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(relaxing music) - [Announcer] And now, the Crosscut Ideas Festival.

Featuring a selection of curated sessions from this year's festival.

Thank you for joining us for Beyond the Breaking News with Michael Barbaro, moderated by Paris Jackson.

Before we begin, thank you to our session sponsors, Becky and Mike Hughes.

We'd also like to thank our keynote track sponsor, BECU, and our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

Finally, thank you to our title sponsor, Amazon.

- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Ideas Festival.

My name is Paris Jackson, journalist and host of Crosscut Now.

I'm delighted to be here and have a chance to talk with Michael Barbaro.

Michael is a New York Times political journalist and host of The Times' The Daily podcast.

He's one of the leading voices in podcasting.

Every weekday, The Daily brings more than 3 million listeners inside the biggest national and international stories.

Listeners are given the opportunity to hear from reporters as they gather information, or directly from people in the middle of the stories.

The result is one of the most influential and impactful news sources today.

In this conversation, we'll talk about the responsibility and challenges that come with this kind of platform, especially in such a tumultuous time for the world, and with distrust in the media at an all time high.

Michael, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

- Thank you very much for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

- We're delighted to have you here with us.

And to just kick it off, you know, we used to get our news on the radio, via newspapers, and even the evening news.

And now, everyone is consuming it in a million different ways.

How do you see podcasting fitting into that mix?

- Well, you're right to say it's new, and yet it's not at all new.

right?

I mean, podcast is a modern iteration of the oldest and most powerful form of broadcast, which is radio.

And radio plays such a huge part in the history of media, especially in the United States.

And podcasting grows out of that tradition, and it experiences this huge growth, this explosive growth over the past decade when technology, which is always the great driver of change in media, kind of meets the moment.

And of course, what I'm talking about is the iPhone.

Right?

- Right.

- Smartphone comes along and everyone's got this purple app, which is the podcasting app.

And simultaneously, they're getting Bluetooth technology in their cars and in their homes.

And suddenly it's possible to listen to digitized audio, which is what podcasting is, my show, The Daily is.

Anywhere, any time of day and it doesn't need to be live anymore.

And so the work that we do, it never times out, it never expires.

TV has basically found that technology as well, right?

You can record things.

But in audio you really couldn't.

If you missed that amazing moment in the car when you were listening to NPR, it was gone forever.

And now, that's not a problem.

So all that stuff comes along, and that's the moment that our show, The Daily, was born in.

A kind of technologically optimal moment where lots of people are ready to give podcasting a try.

So podcasting is having a moment because the world is ready to listen to digital audio at their fingertips at any moment of the day.

- And kind of speaking on that moment, I mean, it came at a very unique moment, a tumultuous time, really globally.

Former president, Trump, didn't shy away from his disdain with the media.

For instance, even talking about The Times and many other broadcast networks.

And even still today, we have elected officials and those within media spaces that continue to expel lies as fact.

And so from your perspective, how are you able to report the news in this type of environment?

Has it changed?

How do you see it?

- Well, I think to answer your question, I have to talk a little bit about the format of The Daily.

So we are created in 2017, as you are hinting at, a moment of great tumult, a moment where Donald Trump has been elected president.

The Daily literally starts a couple of weeks into that presidency.

And it's journalistically speaking, a pretty strange moment, maybe a little bit terrifying 'cause facts are very much in doubt.

We have a president who at that moment was embarking on a pretty unprecedented campaign of mistruths, lies, deceptions.

And if you're a typical journalist, it's very hard to wade through all that because you have to engage it in these very short bursts.

Today, the president said X.

Maybe it's not true, but, It's a very short segment.

We don't have a whole lot of time to engage it.

The Daily was telling one story a day.

One story a day for about 25 minutes, which is a real gift because it means you can start your story in a pretty interesting place and expect your listener to come with you on a pretty long journey.

Which means you don't need to engage.

In fact, you can if you're gonna do the job well in sound bites and the quick hit news of the day.

We spend a ton of time thinking about how we wanna tell a story that will carry you through those 25 minutes, which means telling you a really rich story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And almost by definition, that means not having to obsess and focus on the quick tweet from the president or the thing he said that was false, but getting to the real heart of the matter.

If we're gonna talk about the immigration or the wall, we're gonna go down to the border, we're gonna tell a real story about our real person for 25 minutes.

If we're gonna be talking about the president's relationship to the Muslim ban, which he announced just a few weeks into his presidency, we're gonna spend 25 minutes really exploring the motivations behind that and it's impact.

And so that really liberates us from a lot of the awfulness of that moment.

- And interestingly, as you just mentioned, a lot of those were just difficult, heavy topics, ones that may trigger your audience.

So how were you and your team able to kind of strike that balance between empathy, sensitivity, and neutrality?

- I think we approached the show with this idea that there's plenty of partisan media in the world.

Plenty of conservative media, plenty of liberal media in broadcast especially.

And that what listeners really wanted was curiosity, earnestness, and empathy.

And empathy's tricky, right?

Because empathy can turn into sympathy and who are you being sympathetic towards and who are you not being sympathetic towards.

But I think our curiosity was the driving force of the show.

And wanting to get to the bottom of every story in a way that introduced characters and their emotions, and let the journalists from The New York Times who are the protagonists of our show and their news gathering process and their curiosity be the thing that kind of brought listeners into our journalism, and exposed it for what it is, which is fundamentally fair-minded.

That's what we are.

And in a way, I think media has for a long time resisted letting people come inside, right?

Open up a door and see how we do what we do.

And I think The Daily, by letting people into our process, letting journalists say when they don't know something, embrace their uncertainty and describe the process of gathering facts, lets people see that this is not a mysterious conspiratorial process here.

This is a person doing their best, filling through the uncertainty, trying to get an answer.

So I think all that together became a counterbalance to all that doubt and worry in that moment.

- And that's a perfect segue into, I guess where the fundamental or the groundwork was, another, I guess, step to that was building trust.

How are you able to and how do you build trust with your audience?

- Yeah, I think the way you build trust with an audience that has been, for some good reasons and for some not good reasons, led to believe that the media is not trustworthy, is by being transparent.

And I'm just gonna give you an example.

Throughout the Russia investigation, which was so polarizing, the kind of federal investigation into whether Donald Trump and his campaign had had an improper relationship with Russia.

So much noise around it.

So many questions about what is collusion.

And I remember a moment where we just asked one of our colleagues on the show to basically acknowledge that people don't really, even in the legal world, necessarily know whether collusion is even a crime.

And so if we don't really know that's a crime, what are we up to here?

And I think sometimes when a journalist disarms you by going away off the expected script, acknowledging what they don't know and maybe that they may never know it, that is the opposite of that traditional broadcast anchors declaring what is, this is how it is tonight.

And it's like, well, sometimes we don't know the way it is.

Sometimes we're just trying to figure it out.

And I think that is part of a necessary journey that we as journalists have to go on.

This is what we know, this is what we don't know, this is what we're trying to figure out.

And that's a big part of how we design the show.

- And one thing that you've mentioned before, and I think it even takes it that continual step is you're trying to humanize something that maybe had been more rigid.

And part of building that trust is trying to diversify who you talk to.

And have you guys found that, is there evidence to support that, that you are building trust with your audience?

Because some will say The Times leans more liberal, and so are you finding that conservatives are a part of your listenership?

- They are.

And I think we know that we're striking this balance we're talking about when we hear from our listeners who are left of center or progressive and say, "Oh, I didn't expect to hear from that person and I was glad to hear it from them."

And then when we hear from our conservative listeners who say, "I didn't think you'd ever have that person on," and "I didn't think you'd ever have that conversation" I'll just give you an example.

You know, mass shootings are the great kind of trauma and scourge of our time.

And early on we had The Daily, decided we wanted to cover these mass shootings in as interesting and curious and empathetic way as we possibly could.

And I remember a conversation we had with a man who owned a gun shop that had sold a gun that was used in a mass shooting.

And we wanted to have that conversation 'cause we knew it was going to be a challenge to many of our listeners.

Unexpected.

Who wants to hear from somebody who sold a gun that was used to kill many, many young people in a school?

And it turned out this person was as traumatized.

This gun store owner was as traumatized as anyone in the story, horrified by what had happened, and had a very complicated nuanced relationship to guns himself.

And that was so unexpected.

And I remember hearing from lots of our listeners that we had kind of turned their expectations inside out.

They wanted to hate him but they couldn't because he was so real.

And I think whenever we can challenge each other to see people not as caricatures and not as these kind of straw men and women in the news, but as really fully three-dimensional human beings that the news has just happened to, then we're doing it right or righter than we were before.

- Right.

And I'm even thinking back.

You know, I'm a avid listener of The Daily.

And over the last couple of years, I mean, you just mentioned that story with that gun shop owner, have there been other stories that have touched you and kind of change your view on things?

You personally?

- Yes.

And one immediately comes to mind in a way that I'm a little bit bashful of because I had a very strong reaction to it.

You know, very early on in the history of the show, we interviewed a coal miner about his life in the coal mines at a moment when there was in his mind an assault from environmentalists and the government to try to shut down that industry.

And we had a very searching conversation with this coal miner about what coal mines meant to him and how it had put his kids through school.

And at some point in the interview, he turned to me and asked me about how much I really understood about coal mining, and had I been to a coal mining.

And he was sort of, it was gentle but it was firm, and he was basically saying, do you have any idea what you are asking me about?

Do you really understand this thing that gets turned into a political football?

And I ended up getting very emotional during this interview and I felt very naked and exposed when he turned the questions back on me, and we kept my reaction in the episode.

And it was humbling.

'Cause I think sometimes when you, and I feel this way as a journalist who was writing for The New York Times as a print reporter, you can enter a story with a certain false authority and you can write it without false authority and maybe you don't get challenged on it, but in audio you're having a real conversation with somebody and they can turn on you and ask you a question that can just catch you short.

And that was what happened there.

And it had a deep impact on me 'cause I felt like I had learned a little bit about the limits of my own understanding of the story, but in a healthy and humbling way.

- Right.

The 2024 presidential election cycle is fast approaching.

Former President Trump is running again.

President Biden announced he'll run for another term.

The Daily and media outlets have a huge responsibility to present and listen to a wide array of voices inside the newsroom and out.

And after the last two unusual and turbulent presidential election cycles, what progress has been made to do that?

- Well, I mean, if we're being really honest, the journey has been fast and necessary because we all met Donald Trump in a moment when the news media wasn't quite sure what to do with someone who was telling us things that weren't true.

And how are we supposed to present those things when that person was the president?

It was an existential question of like, wait, how do we do this?

How do we cover the person whose every utterance is supposed to be news when sometimes those utterances are just false?

And it was a huge challenge for us, and I think it forced us to reevaluate the model of how we report.

It forced all of us to do this.

I'm sure it happened to you, it happened to us.

And I know that we've made progress because I see the fact-checking that's starting to occur all over the place.

I see what's not getting covered, which is actually sometimes really important.

You know, if a rally is just gonna be a bunch of lies that are spewed, why are we covering it?

Let's cover something that is factual and we can get to the bottom of it.

There's kind of a rabbit hole you can go down when you're dealing with conspiracies and falsehoods.

And yet there are certain conspiracies and falsehoods you have to deal with.

Like the claims of election fraud around the 2020 election that turned out not to be true.

You have to engage those.

But how do you engage them responsibly?

I think just the nature of your question and the fact that we now all think so much about this is a form of progress.

We no longer live in a world in which we can say to ourselves like, well, we're gonna give equal time to the thing that's false and the thing that's true.

Or if something said false, we're still gonna cover it really heavily and just get the other side, see what they have to say about it.

No.

If something's false, we say it's false.

We're not gonna do that both sides thing.

And that was a necessary adjustment we had to make based on political reality.

That is huge progress.

- I couldn't agree more with you on that one.

And another question that I've been thinking about, I think a lot of journalists and just people in general is people are tired, they're exhausted by the news cycle because it is, we may even, - Right.

We may say it's heavier now, but years, folks can argue the same.

Back in their time, it was just as heavy.

So I guess my question for you is, do you get tired of the news?

How is your team, how do you guys manage the fatigue?

- Okay, three words, Phantom of the opera.

So when the news gets us all down at The Daily, we make sure that we take a pause on the news, and we find a way to tell a story that is good for the soul.

And that's a complicated thing when you make one show a day and you have an audience as big as ours.

You have to trust that the listener's gonna go with you on a somewhat whimsical journey.

And I was only half joking because a couple of days ago, we did a whole episode about Phantom of the Opera because it's the longest running show on Broadway.

It happens to have just closed.

And we wanted to explore why was this show on Broadway for 35 years longer than any other show?

How does that happen?

And what does longevity tell us about American tastes and appetites?

And so we went to the last couple of productions of Phantom of the Opera we interviewed the cast, we talked about this show in this very funny way.

I sang a few lines from something that (speaks faintly).

You know, there's an internal barometer we have on our team, maybe you have on yours too, where we say, oh, it is just getting way too serious around here.

And so we need to apply that same lens and storytelling mode to something that's gonna bring us a little bit of joy.

- Yeah.

Kind of cleanse the palette, you know?

- Kind cleanse the palette.

Eat the little sorbet.

- I love that.

I like to think that, as you said, we're making progress but there's a caveat what do you think that progress looks like and the definitions of that.

But I also see, from your standpoint, The Daily is also expanding.

You're not navigating this behemoth of a podcast alone.

Sabrina Tavernise has now joined you as a permanent co-host.

She's done some phenomenal reporting while in Ukraine.

What has she brought to this iteration of The Daily?

- I mean, she brings world class, international reporting authority, which I have a few skills myself, I don't have that.

I mean, Sabrina arrives at a moment where the war in Ukraine has just started.

And she has covered Russia, she has covered the Middle East, she was stationed in Baghdad for many years for The Times.

She knows how to cover these big global conflicts and makes sense of them in ways that are really valuable to our audience.

And I'll never forget the moment, just a couple of months ago, when she was in Ukraine, tracking people as they left Kyiv, left the whole country to head outside of Ukraine to escape this invasion from Russia.

And she was spending the night in an elementary school with a fleeing family, and she woke up at some ungodly hour and was in a school bathroom next to a young girl, her recorder rolling the entire time.

And all you could hear was the sound of them brushing their teeth together.

And this young Ukrainian girl was telling the story of what she had left behind when she had to flee.

And that was such a powerful journalistic experience that I think brought home to people the stakes of the war.

And I think that's the beauty of having a co-host who is so experienced in international affairs, but who has the show's curiosity and empathy in her DNA.

- Michael, speaking of truth and Trump, you knew him before he was president.

How did that relationship affect your view of his presidency?

- Yeah.

I mean, my relationship with former president Donald Trump is the relationship that everybody who covers New York has, which is that you end up on the phone with him because for the longest time, he was a highly available person to call.

You could reach Donald Trump in nanoseconds.

He loved to talk to reporters from The New York Times.

And so I would call him for various stories, depending on what I was working on.

He would comment on almost anything.

And suddenly, a few years later, he was a reality TV star, and then a presidential candidate who we all thought was a long shot.

And I covered him as a candidate in a way that he found very challenging because I was investigating his business and his personal life, and I was especially investigating his relationship with women.

And so I had a lot of very challenging interactions with him, where he was mad at what I was doing, what my colleague, Megan Twohey, who'd gone on to win up Pulitzer Prize for her work on the Me Too movement was doing.

And so he didn't like me.

And that's challenging, right?

Everybody wants to be liked.

But journalistically speaking, it also just because of the way he operates, created an adversarial relationship where he went on Twitter and said that I should resign for a piece I had written that he didn't like.

And that's not an enviable place to be.

But you also as a journalist have to understand that what Donald Trump is up to is complicated and a bit of a performance, right?

So months after he won reelection, he shows up at The Times, shakes my hand, and says how much he admires my work.

And it's as if like the last thing had never happened.

What about asking me to resign?

So you see that there is a dynamic in which Donald Trump wants to criticize the media as part of his political strategy.

And it's been very successful.

When you attack the media enough, you attack the media's ability to be a counterweight to something you're saying that's false.

And then your falsehood has a lot better chance of becoming powerful and believed by many people in the country.

So it's a little perverse, but it's a successful strategy to call the news media the enemy of the people, which is what Donald Trump did.

And as a journalist, I fear that that has really contributed to the erosion of faith in the news media.

But as a journalist, I also need to understand it and cover it and explain it to our audience, what is happening here.

So I sometimes think of my own relationship with Donald Trump as kind of a case study of how this works.

You know, criticize the reporter, then be really nice to them 'cause you didn't really mean it, but know that the effect of that criticism is to make it harder for that journalist to do their job, which is often to hold you accountable.

So it's kind of a phenomenon you need to depersonalize, analyze, study, and explore.

That's my relationship with Donald Trump.

- Wow.

A ping pong, that back and forth.

And I think it even leads us to this last question that I have for you that I think that we both share a similar view that journalism is a noble profession.

It's vital to our democracy, as we've just outlined in this conversation.

But do you think most people see it that way?

- I think polls would tell us that the answer is no.

That they don't see it the way we see it.

And that's humbling.

I try to spend some time thinking about how I and those around me may have contributed to that feeling, but I try not to take it too personally, 'cause it's been a very long decade, long journey.

And I think we all have to wake up every morning as journalists knowing that we now have two jobs, right?

Our first job is to report the news as fairly and then with as much integrity as we can, curiosity and empathy.

But the second job, which I never wanted, and I bet you didn't want, but we now have, is to recognize that our audience is gonna be skeptical of us, and they might not believe us.

And that we have to think about the form in which we tell the story, and how we approach the story.

And we have to keep that distrust in mind because if we're not doing that second job, then our first job is not gonna work.

So I'm annoyed that we have these two jobs now.

You know, I wish that people trusted us.

But I think to do our job well now, you have to accept that there are now the two jobs, the reporting and the acknowledgement, the recognition, and the confronting of the fact that people don't trust us the way they used to.

- What a responsibility.

Well.

- Yes, it's a lot.

- It's huge.

But I think those that love what they do and that the essence of doing that first part well, it bleeds into that second part.

And so we're both up for the task, and I really appreciate you taking this time to sit down with me and our audience.

- Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much for your time.

- And thank you at home for joining us at the Crosscut Ideas Festival.