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The Future of Journalism After Gaza · Journalism 2050

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello everyone, welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is a podcast about the future of the free press.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Over the course of the next 10 episodes, we're going to be hearing from the finest minds in journalism.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're also going to be hearing from people like entrepreneurs, political scientists, and futurists who can help us figure out our present moment.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Betsy Morris from the Girl of Columbia Journalism Review.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_04: And welcome to a live taping of Journalism 2050, which is a podcast collaboration between Columbia Journalism Review and the Tau Center for Digital Journalism.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_04: This is the coolest thing we've ever done.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_04: So thank you for being here.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_04: And when we're done talking, there will be sandwiches and wine.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: So we hope you'll stay to the end.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'm thrilled to introduce the hosts of our show, Emily Bell, who runs the Tau Center, and Heather Chaplin, who is the founding director of journalism and design at the new school.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_04: And today they will be joined by Osmat Khan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Columbia Journalism Professor, and director of the Simon and June Lee Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schoffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, who is also the co-director of the Technology Policy and Innovation Concentration.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_04: The brains behind today is Amanda Derrick, CJR's podcast producer, and thank you also to Hannah Joy and Sam Earle for all their work on this production.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_04: We are talking today about the past and future of journalism, how we got here, and where we're going next.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: What you hear today will be part of a podcast series on this whole on this subject, and we'll be examining it even more in a special issue, which you can read at CJR in December on CJR.org.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_04: And you can read that and much more by checking us out online and signing up for our daily newsletter.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_04: So thank you for being here.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: And I will put my mic away and hand it off to fine people.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Betsy.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Also I'm thrilled, delighted, and slightly worried to see all of you here today.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for coming to what I hope is going to be a really uh absorbing and I hope important conversation actually.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Heather and I have a podcast for a while together, um, and we decided we wanted to revive our partnership around the future of journalism.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because we're kind of 25 years into a digital journey, uh, and we were thinking, well, 25 years ahead seems like too far, but actually we think that we don't examine the past enough.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, you're very big on this one.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we also need to look at some of the inflection points, and this is where our friends at Asma and Anya come in.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because when we were discussing the plan for this show, I said we really can't ignore Gaza and a moment which has uh completely changed journalism.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And Asma did a really extraordinary piece of work for CJR in the summer, this summer, explaining what we could be doing.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And we're solutions people, aren't we, Heather?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_05: That's a complicated question.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure I believe in solutions per se, but we definitely, I think it is it is so easy to get lost in the horror show of one's present sometimes, that it is super important to be thinking about always what can we be doing to make it better in the future.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: So why don't we start, Asmat, with just um what we're gonna do, I think, is hear a little bit about uh your work over the summer.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Anya and I have been in so many rooms talking about policy decisions over the past decade, particularly around technology platforms, uh, particularly around how do we support journalism in different parts of the world, um, that it would be really great, I think, then to broaden this out into a kind of more of a sort of general policy discussion.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: But tell us a bit tell us about the report and what really what you found from it that you think is most important that people take away from it.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Emily and and Heather, thank you both for having us.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: I am excited about this conversation, and I really appreciate your centering or putting at the forefront the question of Gaza, which has in so many ways led to one of the most unprecedented assaults on freedom of the press, on journalists, and also on freedom of speech.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the work that we did together this summer with under Betsy's excellent leadership and with CJR fellows essentially looked at the landscape of how much journalism has changed during the course of the war in Gaza, and also these incredible assaults on the lives of journalists in Gaza, these Palestinian journalists who've been killed at unprecedented levels as early as less than a month into the war.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, CPJ's numbers showed that they had never previously tracked killings at this scale and pace in that time period.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: And to see that the response to that over time was largely one particular thing, which was uh a number of letters, you know, from news organizations, statements of condemnation, uh, and the occasional slow-moving Israeli Supreme Court case for access to Gaza.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: So in the face of Palestinian journalists who were risking their lives to inform the world amidst a media blackout for foreign journalists to enter, you see people starving, you see them hungry, you see them reporting on the killings of their own family members, of their loved ones, of their neighbors, and being so committed to getting that out there that they put themselves at risk every day.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: And the response from our industry was largely one that put out letters and statements.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_03: And at some point, when the risk shifts to something that is so unprecedented, what you're doing about it should also shift, right?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: To match that, to meet that.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: At the heart of so many problems, right now, when it comes to crises in journalism, is people not being experimental enough, not imaginative enough, letting their bar get lowered to these very base debates rather than being really ambitious.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was an effort to look at well, you know, obviously we need better coverage of this issue and what's happening, and we need access, but what can we be doing about that?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, what can news organizations be doing?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_03: What can individual journalists be doing?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: And that ranges from the question of sanctions against states that are killing journalists or that are allowing this to happen, the question of, you know, after Jamal Khoshokji was killed.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say we've had sanctions before, right?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I mean there's precedent for all of this.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: So we looked at the landscape of, you know, what can and should be on the table.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: There's sanctions, there's the question of, you know, some European Union, the European Union is evaluating a trade agreement and whether, you know, Israel has broken its human rights clause.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: And are they looking at the killings of journalists?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: And according to CPJ, at least 26 journalists killed whom they've identified as deliberately targeted, uh, and many others would argue a larger number than that.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: But it it's really hard to have that proof when you don't have access on the ground, when work that is being documented on the ground is being destroyed.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the evidence is both being bulldozed in many cases, but also just the archiving of that work digitally.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how many news organizations have stated in line um during their coverage that access is not possible for um actually getting into Gaza, you know, that the access is not possible to get in from the outside, which I thought was an interesting uh part of the actual report that people don't think about, which is what happens when you can't get journalists into a country, which we know, you know, there are many examples of that.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we're seeing it in other places like Sudan, etc., at the moment, which is a sort of slightly different case, but again, you know, we're we're kind of do we think that Heather and I were talking about this earlier about is this something which is now we I think we think about Gaza as a very remote example.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, you talked about it as being the most extreme example.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_05: Well, and the continuum of bad things happening within journalism, journalists getting murdered seems, you know, the far end of the spectrum.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_05: But I what I find myself wondering is as you talk about how it's unprecedented and and the the sort of sinister quality of this being the new normal is is the why.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_05: Well what are the conditions that are allowing this to happen and to for it to play out this way?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think it it ties into so many of these topics, which is Palestinian journalists are largely discredited.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: They are considered, or they have been discredited in mainstream discourse.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, their values and contributions are often rendered into allegations of bias and of affiliation with militant groups.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it it goes beyond, you know, this war.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: This is very much a post-9-11 phenomenon where ordinarily we would look at someone and say, well, you're guilty, you're innocent until proven guilty.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: And that has 9-11 very much reversed that sort of understanding.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_03: When there is, you know, a claim of terrorism or link to a terrorist organization, all of a sudden it flips where you are guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: And the thresholds used are so different than what we would use.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like the threshold to prove yourself innocent is so much higher than the threshold used for the intelligence to dub you guilty.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that guilt is essentially the legal threshold that is used for an assassination, for the for rendering a killing acceptable.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: And people are afraid to speak out because they will look like they are defending people associated with militant groups.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: They are afraid of advocating for them because it will impugn their journalism.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: They are terrified of being grouped together and discredited, and it's very much, even now when we talk about foreign journalists not being able to get in, there are local journalists documenting things.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: And yet, like the way their coverage is scrutinized.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: When I have to tell you, I've spent, you know, m many years investigating airstrikes on the ground in countries like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: And in many of these places, in Afghanistan, it's like rural countryside, there's very little internet.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone I spoke to, almost no one said they'd ever spoken to a journalist before.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we were in Iraq and Syria, ISIS banned the use of the internet and information would trickle out, and but there, you know, journalists were famously decapitated.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: American foreign journalists and British journalists were decapitated.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: So there weren't local journalists in these places carrying out this work.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: And yet, in Gaza, unlike any other place I've ever reported, there is such an ethos and a culture for documentation.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: When you ask kids growing up there, what do you want to be when you grow up?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: Here you will get answers like doctor, lawyer, physic, you know, different kinds of things, policeman, woman, firefighter.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: In Gaza, people will often say journalism because that documentation is such a part of the ethos.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: They've had to document atrocities or they won't be believed.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_05: That's it's interest, it's it's super interesting.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_05: And the the point you make about the culture of documentation, if if I can follow up on that for a sec, I you know it's er it's one thing for us in the states to lament what's happening to journalists in Gaza and to think about what that means for our ability to understand what's happening there.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_05: But I do often find myself wondering for Gazans, how are they getting their news?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_05: How how is news and information that's reliable continuing to circulate, and if so, how?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah it's it's a challenge consistently because of internet.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: So people will often go to these charging stations.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, there have been strikes on charging stations.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: But people will go to great lengths to go plug in their phone and get internet.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, one of these beachfront cafes where many people would go to get internet a few months ago was struck and a number of journalists and graphic artists were killed, but it's already an endeavor to go get it.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: To go get internet, to plug in, to upload, to download.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, one of the not just beachfront cafes that I talked to, a source at Nasser Hospital all the time, and he would talk to me from this stairway where there was great internet.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, we would we would video call and you know, we would talk about what was happening.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: In August, August 25th, I believe, Israel struck Nasser Hospital and that very stairway more than twice actually.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: This was where journalists were doing this exact thing where Reuters, where two Reuters camera operators were doing their live filming.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so that news, they put it out through the internet and it circulates amongst people over the apps they use most, WhatsApp groups, Facebook.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: No professionals are putting it out.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: No professional.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many professionals, they're putting it out, but so many others are too.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: And what I will say is the internet is not the only way they get news.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: So by virtue of having to go walk for water and meet up in these places, people often carry news with them.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: There is um, you know, there's a lot of and and I think a lot about like these woven structures that that often get ignored, which is in the absence of a government where there's no police force, like people have to run their own safety, their own and so these like these informal groups follow, and a lot of information is communicated that way.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Anya, I want to sort of bring you in here as well, because uh go back as far as you like, but how did we get how did we get here?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get to a position where you can have this existential threat to journalism in one conflict, which also seems now a playbook for everywhere else, including um you know potentially America, where you have the discrediting and the uh calling the use of the word terrorist, uh you have the talk of visas being withdrawn, etc.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, sort of like that.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is a very weak version of the things that we're seeing in Gaza, but the playbook seems established.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a historic precedent for this.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: I know you've got some thoughts about how we how we ended up here.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, I think right now You have five minutes.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think where we are right now is where we all know where we are, which is you've got these autocrats and authoritarian rulers all over the world, and discrediting the media, discrediting universities, um, making populist promises that they don't necessarily keep is part of what we're seeing.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's a global contagion problem.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, we used to look at countries like Venezuela or Turkey or Hungary and say, wow, this is terrible.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Media captures such a problem.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and by that I mean government working in cahoots with media owners to put out a certain message, and now we see that this problem has really spread everywhere.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, obviously, I could, you know, Osmat's a very hard act to follow.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: You've described the brutality, but let's also not forget what Netanyahu has done to the free press and the public broadcasters in Israel.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: So first you kind of shut down independent voices, and then as you point out, you can get away with murder under cover of darkness.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it's reminding me, listening to you reminded me of my book, Global Muckraking, because there we looked at independent and investigative journalism in the global south in the 19th century.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And in those days, it took forever for things to come out.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So Adam Hochschulz wrote about how it took us 10 years to find out what was going on in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it used to take forever.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And now I thought that with digital media and social media, that problem was solved, that you couldn't actually shut places off, and information would leak out.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: But what you're saying is that you actually still can shut places off, and that's really kind of shocking.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can shut places off with threats and with willing to willingness to do physical violence and with profiling and targeting.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's sort of I think we can talk a little bit as well about the role of technology.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is something else that you've looked at, Anya.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um what do we think about the why is is it is it just a cultural or political um problem that the current class of press owners have not met the moment and haven't uh sort of called out not just this existential threat to journalism, but I'm I'm British.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um the BBC is in a terrible state this week.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I belong to a number of chat groups with uh former executives and academics who've um been attached to the BBC.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And from some way back I was saying, you know, I think it's pretty obvious what is going to happen here, which is you're gonna get a lawsuit from Donald Trump because you badly edited a program.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you don't meet him with some concession, then you'll find that you can't operate in the States.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that, you know, even in the UK, there was a like, well, that's not gonna happen because it's not really legal to do that.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_05: And it's like, well, people always think it's not gonna happen until it happens.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I don't want to cut you off, but like I I was just thinking to go back a little bit and give us some historical precedences.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_05: Are there other moments that you find yourself, like specific moments you really find yourself thinking about as we witness what's happening now?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, sure.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_05: I mean give us like two.
• 18:16
  unknown: Yeah.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_05: Three or for one.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: There's lots of memoirs of people traveling traveling in the Soviet Union or you know, living in Germany in the early 1930s who talk about the sort of disappearance of titles, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: So many people have written about, you know, I went to my newsstand and all of a sudden it was gone.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: My dad, I grew up in New York City, and my dad talks about that during the McCarthy era, that there were places in Times Square where you get all these magazines and suddenly they weren't there anymore.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: And he always talks about how when the UK started the National Health Service, my dad went to like the British Consul Library or something to read the Manchester Guardian because there just wasn't information.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then he went to Yale, and nobody ever talked about politics at all in the 1950s.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as you also know, I've written a lot about Clyde Miller and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis here at Columbia Teachers College.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And in the 1930s, they set up a media literacy program to counter propaganda, and they sent leaflets and brochures to teachers, and they had little sort of emojis even showing propaganda techniques, and they were shut down in 1942, and Clyde Miller, I think, was investigated by the DIES Commission, so that was a shutting down.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: So when all of those attacks on the disinformation researchers came about a few years ago, I thought, well, this is so much like what has happened.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_05: So can can you draw a direct line articulating something disappearing from the newsstand in New York to Palestinian reporters being murdered in Gaza?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think it's also related to the other problem.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: I saw Natalia Antilava speaking recently, and she said, you know, we kind of misunderstood the disminfo problem because it isn't just focusing on pieces of false content, which has obviously been a huge question of what's happening today, but it's also that overpowering miasma of confusion where nobody knows what to believe anymore, and nobody knows what to trust.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I was so interested, you know, the last couple of years in my classroom where students would say, I don't know what to read on the Middle East, I don't know what to trust.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: One of my students came in and said, Harumph, I've stopped looking at mainstream media because of their coverage.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't even read The Guardian anymore.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, that's weird.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: I was too.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: Not the place to start with your boycott.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I'm saying.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_05: Emily, do you remember interviewing Jason?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_05: Emily and I interviewed Jason Stanley, who wrote how propaganda works back in 2016, and he said, that's the goal, is that it's not necessarily convincing people what they know and don't know, it's convincing them there's no way of knowing.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_05: You convince people, and I find myself doing it all the time.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_05: I read this, I read that, go, I I just can't get I I can't deal, right?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_05: Because it's so overwhelming and it's so upsetting that you throw up your hands.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_05: And that's the goal.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's straight out of the Nazis.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's just classic.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Nathan Heller had a wonderful piece in The New Yorker right after the last Trump election, where he just said, that's the problem now.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: You don't it doesn't even have to be true.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: You just put it out there and it takes on a life of its own, and then before you know it, everybody's muddled.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: I was at a conference, um, sorry, we don't spend all of our time going to conferences.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um as academics, you're kind of rewarded for it, I guess.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I went to a conference a couple of weeks ago in um Canada, uh, because they can hold conferences, and we can all say we can all speak, we can all speak speak speak freely there.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a wonderful um MEP called Alexandra Gies, like the trendy band from Brooklyn.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and she uh is the Green MP for Germa Germany, and she actually talked about so everyone says, Look at Europe, they're doing all these amazing things to prop up, and and she says, Do you know what?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: None of this is worth anything if there's no enforcement.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this comes back to that fear about we're seeing in Europe, for instance, the DSA Digital Services Act, which is meant to be providing some kind of transparency and control over American platforms, but there's no enforcement because people are scared.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: JD Vance goes to the security conference in Munich and says, you are not going to stop our platforms.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, to what extent does I I do get a bit red string conspiracy theorist about this.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: But to what extent, Asma, because you look at uh OSINT as well, to what extent should we really be concerned about that level of um uh I guess kind of concentration of power in the platforms as well as and the technologies as well as the states?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: W who is driving that particular vehicle at the moment?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: No, I mean it's a great question, and I think back to, you know, when I was first investigating the war air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and this vast civilian toll that had been kept from us, I needed to access satellite imagery and of areas that were actually blocked in Google Maps maps at the time because of this obscure law from I think 1991 that banned high-resolution satellite imagery from Israel for American satellite service providers of high-resolution imagery.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: And as a result, large parts of the Middle East were blocked out.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: And it was just very hard to get high-quality historic satellite imagery to look at before and afters.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I wound up using this subscription-based site, it was called TerraServer, and I think I paid like$50 a month for this membership for very high-resolution, like beautiful imagery.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: And then all of a sudden, one day, this thing that I'd relied on that helped me for two years and to do this massive investigation called the Uncounted, it was gone.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: It was bought, I think, by a hedge fund, if I'm remembering correctly.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, the hedge funds.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, the hedge funds.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: We have we use resources about that.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: And it was such an example, like throughout, like we need high-resolution historic satellite imagery for incredible human rights documentation.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: And this obscure law from 1990, which has since been undone, so I can actually use Google Maps now, uh, for, or Google Earth, I should say, for historic satellite imagery from some of these places.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's not perfect, but it it is far better than it was before.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: But like, you know, it was in the hands of these congressional leaders who passed this bizarre law for one country and no other, coupled with, you know, defense contractors are often the ones with the biggest relationships with satellite imagery providers, which a lot of OSINT reporters rely on.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so I remember during the war against ISIS, I would have to ask these companies that had great, you know, their their main providers or the governments doing these bombings for access for a particular reason, and I would often get told no.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas if you ask them for, you know, satellite imagery from Bucha and Russian aggression there and crimes there, like you're more likely to so it's it is very politicized.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think the weaponization to to kind of bring this back to your question, which is, you know, how much should journalists be doing?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think we as always have to adapt with the constraints and obstacles we're facing.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I know a lot of journalists these days who implement, they think about laws and legality and and they will create a record of you know what they're documenting and make it public, you know, the underlying material public so that others may also use it and it's part of that transparency.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: I do it with the documents I uncover, I make them public, or that I sue the the Pentagon for.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: There's that part of it, and then there's also this understanding that all of this could go and you know, what you put up, it's it could be not archived, it could be not preserved, and to what extent do we have a responsibility?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think it's um the site we use a lot, if you're trying to get behind a paywall, um, archive, uh today it's called.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's archive.is.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: If I I I think the other day the the federal government um put forth I I want to get this right, so I don't want to misquote my misquote what happened exactly, but they asked for details about its founder and like one of these one of the most important essential archiving tools is under threat.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: We've seen that as well with we've seen that with the Internet Archive, we've seen that with and with as AI crawlers uh become ubiquitous, you would think, well, all of this stuff is being gathered somewhere, but of course it's not gathered in a way that's accessible to us.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's gathered in the training models, and it means that the actually accessible sites out there are putting up walls.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So this uh what what my friend Heather would call a wicked problem becomes much more, much more wicked.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_05: Um it's interesting, this archiving thing I feel like keeps coming up.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_05: Um at at Journalism Design Lab, we we build really grassroots news networks, like very sort of under low-to-the-ground networks, informal networks, and we've done some research recently looking at are there sort of typical ways that wherever you go, are there roles that people play to keep the news and information circulating?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_05: And archivist is one of the roles that comes up again and again that wherever you go in whatever neighborhood, there is some lady or some guy who is archiving the the the whether she keeps all the eviction notices, you know, or she keeps all of the if there's a certain landlord who everyone knows is is uh not doing such a good job, she keeps every every court record filed against him.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_05: She just has them in in her house.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_05: You know, all wherever you go, you find this.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_05: And it's I feel like I don't know if I'm listening for it, but I keep hearing this again and again.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_05: And it scares me that we have actually gotten to a moment historically where we are having to think, you know, what is the political reality of being able to hold on to your own past, right?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_05: And what does it mean that we are living in a society where that's under threat.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think in Europe, all people talk about now is tech sovereignty and how can we build our own platforms and how can we get away from the US?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: That is the number one subject that just keeps coming up, and you know, what that's going to look like is unclear, but it's definitely the conversation everyone's having.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Osmate, you were about to say something.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm really struck by that and and just wish that that was the ethos we were surrounded in.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um I do, I, you know, uh there's a brilliant graduate of the journalism school.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: Her name is Laila Hussein, brilliant journalist.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: She did a really powerful story about the race to preserve evidence of war crimes in Gaza for dropsite news, and it was like very deeply reported, and it it kind of told it through this like cascading, you know, from the the people who chronicle it to the people who like upload it to the people who like collect these drives and try to, you know, bring them across a border.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I it has me thinking about back to what you're saying, which is we're not just worried about the preservation of it, but for those who keep it, right?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's not just making it available, it's those who keep it and the risks they take to do so, right?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_03: Like the ways in which I know, so I just saw the other day that YouTube wiped videos of several prominent human rights organizations that operate in Palestinian territories.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: I think as many as 700 of these really important videos, I work in these same areas in the at least in the West Bank, and have seen the ex the extent to which, you know, researchers from this organization, Al Huk, go to to document on the ground, and it's truly impressive.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: And they have great OSINT techniques.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_03: And remember one day I saw somebody from Al Huk and I was showing them uh these weapons fragments from Tulkaram and like they'd gone through these trainings, and he's like, I know that's a J DAM.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I just confirmed earlier, you know, they're they're really good and they're putting it out for the world and documenting this stuff, and yet all of a sudden, out of nowhere, nobody even noticed that because they've now been added to a sanctions list at Israel's behest, even though the CIA had previously said they had no evidence they had any affiliation with any, you know, of what was alleged against them, it's really a testament to how good they are on the ground, in in my view.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: But all of a sudden, these videos disappear, there's no mention of it.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: You find out later, and it's like, oh, did anyone and now if somebody holds that content, are they at risk?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_05: Well, and what we find with our work, it keeps coming up here in the states and in just local communities, there's no legal framework for them.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm on the phone with um people who provide counseling for uh journalists around legal issues, they're like, huh, because is this person a journalist?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_05: But then they're not really students, so what's the legal framework to say that one day a government agency can't show up, show up and take it all?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_05: And or, you know, even if it's a frivolous lawsuit, wreck their lives with frivolous lawsuit.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_05: So anyone who's listening, we need a new legal framework.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: I remember one day all these airstrike videos that I had saved from the US government and also from you know ISIS propaganda, both had been wiped from my drives.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I gotten these emails.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: I found them later, and it said, you know, this material has been moved for violating our I I don't want to get the words right.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: It was something like it terroristic guidelines.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was something like that.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I had to like contact people, you know, hi people high up at and they were like, oh, sorry, you know, it's been undone.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_03: But it was but it wasn't a mistake.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: It was that they rent they do this, they use AI to scrape and see, oh, this is, you know, um I I don't know why the coalition videos were tagged, but they're US government videos that show you like this, you know, the view of this airstrike.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: You know, tons of these videos were gone.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: I I understood that the ISIS logo, the Amok logo, like, okay, that might happen.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not disseminating it.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: I'm using it for journalistic purposes.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: It is private.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but both were they used AI to find them and they were all gone.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's just this.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I got the Marine State.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is something we don't talk about nearly enough in terms of the AI and actually how it's used on us as a surveillance tool so much more effectively than we can use it yet in the field of journalism.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of quite a fan.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think when you were talking about how we build our own technologies, you know, I'm from the very early phase of digital, and everyone's like, we should build our own tech, and it would take forever, cost a fortune, would break, and you'd all end up on Google or something like that.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas actually now, I'm like, I I don't know that some of us who said these technologies are just incompatible with doing journalism.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think we kind of gave up on that and said, oh, it'll be fine.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it very much feels like it's not it hasn't been fine, and maybe one of the things that we can use low-cost technologies for is to build march well.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Is that just is that a bizarre and stupid idea?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: So what I was just gonna say actually um historically is that another thing that we found in the global muckraking book was how many times the journalism that was produced had no impact at the moment, but was used later in trials.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I have many examples.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: For example, in Chile, there was a journalist who documented the killings after Pinochet took over all around the country.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Allende officials and military people went to turn themselves in, and some of the top people in Pinochet's military flew around the country and assassinated all of them in their cells that night.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then put little articles in the paper saying, you know, shot trying to escape.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: And later on, when there were trials, that was used.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, South Africa, some of the reporting under apartheid was later used.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Clearly, the coverage of the famine in Ukraine later on.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I do think what you're saying is really important.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: And we've actually been having conversations over at my part of Colombia because um one of our student journalists asked the current editors of the Morningside Post to take down something he'd written that was critical of Trump in 2017.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so I sort of wondered, well, what's best practice?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: That seems so I used this as a teachable moment, called lots of people, including Sheila, and sort of asked, and um archivists including Ishvan Rev and Budapest, and of course learned that the guidance from the sort of official student journalism association in this country has now changed.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: Adelina Yankova, our PhD student, came over to talk about it.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I think people are very aware of the risks of the archives, and people think of our, you know, Ishvan pointed out, people think of archive as the static collection, and it's and it's really uh it's not, it's political and it means something.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: Can people build their own tech?
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a technologist, so I don't know.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I worry that if we're thinking about democracy, more fragmentation and more polarization, you know, may not help.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: Can we just say Google's a public utility and has to be regulated as such, but will they listen?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: And over and over again, people are saying, no, they don't actually listen, they don't turn in information, they don't respond to regulators, they don't pay their fines.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: So we let them get too big, clearly, and that's dangerous for everybody, I think.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_05: This is a really nice segue because I know we're starting to run out of time, into what are the levers for change?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_05: Um in my worst moments, in my darker moments, I think what are the chances for good policy considering the sort of rise of authoritarianism.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_05: But on the other hand, I don't see a way out without it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_05: So what do you think?
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_05: What is policy a lever for change?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_05: And if so, what should we do?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, because I was gonna say Osma just had a whole conference on solutions and how to help.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know if you want to.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm gonna ask her next.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, well, I think we're slightly.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: So um I think the one thing that cheers me up is there's great policies all over the world for how you can help journalism.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think that our community, I mean, I feel like Emily and I have been looking at this really for more than a decade, and um now everybody else is interested too.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: We're both thrilled and also slightly annoyed.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's the one it's the good thing about being more of the pessimist in 2020.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's great, right?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: So in the US, you have people like Steve Waldman looking at sort of little things like you know, tax credits for businesses that advertise in local news or vouch, you know, vouchers, or credits for hiring journalists.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that's one thing.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: If you're Europe, then you can do really broad things, right?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: So you can do massive subsidies.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: In France, for example, um, the the newsstand problem was solved.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: If you want a license for a newsstand, you have to stock something like 40 publications.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um you have your, yeah, you have your muscarry, your non-discrimination, you know, the Danes or whoever used to subsidize the second largest paper in each town to make sure there was a plurality.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: Now they're targeting on news deserts.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: So all over the world, there's great policies.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I know in so many of the rooms we've been in, the Africans and the Latin Americans say no, no, no, we don't trust our government, we don't want them anywhere in this, and the Americans used to say that too.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: But I feel like the lesson of Trump is it doesn't like if you have a Trump, everything's gonna get ruined.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm less worried about the perfect law.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I know I've said this to Erasmus many a time.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I teach in a policy school, everything is a trade-off.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: If we give subsidies for news, some bad person is definitely going to get one.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's the way it is.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really just trade-offs, but there's layers of oversight.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many systems that have been working pretty well, and I think that's it.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think we can ask for perfection, but I think there's a lot that can be done.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like our community has learned, and I feel like the next generation has listened to these conversations.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I feel like there's a lot of um good things and good possibilities.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_05: And you but not specifically about policy, but just from your perspective, do you see any one or two levers of change that you think really have the most potential?
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I I I just want to before I mention two levers, I I think to something our my our amazing colleague Sheila Cornell, you know, had said.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_03: She's just there for the forgotten.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: She, you know, but lessons learned from the Philippines and elsewhere.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: Where, you know, when there's rising authoritarianism, what has what have been the appropriate responses, what are trends, would have been lessons learned.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I think if I'm remembering correctly, you know, one of the first things you called out, Sheila, was just that the sooner people organize and collectively resist, the better chance you have.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I think journalism is one of these very strange uh fields where advocacy is eschewed in many ways.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like we have certain means of it, or there are press freedom groups that will do the advocacy portion, and you know, it's interpreted as though we don't involve ourselves in that.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's not actually true.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: There means, you know, you can see the great ways in which the Wall Street Journal advocated for one of their own, Evan Gerskovich, after he was unfairly prosecuted in Russia and accused of crimes that he is not involved in as this journalist, um, and the work that he did.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there is evidence that they can act, um, but I do think that given, again, when the precedent changes, when the threat level changes, your actions also have to shift with it.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so, like, you know, the very first thing I think is that these news organizations should collectively be organizing across the spectrum.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I think that the Washington Free Beacon and the National Journal and Drop Site News, they have some commonality, right?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_03: And shared values and ethos.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_03: And what is the bare bones minimum that they should be organizing around?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_03: And are they doing that?
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_03: Or are we so bifurcated that like that meeting of the minds cannot happen?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_03: Are we, you know, I think there's a journalist for Fox News who has been quite outspoken about the killings of journalists in Gaza.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_03: His name is Trey Yangst.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, there are different people who have spoken up, and I think that not forgetting that commonality and that overlapping shared values to act quickly, because I've seen the precedent it has set when it comes to to Gaza and and what we've you know, what we've allowed.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_03: Like Romesa Oster, this tough student, was picked up off the street like like she was kidnapped coming home from iftar or coming on her way to iftar and for writing an op-ed.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: For writing an op-ed, and that yeah, sure, there were people that were upset by that, but look at the response, look at the vilification of students who have been picked up and accused of these heinous crimes, and look at how many people have said yes, they should be deported.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_03: People who otherwise, when it came to some other conflict, you know, were the ADL and other organizations that, you know, proclaimed to fight for civil liberties, right?
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like all of these things fall apart.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's a question of shared values and seeing that.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: I think people right now in this moment are seeing cancel culture affect them in an era when you know it didn't previously.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: At least like what are these shared values now about freedom of the speech?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um I will also say that just a real commitment towards the core of great journalism.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: So training people, yes, like everybody should be trained.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_03: I I was just talking to some students about this.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: Like you should learn these OSINT skills.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_03: People think of that as a separate form of journalism.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: I see it as just journalism that will you've already been doing just advanced for the times, you integrate them, you don't exclusively only use them, but everyone needs to up their game in terms of their reporting.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: I think that we need to collaborate more with people who are computer scientists and others who can experiment and be more imaginative.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I could go on and on, but I would encourage people to read that that Columbia Journalism Review article, Urgent Ideas for Press Freedom in Gaza, that gets specific about that.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: But if I had to boil it down to one or two lessons, for everyone, it's like being really imaginative, throwing ideas out there for discussion, and then experimenting.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_03: We need pilots, we need experiments, we need people who are willing to be game, and I'm grateful for you guys for bringing this together.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_05: That's tricky.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_05: I've written about this, about the need for being more imaginative and more experimental, but it's a psychological challenge because I think in moments like the historical one we're now, it's people's instinct to like batten the hatches.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_05: So asking people like, we know you're afraid, we know it feels like there's no margin for error, but this is when you have to be willing to be imaginative.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's a challenge.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think a lot of people are buckling down in this moment, they're feeling that pressure.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_03: And in news organizations, because their credibility is coming under attack from so many different sides, that they're just trying to hold on to some semblance of everything.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_03: But it's it's it's it's honestly, I I think about this a lot.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what are your creative ideas?
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: I we we have to, so we so we do kind of have to stop, but I absolutely don't want to.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that actually just on that last point, um Asma, which is I think that this is great for young journalists, like really great to.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: I want my son as a journalist.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um he went out to a workshop the other day around political organization.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, ooh, be really careful that you don't, you know, that way that you do when you're a mother and you give your children bad advice.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um but all but also that I was thinking I was thinking, no, actually, this is actually exactly the skills that we need now.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: And there's something great about seeing our students, and I think, you know, kind of the people that you work with in community colleges, uh being really energized, and I think in news and I see people are very beaten down and worn out, and I'm like, you know, we need to find a way as well to kind of bring that energy in here, I think.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for for that conversation.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna we're going to and thank you all actually for being here.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have we're gonna carry on.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to if anyone wants if anyone wants to stay and ask questions, we're gonna kind of just carry on with the cameras rolling.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Despite being a research on the podcast, this is an implant question.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it's not capture.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one thing I was thinking, um, because we're working on this podcast as we've been talking about the effect that the internet had on journalism, and one of the things that it did was it um you know, it was supposed to be in an empowering way it blurred the line between a civilian and a journalist, and this was seen as a great thing anyone could report for themselves and for their local community.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: But then with Gaza, you really see how dangerous it can be to have the category of a journalist blurred to the point where it can be discredited.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we now are in a moment when journalism can both be be both discredited as a category, but also claim to so easily.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: So even Elon Musk has defined himself as a citizen journalist at one point.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think in Gaza they don't let journalists in except in a cynical way where sometimes I know there was a a British far-right commentator who um Douglas Murray, who has appeared in Gaza wearing press uniform and been interviewed, uh which so it's sort of claiming the authority of a journalist, but it's being weaponized in a cynical way.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I so I wondered how important it is for journalists to define their profession, or should we embrace the blurring of that category?
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: Who decides what a journalist is?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: Should it be journalists standing up for who they see as their peers?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, without wanting to get too philosophical, it's kind of what it is.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: We love silver.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we don't have if we don't have at least one philosopher per episode here that gets very upset.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's good.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is a great question about because we I was part of the internet era which said opening the category is actually incredibly healthy for journalism.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think it actually applies to other conflicts more than it does to Gaza, because there, again, I want to say there are some of the most professionally trained journalists in Gaza than in any conflict zone I've ever been in before.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that citizen journalist category.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, there are people like documenting things, but actually at this stage with what's happening in Gaza, to have uh quality internet, to have these materials, to have the means to live broadcast, you do tend to be somebody with the Reuters operation or with this, you know, Al Jazeera, to do the work where we're getting a lot of that content, it is coming from professional journalists.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to make that distinction, but I think the question is a good one, irrespective of whether or not we're talking about Gaza.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think what we need are journalists who are better trained at verifying that content and platforms, you know, I'm pretty sure I would imagine in this era of like just burgeon disinformation and means to disseminate it and reproduce it, that we are going to probably have some platform or some shared commonality of verified content or means through which, you know, there's language for this, for like cryptology of how you know things are going to emerge that we know or can verify.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think it means it requires, yes, we want more people documenting things, but we also want journal, you know, we want platforms that allow us to verify that, and then journalists who are really discerning and sharp in using that.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think we've had a ton of content come out of Gaza, and yet how much of it makes it into these news organizations, who do we trust?
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think it's an issue of verification, trust, and and all of the things.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, historically the US, of course, has resisted definitions and licensing, whereas in Europe they've always had very strict rules about, you know, if you've been to these journalism schools or you've worked at those outlets.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think sometimes in the policy world, defining journalism becomes an excuse not to do any funding because people go, people who don't want to do any funding go, ooh, we have to think for a couple of years about what is a journalist, and then it becomes just a we told to give the money money.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's a stalling technique.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I was just, I'm planning our next saving journalism conference, which obviously everyone's invited to on March 20th.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just reading a report on how some of the European countries are now regulating influencers.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: But for advertising for fraud reasons, right, and advertising disclosure.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that probably one of the questions will be is there money involved?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: Are you selling something?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: Are you getting money from somebody?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then that also adds a whole new layer.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_05: What are the pros, how do you think about the pros and cons of those two different approaches?
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_05: European versus America reguling versus not.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think defining is sort of, Sheila and I, when we taught our journalism and film course, world's best class, except for the one I taught with Emily.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um remember we talked about that.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was like more fun than the one we taught, actually.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: One movie, one or two movies a week, and then discuss it.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: Remember, we sort of landed on this, it's a process, right?
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: That was where we kind of got with that.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_06: You know, with the with the committee of to protect journalists, we never define who a journalist is.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_06: We just say we know we know we know it when we see it.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_06: You know it when you see it.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, this comes back to this sort of like we're on the ground.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_06: I say that's the right way because it's an ever-expanding world of democracy.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: And who works with who, I think, is a really I I was talking to a news influencer who said, I'm really careful about who I work with because not everybody has the same standards as me.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that's quite interesting.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: That sort of this new world that's emerging says we have certain you know, we actually do have certain standards.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that sort of that comes down to the how do you build these networks of resilience.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you it's gonna have to be more expansive, our view.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_06: But but I also think you know the structures that we built to protect press freedom, et cetera, dating back to I don't I don't know when it's a very important thing.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_06: I think because the press has changed so much, whether they're still relevant or whether we need more you know, press associations, um press freedom protection groups, advocacy groups, et cetera.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_06: Do they suffice in the current moment?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_06: Or do we or even Columbia Journalism Review, journalism schools, that whole infrastructure of legal support, et cetera?
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_06: They are they enough?
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_06: Or is it more like we're putting a finger in the dike which is about to explode eventually?
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_05: I think they're not they're not enough.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_05: Again, uh the the work I'm mostly involved with is very, very grassroots.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's ordinary people in their neighborhood sort of stepping in to do the informal um news collection and dissemination and sharing.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_05: And there there is no support for them and no legal framework.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_06: And when they get support and they get sued, for example, who comes to support.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_05: This is what keeps me up at night, and I'm constantly talking, trying to get legal opinions, and every single person I talk to goes, huh?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_05: That's interesting.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_05: Like that's not really what I want to hear.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_06: A substack or get sued for a libel, right?
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_05: And and what I'm starting to investigate is that there might be legal framework frameworks that community activists are more familiar with.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_05: Because a lot of the people in art networks, they are disseminating the news verbally or l in a live way, so it's not even published.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_05: So then how does that change it?
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's we do have a piece in the issue, the journalism 2050 issue about Perez Hilton.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_04: And how uh the Blake Lively Justin Baldone drama became in has to do with all this.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um because Blake Lively sued or tried to subpoena uh Perez Hilton, who I listen to wanted to take advantage of uh the very good SHIELD laws in Nevada.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_04: And so Joel Simon has written about this and why it actually behooves journalists of all kinds to broaden the definition of who should be protected.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_04: How we got here and where we're going.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_04: That's how we got here and where we're going.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody mentions.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the ground zero of all of this.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_04: But yes, so you can read more about it and CJR.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: But we've actually now lost, we've we've actually now lost a part of our podcast.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it kind of like maybe is a time now that we kind of just break and say thanks very much for everyone.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's sandwiched time.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you to CJR for interesting.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Town Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Our producer is Amanda Derrick, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earle.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.