at local level, the administration starting to look at bringing more defamation suits, to use local laws to go after news outlets that we don’t like. Since November CPJ has trained 500 journalists in the United States on digital safety and physical safety and security issues. That is completely unprecedented and I think signals the level of fear that people rightly have about what might happen not just at national level but at local levels, too. ROBBINS: So what happens in Washington doesn’t stay in Washington. GINSBERG: Absolutely. ROBBINS: So are we enabling this as journalists? David Sanger was asked this question here last night, which was when the AP was banned from the Oval Office why didn’t you all just get up and walk out? And, certainly, a question that I’ve thought about—and I say this as the former masthead editor of the New York Times—I think it’s a pretty big question and an important one. FREEMAN: I think the answer is yes. When we—we had a meeting before Inauguration Day, and you couldn’t really deal with the substantive issues because you didn’t know which of these many things he would do. As it turns out, he’s done about all. But there were no—it was hard to give substantive answers as to what action we should take before he was even inaugurated. But what we did agree on and everyone in the room agreed on is that we have to be coordinated. We have to work together. We have to be a team to resist these attacks, and if anything the exact opposite has happened. And one of the things I think you mentioned is the settlement of the defamation cases, which were totally meritless, by ABC, the likely settlement by CBS of a totally inane lawsuit about the editing of the Kamala Harris interview. On the AP thing there was some degree of unity— ROBBINS: A letter. FREEMAN: —more than in the other instances. But, really, I mean the history of Trump is that if you actually fight him he tends not to want to lose so he kind of backs off a little bit. But to get picked off one by one the way the law firms have done in instances where the law and the odds are on your side, really, I think is the answer to your question, Carla, which is that we have helped enable and we certainly haven’t in any coordinated or efficient way resisted. And so part of the burden, I think, is on us. I agree with you. ROBBINS: So, Aimee, do you think that the White House Correspondents Association—do you think the big papers—I think that President Trump really cares about what the New York Times writes. EDMONDSON: Right. ROBBINS: And, I mean, do you think the big papers should have all gotten up and said if the AP is not in the Oval Office—if the AP is not going to be part of the rotation for the pool we’re just not going to come to the briefings? We’re just all going to get up and walk away? It’s not like we wouldn’t get the information anyway. EDMONDSON: Right. Right. Well, you know, journalists don’t want to be the story. You know, that’s just not what we do. And so that definitely goes against our DNA, most certainly. But, of course, we’ve not experienced this kind of behavior before in our so-called commander in chief, and so I don’t know that that’s necessarily the answer. I do think that continuing to be transparent, who we are, what we do, this is the prime time to do that, which is a lot of people don’t know what we do. That we’re not stenographers, that we’re here to question our government and our leaders. Everything else is stenography and public relations. And so with that it is a really good time to get good at explaining who we are and what we do and what our function is in a democracy. ROBBINS: So, Jodie, back to you. Are we enabling them? Should they—should everybody walked out when the AP was barred from the Oval Office and from the press pool? GINSBERG: To be honest, I think that’s—I think there’s a kind of self-servingness about that where we’re, like, you know, we’ll walk out and everyone will notice and that will send a strong message, and I’m not sure it would do anything except reinforce a view that is held—and I agree with Aimee—quite widely across the country that journalists are really self-serving, that we’re all in it for ourselves. It’s all about the mainstream media. It’s all about the—maybe that’s Trump calling—(laughter)—and—from his jet. You know, it’s all about the, you know, left-wing work, all of—and I think all, potentially, that would have done is serve that argument. Actually, one of the things that we did when the AP—we did a letter with the Society of Professional Journalists. One of the things we did was also then support the society to reach many of its members so that they could lobby local congress people about why it mattered and I think that’s the key thing. And I totally agree with Aimee. Where we have, I think, failed as journalists is we expected people to understand the value that that brought rather than explaining it. You should just know that this is good for you. Take your medicine. It’s good for you. Instead of explaining why it has value and why it matters and what you lose when you don’t have independent, pluralistic media in your communities. And I think that’s the message that we’ve got to keep hammering home rather than sort of seeming to almost play to the tune of the administration which is that the media is all elite, out of touch, all of one political persuasion. That’s absolutely not the case, but I think we can do a better job explaining the value that journalism has to everybody that consumes it, and everybody does and everybody needs it. ROBBINS: Aimee, you teach the history of journalism. Can you put this in historical context for us? Are we hyperventilating? I mean, have we seen other times? I will tell you I have covered, you know, the national security side of many White Houses. Jodie mentioned the Justice Department change about our notes and the subpoenaing, but that’s something that changed under the Biden administration. Before the Justice Department was pretty—you know, liked to rough us up, and I will tell you that Obama couldn’t stand the press. It was really, really hard to get any information out of that White House. I’ve seen—the Clinton White House was a dream because they leaked like a sieve. (Laughter.) But, you know, there’s—this is—you know, it changes according to the different presidents. There’s been a lot of hostility to the press before. Now, is this just many orders of magnitude different? EDMONDSON: I think it definitely is. And to Jodie’s point, Trump loves chaos and he loves confrontation. So I think that is—you wouldn’t want to play into that game. But, yes, throughout history there has been that healthy tension between presidents and the press. We all know that. Of course, George Washington said about the opposing, quote, “party press” at the very beginning, “Oh, that rascal of an editor.” You know, fast forward to George Bush and the “major league asshole” hot link, right? So it’s there. You’ve got Spiro Agnew— ROBBINS: That was one of our Times colleagues he was talking about. EDMONDSON: Sure. ROBBINS: And we can talk about that guy, whether he deserved it. But OK. (Laughter.) EDMONDSON: So it’s healthy and it’s always been there. Spiro Agnew labeled the press the nattering nabobs of negativism. Of course, this was Nixon’s vice president, former governor of Maryland who—felony tax evasion charges, et cetera. So he had a lot of press that he didn’t love. So, you know, Nixon was really the big high-water mark, of course, until today and, of course, in January 2016 when Trump comes in with we’re going to open up libel laws and sue you like you’ve never been sued before, you know, that’s where we kind of knew he says game on and he’s having a good time. It’s another high-water mark. ROBBINS: So, George, can we talk about libel law for a minute? I mean, the law hasn’t changed. So is the implementation of the law different? Are the courts more hostile? Or is it that the administration is pushing? Is it—or is it more the regulatory environment? Is it—I mean, what’s different now if the law—libel law itself hasn’t changed? FREEMAN: You know, I think it’s important to underscore just what you said, that the law hasn’t changed. Libel law isn’t going to change despite the fact that Trump said he wants to open up the libel laws, whatever that means. It’s a pretty vague statement. If it means overturning Times v. Sullivan, which it seems to be what he meant, I don’t believe that’s going to happen and I’m not that worried about that. What’s changed, really, is the environment and he’s fostered that. I mean that really, I think, can be pointed right at the president. He’s fostered both the notion that it’s a good thing to sue. You can win by suing, which ABC and others have helped enable, and the fact is that this polarized society we’re in has made it easier for the plaintiff to win in those areas that are red states which are MAGA supporting, et cetera, because they have taken to heart his attacks on the media. And I think it’s one thing I would really underscore in terms of your own cases that you might have wherever you are that right now the greatest determinant of whether the media is going to win or lose a libel case has nothing to do with the facts of the case itself. It has to do in what court you’re in. I mean, compare New York where Sarah Palin lost the case despite the fact that the Times didn’t do all that great in the article that was at issue, but yet the jury found in the Times’ favor because there was no actual malice and they took the judge’s instructions seriously, with central Florida where CNN lost a jury case for $5 million and then settled the punitive damage part of the case, and the forewoman of the jury said she would have given the plaintiff a hundred million dollars of punitive damages, basically, because she doesn’t believe in the media. So if those two cases had been in the different places probably the results would have been diametrically opposed. So where you are and what court you’re in has become incredibly important and there that kind of leads to the next point, which is then you need good lawyers, I hate to say it. But if you have a lawyer who doesn’t think about those issues, about where the venue should be, you’re losing the first step of the game. ROBBINS: Jodie, you said that you had trained, what was it, 500— GINSBERG: Five hundred, yes. ROBBINS: —versus twenty. What does training mean? I mean, how do—what—do you train people? Like, I’ve taken training about how to go into a war zone. So what sort of training are you giving? GINSBERG: So we at CPJ offer digital and physical security training. So we have digital and physical security advisors who will talk you through how to keep your phone safe, how to keep your sources safe, how to—equally how to kind of start to think about protecting your newsrooms and your staff regarding online harassment, how to think about staying safe physically when you attend a protest and that sort of thing. There are many other organizations in this space and in fact we’re working together with a number of them who provide other kinds of support including trauma support, including legal support, like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. So there are many organizations that do this. I agree entirely with George. It’s really important that you know what you’re going in for. One of the things about libel cases and these legal cases is most of the people do not go in them to win them. They go in to tie you up in really expensive, time-consuming lawsuits so that you will stop because the cost to you of just being involved in it emotionally, financially, is too high. And so what happens as a result is people stop reporting. It’s very well documented that in environments where this is a repeated pattern journalists stop touching difficult subjects. If you know that there’s a particularly litigious, corrupt business you might decide that it’s just not worth it because you know you’re going to get caught in some kind of spurious legal action that’s going to put you on the hook for thousands, if not millions, of dollars. So getting advice in advance and making sure that you know what you’re going into is really important but, you know, it shouldn’t be the thing that deters people from reporting because otherwise all we’re going to have is reports about, you know, cats and maybe football. But that could be controversial, too. ROBBINS: So, George, did you want to say something about that? And I have a follow-up for Jodie after that. FREEMAN: Yeah. I was just going to say that it’s important to understand why Trump is doing this. You know, it’s not only because he doesn’t like the press. In fact, he does like the press. He said why he’s doing this once to Leslie Stahl in an interview. He wants the public not to believe the press. So his whole campaign is based on lowering the press’ credibility because when he knows inevitably the press will criticize him he doesn’t want people to believe the press in those criticisms because it’s all about him. Is always all about him. But he really spelled that out. That’s the reason why he says fake news and enemy of the people. It’s all part of a plan of self-defense that the public not believe what the press says. So he really is an evil enemy in that sense because he’s trying to for his own purposes lower the morale and lower the credibility, really, of the press to the public, which is not what a president ought to be doing. I should add, in terms of what Jodie said that my organization, which is really made of lawyers, we’ve done a lot of seminars on—not so much on the security and, you know, tape type stuff, but really on the basic legal fundamentals and we’ve done that at conferences, conventions, and sometimes to individual newsrooms if there are enough people. So we’re available to do that if people are interested. ROBBINS: So—and I want to talk to Aimee because Aimee wrote a book about Sullivan and also you train people. But I want to just follow up quickly with Jodie, which is when I worked at the Journal and I wrote a difficult story we had great lawyers—really well-paid lawyers, and you’d go through line by line by line, and usually what I found with the lawyers the lawyers were always saying things like—pushing the editors, saying, yeah, we can do this and the editors were going, you sure you could do this. The editors were usually wimpier than the lawyers. In fact, one very famous conversation with a lawyer screaming at the editor, saying, I’m the only f-ing one on this phone call who actually has a law degree and I’m good with it. But in the environment now, particularly when news organizations have far less money than they used to have and when local news organizations are particularly strapped, they don’t have a bunch of really high-paid lawyers on call all the time. So given how nervous everybody is and generally, what do you do to avoid the defensive crouch you’re talking about? How do you give people the—you can say to people they’re trying to harass you, they’re trying to intimidate you. Is there a twenty-four-hour hotline that somebody can call to say— GINSBERG: Well, actually, RCFP does have a twenty-four-hour hotline. But I would also say there are—networks of pro bono lawyers who will do pre-reads. There’s now a new organization called Reporters Shield that people can join that’s also an insurance scheme and they will do prereading as part of that initiative. So there’s a number of initiatives out there to try and give you that. The other thing I would say that may be really important for this room is it’s not just libel anymore. You know, so many of the queries that have come to us in the past six months have been about immigration law and 501(c)(3) status. You know, these are not things that we would normally advise people on because we’re normally dealing with media law related things. But very many people now are worried about their 501(c)(3) status, given what’s been talked about— ROBBINS: Nonprofit status, the tax—the tax law. GINSBERG: If you are a nonprofit newsroom that, perhaps, they can come after your tax status if you report on certain things or you do certain things, and immigration. Many, many people have staff working for them or are covering ICE raids and so on who are deeply concerned. We know of people who are now taking their bylines off stories, particularly in student journalism, because they do not have citizenship and are concerned that that will be used as an attack vector, and that’s a real fear. I mean, you mentioned we’ve done a lot of exceptional things this year including issuing a safety travel advisory for the United States because of the number of queries we were getting from journalists internationally about how they could ensure that they could travel safely into the U.S. without, for example, their phones being looked at and their sources becoming vulnerable. ROBBINS: So we will share with you all a list of resources from all three of these people. So I know we’re writing down names but of—including this. I didn’t know there was this twenty-four-hour back read hotline. I love that. That’s a great thing. That sounds like an absolutely fundamental. So, Aimee, you shape young minds or distort young minds. Just think of the power you have. So—and you also wrote a book on Sullivan. So how differently are you preparing students, given the environment here? EDMONDSON: Right. Well, we spend a lot of time on libel law in our media law classes because it really is complex, and the law hasn’t changed but to understand it from the very beginning from 1964 takes a minute. And so I think that gives students and journalists a sense of freedom to know that the law is really, in Justice Brennan’s words in the opinion in Sullivan, we must be uninhibited, robust, wide open in our public discourse about these important issues of our day. And so if you think of the context of Sullivan, it was the height of the civil rights movement and it was about police brutality. The case arose out of the cops in Alabama—Montgomery, Alabama, beating civil rights protesters, right. So what an amazing thing. Fast forward to today and you think about what’s happening with the DEI-related issues and so many things that are so similar to the 1960s with the crackdown on libel. L.B. Sullivan was the police commissioner, the top cop in Montgomery, Alabama, who was probably a hero in his community for brutalizing African-American protesters. And so did he truly feel libeled? No, probably not, but he was going to punish the New York Times for coming in to write about this story. And so with that, I think if we can remember that history, and it’s the idea that before Sullivan if you got anything wrong in your story you pay. But with Sullivan 1964 you could make an error by accident, right, because we are human beings. And so what you have to show is that you did not act with actual malice, right, which is I got the information, I thought it was right, and so we went with it. Actual malice is did you publish with knowledge of falsity? Did you publish something knowing it was wrong? No. Journalists aren’t going to do that, right? And so—or should you have known it was wrong. And so with that, this is just basic journalism. The court wasn’t looking for superhuman strength but every now and then we’re going to make an error and we’re going to correct it. And so with that actual malice standard we are much more free to report at the time on things like the Vietnam War, Watergate, et cetera. And so it was really a new era of American journalism, and I agree with George and many others such as David McCraw. The Truth in Our Times is a great book. He’s the lawyer for the New York Times who did say, you know, Sullivan is going to hold. We do have two justices that are getting kind of grumpy about it, Thomas and Gorsuch, but it’s going to hold. It’s the other stuff McCraw said and so many others have that it discredits the press. You better believe that Trump and his ilk read the New York Times and the Washington Post, et cetera, but they don’t want their supporters to. FREEMAN: Just to add one thing to what was said and that is that I think you said that the motive of L.B. Sullivan was to punish the Times. The real motive that was going on was that the Southern segregationist establishment didn’t only want to punish the Times. They wanted to get the Times out of Alabama because if there was no national media covering Alabama for fear of these kind of libel suits then they could go on, you know, beating up on the civil rights workers and the blacks with impunity because the word wouldn’t get out to the rest of the country. There weren’t thousands of media entities the way there are now. There were essentially two or three national newspapers, AP, PI, and maybe two television networks, and that was—and Time magazine, and that was it. So if you could get those guys out of Alabama then they could—the Southerners could do whatever they wanted and the rest of the country wouldn’t learn about it and no pressure would come on them to stop it. And that—you know, that’s even more similar to the playbook that we’re seeing now, the idea of scaring the press so that they won’t report the bad stuff the government doesn’t want reported on. ROBBINS: So I want to turn it over to the group but before I do we started out with this question of we don’t like writing about ourselves, and I can understand that because we shouldn’t be in the story, and I’ve always been very uncomfortable with the I in a story, even though it’s become he told me. I mean, who else did he tell? (Laughs.) I mean, it’s just—I understand this is now the cool convention in stories—(inaudible)—the wall just always made me crazy. OK. So but you in the CPJ report cite some Pew polling, and if you don’t use Pew polling—and Pew has done some great work on lots of different topics but including on media consumption. But Pew found in 2017 that 94 percent of Americans knew about the state of the relationship between President Trump and the press, and nearly three-quarters—73 percent—felt that the situation was impeding their access to news. That’s really the key thing. If people feel that they’re not getting information, people, I would think, would start getting rather peevish about it. Relationship arguably worse more recent, much less awareness of it in the Pew polling. Here’s the question. Given the fact that all the Edelman polling, the Trust in Institutions polling, the Gallup polling, all of which is that people have lost trust in pretty much everything—the banks, you know, the churches, the universities and certainly in us. The good news is people trust us more than they trust Congress but that’s a pretty low bar. FREEMAN: I combine this because I’m a lawyer and a journalist, so therefore I’m kind of at the bottom—really, at the bottom of the ranks. ROBBINS: I can’t believe I ever rode a train with you, when you think about it. But should we be writing about attacks on us? GINSBERG: Yes. ROBBINS: OK. Tell me the— GINSBERG: Yes. I mean, I think you should—I mean, I love writing about the—that’s what we do all the time at CPJ. Absolutely, we should be writing about attacks on the press, and one of the things I would say— ROBBINS: Can we do that without looking like a bunch of hissy babies? GINSBERG: Of course, you can. Of course, you can because, look, journalists engage in—should be engaged. Largely, the job is identifying and disseminating the facts, news, and information. You can do it in such a way that doesn’t require you to, you know, have a hissy fit or sound like, you know, you’re speaking from the pulpit. You can just do it in a fact-based way. There are very many ways to cover this as the story that it is. If in your local community your local police chief is raiding your newsroom that is a news story. If your local governor is suing you to stop you writing about things that the governor has said—factually said—that is a news story. Those are news stories. And the thing that, you know, I keep coming back to is explaining why that matters. It matters because if this is what they’re doing for this piece what are the other things that we don’t know? What are they trying to conceal from us? And going back to people and showing that, there’s plenty of studies that show the link between a lack of independent information providers in communities and democracy, corruption, return on tax dollars. You know, it costs you more money to live in a place that doesn’t have a free and independent media. There’s plenty of research that shows that. So it matters to people, and there are plenty of organizations I think doing really good work, particularly at the local level, to rebuild that sense of, you know, this is why it should matter to you as a local individual and a reader. So, absolutely, we should write about those and we don’t have to write about it from a kind of highfalutin, principled stand where we all beat our chests. We do it in the way that journalism, you know, at its core exists to do, which is provide facts to people so that they can understand how that impacts them. ROBBINS: George, a story that you want to read that isn’t being written enough? FREEMAN: I agree with Jodie. I mean, I think that the niceties that we’ve lived on as principles for all these years really has come to be overcome and should be set aside. I mean, we’re at war now and I think we have to realize that. To say, oh, we shouldn’t write about ourselves or we shouldn’t get together with a competitor in town and talk about how to deal with the local government and maybe unify our forces a little bit, oh, that will lead to an antitrust suit. It won’t lead to an antitrust suit. It’s not what we usually do. But these are unusual times. So I agree and would go further, I think, than Jodie, and a lot of people disagree with me that we shouldn’t give up our old principles. But I just think these are kind of emergency times and some of them, like, let’s not write about ourselves I think need to be discarded because of the emergency we’re in. ROBBINS: Last word to you. EDMONDSON: I think sticking with that traditional documents-based reporting where you are—constantly have these FOIA requests out. You know, if you hear talk about FOIA Fridays, check in and see where are your public records requests. Are you hounding the county commission, the city council, what have you, and really sticking with that kind of government transparency traditional work that we do where you link directly to the documents, et cetera, and just keep doing what we do is really going to be the best way to handle what’s going on. ROBBINS: So turn it over to you all. We have mics. Wait for the mic. State your name and affiliation. And right back there to start, the gentleman, and then I’ll only call on women after that. (Laughter.) Q: Hi. Jeff Parrott. I’m with the Salt Lake Tribune. Jodie, one, thank you. I’m one of your 500 so I appreciate it. I can’t recommend enough if you guys all get a chance. So thank you. ROBBINS: What were you trained in? Q: We were targeted by some Trump fans earlier this year after running a story about some folks that were working with Musk that were in Utah and were getting a lot of online hate and a lot of doxxing threats, and so I think we have all deleted me at this point and so things seem to be calming down. Not my question. My question is especially—it’s especially a legal one. What are we doing to screw up, like, so obviously in some of these lawsuits where you get off the phone with the newsroom and you’re like, God, why’d they do that? Like, what are some of those things we’d stop doing? FREEMAN: I think there are three things that you should be aware of—without giving a whole legal seminar—that cause 90 percent of the lawsuits out there. The first is reliance on confidential sources. That’s an important thing to do, yes, but legally it’s very dangerous. You know it’s true. You’ve got it from a confidential source. But if you get sued how are you going to tell the judge or the jury that I knew it was true, it is true, without saying anything at all about who your source was and how you got the information? You are really naked in court, I used to tell my students, because there’s no way you can prove that and it’s really a dilemma. At the Times, I mean, which has a lot of resources or had a lot of resources, you know, the story really had to be important enough to take that risk. So you have to weigh a lot of factors. How likely is it that the confidential source might renounce their confidentiality and come clean and come to court to help you? How likely is it that the other side will sue? I mean, if it’s the mafia and you rely on a confidential source they’re probably not going to see you anyhow. So you look at a lot of factors but, A, relying on confidential sources needs a team to decide whether it’s worth putting that into print. Secondly is implication. If you can’t say something frontally—you can’t declare it but you want to say it through the back door by putting a couple of hints together, don’t do that. That’s a formula for getting sued and it’s a formula for losing the suit because libel by implication is a valid cause of action. So if you’re afraid to say it frontally you shouldn’t say it at all. And the third thing, which is the most basic kind of libel law thing that people don’t get, is you can’t just put into the paper what someone says. Because someone said it to you that’s not good enough of a backing of support to publish it yourself. You have to be convinced it’s true. You have to test whether that person you’re relying on is reliable enough. See if you can get corroborating information, et cetera. But a lot of people think it’s a defense. Well, the agent of the singer said that the opposing singer was a drunken drug-dealing person and I can put that in the paper, right, because that’s what they told me. Well, no, that’s wrong. If you don’t believe it you’re guilty of actual malice and even if you don’t check it you’re negligent, perhaps. So you can’t just rely on what anyone out there says. If it’s a court document or an official statement then you can but if it’s just someone off the street or someone who’s not official and governmental in a governmental forum you have to go through all the checks as though you’re saying it yourself. So those are the three things I think you should keep in your head as to what to watch out for, in answer to your question. ROBBINS: The woman right there. Yeah. Q: Hi. I’m Janet Wilson with the Desert Sun and USA Today network. I’m the one who asked the infamous question last night— ROBBINS: Thank you for that. Q: —about the White House press corps. So I guess to Aimee and Jodie, I want to stick to the facts here. I don’t want to inject my own opinion too much. So you did have an opportunity there. Even Fox News said that week that the Trump White House had overstepped. So I wasn’t just talking about the print organizations. I was talking about everybody stepping out. I mean, he breathes the media and now instead—I think it’s just this week, the past few days—we have WH.gov. It’s a new wire service that the White House has just started to put out complete stories to be used by smaller, regional, whoever wants them, news outlets. So I guess my question is if the moment has passed or there’s just not enough consensus that we’re in these extraordinarily bad times with the president, what else can we do in terms of Trump, not just educating, in many cases, our very loyal readers who do trust us at the local level—not everybody. There’s definitely the MAGA haters. But what can the American press do to counteract what’s going on with Trump and all of these influencer outlets and, you know, not news outlets that are in the White House now? That’s a little jumbled. Sorry. But do you collectively sue? I mean, what can you do? What can we do? GINSBERG: So I think there’s—I’m going to separate that question into two parts, right? So I think what I understand your question to mean is, like, what is the front foot action collectively against the administration, right? So I’m going to take that one in a second, and then there’s the kind of what can we do on a more existential level, right? And I think both are key because I think it’s very easy to think that if we can just find the right collective action that will stop this and I think the lesson that we learn from every single authoritarian regime—and make no mistake, this is why we called it this is not normal times—what you are seeing in America is exactly what has happened in Hungary, exactly what we’ve experienced in places like Brazil, exactly what we’re seeing in Hong Kong. You know, I don’t want you to be under any illusion that it’s somehow different here because you’re America. I’m sorry to tell you this as a non-American it is no different and, in fact, everyone I know who has experienced an authoritarian regime—going from a democracy to an authoritarian regime says what they’re seeing exactly reminds them of that except at warp speed. So this is happening really, really fast. So and to take us back, therefore, the experience of a lot of those places is collective action can go so far but it’s not going to stop this because once you’ve kind of embedded within the structures the ability to essentially control the narrative it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter whether CBS, Fox, News Corps, and the New York Times all get together and say no more because you’ve already got control of the means of information dissemination, which we’re already seeing with the inclusion of these other news outlets that don’t follow, you know, traditional journalistic practice, don’t necessarily follow codes of ethics, being brought in and now with things like the new White House press service. So I think there needs to be collective action in order to signal that the press has value. I’m not convinced there’s necessarily a single action like everybody sue the president that is going to have some strength. We joined the AP lawsuit as an amicus. There were lots of reasons. You know, it’s hard to see at the moment because he’s picking everybody off individually what collective action legally you might be able to take. But George will speak to that better than me. But I do think collectively speaking out for the value, doing it on the front page, I’ve noticed a number of local news outlets really putting front and center stories about threats to democracy and those increasingly, evidence shows, are playing really well. You know, putting those stories about this is illegal, not Trump is unsure whether he has to abide by the Constitution. You know, this is illegal. This is illegal, and I think actually making much more in the news reporting of the acts that are illegal—if not illegal, you know, are a massive threat to democracy and the Constitution I think is part of the way that you can see push back. ROBBINS: Aimee? EDMONDSON: There was a big study done in the ’70s and ’80s in Iowa relating to libel and some academics found all the libel cases they could in this decade or so, and then reached out to the plaintiffs—why did you sue, et cetera. And so the first thing that someone does when you write something that they don’t like they don’t go to court. They call you. They reach out through email, et cetera. And so while—and this is in the context of libel but this is much bigger—my point here in a minute—and that is we’re going to win these libel suits because truth is the ultimate defense, right? If it’s true you’re not going to lose the libel suit, and we can talk about other ways in court like tortious interference in a minute. But in that context people told the researchers in the Iowa project, I called and was treated rudely, or, I didn’t get a call back. And so I just remember as a reporter when I’d get the call that said you made an error and I’d be—oh, I mean, you know, your heart just falls. What did I get wrong? And then it’s, like, OK, walk me through what happened. And, you know, it might be twenty or thirty minutes later but they just wanted to vent. They did not like what you wrote but there’s no there there legally. And then they got to know me, Aimee the reporter, and so it’s almost like an each one take one, which is incredibly laborious and time consuming. But I really did feel at the local level we could do some good and even do a little care and feeding of sources. Maybe they’ll call me for a different story at a different time. And so I think that really ground level work, you know, it’s a lot to do but I think we don’t have a choice and that’s something we can definitely control. We can control. Yeah, I think that it would be really helpful when people hear what a Trump or Trump like person says such as Kari Lake or, you know, any of these, you know, state, local, public officials who go, oh, fake news, and I think that a really interesting example out of—it kind of has Ohio roots as well as Florida, and that is the Melissa Howard case. This was a woman who was running for state legislature in Florida who said she had graduated from college at Miami of Ohio University in Oxford. Well, she didn’t, and so it was reported that she did not actually get her degree as she’s running for this state office and she’s, oh, fake news, and it was just that very Trumpy you don’t like it, fake. Well, she even goes up to Ohio and supposedly gets her diploma, takes a picture of it, posts it on social media, but turns out she doctored it. And so finally Miami of Ohio did put out some information that said, no, she did not graduate from college. And so then the—Melissa Howard, the candidate, then dropped out of the race and said, you know, I’m sorry. I had an error in judgment. And that took a lot of work but it’s very Trumpy when you think about what it is. And so it’s—the bigger concern to me is it’s not just Trump. It’s this blueprint that has been wildly successful with this ability to manipulate information. ROBBINS: George, do you have— FREEMAN: The only thing I would add to that, and I agree totally with what you all said—the only thing I would add is that part of the problem, and maybe it goes back to a couple of questions, is, you know, everyone’s afraid to give their opinion because newspapers aren’t supposed to give in their news pages opinion. They’re supposed to give facts. And at the Times this came to a crescendo in September of 2016 when the Times for the first time said that Trump was lying. Lying sounds like a word of opinion, you know, because how can you really— ROBBINS: No. They didn’t say he was lying. They said he had lied. They used the word lie in the lead. OK. FREEMAN: The question is people—a lot of people use that as evidence for their argument that the Times is giving too much opinions and you can’t rely on it because it doesn’t give the facts. But the fact that—I should not use the word fact—the fact that Trump is a liar is a fact. I mean, there have been so many occasions, so much evidence of that, that the answer is that you got to tell the readers what the facts are and the facts are that he makes up stuff and lies time after time after time, and the Washington Post said 30,000 times during his four years in office. So I think that one shouldn’t—one has to be careful not to be victim of the argument you’re giving opinions, not facts, but what’s a fact and what’s an opinion has always been a difficult question and in the case of Trump is an even more difficult question. But it shouldn’t shy people away from giving the facts about what he really is up to and what he’s doing. ROBBINS: I think that there’s another question that was raised here, which is, and I—and certainly as more and more local newspapers are being taken over by investment funds and the economics of it—which is if the administration is offering its own wire service, and newspapers can’t afford it or they decide they can’t afford it, and you can get free—a free news feed that’s actually closer to, like, Fars News in Iran or in Xinhua in China or something that becomes the official state news agency, then there is the danger that the news space and—that they are defining what the facts are, that it’s easier—it’s not just what’s said from the lectern in the briefing room. They start defining everything and that that becomes particularly—it’s not just that the AP is in the Oval Office. The entire news feed becomes that and that is pretty damn scary when you marry it with the economics of what’s going on in local news, and I do think that that’s an enormous challenge for us. And to put it in an international context itself, I mean, first they were going to completely dismantle VOA and it goes to the courts and the courts say the Voice of America and they can’t—that Kari Lake can’t dismantle it. And what are they doing? They’re going to use a news feed from One America News Network, right? GINSBERG: ONN. ONN. ROBBINS: And so that is the international version of that is that they’re going to have their official news feed from that. That’s what people overseas are going to get and they think that that’s going to be when VOA has been a hugely independent news organization and by law it has to be an independent news organization. So I think there’s a danger there of that cognate happening and the challenge becomes that news organizations and editors have to say, we’re not going to run that. We’re going to stick with the news under a huge amount of economic challenges. I don’t think you can sue for that. I think it’s the challenge that—it puts even more pressure on economically pressured news organizations. So it’s—you know, it’s hard. It’s hard. There’s no question. I’m glad you raised it but it’s really terrifying. Next question. So right here in the front. Q: Hi. I’m Liz Ruskin. I work for Alaska Public Media. I just—as you’re talking I struggle to—you know, I’m thinking about a lot of us here in this room need to preserve our neutrality. We are not opinion writers. We every day have to write. You know, how do we hit hard back at the things that the Trump administration is doing or that the president himself is doing without losing that voice of neutrality? I mean, your point about calling something a lie I understand that. I find that the word “liar” and “lie” is not good for me to use because it gets in the way of me being able to say, he said this and this is wrong. It just gets everyone all inflamed and because it sounds like opinion and it does require that you understand the— ROBBINS: Intent. Q: The intent and the mental state and, frankly, I think a lot of the time the president is—whether something is true or false is immaterial to him to the point that I can’t say that he’s intentionally saying something that’s false. I don’t know that true and false matter to him as much as what he’s trying to achieve. So anyway, that’s one example on using the word lie. I’m just—I try to avoid using it. But I wonder if you had any advice on how to preserve our neutrality or whether we should, whether this is just—these are extraordinary times and we should give up that idea that we should be a neutral voice. ROBBINS: Is neutrality really the word or just that you’re actually reporting the news? That’s the—I think that’s the issue itself. Yeah. I mean, we’re pretty good on time here. EDMONDSON: Just one sentence about this. I really appreciate the Trump said falsely, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and then put the reality in the sentence right below it and then keep going. Rather than saying lie just said falsely and not getting to motive. Yes. ROBBINS: I mean, just this whole—this whole question, truth sandwiches—there’s been all sorts of studies about you tell the truth and you say what the false thing was, and there’s been studies about—it’s the same thing as writing a correction. Do you say the right thing first and then the wrong thing? What sticks in people’s minds? What gets flagged? I mean, we’ve all struggled with this. And certainly lie means intent. I think this is—I think it’s a really hard—a really hard thing. I mean, how many people here think that their job is to be neutral, you know? How many people think that their job is to be as objective as humanly possible? I mean, that’s the way I always felt as a reporter, you know, and it’s hard in this environment. So—and that’s as someone who went over to the dark side and became an editorial writer. (Laughs.) So another question. So the woman back there. Thank you. Q: Hi. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton with the Denver Post. So in my newsroom we have a running joke that it’s only a matter of time before we get rounded up and sent to CECOT. Realistically, what is the worst-case scenario that you guys are preparing for? ROBBINS: They have really nice clogs, though. Q: What was that? ROBBINS: They wear crocs, I mean, so it won’t be that bad. Q: (Laughs.) But what is the worst-case scenario that you guys are preparing for under Trump? ROBBINS: You mean for reporters? Q: Yes. ROBBINS: This is the worst-case scenario person here. GINSBERG: Oh, yeah. Arrests and—arrests and—well, the worst-case scenario is that we always plan for arrests and killings. I think what is likely here is arrests. You know, we may likely see many more people be detained for their reporting if it starts to become—you know, if we see new foreign agent laws, for example, or increased use of the Espionage Act, or certainly as a result of increased leak investigations I certainly think that you might see people detained for contempt, for example. So many more arrests before we get to that level. I think, obviously, a sharp uptick in legal threats is likely and one of the things that you can certainly expect is an environment in which those who are supportive of the administration get much more leeway to own and run local news outlets. So to the point about, you know, the White House press service will be replicated across the country in a variety of local news outlets that have—you know, are allowed to operate under new FCC regulations and so on. And so what that does is, if you look at places like Hungary and elsewhere, that squeezes independent press to the margins to the point where then often those people who are doing that reporting are either hounded out through legal threat or actually jailed. The absolute worst-case scenario, obviously, is that journalists are physically targeted, including killings, and one of the reasons that can happen is if you continue to push this narrative that journalists are the enemy and they’re bad people. So you turn up to a protest and someone thinks it’s OK to attack you or they think it’s OK to show up at your workplace with a gun because you wrote an article that they didn’t like and that—again, that’s a very, very real concern in a place that has the highest personal gun ownership of any country in the world by a very long way. ROBBINS: George? FREEMAN: I’ll just try to make one bright spot out of some of this. (Laughter.) ROBBINS: Please. FREEMAN: And that is that when we started going down this road the question was, you know, who is going to stop the administration, and it’s pretty clear—incredibly clear—that Congress is not the answer. Congress is enabling the administration. But so far I would say, and disagree with me, that the court system has done better than I would have predicted in repulsing to some degree what’s been going on and the question really is, it seems to me, looking forward, whether the court system will be stronger than it has been in those other autocratic countries that have been referred to and will continue to do its job in the way that the lower courts so far have done. And I think the jury is out on that. There’s some good signals from Chief Justice Roberts that he’s not going to give in to some of this stuff. But exactly how that’s going to play out, number one, and number two, the real question of what’s the downside or what’s the worst-case scenario seems to me is if the courts say, no, you can’t do this, that and the other and the administration goes ahead and does it anyhow then we really are in a major crisis. And to me, that’s kind of the answer to what’s the downside or what’s the worst case. GINSBERG: And just to say—you asked me the worst-case scenario. There are ways to push back against this, right, and I think that’s the key thing. There are ways to push back against this. One, I think you’re absolutely right. I think the courts are really holding very strong at the moment. The second is, and this is something that everyone will tell you if they’ve experienced this, is what’s called—what the historian Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience, right, where you just kind of give up ahead. I’m not going to write that story. I’m not going to use this kind of language because it’s going to annoy this person over there. I’m not going to cover this story because I know that will rile them. That’s what creates the space for increased autocracy to fill is actually that everybody else steps back from the space because they are too frightened, too nervous, too exhausted, to economically challenged, to push back in this space. And so continuing to call things out, report things as you see them—you know, call out when you see something that’s wrong, unfair, and do it in defense of your colleagues is really important and so— FREEMAN: And do it together. GINSBERG: Yeah. And so, you know that is the worst-case scenario. That doesn’t mean I think that’s what’s going to happen in the U.S. but it does mean that I think—and that’s why we called the report “Alarm Bells”—we can’t just pretend this is normal. We can’t just sort of say, well, you know, I don’t know whether he’s telling the truth or not telling the truth or, you know, oh well, you know, they’ve just dismantled—they’ve just sacked, what was the latest one? You know, they’ve just sacked the head of the Library of Congress. You know, oh, well. You know, these things should all be making everybody really, really alarmed and we need to say that stuff publicly. And that’s not having an opinion; that’s just calling it for what it is. Putting it in context—this isn’t normally how things are done, people. You know, putting—that’s what we do as journalists. And so I don’t want people to come away and think, oh my God, you know, we’re now going to become a full-blown dictatorship. But I do think it’s really important that people recognize what’s in front of them because I can tell you now I’ve also never lived through an authoritarian regime. It doesn’t look like how I felt it would look because everything else is normal. Here we are sitting in this lovely room with these beautiful flowers and you probably had a lovely dinner yesterday, and the subway is still running and it doesn’t look like you imagine autocracy to look. It doesn’t look like boots on the ground. Guess what? That’s the experience of all the other people who’ve just gone through this over the last ten years. They also had running subways and, you know, running water and they going out for dinner and it all looked normal. Meanwhile, all of their rights were being taken away. So I just think we’ve got to wake up and recognize and call it for what it is and that’s part of the way—and support one another when we see that our colleagues are being attacked, that we will push back against some of this. We’re not helpless. ROBBINS: Another bright spot is that in places like Poland people did seize it back and they seized it back through voting. So I’m not saying we should just sit back and wait for the next election but it’s just—you’ve got Hungary and then you also have the example of Poland including the attempt to stack the courts and the attempt to completely seize power over journalism. GINSBERG: South Korea, or—yeah. ROBBINS: Yeah. So this is just—but yes, pretty frightening. Another question, please. The gentleman here, and then we’ll go back to this side. Q: Hello. John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight. I just want to talk about the “telling our story” piece that you guys began with. My daughter is fairly well informed and she actually does trust the press because she’s, you know, mine but most of her friends— ROBBINS: Like, what choice does she have? Yeah. Q: Yeah. Right. Most of her friends get their news the same way that she does, which is on social media, and this Pew report that came in our background materials talked a lot about that. What do you think our relationship should be with the kinds of people who make their living on the original reporting that we do by talking about it and often reaching more people than we do? How do we tell our story? Do we have a relationship with these people? Do we try to be that? What are your thoughts on this? ROBBINS: Aimee, are you training influencers? EDMONDSON: I think so. We are training the next generation for jobs that we didn’t even know existed, and then I’ll hear, oh, I got a job in New Orleans. I’m the social media voice for this celebrity and I can’t tell you who, and I’m, like, that’s a job? (Laughter.) Of course, that was about five years ago and it’s now, like, well, of course, it’s a job. So yes, and when people say they get their news from social media my next question is, OK, well, what do you mean? Is it the New York Times on a particular channel or is it a particular—is it the local newspaper or television station? And so I always tell my students that the social media is the channel through which they get the information. So if we’re there as journalists that’s incredibly helpful because we know everybody is on their phones now. And so the—I think one of the big things we really need starting in probably the eighth grade is a return to true media literacy training. We used to call it civics, and I know that that’s still there and—but, you know, when we think about the small percentage of people who go to college so you got to grab them young to be able to distinguish between, you know, what is news and what is a journalist, because the word journalist and media are not synonymous, right? Don’t call us the media. We’re journalists. So there’s a lot of work to be done there and to meet them where they are, to answer your question, is an incredibly good idea. ROBBINS: But I also think—I mean, yes, wouldn’t that be fabulous but I think the most immediate and pressing question is what do we do about the people on TikTok who are actually reading our stories and are reading them more persuasively than we could read them because they are doing it with flashing lights or funny, great accents or whatever it is, and they seem to reach more people than the New York Times TikTok channel would. EDMONDSON: Right. Right. And then, of course, the legal brain would be going Hearst v. NIS from, like, the 1920s and then there was an outlet that stole AP story after story after story. And so, you know, that’s not a sustainable business model when you’ve got a handful of media outlets doing the reporting and everybody else just repeating it. So there’s that. FREEMAN: You tell ‘em. EDMONDSON: (Laughs.) There were two court cases, one from the 1920s and then one more recently in the ’90s that showed that’s not a— ROBBINS: But it would be whack-a mole, though. I mean, there’s just— EDMONDSON: It would be. ROBBINS: —there are too many people on TikTok. So do you just say as long as they’re accurately reflecting my reporting for the sake of democracy at least they’re getting the information, or does that mean that they’re not coming to my website? They’re not coming to my reporting? They don’t actually even know where it’s coming from, so they’re even less likely to ever subscribe to a newspaper. I mean, isn’t that the dilemma? Is that what you’re asking? EDMONDSON: Yes, I think so. You make friends. I do, and then it would be really great, friend, if you could attribute this. ROBBINS: Include a link. Include a link on your—yeah, for more— EDMONDSON: For more information. ROBBINS: —for more information, for better information you could go to. I think that’s—(laughter)— GINSBERG: And I think you already see this happening, right, in the number of people that are actually leaving traditional media to set up on their own in this kind of way and actually I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing to provide newsletters or to go on TikTok. You know, I think the format always shifts. The key thing is that people understand that they’re getting information that’s trustworthy and credible and they understand how that’s being sourced, whether it has bells and whistles or not on it. I think that’s, to me, the key thing. I’m smiling because we’ve just done a whole series—a piece of work within CPJ around this who is a journalist question because, obviously, we get asked that a lot. It’s in our name. And that gets really complicated when you get into the area of commentary, you know, because there are people who are taking fact-based information and commenting around it. Does that make them a journalist, question mark, I think, is a really key one and traditionally within—commentators within newspapers have been considered as such because they worked within that framework but anyone outside has not. Well, is that still a valid—is that still a valid distinction? And I think it’s a really important one to ask when we think about, well, what is it that we do and how does it have value. Lots of things have value. That doesn’t necessarily make them journalism. Lots of things have value for democracy. It doesn’t make them journalism. So I think really kind of getting to the core of what is it that we do that has specific value is really important if we’re going to be able to defend it. ROBBINS: Then there’s the question of the challenge of monetizing it on a local level. GINSBERG: Yeah, that’s a—yeah, that’s a— ROBBINS: Which is a pretty—I mean, having watched the New York Times come this close to going under before we decided to go pay, I mean, it’s just a—and the Times is thriving but very few other news organizations are. So you have a half an hour to make it to your lunch discussion, which will be at 12:00 p.m. You know where it is. There will be food outside the room. But you have—it’s not—it’s a big building but not that big a building so I’m going to volunteer these people to talk to you if you didn’t get a chance to do it. I just really want to thank Aimee and George and Jodie for a great conversation. (Applause.) (END)