- [Announcer] And now, an Arizona PBS original production.

- [Narrator] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project, Ideological Conformity on Campus and in American Society.

This week- - First thing, like, are newsrooms woke?

Yes, right?

We've known this for a while.

- I am using the word woke in the way sociologists do to refer to something that happened in 2015.

- To use the term this way is to ignore its origins and to tacitly participate in anti-Blackness.

- [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

And now, Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy Opinion Editor at Newsweek, Megan McArdle, columnist at The Washington Post, and Dr. Jason Nichols, political analyst, columnist, senior lecturer of African American Studies at University of Maryland discuss, is the woke newsroom a danger for American democracy?

- As the author of a book called "Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy", you can probably guess (chuckles) that I think the answer is yes, the media does promote the idea that there are unchallengeable orthodoxies, and yes, this is problematic for democracy.

I think that woke newsrooms are a threat to democracy because they have limited the viewpoints that are allowed in the mainstream media to the views of a tiny sector of the American public, and that tiny sector is an economic and cultural elite whose views are very distant from those of the average American on most issues, from gender, to race, to immigration, to the economy, to COVID.

I am using the word woke in the way sociologists do to refer to something that happened in 2015, which is when white liberals started showing up in polls as more extreme in their views on race than Black and Hispanic Americans.

This phenomenon, social scientists have dubbed the Great Awokening.

They started to express the belief that power, privilege, and agency are the exclusive provenance of white people and those adjacent to them, like Jews and Asians, while people of color are routinely denied these things.

A Yale study from 2018 summarized the effects of the Great Awokening nicely.

The study found a difference between how white liberals and white conservatives talk to Black and Hispanic Americans.

This was the difference.

White liberals, this 2018 Yale study found, dumb down their vocabulary when talking to people of color, and white conservatives don't.

When white liberals encounter a black or Hispanic American, they immediately stereotype them as lower status and start to use lower level vocabulary, and white conservatives don't do this.

That is wokeness in a nutshell.

That is the phenomena that sociologists are talking about.

Believing that the color of somebody's skin immediately marks them as lower status than you and in need of your beneficence, and then acting to compensate accordingly.

As I'm sure you can tell from my tone, I think this is disgusting and deeply racist.

And needless to say, as the polling shows, but also as all of your encounters will show you, people of color don't see themselves this way.

But whether they know it or not, this is how white progressives have started to think and started to behave, especially those at the top of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Well, you can read my book for a history on that, but for now, suffice it to say that the media played a big role in the Great Awokening.

Data shows that starting in 2011, not incidentally, the year The New York Times erected its online paywall and went all in on digital media, words like white privilege and marginalized and then people of color in the same sentence as the word marginalized started to appear with just exponential frequency as media outlets try to capitalize on the tools of digital media.

And I can talk much more in depth about how that works.

It may look like we have a partisan divide ruling our media.

What we actually have is a massive class divide, a situation where the liberal media outlets which represent the majority, by far, are made up of and cater to a teeny tiny minority of people who have extremely embarrassing views on race and gender, and both the journalists at these outlets and the audiences they are catering to, other rich white progressives, have a habit of public shaming and firing campaigns against people who dissent from their views, hence enforcing orthodoxies.

Back when they were catering to the vast American middle, America's liberal media managed to change a once racist nation into one that overwhelmingly favors Dr. King's vision that the only society worth living in is a colorblind one.

Today, America's leftist media chasing the clicks of an overeducated progressive elite demonizes anyone who shares Dr. King's vision as racist for daring to erase the rarefied privilege of the marginalized.

America's liberal media once turned the nation in favor of gay marriage by targeting middle and working class readers and viewers and convincing them that they too might know someone excluded from the joys of marriage due to their sexual orientation.

Now, legacy outlets demonize and de-platform gay activists who are opposed to gender-affirming care in children.

Naturally, the right has its version of this.

People who disagree with the right's stance on abortion or transgender issues are smeared as baby killers or groomers.

Chasing digital traffic, the media outlets of both sides have abandoned the vast middle to make money and consolidate power for elites, and economic, and economic policy has followed a pace, NAFTA, globalization, the decimation of the American working class.

That is a disaster for any democratic society as it has been for ours.

Thank you.

(audience applauds) - First thing, like, are newsrooms woke?

Yes, right?

We've known this for a while.

We've known that the media leans overwhelmingly to the left.

95-plus percent of my colleagues vote either, vote Democratic, support Democrats, or support someone to the left of the Democrat.

I don't say just my colleagues at The Washington Post.

I mean generally in the mainstream media.

That is a fairly new development.

It used to be more like one third, two thirds, one third conservative, two thirds liberal, but we are now so liberal that it's sort of questionable whether you should call us the mainstream media.

The first important thing about the old media world was that even though that was true then, even though it was more liberal than not, they had a lot of reasons to try to be balanced.

So why was that?

So first of all, the most powerful bits of that media had monopolies or oligopolies.

There were three networks.

Most towns had one newspaper.

If you lived in a big city, you had two.

If you lived in New York, you had three.

And so when you have a monopolist, as any economist will tell you, their incentive is to maximize the extent of their market, right?

They're not trying to carve out a competitive niche.

They're not competing with anyone.

They make the most money by selling the most to the most people.

So the second thing is that these monopolies are supported by advertising, not by subscribers.

Now, people subscribed to magazines.

They subscribed to newspapers, et cetera.

But those subscriptions didn't even cover the cost of putting the physical dead tree in your hands with the print on it.

All of the reporting, everything else, that was paid for by the ads.

Interestingly, not just the big department store ads or the movie ads, but the classified ads were about 50% of the revenue of a normal newspaper.

Third, media markets were defined by physical limits.

A newspaper's market was how far a delivery truck could drive in a day.

A magazine's market was how fast is this going to get, how fast can I print this, and how fast can I get this into people's hands through the US mail.

A television or radio station's market was literally how far can light waves travel carrying my signal before it peters out.

Taken in concert these three facts produce a media that tried to appeal to as many people as possible in a distinct local market.

They bundled comics and sports and news in a convenient package to get as many people as possible reading because that maximized their market, and they tried to avoid picking sides in controversial fights because people who feel slighted cancel their subscriptions.

This was easier to do because they were local.

They could tailor themselves to the community.

The Wichita paper was a lot more conservative than the New York paper.

The internet blew this up, not just because it competed with old companies for news.

That's actually the smallest part of it, although people who are competing with the main, the dreaded MSN think that it's the biggest part.

The biggest part is it created new and more efficient channels for advertising.

Craigslist and Monster took all the classified ads.

Facebook and Google took the rest.

It also created massive economies of scale.

So you're no longer bound by how far a truck or a light wave can travel.

What that means is that it's now much more efficient to produce these things in a centralized way and maximize the extent of your market across a country or a language.

As I say, the motto of the early internet was information wants to be free.

The problem is journalists still gotta get paid.

What we do is, believe it or not, very expensive.

And the most expensive part is actually the part that makes people the least angry.

It's the reporting.

Opinions are cheap and fast.

Finding out what some city councilor said to another last Monday, that takes a long time.

And here's the other thing, I'll close by this, is that this all played into cultural forces.

I've talked about all the structural forces.

There was also a cultural moment.

On campus, a critical theory movement arose that was pretty skeptical about free speech.

I understand why.

And like, I don't agree with it, but I understand it.

But they created a permission structure for people who were looking to make the mainstream media into a tool for their political views.

The people, the critics who said, "Don't do this he said-she said.

Tell the truth."

And we saw this.

Trump created the conditions under which we gave in.

We were fighting an existential battle for good and evil.

We missed stories.

We missed Donald Trump, but we also missed Hispanic voters shifting because we, in a very rarefied group, assumed that all they cared about was immigration because that's how we thought of it.

Despite the fact that our newsrooms are more diverse racially, gender, and other ways, which is great and far, took far too long, because we're such a narrow class, we are prone to an exquisite group think that misses more and more stories, and by the way, offends half of the country.

And they create their own media, but that media isn't doing the job we're not.

Instead they're, they only report out the stories where we make mistakes, or where we are in the biggest battle with them.

They are like the satellite, the moon to our Earth rather than becoming a vital new ecosystem.

These are poisonous dynamics, and I wish that I knew, that describing the problem told me how to solve it.

I don't.

I don't know how we get back from this.

I only know that if we don't find some middle ground, we are gonna rip this country apart.

(audience applauds) - Who said this?

White Americans must recognize that justice for Black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.

That would be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Believe that we need radical changes to the structure of our society.

I think it's important to reiterate that the term woke started in the Black community as a way to express that one was aware of injustices, both overt and covert.

The term was co-opted, or rather hijacked, or better yet still, colonized in bad faith by right wing ideologues in the media to encompass anything that is absurd or unfair in the name of social justice.

To use the term this way is to ignore its origins and to tacitly participate in anti-Blackness.

We've seen this with other terms like critical race theory, or intersectionality, or even Karen.

However, while I disagree with how some use those terms, I'll defend their right to do it.

Freedom is paramount in a functioning society, more so than order, because people who feel free will often behave in an orderly manner.

People who feel free respect and trust their institutions.

People who feel constrained, oppressed, misled, and silenced will rebel against the power they feel is doing so.

One of the ways of keeping order was to control the access to information, especially for the most marginalized and oppressed.

Many of you are familiar with the Antebellum Period and the policies regarding enslaved and many free Africans.

They could not marry, own businesses or land, or travel without a pass.

But the part that maintained the system the most prevented Africans from learning to read and write.

White supremacy has always dominated the American media, including the newsroom.

Arguably, no one has had more of an impact on academic and historical memory in the 20th century than the United Daughters of the Confederacy who erected monuments to the traitorous Confederates.

In fact, Arizona had a Confederate monument outside of its state house that stood alongside Dr. King, that the right respects so much, and the Navajo Code Talkers.

The state had at least five Confederate monuments in total.

And if I'm not mistaken, your state had one battle throughout the entire Civil War, but you have five monuments.

Now, people like Christopher Rufo will tell their vast audience that critical race theory is coming to harm their children.

I don't know if Christopher Rufo understands what critical race theory actually is, but I do know he doesn't care.

Rufo said, quote, "The other frames are wrong too.

Cancel culture is a vacuous term and doesn't translate into a political program.

Woke is a good epithet, but it's too broad and too terminal and too easily brushed aside.

Critical race theory is the perfect villain."

Instead of expanding intellectual conversations, they moved to ban books, including ones on Rosa Parks and Malala Yousafzai.

Banning the study of critical race theory, which is a very broad intellectual dialogue on inequality and white supremacy, along with attempts to ban other controversial material and concepts like socialism, communism, totalitarianism, and many other political and social philosophies, is wrong not only morally but strategically.

Learning about things you disagree with will only firm your position.

The problem is not the woke newsroom.

It's that the newsroom lacks credibility.

It's the lying newsroom.

It's the newsroom that wants to be first more than it wants to be correct.

At times, it's the ideologically singular newsroom.

It's the blending of entertainment with news and pursuit of profit.

We live in an age of disinformation spread by profiteers and those seeking fame and social media clout.

The difficult part is that we should not censor them.

We must challenge them and defeat them with facts.

Academia has a unique responsibility to enter contextualized facts into the discussion.

Thank you very much.

(audience applauds) (serene music) - Batya speaks from a principle of justice and equality, mass democratic equality, so I think this question applies even to your position.

Where would, where would American citizens, and journalists as a subset of them, learn this principle of justice and of equality?

So here's my question.

Is there a civic duty in higher education in America in the 21st century, colleges and universities, to emphasize a principle of heterodoxy, and pluralism, and civil disagreement, particularly about political, social, economic, broadly civic views?

- One of the ways that I start my classes out is at the beginning of the semester, when I'm showing them the syllabus and everything, I start with, this class has a bias.

It reflects my biases and the biases of African American studies at the University of Maryland.

And the truth is that all of your classes, save for a math class, will have a bias, including your science classes.

What research do they consider legitimate?

Where it comes from?

The difference is I'm being open about the fact that this class has a bias in the source material that I choose and the lectures that I will give.

I'm being open, I'm being honest with you, and I'm respecting you as an adult.

- I think that a big problem for academia having reconceived itself as a left wing project, a, it is missing stuff.

It's making mistakes.

And you see this, there's a series of great papers in social psychology about all, which was the, for those of you who didn't follow the stories closely, was an evergreen source of wonderful stories about what terrible, terrible human beings conservatives are, scientifically proven.

So for example, conservatives are super authoritarian.

Well, yes, because they were using a scale that's literally like the right wing authoritarian scale.

It is designed to ask people if they believe in right wing authorities.

And it turns out that if you change the authorities, if instead of asking people like should children obey their parents, et cetera, if you instead ask them like should people defer to environmentalists and let them make the decisions about the environment, it turns out left wing people are huge authoritarians and right wing people are like bloody freedom fighters.

(audience laughs) Right?

It makes you stupid.

It makes you less good at your job.

And the problem is conservatives don't trust you.

We have, our crisis in this country, our biggest political crisis, is an epistemic crisis.

The only thing that you have to bring to political debates as an academic is your institutional credibility.

It's your expertise.

And people aren't stupid.

If you don't tell them all the truth, if you only pick the truth that flatter your side, if you tell them that, like, "How dare you say this.

Conservatives might like it," they understand that you're not doing history anymore.

You're doing politics.

And there's a reason people don't trust politicians.

And so I think that like on so many levels, it makes academia ineffective at what it is supposed to do, which communicating true, finding truths and communicating truths.

And it also, by the way, means that you have created a class of conservatives who wants to destroy you.

And given how much academia is now state funded, it's just politically stupid.

So they're not even doing politics right.

They're doing it in the dumbest possible way, and I wish they would stop.

And I think this is true of journalism too.

- Batya.

- So I think there's like a temptation to be like, well, academia, you got us into this mess.

Now you get us out of it.

But to me, the big problem with America is that it's led by people with a college degree.

It's led by elites.

It's led by the economically privileged.

It's led by rich people.

So I feel a little bit embarrassed to come here, sit on your stage and say this, but I actually think academia has way too much power right now.

And it really, it really doesn't matter.

I mean, it's shown that both it has the ability to fill newsrooms with people with really embarrassing views, but also that it does not have the ability to guide the nation and that the, it really does make you rethink, I'm sorry again.

I say this with humility in this room.

It really does make you rethink the value of this liberal arts education and I think especially because across the nation, in working class communities, people are debating everything, and it's not a big deal.

Like, you can't walk into a nursing home in Florida, into a break room and not find Republicans and Democrats happily debating all of the issues of the day.

On the major issues of the day, the most important values that this nation was founded on and never lived up to, there is no longer a partisan divide.

And on all the other issues, people are happily debating if they're not part, if they haven't gone to university.

If they have gone to university, they cannot stand the fact that anybody disagrees with them.

So pardon me that I don't think the university's the answer.

I mean, I think the answer is give the working class back a voice in the public sphere and you will solve the problem.

- Real quickly.

I heard what you said about having a wide variety of views at universities, but doesn't the university have a responsibility to reject people who come and just lie, just don't use facts?

Doesn't the university have the right to make a determination we're not gonna allow this person on because the information they're providing is simply factually incorrect, and therefore, does not further a civic discourse?

- So by reputation, a given speaker could guest, yeah.

- An election, for example, an election denier, a Holocaust denier, someone who has written widely about those kinds of things that are clearly untrue, does that person deserve a place that an academic table?

- I just so disagree with this.

I understand where it comes from, and it comes from a well-meaning place.

But I mean, two things.

First of all, I am not that sure I'm right about anything.

I am not sure enough that I'm right about anything to say that person can't speak.

And second of all, honestly, like if someone is really that wrong, that obviously incorrect, then I should be able to rebut them pretty convincingly pretty quickly.

We don't, in fact, want to shut down speech that we think is so obviously untrue that no one should hear it.

We wanna shut down speech that we are afraid we can't rebut.

And look, I get it.

The election was not stolen.

Donald Trump is a vile liar about that, and he has duped his followers into basically stoking his ego at the expense of the country.

So I'm not neutral on this.

That said, I don't wanna shut them out of discourse 'cause they're not going away.

They're just gonna all be talking among themselves.

I want them here so that we can talk, so that we can debate, so that we can, again, try to find some shared ground where we can all agree about what facts are.

- Responses?

- Jason?

- Yeah, so I totally agree that we cannot shut out 75 million people.

So anyone who's like, "I don't wanna talk to any Trump supporters," I'm like, "You do talk to Trump supporters, probably every day, several times a day."

So, and the fact is we can take it a step farther.

Like, I mentioned Alex Jones.

The trouble, and I think that the gentleman was bringing up, is that lots of people do believe that, what he said about Sandy Hook, which was really painful for a lot of people.

And they really do have big platforms.

So it's, I think everybody has free speech, but everybody is not owed every platform.

I think that there can be discussions about what the limits are in terms of lending this stage to somebody who's a Holocaust denier or a, someone who is a generally hateful person, or a violent person, or something like that.

I think we can have that discussion.

I think it's more important, generally, if it's just someone you disagree with, then your First Amendment right, their First Amendment right is to speak.

Your First Amendment right is to protest.

So I know the right is all always like, "Oh my God, look at these liberals yelling at the, outside of this speech."

And I'm like, that's their First Amendment right.

They are allowed to assemble peacefully.

And if they shout and you hear it through and it disrupts, or they bang on the walls, they're allowed to do that.

I don't know about banging on the walls, but probably.

- Please join me one last time in thanking Batya Ungar-Sargon, (audience applauds) Megan McArdle, and Jason Nichols.

(serene music) - [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project, Ideological Conformity on Campus and in American Society is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.