A Journalist’s Take on Knowing What’s Behind Your News

Nancy Gibbs

Director, The Shorenstein Center; Edward R. Murrow Professor, Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy; Editor at Large, TIME; Author, The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity

What book changed your life?

I think for a lot of writers, the book that most changed their life has to do with the writer more than the book. When I was a baby intern at TIME, there was a very senior writer named Otto Friedrich. He was absolutely brilliant. Following a health scare, he started to look to young writers he could mentor. He was always working on a book in his free time, and he would leave me three pages of manuscript he had written over a weekend. So more than anyone else, his books changed my life, because he changed my life. Between watching how he wrote and watching him eviscerate what I wrote, it was such a formative experience.

The best thing to happen in the ‘80s? 

I think more broadly, it was the mood of the country during the ‘80s. There are plenty of things to criticize about Reaganism, but as I remember growing up between the '70s and the '80s, the difference in climate was enormous, especially at  the end of the Cold War. 

And I don't discount the power of optimism in leaders, and its infectiousness. Many of the good things that happened in the 1990s could not have happened if that pivot hadn’t happened in the '80s. By the time you get to the '90s, you have this incredible unleashing of innovative energy in science, in technology, in the real arrival of the information age. You have this decade of such unprecedented peace and prosperity. But I don't think we should discount how much was made possible by that spirit the '80s had. Even in all the parody of the decade’s excesses—which were real—sometimes an excess of optimism is not a bad thing.

Nancy Gibbs: In the room where it happened (and writing about it).

Who or what got you interested in history and politics?

I had gotten into college thinking I’d be an English major, but I found that history had just as many great stories—except they were true. That switch to a history major, and getting to study with these incredible historians at Yale at the time, was a back door into politics. 

At every point, what has interested me about politics is its human side: What motivated people to go into public life? What allowed them to deal with the burdens of public life? I liked writing about the presidency because that’s still a human being who has to put on socks in the morning and carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. What kind of person decides to do that, and what do they do in order to handle that? The human drama around ambition, the opportunity and desire to make things better, combined all sorts of diversion and distraction and temptation—how well fortified are you against that? Maybe it’s because my mother’s a psychoanalyst, but I just find all of that fascinating. 

What made you decide to become a journalist?

I didn't really decide to become a journalist, because people scared me and still do. The idea of having to go interview people and get them to tell me things was terrifying. But I knew that the news magazines had this system where they took the people who were incredibly great detectives or interviewers, but completely froze up at the site of a blank page, and paired them with people who were not always fit to interact with other humans, but loved the jigsaw puzzle of putting a story together and turning a mess of information into meaning. It was an incredibly fun joint enterprise; you knew that if you did it right, you were going to tell a better story than either of you possibly could have told operating alone.

For example, writing the election night story. All of the correspondents covering the different candidates and races are all filing all their information into the New York headquarters, and my job was to sit there and read all of this and say, "Okay, what does this election mean? What do we now know about ourselves as a country that we didn't know 24 hours ago, before these results came in?" And what lessons do we draw, knowing that historians are going to be doing that analysis a hundred years from now? You get it together first and take a stab at it, and that is unbelievably fun.

Your favorite Presidential interview?

It has to be Donald Trump, because if the point of any interview is to come out understanding things you didn't understand going in, with the hope that it will allow you to explain it to readers, that happened with him.

There were things to admire and enjoy about all of the other presidents. Both Presidents Bush are charming and funny; interesting and delightful company. And Bill Clinton famously makes you feel like you're the only person on earth at that moment. Even Jimmy Carter in all of his earnestness—these tend to be very compelling figures. But in no case were any of those interviews as surprising and fundamentally startling as the interviews I did with Donald Trump, either early on in the campaign, immediately after he won, or then in the White House where I had dinner—the night before he fired James Comey, in fact.

I remember at one point during dinner (months past the inauguration), he summoned the White House photographer to bring a photo of the inauguration into the dining room. He wanted to walk me through all the ways that Obama had the National Park Service block off parts of the mall and lay out the white sheeting that would make it look like there were fewer people there. He spent a good 15 or 20 minutes trying to persuade me that in fact his inaugural size had been bigger than Obama's—which is just completely confounding. We both have a reason for being at this meeting, and you are making decisions about what it is you want me to take away from this conversation, and you're going to devote a piece of it to convincing me that your inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama's?

It was already an incredible role of the dice that the public decided to put in the Oval Office someone whose experience with public office and government was less than literally any president in history, including George Washington. Even George Washington had a kind of national leadership experience that Donald Trump had never had. Dwight Eisenhower had never run for anything before running for president, except he had lived and operated in Washington for years. It was a wild experiment.

With Donald Trump, reckoning with what he knows and doesn't know got tangled up in the semantics of whether you say he's lying or not. To me, interviewing him was really valuable in getting a better feel for the power he had over people, how people who were trying to manage him managed him and why people reacted to him the way that they did. That was, by far, the most useful and important of any of the interviews that I did.

If a free and functioning press is the bedrock of democracy, where are we right now?

If you add up the current market value of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, it’s greater than the GDP of all but the three largest countries on earth. They aren’t just too big to fail, they are too big to regulate.

It's not that countries aren't trying, the EU obviously has been much further along than the US has been. But there have never been companies this powerful, with this much control over people's access to information and the things that shape people's belief and behavior. Typically communications revolutions and innovation, starting with Gutenberg, have a way of driving enormous social and economic upheaval. I think we continue to underestimate the implications of that. We talk about adolescent mental health, we talk about the rise and fueling of extremism, but what about this basic ability to polarize just because the algorithm favors content that will engage people with things that make them mad or scared? It massively fuels the outrage industry that has always existed. 

At the same time, these same platforms have crippled local news organizations, which are our immune system. If you think about local news, which is the most trusted, it’s most focused on necessary information—the things that people actually need to know, like what roads are closed, or where is my polling place. They give communities their cohesion. When people are not connected to their community, is it any wonder that it's much more likely that they're going to be susceptible to being connected to QAnon, or whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is? It isn't just that people don't have the access they need to reliable, relevant, local information, but that the absence of it eats away at the fabric of our communities. 

This is stuff Robert Putnam was writing about 20 years ago in Bowling Alone, but it’s been accelerated by these technologies. When it comes to the majority of substantive issues, we're not actually as divided and polarized as we think. When you survey people about their top priorities, Trump voters and Biden voters share 11 of their top 15 in common. But we’ve been taught to hate the people across the divide and think that they are dangerous. 

We also have these wildly distorted views of them. A political scientist named Doug Ahler wrote a paper called The Parties in Our Heads, where he found that Democrats think that at least 38.2% of Republicans earn at least $250,000 a year. Actually, it’s more like 2.2%. And Republicans estimated that 31.7% of Democrats are gay; it's actually more like 6.3%. It's like we have these really cartoon versions. Where do those come from? They come from partisan media, by and large. So the media is a distorting lens and the research shows that the more media people consume, the more distorted their view of people on the other side of the divide.

What do you wish more people understood about the media?

How many other things are attached to the collapse of the economic model. The press is the only constitutionally protected industry, but the kind of journalism that we as citizens need newsrooms to do is expensive. And often, advertisers don't want to be anywhere near it. If I take the risk and spend the money to send a reporting and photographer crew to Yemen to cover the fighting there, no advertiser wants to be near that. Often, readers aren’t interested, either. That hurts your revenue. But the flip side of that is the informational equivalent of junk food, which is cheap to make and sells really well. Without understanding the underlying financial pressures that newsrooms are facing, it's very hard to understand their complicity in all of these other negative effects.

Even the fact that newsrooms are now more dependent on their audiences than on their advertisers—those lines crossed over a couple years ago. The New York Times makes more money from you as a subscriber than from its advertisers. That runs the risk that newsrooms are incentivized to give readers what they want and not piss them off. Yet the actual public interest obligation of a newsroom is to publish stories that irritate their readers and tell them things that they wish were not true. People really have to understand how inseparable the economic pressures are from some of the media trends we’re seeing.

The silver lining of that, which I also believe is true, is that the tools of journalism and of storytelling have never been cheaper or more widely available. 

What could we all do to be better consumers and supporters of the media?

One thing I require my students to do—and it's a little harrowing for some—is to very deliberately alter their media diet. If you normally watch CNN at 7 p.m., tonight watch Fox. And if you normally watch Fox, watch the BBC. Year after year, especially among those whose news diet is pretty uniformly progressive, students say it’s one of the most important exercises, that they just understood differently why people believe differently.